Eleven on Top (Stephanie Plum 11)

I hit the door locks and automatic windows, put the car into reverse, and screeched out of the driveway into the road. I changed gears and roared away, gagging on the odor of wet barbecued car. He was right, of course. The car was a death trap, and I was being stubborn. Problem was, I couldn't help myself.

Morelli brought out the stubborn in me.

Kan Klean was a small mom-and-pop dry cleaners that had been operating in the Burg for as long as I can remember. The Macaroni family owned Kan Klean.

Mama Macaroni, Mario Macaroni, and Gina Macaroni were the principals, and a bunch of miscellaneous Macaronis helped out when needed.

Mama Macaroni was a contemporary of Grandma Bella and Grandma Mazur. Mama Macaroni's fierce raptor eyes took the world in under drooping folds of parchment-thin skin. Her shrunken body, wrapped in layers of black, curved over her cane and conjured up images of mummified larvae. She had a boulder of a mole set into the roadmap of her face somewhere in the vicinity of Atlanta. Three hairs grew out of the mole. The mole was horrifying and compelling. It was the dermatological equivalent of a seven-car crash with blood and guts spread all over the highway.

I'd never been to Kan Klean that Mama Macaroni wasn't sitting on a stool behind the counter. Mama nodded to customers but seldom spoke. Mama only spoke when there was a problem. Mama Macaroni was the problem solver. Her son Mario supervised the day-to-day operation. Her daughter-in-law, Gina, kept the books and ran day care for the hordes of grandchildren produced by her four daughters and two sons.

“It's not difficult,” Gina said to me. “You'll be working the register. You take the clothes from the customer and you do a count. Then you fill out the order form and give a copy to the customer. You put a copy in the bag with the clothes and you put the third copy in the box by the register. Then you put the bag in one of the rolling bins. One bin is laundry and one bin is dry cleaning. That's the way we do it. When a customer comes in to pick up his cleaned clothes you search for the clothes by the number on the top of his receipt. Make sure you always take a count so the customer gets all his clothes.”

Mama Macaroni mumbled something in Italian and slid her dentures around in her mouth.

“Mama says you should be careful. She says she's keeping her eye on you,” Gina said.

I smiled at Mama Macaroni and gave her a thumbs-up. Mama Macaroni responded with a death glare.

“When you have time between customers you can tag the clothes,” Gina said.

“Every single garment must get tagged. We have a machine that you use, and you have to make sure that the number on the tag is the same as the number on the customer's receipt.”

By noon I'd completely lost the use of my right thumb from using the tagging machine.

“You got to go faster,” Mama Macaroni said to me from her stool. “I see you slow down. You think we pay for nothing?”

A man hurried through the front door and approached the counter. He was mid-forties and dressed in a suit and tie. “I picked my dry cleaning up yesterday,” he said, “and all the buttons are broken off my shirt.”

Mama Macaroni got off her stool and caned her way to the counter. “What?” she said.

“The buttons are broken.”

She shook her head. “I no understand.”

He showed her the shirt. “The buttons are all broken.”

“Yes,” Mama Macaroni said.

“You broke them.”

“No,” Mama said. “Impossible.”

“The buttons were fine when I brought the shirt in. I picked the shirt up and the buttons were all broken.”

“I no understand.”

“What don't you understand?”

“English. My English no good.”

The man looked at me. “Do you speak English?”

“What?” I said.

The man whipped the shirt off the counter and left the store.

“Maybe you not so slow,” Mama Macaroni said to me. “But don't get any ideas about taking it easy. We don't pay you good money to stand around doing nothing.”