I went back to the kitchen and dialed Ranger.
“Yo,” Ranger said.
“Anyone bragging about killing Ronald Anders?”
“No one's bragging about anything these days. The streets are quiet.”
“Turf war?”
“Don't t know. A couple players are missing. A couple dopers are dead. Got some hot shit going around killing people.”
“ODs?”
“That's the way the death certificates read.”
“You think something different?”
“Feels dark, babe.”
I disconnected and a minute later the phone rang.
“We got a situation on our hands,” Lula said.
“A situation?”
“Just got a call from Jackie, and I can't make any sense of what she's saying. Something about how her old man jacked her over again.”
“Where is she?”
“She's at the FancyAss Apartments. She's been there day and night, and she sounds flipped out. I told her to wait right where she was, and we'd come fast as we could.”
Fifteen minutes later I pulled into the RiverEdge lot. The sky was black and dense above evenly spaced pools of artificial light thrown by the overhead halogen lamps. Jackie had parked her Chrysler on the fringe of one of those pools. The river was a block away, and the ice fog swirled around the lamps and settled on the cars.
Jackie stood beside her car, waving her arms while she yelled at Lula, and Lula was yelling back at Jackie.
“Calm down,” Lula was saying. “Calm down!”
“He's dead,” Jackie shouted. “Dead, dead, dead. Fucking dead. Dead as a goddamn doorknob. What a bitch!”
I looked at Lula, and Lula gave me an I-don't-know shrug.
“I just got here,” Lula said. “I can't get her to say anything besides the motherfucker's dead. Maybe she's too coked up. Maybe we need to get something to slow her down.”
“I'm not coked up, you dumb ho,” Jackie said. “I'm trying to tell you he's dead, and you're not fucking listening.”
I looked around the lot. “Is he dead anywhere nearby?”
I really wanted a no on this one. I'd already had my millennium quota of dead.
“You see that big bush by the Dumpster?” Jackie said.
“Yeah.”
“You see that ugly-ass foot sticking out of that big bush?”
Oh boy. She was right. There was a foot sticking out of the bush.
“Shit, Jackie,” I said. “You didn't kill that foot, did you?”