Twisted Twenty-Six (Stephanie Plum 26)

“How’s the guy on the floor doing?” I asked Morelli. “Do you recognize him?”

Morelli stepped over to w

here the gunman was still sprawled and spoke to one of the uniforms standing watch. A stretcher was rolled in, and the gunman was loaded onto it. Morelli came back to me.

“I don’t recognize him,” Morelli said, “but then it’s hard to really see what he looks like with the big iron imprint on his face. He didn’t have any ID on him. The only thing in his pocket was a packet of what appears to be cocaine.”

Lula swung into the room. “What’s going on? What did I miss? I couldn’t get a hair appointment so I came for lunch.” She spied the guy on the stretcher. “Holy crap! What happened to him?”

“He tried to kidnap Grandma, so my mother took him out with her iron,” I said.

Lula turned to my mom. “Way to go, Mrs. P.!” She did a high five and a down low with her. “Is he dead?”

“Not yet,” Grandma said.

“Good thing,” Lula said. “If California found out a guy got killed with an iron, they’d ban them, and all those movie stars would be wrinkled all the time.”

The medic attending me packed up. “We need to get Stephanie out to the truck,” he said to Morelli.

I glanced over at Grandma and my mother. “Are you going to be okay?”

“As soon as they get this guy out of here, we’re hitting the bottle,” Grandma said.

My mother nodded. “Then we’re going to pull on some gloves and scrub the floor.”

“I’ll stay and help,” Lula said. “I need to hear all the details.”

* * *

—

It was close to six o’clock by the time I was released from the hospital. I was numbed up, stitched up, and hydrated. Morelli had waited with me, going between my bed and the gunman’s bed in the ER.

“I told your mom we were bringing pizza for dinner,” he said. “I thought you would want to check up on her and Grandma.”

“Yes, thanks.”

We stopped at Pino’s. Morelli ran in and came out with a bunch of pizza boxes.

“That’s a lot of pizza,” I said.

“Some of it is for the Rangeman guys parked in front of your parents’ house. We decided you would come home with me, and Ranger would leave a patrol to watch over your family.”

“Sounds like a plan. I’m starving, but I’m exhausted. I can barely think.”

“It’s the adrenaline letdown,” Morelli said. “You just need pizza.”

My mother, Grandma, and my dad were lined up on the couch, watching the news on TV. They were slack-faced and glassy-eyed. My dad had his baseball bat resting beside the couch.

We ate at the dining room table. Nobody said anything. Finally, Grandma broke the silence.

“There’s bingo tonight,” she said. “It’s at the firehouse. Margie Pratt said she’d pick me up.”

My father’s mouth dropped open and a piece of pizza fell out. “Jeez Louise,” he said. “Why don’t you just stand in the middle of the street and let a car hit you. Get it over with so I can stop carrying this baseball bat around with me.”

“What my father is saying, is that maybe going to bingo tonight isn’t such a good idea,” I said.

Grandma gnawed on a pizza crust. “There’s nothing on television that I want to see, and Marvina is calling numbers at the firehouse. It’s always good when Marvina calls.”