Four to Score (Stephanie Plum 4)

He got a pen from a hall table and made some marks on the note. “Lorraine said you're a bounty hunter.”

“I almost never shoot anybody,” I said.

“If I was a bounty hunter I'd fucking shoot lots of people.” He finished scribbling on the paper and gave it back to me.

“You're probably gonna find this hard to believe, but I was sort of weird when I was a kid.”

“No!”

“Yeah. I was like . . . out there. So I used to spend a lot of time talking to Spock. And Spock and me, we'd send messages to each other in code.”

“You mean Spock from Star Trek?”

“Yeah, that's the dude. Boy, Spock and I were tight. We did this code thing every day for years. Only our codes were hard. This code is too easy. This code is just a bunch of run-?together letters with some extra shit thrown in. 'Red and green and blue. At Cluck in a Bucket the clue waits for you.' ”

“I know Cluck in a Bucket,” I said. “It's just down from the bonds office.”

The trash containers in the Cluck in a Bucket parking lot are colored red, green and blue. The green and the blue are for recycling paper and aluminum. The big red one is for garbage. I'd bet my apprehension fee the next clue was in the garbage.

A second man came to the door. He was neatly dressed in Dockers and a perfectly pressed button-?down shirt. He was shorter than Sweet. Maybe 5'9". He was slender and totally hairless, like a bald Chihuahua, with soft brown eyes hidden behind thick glasses, and a mouth that seemed too wide, too sensuous for his small pinched face and little button nose.

“What's going on?” he asked.

“This is Stephanie Plum,” Sally said. “The one Lorraine called about.”

The man extended his hand. “Gregory Stern. Everyone calls me Sugar.”

“Sugar and I are roommates,” Sally said. “We're in the band together.”

“I'm the band tart,” Sugar said. “And sometimes I sing.”

“I always wanted to sing with a band,” I said. “Only, I can't sing.”

“I bet you could,” Sugar said. “I bet you'd be wonderful.”

“You'd better go get dressed,” Sally said to Sugar. “You're going to be late again.”

“We have a gig this afternoon,” Sugar explained. “Wedding reception.”

Yeeesh.

* * * * *

CLUCK IN A BUCKET is on Hamilton. It's housed in a cement cube with windows on three sides. And it's best known not for its outstanding food but for the giant rotating chicken impaled on a thirty-?foot flagpole anchored in the parking lot.

I cruised into the lot and stopped short of the red Dumpster. The temperature had to be a hundred in the shade with a hundred percent humidity. My sunroof was open, and when I parked the car I felt the weight of the heat settling around me. Maybe when I found Nowicki I'd have my air-?conditioning fixed, or maybe I'd spend a few days at the beach . . . or maybe I'd pay my rent and avoid eviction.

I walked to the Dumpster, thinking about ordering lunch. Two pieces of chicken plus a biscuit and slaw and an extra large soda sounded about right.

I peeked over the edge of the Dumpster, gave an involuntary gasp and staggered back a few feet. Most of the garbage was in bags, but some of the bags had split and had spewed out guts like bloated roadkill. The stench of vegetable rot and gangrenous chicken boiled over the Dumpster and had me reassessing my lunch plans. It also had me reassessing my job. There was no way I was scrounging in this mess for the stupid clue.

I returned to my car and called Eddie Kuntz on my cell phone. “I've deciphered the note,” I told him. “I'm at Cluck in a Bucket, and there's another clue here. I think you'd better come see for yourself.”

Half an hour later, Kuntz pulled into the lot. I was sitting in my car, slurping down my third giant-?sized Diet Coke, and I was sweating like a pig. Kuntz looked nice and cool in his new sport utility vehicle and factory-?installed air. He'd changed his clothes from the sweat-?stained boxers he'd worn this morning to a black fishnet undershirt, black spandex shorts that didn't do much to hide Mr. Lumpy, two gold chains around his neck, and brand-?new Air Jordans that looked to be about a size 42.

“All dressed up,” I said to him.

“Gotta maintain the image. Don't like to disappoint the chicks.”