“What happened to the license and the shoe?”
“Threw them away. The license was all torn and bent, and the shoe was a mess and it smelled real bad. Anyway, the office said no one ever comes to claim stuff that’s been shook from the crusher.”
“Probably, the junkyard’s doing big disposal business since they put the surveillance cameras up at the landfill,” Lula said. “I bet you could bring a cadaver dog here, and he wouldn’t know where to go first.”
SEVEN
“I’M HUNGRY,” LULA SAID, pulling out of the junkyard. “What would Ranger eat for lunch? I bet he’d be up for a bucket of fried chicken.”
“He usually grabs a sandwich at Rangeman. Roast beef on multigrain. Or a turkey club.”
“I could do that. What else does he eat?”
“An apple sometimes. And water.”
“Say what? Is that it? How could he live on that? What about chips? What about a root beer float? And how many of those roast beef sandwiches does he eat for lunch?”
“One sandwich. No chips.”
“That’s un-American. He’s not stimulating the economy like that. I’d feel it was my patriotic duty to at least have chips.”
Lula stopped at a deli on the first block of Stark.
“This looks sketchy,” I said. “The window is dirty, and I just saw a rat run out the front door.”
“I’ve been here before,” she said. “They give you a half-pound of meat on your sandwich, and they throw in pickles for free. If I’m only gonna have one sandwich, this is the place.”
It looked to me like they threw in food poisoning for free, too. “I’ll pass.”
“You have no spirit of culin
ary adventure. You need to be more like that snarky guy on the Travel Channel. He goes all over the world eating kangaroo assholes and snail throw-up. He’d eat anything. He don’t care how sick he gets. He’s another one of my role models, except he needs ironing.” She took her big silver Glock out of her purse and handed it over to me. “You wait here and don’t let anyone take my car.”
I hefted the Glock, aiming it out the window at an empty street corner. My own gun was smaller, a Smith & Wesson .45 revolver. I’d gotten it from Ranger when I first started doing bond enforcement and Connie had asked him to mentor me. He was scary tough and mysteriously complex back then. He isn’t so different now. He’s abandoned his Special Forces camo fatigues for Rangeman black, he’s dropped the ghetto accent and lost the ponytail as his business needs changed, but he’s still a tough guy with lots of secrets.
Lula hustled out of the deli with a large plastic food container in one hand, a massive wax paper–wrapped sandwich in the other, and a two-liter bottle of soda under her arm.
“He put all my free pickles right into the sandwich,” she said, sliding behind the wheel. “And I got some homemade potato salad instead of chips. It was half price.”
Oh boy. Bargain potato salad from the Rats-R-Us. “The potato salad might not be a good idea,” I said.
Lula opened the lid and sniffed. “Smells okay.” She dug in with her plastic fork. “Tastes okay. Got a tang to it.” She unwrapped her sandwich, ate half, and washed it down with some soda.
I tried not to grimace. I didn’t want to ruin her eating experience, but I was getting queasy inhaling the meat and mayo fumes. I had my window down and my head halfway out when the Lincoln pulled up alongside.
Lancer made a gun with his hand, index finger pointed at me. “Bang,” he said.
I still had Lula’s Glock in my lap. I raised it and pointed it at Lancer, and he drove away.
“What was that about?” Lula asked.
“It’s complicated.”
“I’m getting real tired of hearing it’s complicated. Would you say something like that to Ranger? I don’t think so. I bet he calls you Babe and you tell him everything he wants to know.”
I tell Ranger nothing. Ranger isn’t a talker. Ranger reveals very little and doesn’t encourage verbal spewing on the part of others.
“On the way home from Hawaii, I accidentally picked up a photograph of a man,” I said to Lula. “I didn’t know who he was or how I got the photograph, so I threw it away. Turns out it’s one of a kind, it’s tied to national security somehow, and now I’m the only one who knows what the guy looks like. The FBI is searching for the guy, and the two morons who just drove by are searching for the guy. And it’s possible there are other people searching for the guy.”