Four to Score (Stephanie Plum 4)

I'd done this drill before. He wouldn't call me. Not until it was all over.

Sally and I crossed the street, entered Morelli's house, walked the length of it and exited the back door. I stood for a moment in the yard and thought about Morelli, lost in shadow again, his street appearing deserted. It gave me a creepy feeling. If Morelli could disappear, so could Sugar.

* * * * *

ONCE A WEEK Grandma Mazur went to the beauty parlor and had her hair shampooed and set. Sometimes Dolly would use a rinse and Grandma would have hair the color of an anemic apricot, but mostly Grandma lived with her natural color of steel gray. Grandma kept her hair short and permed with orderly rows of curls marching across her shiny pink scalp. The curls stayed miraculously tidy until the end of the week, when they'd begin to flatten and blend together.

I'd always wondered how Grandma had managed this feat. And now I knew. Grandma rolled her pillow under her neck so barely any skull touched the bed. And Grandma slept like the dead. Arms crossed over her chest, body straight as a board, mouth open. Grandma never moved a muscle, and she snored like a drunken lumberjack.

I crawled out of bed at six A.M. bleary-?eyed and rattled from my night's experience. I'd had maybe thirty minutes of sleep, and that had been accumulated time. I grabbed some clothes and dressed in the bathroom. Then I crept downstairs and made coffee.

An hour later I heard movement overhead and recognized my mother's footsteps on the stairs.

“You look terrible,” she said. “You feel okay?”

“You ever try to sleep with Grandma?”

“She sleeps like the dead.”

“You got it.”

Doors opened and slammed shut upstairs, and my grandmother yelled for my father to get out of the bathroom.

“I'm an old lady,” she yelled. “I can't wait all day. What are you doing in there anyway?”

More doors slamming, and my father clomped into the kitchen and took his place at the breakfast table. “I gotta go out with the cab this morning,” he said. “Jones is in Atlantic City, and I said I'd cover his shift.”

My parents owned their house free and clear, and my father got a decent pension from the post office. He didn't need the money from hacking. What he needed was to get out of the house, away from my mother and my grandmother.

The stairs creaked, and an instant later Sally's frame filled the doorway. His hair stood out from his head in snarls, his eyes were half closed and he stood stoop shouldered and barefoot, hairy arms dangling from my too-?small, fuzzy pink robe.

“Man,” he said, “this house is frantic. I mean, like, what time is it, dude?”

“Oh jeez,” my father said, grim-?faced, “he's wearing ladies' clothes again.”

“It was in the closet,” Sally said. “Guess the clothes fairy left it for me.”

My father opened his mouth to say something, my mother gave him a sharp look, and my father snapped his mouth shut.

“What's that you're eating?” Sally asked.

“Cereal.”

“Far out.”

“Would you like some?”

He shuffled to the coffeemaker. “Just coffee.”

Grandma Mazur hustled in. “What's going on? I didn't miss anything, did I?”

I was sitting at the table, and I could feel her breath on the back of my head. “Something wrong?”

“Just looking at this new-?style hairdo you got. Never seen anything like it, what with these big chunks cut outta the back.”

I closed my eyes. The egg. “How bad is it?” I asked my mother. As if I didn't already know.

“If you have some free time you might want to go to the beauty parlor.”