Hardcore Twenty-Four (Stephanie Plum 24)

The only thing I heard calling was lunch. I’d had a candy bar from the vending machine in the courthouse and nothing since.

“How did it work out with LeRoy?” I asked. “Did he make bond?”

“Yep. And we went to get something to eat after. We went to the deli on Line Street, and they have excellent coleslaw. You get a good dish of coleslaw, and it goes a long way at providing happiness for the rest of the day.”

Words to live by.

“What about LeRoy?” I asked.

“He’s confused,” Lula said. “He doesn’t know if his wife is coming back or not. I guess his kids got over him being naked on the cake, but the wife not so much. Sounds to me like they might have had problems before the cake incident. He’s an okay guy, but I don’t see a romantic future with him.”

“Because of the wife confusion??

?

“No. From what I can tell every married man has wife confusion. LeRoy is a tapper. Tap, tap, tap on everything. On the deli table. On the dashboard. On his chin. Only time he wasn’t tapping was when you had him cuffed or when he got food in his hand. Only thing worse than a tapper is a jiggler or a hummer. You find a man does any of those things and you run don’t walk away, because if you get locked in a room with him, eventually you’re gonna have to kill him.”

Lula stopped for a light, and I searched through my messenger bag, hoping to find a breakfast bar, finding only a cough drop.

I unwrapped the cough drop and popped it into my mouth. “Diggery got off with a fine this morning. Trespass at the wrong time of day.”

“Connie told me. She said she heard from the court cop that Diggery was on his game. Besides, everyone wanted to get out to the food truck. The Cuban sandwich guy was there today.”

“I didn’t know there was a food truck!”

“They let him park in the cop lot. Where were you parked?”

“Public parking across the street.”

“You’re such an amateur,” Lula said. “You give the guy at the gate a BJ once in a while and he lets you park in the cop lot.”

Not only did I not want to give the guy a BJ, but I had no confidence my BJ would be good enough for entrance into the lot.

“Anyway,” I said, “I took Diggery home, and his neighborhood is filled with police rounding up zombies.”

“I heard that too. Connie’s sister-in-law works on the lockup floor at the hospital. She said the whole place stinks like carnations. Something about the chemistry of the drug that makes carnation stink ooze out of your skin. I have my own theory.”

I was afraid to ask.

“I’m thinking that brains smell like carnations,” Lula said. “Probably some people know that, like undertakers and doctors who do autopsies, but they don’t tell nobody. That’s why funeral homes always smell like carnations.”

“They smell like carnations because people send flower arrangements with carnations in them.”

“That’s what they like you to believe,” Lula said, “but downstairs they got dead people on slabs with their brains leaking out.”

I turned the air-conditioning up and powered the window down. I needed air. The cough drop wasn’t sitting great in my stomach. Probably what I needed was bread. With meatloaf between it.

“I need to go to my parents’ house,” I said. “My car is there, and I want to make sure Grandma got home okay.”

And there would be bread and meatloaf. And if no meatloaf, there’d at least be bologna.

Lula cut down a couple side streets and crossed the train tracks. Ten minutes later she turned into the Burg and pulled to the curb, behind my Honda SUV.

“Is this CR-V a new Ranger car?” she asked.

“Yes. It’s a loaner.”

“It’s a shame it’s gonna get destroyed by your bad car juju. It’s freaky how the only car you can’t kill is the Buick.”