Hard Eight (Stephanie Plum 8)

“I'm not a morning person.”

“It's your love life,” Lula said. “You aren't getting any, and you got nothing to put a smile on your face. You're letting yourself go, is what you're doing.”

“I could get plenty if I wanted.”

“Well, then?”

“It's complicated.”

Connie gave me a check for the Paulson capture. “You aren't thinking about going to work for Sebring, are you?”

I told them about Evelyn and Annie.

“Maybe I should talk to Sebring with you,” Lula said. “Maybe we can get him to show us his legs.”

“Not necessary,” I said. “I can manage this myself.” And I didn't especially want to see Les Sebring's legs.

“Look here. I didn't even put my bag down,” Lula said. “I'm ready to go.”

Lula and I stared at each other for a beat. I was going to lose. I could see it coming. Lula had it in her mind to go with me. Probably didn't want to file. “Okay,” I said, “but no shooting, no shoving, no asking him to roll up his pants leg.”

“You got a lot of rules,” Lula said.

We took the CR-V across town and parked in a lot next to Sebring's building. The bonds office was on the ground floor, and Sebring had a suite of offices above it.

“Just like Vinnie,” Lula said, eyeballing the carpeted floor and freshly painted walls. “Only it looks like humans work here. And check out these chairs for people to sit in . . . they don't even have stains on them. And his receptionist don't have a mustache, either.”

Sebring escorted us into his private office. “Stephanie Plum. I've heard of you,” he said.

“It wasn't my fault that the funeral parlor burned down,” I told him. “And I almost never shoot people.”

“We heard of you, too,” Lula said to Sebring. “We heard you got great legs.”

Sebring was wearing a silver gray suit, white shirt, and red, white, and blue tie. He reeked of respectability, from the tips of his shined black shoes to the top of his perfectly trimmed white hair. And behind the polite politician smile he looked like he didn't take a lot of shit. There was a moment of silence while he considered Lula. Then he hiked his pants leg up. “Get a load of these wheels,” he said.

“You must work out,” Lula said. “You got excellent legs.”

“I wanted to speak to you about Mabel Markowitz,” I said to Sebring. “You called her on a child custody bond.”

He nodded. “I remember. I have someone scheduled to visit her again today. So far, she hasn't been helpful.”

“She lives next door to my parents, and I don't think she knows where her granddaughter or her great-granddaughter have gone.”

“That's too bad,” Sebring said. “Do you know about child custody bonds?”

“Not a lot.”

"PBUS, which as you know is a professional bail agents association, worked with the Center for Missing and Exploited Children to get legislation going that would discourage parents from kidnapping their own kids.

“It's a pretty simple idea. If it looks like there's a good chance either or both parents will take off with the child for parts unknown, the court can impose a cash bond.”

“So this is like a criminal bail bond, but it's a child who's at risk,” I said.

“With one big difference,” Sebring said. “When a criminal bond is posted by a bail bondsman and the accused fails to appear in court, the bondsman forfeits the bond amount to the court. Then the bondsman can hunt down the accused, return him to the system, and hopefully be reimbursed by the court. In the case of a child custody bond, the bondsman forfeits the bond to the wronged parent. The money is then supposed to be used to find the missing child.”

“So if the bond isn't enough of a deterrent to kidnapping, at least there's money to hire a professional to search for the missing child,” I said.

"Exactly. Problem is, unlike a criminal bond, the child custody bondsman doesn't have the legal right to hunt down the child. The only recourse the child custody bondsman has to recoup his loss is to foreclose on property or cash collateral posted at the time the bond is written.