Explosive Eighteen (Stephanie Plum 18)

Silence for a beat. “Berger’s in his early fifties, black hair going gray, and Gooley looks like he’s had the same suit on for two weeks, right?”

“Yeah. Should I let them in?”

“No. Gooley eats out of Dumpsters and fucks feral cats. Let me talk to Berger.”

I passed my cell phone out to Berger. Two minutes later, Berger gave it back to me.

“Do you know where the Bureau’s located downtown?” Berger asked me.

“Yep.”

“I’ll meet you there tomorrow at ten o’clock. Bring the photo.”

“I don’t have the photo,” I told him.

“Then bring your lawyer.”

I rolled my eyes at him. “You need to practice your people skills.”

Berger pressed his lips tight together. “I hear that a lot. Mostly from my ex-wife.”

I closed my door and got back to Morelli. “I guess Berger is FBI?”

“More or less. I need to talk to you.”

“I figured. I hoped to see you tonight.”

“I might be late.”

“How late?” I asked him.

“Hard to say. Someone just took sixteen rounds to the head in the projects.”

“Sixteen bullets to the head? That seems excessive.”

“Murray saw him, and he said he looked like Swiss cheese. Murray said the guy had brains leaking out all over the place.”

“Too much information.”

“It’s my life,” Morelli said. And he disconnected.

I went back to bed, but I kept thinking about brains leaking out from bullet holes. Morelli was the only one I knew who had a worse job than I did. Okay, maybe the guy at the mortuary who drains out body fluids was also in the running. Anyway, against all odds, Morelli liked being in law enforcement. He’d been a wild kid and the product of an abusive father. And now Morelli was a good cop, a responsible home owner, and an excellent pet parent to his dog, Bob. I’d always thought he had superior boyfriend, maybe even husband, potential, but his job was a constant, frequently grim, intrusion, and I couldn’t see that changing anytime soon. Plus, now there was the Hawaiian thing.

The other guy in my life, Ranger, realistically had no boyfriend or husband potential whatsoever, but he was an addictive guilty pleasure. He had a body like Batman, a dark and mysterious past, a dark and mysterious present, and an animal magnetism that sucked me in the instant I approached his force field. He wore only black. He drove only black cars. And when he made love, his brown eyes dilated totally black.

I rolled all this around in my mind … Morelli, Ranger, the brains leaking out. Then I thought about the FBI guys, both fake and real, and the guy in the photo. And none of this was conducive to napping. Not to mention, I’m not on salary. If I don’t capture skips, I don’t make money. If I don’t make money, I can’t make my rent. If I don’t make my rent, I’ll be living in my car. And my car isn’t all that terrific.

I returned to the kitchen and went back over my files. I thought I had my best shot with the purse snatcher. True, they were usually runners, but the guy looked fat in his photo, and I might be able to run down a fat guy if he wasn’t in top shape. His name was Lewis Bugkowski, aka Big Buggy. Twenty-three years old. He’d robbed an eighty-three-year-old woman who was sitting on a park bench. Forty-five minutes later, Buggy was arrested when he tried to buy six buckets of fried chicken with the woman’s credit card and the counter clerk didn’t think Buggy looked like a Betty Bloomberg. So besides being fat, Buggy was probably not real smart.

I thought about taking my gun, but decided against it. It made my bag too heavy and gave me a neck cramp. Truth is, I never use the gun anyway. I took pepper spray and hair spray instead. I had my phone clipped to the waistband on my jeans and handcuffs in my back pocket. I was ready to roll.

Buggy lived with his parents just slightly beyond Burg limits. This is always a bummer situation, because I hate snagging people in front of their parents or their kids. I could get him at his workplace, but he hadn’t listed any. I drove to Broad, hooked a left, and cruised by the Bugkowski house, a small Cape Cod. Clean. Tiny front yard, neatly maintained. One-car garage. No cars parked at the curb in front of the house.

I dialed Buggy’s phone, and he picked up after two rings.

“Lewis Bugkowski?” I asked.

“Yeah?”