Smokin' Seventeen (Stephanie Plum 17)

“I hear Skooter Berkower is real worried. He played poker with those guys sometimes. That whole poker group is getting wiped out. Somebody don’t like poker players. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it’s someone’s wife doing this. Probably one of those guys lost a lot of money and some wife wigged out.”

That would be a decent theory except for the two bodies addressed to me.

“Or maybe it’s Joyce Barnhardt trying to get attention,” Grandma said. “I wouldn’t put it past her. You know how she loves to be in the spotlight.”

I drank some soda and recapped the bottle. “Killing five people seems extreme, even for Joyce.”

“I suppose,” Grandma said. “This sure is a mystery.”

“That’s a lot of potatoes you’re mashing,” I said to my mother.

My mother added a big glob of butter to the potatoes. “We have a lot of people for dinner. Valerie and Albert are coming with the children.”

My sister Valerie has two children by her disastrous first marriage, and two with her second husband Albert Klaughn. I love my sister and Albert, and I especially love the kids, but it’s half a bottle of Advil when you get them all into my parents’ small house.

“We’re gonna need rubber walls if you ever get married and have kids,” Grandma said to me. “I don’t know how we could fit any more people in here, and Dave looks like the kind who’d want a big family.”

“Dave isn’t in the picture.”

“I hear different,” Grandma said. “It’s all over town about you and Dave.”

I traded my soda in for a glass of wine. If I had to deal with Valerie and the kids and talk about Dave, I was going to need alcohol.

THIRTY-SIX

“JEEZ,” LULA SAID when I met her by the bonds bus. “You look worse than me, and I just had root canal.”

“I had dinner with my parents and Valerie and Albert and the kids. The dinner was fine. And it was nice to spend time with Valerie and the girls, but the conversation kept coming back to Dave Brewer and me.”

“And?”

“And I’m not interested in him. I don’t want to date him. I don’t want him cooking in my kitchen.”

Lula did a raised eyebrow. “You don’t want him cooking in your kitchen?”

“Okay, maybe I want him cooking in my kitchen. The problem is he won’t stay in the kitchen. He wanders.”

“Hunh,” Lula said.

I put my hand up. “Let me revise that statement. I don’t even want him in my kitchen. Yes, he makes great food. Is it worth it? No. And I can’t discourage him. He doesn’t take hints. He doesn’t listen. I broke his nose, for crying out loud. And he came back to make breakfast.”

“How’d you break his nose?”

“I hit him in the face with a hair dryer.”

“Good one,” Lula said.

We were on the sidewalk, standing by an old junker SUV. It looked like it might be black under the grime, and there was some rust creeping up from the undercarriage.

“I don’t think I’ve ever met your cousin Ernie,” I said to Lula.

“Ernie works for the roads department, patching potholes. It’s not a bad job except he always smells like asphalt, and he got hit a couple times.”

We saddled up in the SUV, and Lula drove to Stark Street. We cruised past the dry cleaner, turned at the corner, and rolled down the alley. Lula stopped just short of Alpha’s building and killed the engine. Lights were on in the second-floor windows, and there was a dark-colored Mercedes sedan parked next to the dry-cleaning van.

A little before nine o’clock Alpha’s back door opened, lights were switched off in the apartment, and Alpha walked down the exterior stairs and got into the Mercedes.

“We’re in business,” Lula said.