Explosive Eighteen (Stephanie Plum 18)

Twenty minutes later, I rolled into the lot to my apartment building and did another car check. No RAV4. No black Lincoln Town Car. No green SUV that belonged to Morelli. No megabucks shiny black Ranger car. I found a space close to the building’s back door, parked, and locked up. I took the elevator to the second floor, walked down the hall, and listened at my door. All was quiet. I let myself in, kicked the door closed, and a swarthy guy with lots of curly black hair jumped out of the kitchen at me. He was holding a huge knife, and his dark eyes were narrowed.

“I want photograph,” he said. “Give it to me, or I kill you big-time. I make you very painful.”

I grabbed the bottle of wine from the doggy bag, hit the guy in the face with it as hard as I could, his eyes rolled back, and he crashed to the floor. I’d acted totally on instinct and was as surprised as he was that he got knocked out. I put a hand to the wall to steady myself and took a couple deep breaths. It felt icky to have the guy in my apartment, so I cuffed him and dragged him into the hall. I returned to my apartment and closed and locked the door in case there was a partner lurking somewhere.

I retrieved my Smith & Wesson from the cookie jar and walked through my apartment looking in closets and under the bed, finding dust bunnies but no more swarthy guys. I went back to the kitchen and called Bill Berger.

“There was a nasty-looking guy in my apartment when I came home just now,” I told him. “He had a big knife, and he said he’d kill me if I didn’t give him the photograph.”

“And?” Berger asked.

“I hit him in the face with a bottle of table wine and knocked him out.”

“Where is he now?”

“He’s in the hall.”

There was a beat of silence. “What’s he doing in the hall?”

“I didn’t want him in my apartment, so I dragged him into the hall.”

More silence. Probably, Berger wasn’t believing any of this.

“Did you check for ID?” he finally asked.

Damn! “No. Hold on, and I’ll go look.”

I opened the door, and the hall was empty. No swarthy guy.

“He’s gone,” I said to Berger.

“Problem solved,” Berger said. And he hung up.

I closed and locked the door, plugged my stun gun into a wall socket, returned the Smith & Wesson to the cookie jar, and opened the bottle of wine. Thank God it hadn’t broken, because I really needed a drink. A Cosmo or a Margarita or a water glass filled with whiskey would have been even better. I brought the bottle into the living room, settled in front of the television, tuned in to the Food Network, and tried to get my heart rate under control.

Some woman was making cupcakes. Cupcakes are good, I told myself. There’s an innocence to a cupcake. A joy. I poured a second glass of wine, and I watched the woman frost the cupcakes.

Halfway through the bottle of wine, I flipped to the Travel Channel, and I don’t remember much after that.

• • •

I woke up to the sun streaming into my bedroom. I was naked, tucked under the covers, and alone. I vaguely remembered half-waking to Morelli telling me the chicken was all he hoped it would be.

I rolled out of bed, wrapped myself in my robe, and padded into the kitchen. No Morelli. No chicken. No dinner rolls. No apple pie. A note was stuck to the counter by Rex’s cage.

You were asleep on the couch, so I put you to bed and ate the chicken.

I dialed Morelli. “How’d I get naked?” I asked him.

“That was the way I found you. You were mumbling something about being hot, and God was just going to have to deal with it.”

Good grief. “How’d it go at the junkyard?”

“We didn’t find Joyce’s body, but we found Frank Korda, the jeweler she supposedly stole the necklace from, and we found Joyce’s other shoe.”

“Was Korda dead?”

“Yeah, and then some.”