Finger Lickin' Fifteen (Stephanie Plum 15)

“What are they doing?”

“I don’t know,” my mother said. “I’m afraid to look.”

I pushed through the back door and almost stepped on a tray of chicken parts.

“Hey, girlfriend,” Lula said. “Look at us. Are we chefs, or what?”

Grandma and Lula were dressed in white chef’s jackets. Grandma was wearing a black cap that made her look like a little old Chinese man, and Lula was wearing a puffy white chef’s hat like the Pillsbury Doughboy. They were standing in front of a propane grill.

“Where’d you get the grill?” I asked.

“I borrowed it from Bobby Booker. He brought it over in his truck on the promise he was gonna get some of our award-winning barbecue chicken someday. Now that we got this here grill, my barbecue is gonna turn out perfect. Only thing is, I can’t get it to work. He said there was lots of propane in the tank. And my understanding is, all I have to do is turn the knob.”

“I got some matches,” Grandma said. “Maybe it’s got one of them pilot lights that went out.”

Lula took the matches, bent over the grill, and Phunnf! Flames shot four feet into the air and set her chef’s hat on fire.

“That did it,” Lula said, stepping back, hat blazing. “It’s cookin’ now.”

Grandma and I had a split second of paralysis, mouths open, eyes bugged out, staring at the flaming hat.

“What?” Lula said.

“Your hat’s on fire,” Grandma told her. “You look like one of them cookout marshmallows.”

Lula rolled her eyes upward and shrieked. “Yow! My hat’s on fire! My hat’s on fire!”

I tried to knock the hat off her head, but Lula was running around in a panic.

“Hold still!” I yelled. “Get the hat off your head!”

“Somebody do something!” she shouted, wild-eyed, arms waving. “Call the fire department!”

“Take the damn hat off,” I said to her, lunging for her and missing.

“I’m on fire! I’m on fire!” Lula yelled, running into the grill, knocking it over. Her hat fell off her head onto the ground and ribbons of fire ran raced in all directions across my parents’ yard.

Growing grass was never a priority for my father. His contention was if you grew the grass, you had to cut the grass. And what was the point to that? The result was that most of our backyard was dirt, with the occasional sad sprinkling of crab grass. In seconds, the fire burned up the crabgrass and played itself out, with the exception of a half-dead maple tree at the back of the yard. The tree went up like Vesuvius.

I could hear fire trucks whining in the distance. A car pulled into the driveway, a car door opened and closed, and Morelli strolled into the yard. Lula’s hat was a lump of black ash on the ground. The tree was a torch in the dusky sky.

“I saw the fire on my way home from work,” Morelli said. “I stopped by to help, but it looks like you have everything under control.”

“Yep,” I said. “We’re just waiting for the tree to burn itself out.”

He looked at the grill and the chicken. “Barbecuing tonight?”

A pack of dogs rounded the corner of the house, ran yapping up to the chicken, and carried it off.

“Not anymore,” I said. “Want to go for pizza?”

“Sure,” he said.

We each took our own cars, sneaking out between the fire trucks that were angling into the curb. I followed Morelli to Pino’s, parked next to his SUV in Pino’s lot, and we pushed through the restaurant’s scarred oak front door into the heat and noise of dinner hour. At this time of day, the majority of tables were filled with families. At ten in the evening, Pino’s would be crammed with nurses and cops unwinding off the second shift. We were able to snag a small table in the corner. We didn’t have to read the menu. We knew it by heart. Pino’s menu never changes.

Morelli ordered beer and a meatball sub. I got the same.

“Looks like you’re working for Rangeman,” Morelli said, taking in my black T-shirt and sweatshirt with the Rangeman logo on the left front. “What’s that about?”