Takedown Twenty (Stephanie Plum 20)

Lula looked in through the window. “Holy horse pucky,” she said. “What the heck?”

Red lights were flashing in the alley. Men’s voices. The rumble of a big truck. Blue strobes flashing with the red lights.

“What’s going on out there?” Grandma asked.

“I saw Moe and Shorty standing there with the cement truck and I got worried, so I called everyone. We got police and a fire truck and EMTs and Ranger and half of Rangeman here.”

There was scraping at the door and the door opened, oozing cement onto the dirt floor. Morelli was the first one I saw. He grabbed me and pulled me out of the room. Cement was dropping off me in globs, but the cement on my legs was beginning to harden. He half dragged, half carried me up the stairs and out into the alley. A uniform followed with Grandma.

Morelli yelled for water, and an instant later Grandma and I were getting hosed down. Grandma went to the hospital to get checked out, but I refused. I shucked my clothes behind the fire truck and wrapped myself in a blanket. When I came out from behind the truck I saw that Moe had been hosed down and cuffed, and his leg was bandaged. Shorty was strapped to a backboard.

“What happened to Shorty?” I asked Lula.

“He got trampled,” Lula said. “I guess the lights from the police cars scared Kevin out of his hidey-hole, and he came barreling down the alley and ran right over Shorty.”

“Sunny is dead,” I told Morelli. “Heart attack.” I gave him the short version of the night and asked him to retrieve my messenger bag. I would have gotten it for myself, but I didn’t think my legs could get me up the stairs. I felt like I was still encased in cement.

Morelli gave me a kiss on the forehead and handed me over to Ranger to take home.

“I need to stay and do my cop thing,” Morelli said, “but I’ll stop around when I’m done.”

It was past midnight when Morelli let himself into my apartment.

“You did it, Sherlock,” he said. “You solved the Dumpster murders.”

I was on the couch, watching television, waiting for him. “It was an accident. Dumb luck.”

“Better to be lucky than smart,” Morelli said, slouching onto the couch next to me, handing me the messenger bag I’d left in Sunny’s bachelor pad. “Shiller already questioned Moe and Shorty, and they blabbed everything. Turns out there were old ladies getting left in Dumpsters for the last ten years, over a three-state area. It was how Sunny got his kicks.”

“Sick.”

“Yeah. Big-time. There’s a name for it. ‘Granny grabbers.’ They’re like chubby chasers, but they like to do old ladies. Sunny added his own twist to it by killing them after.”

“What was the connection? Was it Bingo? Was it the Senior Center?”

“There was no connection. They were all random encounters. Sunny was out and about, going to wakes, shopping in bakeries and grocery stores, meeting women in the casinos in Atlantic City. He was Mr. Charm, and after a couple phone calls there was a date.”

“And a death.”

“Yeah, and a death,” Morelli said. “And a sunflower. We should have picked up on it. We should have made the Sunny and sunflower connection. Are you hungry?”

“Starved.”

He went to the kitchen and came back with a bag of food and a six-pack. He gave me a beer, and he pulled Philly cheesesteaks out of the bag.

“Somehow Moe mysteriously got shot just before we arrived. I don’t suppose you have any ideas on this?”

“Nope.”

That was a fib. I only knew of one gun that made that much noise, and I suspect it was in Lula’s purse. She was lucky she didn’t have a broken nose.

“I’ve got more news for you,” Morelli said. “Sunny was renovating the brownstone, hoping to turn it into an exclusive restaurant that served big game and endangered species. For an extra charge you could even kill the animal yourself. I don’t exactly know how he was going to pull that one off. Take everyone out in the alley and give them an assault rifle, I guess. Anyway, the giraffe got delivered early and managed to escape. Eventually they gave up trying to catch it, since the restaurant wasn’t done anyway.”

“Why didn’t anyone report the giraffe to the police or the Humane Society?”

“Sunny controlled those blocks. The giraffe cost him lots of money. He didn’t want someone snatching it out from under him. Some of the people on those blocks hoped they’d get a job at the restaurant. They didn’t want to jeopardize it.”

“So what’s going to happen to the giraffe now?”