Takedown Twenty (Stephanie Plum 20)

“It’s a cow tongue,” I said.

“No wonder cows are so contented.”

“Did you want something?” I asked Lula. “Lunch meat? Hot wings?”

“No. I just came in to see you, and see how you’re doing.”

“My nose feels a lot better.”

“Are you going to Bingo tonight?”

“No. This job gets out late.”

“It don’t sound like such a good job to me,” Lula said. “And that apron you’re wearing is yikes. You need to go to the kitchen store and get yourself something with ruffles.”

Ranger called at noon. “What’s with the butcher shop?”

“I quit the bonds office and took a job as a butcher.”

“Babe,” Ranger said. And he hung up.

By four o’clock Randy had hacked up half a cow and gone through a lot of peach schnapps. I saw no indication that the schnapps affected him, with the possible exception of increasing the ruddiness in his cheeks. Hard to tell if the ruddiness came from the schnapps or from taking a cleaver to Ferdinand the Bull.

“Do you live close to the store?” I asked him.

“I live a quarter mile away in an apartment over the laundromat. It’s real convenient when I want to do laundry, only thing is my floor vibrates if all the dryers are going at once.”

“Is that the laundromat on King Street?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a nice laundromat. I use it sometimes. Maybe I’ll use it tonight and come visit you.”

“You mean you’d come in to my apartment?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t get a lot of visitors.”

“You could show me how to cook something,” I told him. “A hamburger or a pork chop.”

“I was planning on steak tonight.”

“I’d love to learn how to cook steak. I won’t even go home to get my laundry. We can go straight from the store.”

“I guess that would be okay,” Randy said. “Is it a date?”

“No. It’s a cooking lesson.”

“Maybe it could turn into a date someday.”

“Sure. Anything’s possible.”

Okay, so I knew that wasn’t possible, but it was a small fib for a good cause. I wanted to look around Randy’s apartment to see if he had Venetian blind cord stashed somewhere.

I started cleaning up before the shop closed. By eight we were picking out steaks, and we were on the road by eight-thirty. I followed Randy and parked in the laundromat lot. I got out of the CR-V and looked up at the second-floor apartment. There were Venetian blinds on the windows. I cautioned myself not to get carried away. Lots of people had Venetian blinds on their windows, and most of those people weren’t killers.

We trudged up the stairs, Randy unlocked his door, and we carted our dinner inside. Randy had a grocery bag with the steaks and a loaf of sourdough bread, and I had the half-empty bottle of schnapps.