“Which house is his?” Lula wanted to know.
“The one with the green door.”
“Hard to tell if anybody's in there.”
We drove by the house twice, and then we took the one-lane service road to the rear and stopped at Munson's garage. I got out and looked in the grimy side window. The Crown Victoria was there. Rats.
“This is the plan,” I told Lula. “You go to the front door. He's never seen you. He won't be suspicious. Tell him who you are and tell him you want him to go downtown with you. Then he'll sneak out the back door to his car, and I'll catch him off guard and cuff him.”
“Sounds okay to me. And if you got a problem, you just holler, and I'll come around back.”
Lula cruised away in the Firebird, and I tippytoed up to Munson's back door and flattened myself against the house so he couldn't see me. I shook my pepper spray to make sure it was live and listened for Lula's knock on his door.
The knock came after a few minutes; there was some muffled conversation, and then came the sounds of scuffling at the back door and the lock being retracted. The door opened and Morris Munson stepped out.
“Hold it,” I said, kicking the door shut. “Stay exactly where you are. Don't move a muscle or I'll hit you with the pepper spray.”
“You! You tricked me!”
I had the pepper spray in my left hand and the cuffs in my right. “Turn around,” I said. “Hands over your head, palms flat against the house.”
“I hate you!” he shrieked. “You're just like my ex-wife. Sneaky, lying, bossy bitch. You even look like her. Same dopey curly brown hair.”
“Dopey hair? Excuse me?”
“I had a good life until that bitch screwed it up. I had a big house and a nice car. I had Surround Sound.”
“What happened?”
“She left me. Said I was boring. Boring ol' Morris. So one day she got herself a lawyer, backed a truck up to the patio door, and cleaned me out. Took every fucking stick of furniture, every goddamn piece of china, every freaking spoon.” He gestured to the row house. “This is what I'm left with. This piece-of-shit row house and a used Crown Victoria with two years of payments. After fifteen years at the button factory, working my fingers to the bone, I'm eating cereal for supper in this rat trap.”
“Jeez.”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Let me at least lock the door. This place isn't much, but it's all I've got.”
“Okay. Just don't make any sudden moves.”
He turned his back to me, locked the door, whirled around, and jostled me. “Oops,” he said. “Sorry. I lost my balance.”
I stepped away. “What have you got in your hand?”
“It's a cigarette lighter. You've seen a cigarette lighter before, right? You know how it works?” He flicked it, and a flame shot out.
“Drop it!”
He waved it around. “Look how pretty it is. Look at the lighter. Do you know what kind of lighter this is? I bet you can't guess.”
“I said, Drop it.”
He held it in front of his face. “You're gonna burn. You can't stop it now.”
“What are you talking about? Yikes!” I was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, tucked in, and a green-and-black flannel shirt jacket-style over the T-shirt. I looked down and saw that my shirttail was on fire.
“Burn!” he
yelled to me. “Burn in hell!”
I dropped the cuffs and the pepper spray and ripped the shirt open. I fumbled out of it, threw it to the ground, and stomped the fire out. When I was done stomping I looked around and Munson was gone. I tried his back door. Locked. There was the sound of an engine catching. I looked to the service road and saw the Crown Victoria speed away.