Finger Lickin' Fifteen (Stephanie Plum 15)

“That gives us more selection,” Pookey said.

By the time Lula was done shopping at C.J. Scrap, she had a grill and a card table loaded into her truck. The plate on the truck was expired, but you could hardly tell for the mud and rust. I followed her down Stark and parked behind her when she stopped at Maynard’s Funeral Home.

“I gotta make a pickup here, too. You stay and guard the truck,” Lula said, sticking her head in the Buick’s window. “Bad as it is, if I leave it alone for ten minutes in this part of town, it’ll be missing wheels when I get back.” She looked at Grandma, sitting next to me. “Do you have your gun?”

“You betcha,” Grandma said. “I got it right here in my purse. Just like always.”

“Shoot whoever comes near,” Lula said to Grandma. “I won’t be long.”

I looked over at Grandma. “If you shoot anyone, I’m telling my mother on you.”

“How about those three guys coming down the street? Can I shoot them?”

“No! They’re just walking down the street.”

“I don’t like the looks of them,” Grandma said. “They look shifty.”

“Everyone looks like that on Stark Street.”

The three guys were in their early to mid-twenties, doing the ghetto strut in their ridiculous oversize pants. They were wearing a lot of gold chains, and one of them had a bottle in a brown paper bag. Always a sign of a classy dude.

I rolled my window up and locked my door, and Grandma did the same.

They got even with the Buick and looked in at me.

“Nice wheels,” one of them said. “Maybe you should get out and let me drive.”

“Ignore them,” I said to Grandma. “They’ll go away.”

The guy with the bottle took a pull on it and tried the door handle. Locked.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to shoot him?” Grandma asked.

“No. No shooting.”

They tried to rock the car, but the Buick was a tank. It would take more than three scrawny homies to rock the Buick. One of them dropped his pants and pressed his bare ass against the driver’s side window.

“You’re gonna have to Windex that window when we get home,” Grandma said.

I was looking at the funeral home, sending mental telepathy to Lula to get herself out to her truck, so we could leave, and I heard the back door to the Buick get wrenched open. I hadn’t thought to lock the back door.

One of the men climbed onto the backseat, and another reached around and unlocked the driver’s door. I reached for the ignition key, but my door was already open, and I was getting pulled out of the car. I hooked my arm through the steering wheel and kicked one of the guys in the face. The guy in the back was grabbing at me, and the third guy had hold of my foot.

“We’re gonna have fun with you and the old lady,” the guy in the backseat said. “We’re gonna do you like you’ve never been done before.”

“Shoot!” I said to Grandma.

“But you said . . .”

“Just fucking shoot someone!”

Grandma carried a gun like Dirty Harry’s. I caught sight of the massive barrel in my peripheral vision and BANG.

The guy holding my foot jumped back and grabbed the side of his head, blood spurting through his fingers. “Son of a bitch!” he yelled. “Son of a fuckin’ bitch! She shot off my ear.”

I knew what he was saying because it was easy to read his lips, but I wasn’t hearing anything but a high-pitched ringing in my head.

The guy in the backseat scrambled out of the Buick and helped drag the guy with one ear down the street.