Hot Six (Stephanie Plum 6)

Joyce smiled. “The only problem I've got is trying to decide how I'm going to spend Ranger's capture money.”

“Oh, yeah,” Lula said. “You want to waste a lot of time on that one.”

“You'll see,” Joyce said. “I always get my man.”

And dog and goat and vegetable . . . and everybody else's man, too.

“Well, we'd love to stand here talking to you, Joyce,” Lula said. “But we got better things to do. We got a big important apprehension to make. We were just on our way to go catch a high-bond motherfucker.”

“Are you going in the clown car?” Joyce asked.

“We're going in my Firebird,” Lula said. “We always take the Firebird when we got serious ass-kicking lined up.”

“I have to see Vinnie,” Joyce said. “Someone made a mistake on Ranger's bond application. I checked out the address, and it's a vacant lot.”

Lula and I looked at each other and smiled.

“Gee, imagine that,” Lula said.

No one knows where Ranger lives. The address on his driver's license is for a men's shelter on Post Street. Not likely for a man who owns office buildings in Boston and checks with his stockbroker daily. Every now and then Lula and I make a halfhearted effort to track him down, but we've never had any success.

“So what do you think?” Lula asked when Joyce disappeared inside the office. “You want to go do some damage on Morris Munson?”

“I don't know. He's kind of crazy.”

“Hunh,” Lula said. “He don't scare me. I guess I could fix his bony ass. He didn't shoot at you, did he?”

“No.”

“Then he isn't as crazy as most of the people on my block.”

“Are you sure you want to risk going after him in your Firebird, after what he did to the wind machine?”

“First off, assuming I'd even be able to get my full figure into the wind machine, I think you'd need to take a can opener to it to get me out. And then, being that there's two seats in this little bitty car, and we'd be sitting in them, suppose we'd have to strap Munson to the hood to bring him in. Not that it's such a bad idea, but it'd slow us down some.”

Lula walked over to the file cabinets and gave the bottom right-hand drawer a kick. The drawer popped open; Lula extracted a forty-caliber Glock and dropped it into her shoulder bag.

“No shooting!” I said.

“Sure, I know that,” Lula said. “This here's car insurance.”

BY THE TIME we got to Rockwell Street my stomach was queasy and my heart was tap-dancing in my chest.

“You don't look too good,” Lula said.

“I think I'm carsick.”

“You never get carsick.”

“I do when I'm after some guy who just came at me with a tire iron.”

“Don't worry. He do that again, and I'll pop a cap up his ass.”

“No! I told you before—no shooting.”

“Well, yeah, but this here's life insurance.”

I tried to give her a stern look, but I sighed instead.