Fortune and Glory (Stephanie Plum 27)

“Eeuuw,” I said. “Get real.”

Benny scooped a glob of cannoli filling off his shirt. “I just said that for old times’ sake. I wanted to see how it would feel.”

“So? How did it feel?”

“Not as good as I remember. I was something in my day. You won’t tell my wife, will you?”

“No. I won’t tell her. You should share the last cannoli with her.”

“Maybe,” Benny said.

“One last question. And I think I already know the answer. Obviously, someone knows the location of the treasure.”

“The guy who stashed it away,” Benny said.

“The Keeper of the Keys?”

“Bingo. You got it. Jimmy. He was the guy we all trusted. He hid the treasure a bunch of years ago and gave us our clues. He even gave himself a clue. He got the last clue. I’m thinking it probably was the combination for the lock. You gotta stick the keys in and then you need the combination.”

“And now he’s dead.”

“Yeah. Dumb fuck. Who would have thought he’d go like that?”

“When someone dies, what happens to his clue?”

“The clues get put in the Mole Hole safe… if we can find them. It was like a ritual. We drank some whiskey. We talked about old times. We spit on the floor and put the clue in the Mole Hole safe.”

“Why did you spit on the floor?”

“Men do these things. Like I said, it was a ritual. Like retiring the dead SOB’s chair.” He looked at the two cannoli left in the box. “I might have to eat these.”

“Three of the six treasure owners have died,” I said. “And I’m guessing you only have two clues in the safe. I’m guessing Jimmy’s clue is missing along with the keys.”

“I’m not saying, but you could be right. Look, here’s the deal. The clues were more like a fun game. Truth is, if we wanted to find the treasure we could. We could just put all our clues together. And besides, some of the guys probably followed Jimmy and figured it out. I couldn’t be bothered. For that matter, we could have gotten the keys from Jimmy if we really wanted. All we had to do was kill him. None of us did any of this because the treasure was basically worthless hours after we got it. It was hotter than hot. The booby trap was set so the treasure would be destroyed if someone got stupid greedy before enough time had passed.”

“Has enough time passed?” I asked.

Benny shrugged. “Hard to say.”

Leaving Benny with cannoli crumbs and powdered sugar on his shirt, I let myself out and drove to the office. As far as bail bonds offices go, this one’s okay, but it’s not going to get a spread in Architectural Digest. It’s basically a storefront. The front room has an ugly brown Naugahyde couch against one wall, and two uncomfortable plastic orange chairs are positioned in front of a large metal desk on the other side of the room. A bank of rarely used file cabinets line the back wall. There’s storage in the room behind the file cabinets, and a coffee station just inside the rear exit. My cousin Vinny hides out in a private office located behind the metal desk. Anyone wanting to beat the crap out of Vinnie has to get around the desk and through his locked door. Conni

e Rosolli, the office manager, sits behind the desk and keeps a loaded Glock nine in her bottom drawer. Vinnie is an excellent bail bondsman, but a slimeball in every other aspect of his life. Hence the security precautions.

Connie looked up from her computer when I walked in. She’s a couple years older than me and a much better shot. She’d be a dead ringer for Dolly Parton if only Dolly had black hair and a mustache.

“I have three Failure to Appear files for you,” Connie said to me. “One of them is a high bond. Vinnie is going to be all over you to bring him in.”

If you get arrested and don’t want to sit in jail until the court decides your ultimate fate, you pay my cousin to put up a bond for your release. If you don’t show up for your court date and disappear off the face of the earth, Vinnie is out his bond money. If this happens too many times, not only is Vinnie in the red, but his father-in-law will amputate Vinnie’s penis.

It’s my job to make sure the ifs never get to the penis removal point. I make my money by finding the failure-to-appear idiots for Vinnie and dragging them back to jail. Currently, I was in desperate need of money. Rent was due, and I was two days away from searching the bottom of my bag for spare change.

Lula was on the couch. She’d changed her clothes and she’d added pink glitter to her eyelids for some afternoon glam.

“I already went through the files,” she said. “We got a good one. George Potts. Remember him? He made national news a couple months ago when he got arrested for streaking down Hamilton Avenue and using the sidewalk in front of Tasty Pastry Bakery as a bathroom. He blamed it on bad weed and a gluten allergy.”

I looked at the other two. Arnold Rugalowski, one of the fry cooks at Cluck-in-a-Bucket, was caught on camera putting fried roaches in his ex-wife’s bucket of Clucky Chicken. She was insisting it was attempted murder, and he said it was a hate crime. The third FTA was the high bond. Rodney Trotter had been giving silicone butt implants in the back of his fifteen-year-old VW bus. His slogan was we come to you and you get what you want. After numerous complaints and an almost death, he was arrested for practicing butt enhancement without a license. The court set a six-figure bond because it deemed Trotter a high risk for flight.

“You look like a balloon someone just let the air out of,” Lula said to me. “Are you okay?”