Sizzling Sixteen (Stephanie Plum 16)

“What the heck is this?” Lula said. “I’m confused.”

Connie looked over at me. “What do you think?”

“I don’t think they have him,” I said.

Connie gave a curt nod. “That’s what I think.”

“So who’s got him?” Lula asked.

“Don’t know,” Connie said, “but if we give them the money, they won’t blow us up.”

Lula opened her door and dumped the money out on the pavement. “I want a receipt,” she said.

“I don’t got a receipt,” the one guy said. “Mr. Sunflower didn’t give us no receipt. And anyway, we’d have to count it to give you a real receipt.”

“Are you sayin’ I’m a cheater?” Lula said to him. “Because you better take it back if that’s what you meant to say. You be in for a world of hurt if you slander me.”

“Cripes, woman,” the guy said. “I just don’t

got a receipt. Cut me some slack here.”

“Hunh,” Lula said, and she slammed her door shut.

“Guess we’re done here,” I said.

And I drove off.

“That was sort of a letdown,” Lula said. “I expected to get Vinnie back. Not that I even want him back, but we gave those guys a lot of money, and seems like we should get something. I need a doughnut. If you turn onto Broad, there’s a doughnut place.”

“You can’t solve all your problems with doughnuts,” I said. “If you keep doing that, I’m going to get fat.”

“There’s four ways to manage stress,” Lula said to me. “There’s drugs, there’s alcohol, there’s sex, and there’s doughnuts. I go with sex and doughnuts. I tried the other two and it wasn’t any good. You being in a dry spell, you might have to rely on doughnuts.”

I turned onto Broad, and a block later, I pulled into a Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through. Lula got a bag of doughnuts, and Connie got a bag of doughnuts.

I took a doughnut from Connie’s bag. “So what do we think about Vinnie?”

“I think he’s dead,” Lula said.

“He hasn’t turned up,” Connie said.

Lula finished off her first doughnut. “He could be in the morgue.”

Connie shook her head. “All the cops know Vinnie. He’d get ID’d if he showed up dead.”

“Then they must have shot Vinnie full of holes like Swiss cheese and weighted him down with cement boots and thrown him off the bridge into the Delaware. Or they could have taken him to a butcher shop and chopped him up into little pieces and put him into the meat grinder,” Lula said. “I’m gonna eat this jelly doughnut next. I love jelly doughnuts.”

“So dead is one possibility,” I said. “What else?”

“Somebody else could have snatched him,” Lula said. “Somebody other than Bobby Sunflower.”

“Why?” Connie asked.

“I guess to get money, like Sunflower. It could be a copy-cat snatching,” Lula said.

“No one’s gotten in touch with us,” Connie said.

“Hunh,” Lula said. “That’s problematic.”