“As long as you don’t go out of cell range . . . and you take the monkey.”
“Why can’t Carl stay here?”
“He’s annoying. It’s nonnegotiable.”
“Okay, fine, but you owe me.”
“Lookin’ forward to settling the score,” Diesel said.
“Boy, you never give up, do you?”
“I wouldn’t be me if I gave up.”
I got Carl settled in the back of the Jeep and I drove to the office.
“I’ll go with you,” Lula said, “but I’m not going inside. I’m not having no more rat experiences.”
“What good are you if you won’t go inside?”
“I can guard the Jeep. Suppose by dumb luck or something you snag Melon Head. You want to make sure the Jeep is still there when you come out, right?”
Twenty minutes later, I left Lula and Carl in the parking lot, put on my game face, and walked into Greenblat Produce.
“If you’re looking for Gordo, you’re out of luck today,” one of the women said. “He called in sick.”
“That was fast,” Lula said when I climbed behind the wheel.
I pulled Bollo’s file out of my bag. “He called in sick.” I thumbed through pages and found his home address. “He lives in Bordentown.”
“I’m cool with that,” Lula said. “Let’s go to Bordentown and root him out.”
The day had started out warm, but clouds had rolled in and the temperature was dropping. Not winter-?quality dropping, but enough to notice when there were no windows in your car. I turned the heater on full blast and hunkered down.
“Where’s your windows?” Lula wanted to know.
“They need to get zipped in.”
“Well, zip them in. I’m freezing my ass off.”
I’d bought the Jeep a month before, when it was hot and I didn’t need windows. I’d tried to zip them in once when it rained and had partial success. I was willing to try again. I pulled to the side of the road, and Lula and I grunted and tugged and cussed at the plastic windows. We finally got most of them secure, with the exception of the back window. The back window would zip only halfway.
“Good enough,” Lula said. “We need ventilation anyway since the monkey’s back there.”
Carl gave her the finger.
“That all you got?” Lula asked Carl.
Carl grabbed his crotch and hiked it up.
“That’s disgusting on a monkey” Lula said. “You been letting him watch MTV? You want to monitor his tele vision viewing.”
I checked Carl out in my rearview mirror. He was back to playing with his game.
“Get the map out and find 656 Ward Street in Borden-?town,” I told Lula.
Lula opened the map and traced a line with her finger. “You gotta get off Route 206 in about half a mile.”
Ten minutes later, we were on Ward Street, but we couldn’t find Bollo’s house. There was no 656 on Ward Street. The only thing on Ward Street was a cemetery on one side and a ceramic pipe factory on the other.