Hard Eight (Stephanie Plum 8)

“Hope I'm not disturbing anything,” Kloughn said, stretching his neck out to look around me into my apartment. “You aren't entertaining or anything, are you? I didn't know if you were living with anyone.”

“What's up?”

“I've been thinking about the Soder case, and I have some ideas. I thought we could, like, brainstorm.”

I looked down at the box he was holding.

“I brought a pizza,” he said. “I didn't know if you'd eaten yet. Do you like pizza? If you don't like pizza I could get something else. I could get Mexican or Chinese or Thai . . .”

Please, Lord, tell me this isn't a date. “I'm sort of engaged.”

He vigorously nodded his head. Up and down, up and down, like one of those dogs people put in their back car windows. “Absolutely. I knew you would be. Understood. I'm almost engaged, too. I have a girlfriend.”

“Really?”

He took a deep breath. “No. I just made that up.”

I took the pizza box from him and dragged him into my apartment. I got some napkins and a couple beers, and we sat at my small dining room table and ate pizza.

“What are these ideas you have about Evelyn Soder?”

“I figure she's with a friend, right? So she had to get in touch with the friend somehow. She had to tell her she was coming to stay. I figure she did this on the phone. So what we need is a phone bill.”

“And?”

“That's it.”

“Good thing you brought a pizza.”

“Actually, it's a tomato pie. In the Burg they call it a tomato pie.”

“Sometimes. You know anyone at the phone company? Anyone in the billing department?”

“I figured you'd have the contacts. See, that's why we're such a good team. I have the ideas. And you have the contacts. Bounty hunters have contacts, right?”

“Right.” Unfortunately, not in the phone company.

We finished the pizza, and I brought out the bag of frozen cookies for dessert.

“I heard you get cancer from eating raw cookie dough,” Kloughn said. “Don't you think you should bake this?”

I ate a bag of raw dough a week. I considered it to be one of the four major food groups. “I always eat raw cookie dough,” I said.

“Me, too,” Kloughn said. “I eat raw cookie dough all the time. I don't believe that stuff about the cancer.” He looked into the bag and tentatively took out a frozen lump of dough. “So what do you do here? Do you, like, nibble on it? Or do you put it all in your mouth at once?”

“You've never had raw cookie dough, have you?”

“No.” He took a bite and chewed. “I like it,” he said. “Very good.”

I glanced down at my watch. “You're going to have to go now. I have some unfinished business to take care of.”

“Is it bounty hunter business? You can tell me. I won't tell anybody, I swear. What are you doing? I bet you're going after someone. You were waiting for nighttime, right?”

“Right.”

“So who are you going after? Is it anyone I know? Is it, like, a high-profile case? A killer?”

“It's no one you know. It's domestic abuse. A repeat offender. I'm waiting until he passes out in a drunken stupor, and then I'm going to capture him when he's unconscious.”