Explosive Eighteen (Stephanie Plum 18)
“Yeah, and it wasn’t easy with the two of you rolling around on the ground, whaling away at each other.”
Actually, I had stunned both of them, cuffed them while they were immobilized, and drove them to the emergency room. Then I changed out my plane ticket for an earlier flight, called Lula, and took off before they were finished getting stitched and patched. Not only did I want to put distance between us, but I thought it smart to leave the island before getting charged with illegal use of an illegal stun gun. Sometimes there’s a fine line between a cowardly act and a brilliant decision, and my brilliant decision had been to get out of Honolulu and leave the stun gun behind.
Ranger transferred the messenger bag from his shoulder to mine, pulled me into him, and kissed me like he meant it. “Let me know if the guys following you in the Lincoln get too bothersome,” he said, opening the door to my car.
No point asking how Ranger knew about the Lincoln. Ranger pretty much knows everything.
• • •
I slid behind the wheel of the RAV, cranked it over, and drove to the coffee shop. Lula and Connie were in the table area by the front window. Connie was working on her laptop, and Lula was drinking coffee, paging through a magazine.
“Is this the new office?” I asked Connie.
“Until I come up with something better. DeAngelo says the building will be done in three weeks. Hard to believe.”
“Did he say that before or after he firebombed the bus?” I asked her.
“After. I just spoke to him.”
Lula picked her head up. “You think DeAngelo did the bus?”
“It’s a theory,” I said.
I got a Frappuccino and a big cookie, and suggested to Lula that we head over to the junkyard to check out the rumor about Joyce.
“Hard to believe Joyce is dead,” Lula said. “She’s too mean to die. It’d be like killing the Devil. You see what I’m saying? I bet it’s damn hard to kill the Devil.”
We piled into the Firebird, and Lula cut through town and motored up Stark Street, past the mom-and-pop chop shops, groceries, bars, and pawnshops. The groceries and pawnshops gave way to crack houses, third-world sanitation, and hollow-eyed stoop sitters. The crack houses gave way to the burned-out, rat-riddled slums of no-man’s-land, where only the crazies and the most desperate existed. And the junkyard rose fortress-like and defiant, a mountain of heavy metal and fiberglass discard, beyond no-man’s-land.
Lula parked in the junkyard lot and tried to gauge her distance from the big electromagnet that swung the cars into the compactor.
“They better not get the wrong idea about my Firebird,” she said.
“You’re good,” I told her. “You’re in the visitor parking area.”
“Yeah, but if these people were smart, they wouldn’t be working in a junkyard at the end of the world.”
No argument there. It wasn’t so much the junkyard as it was the proximity to Hell. Connie’s cousin Manny Rosolli owned the junkyard. I knew him in a remote sort of way, and he seemed like a nice man. And since 80 percent of Connie’s family was mob, this gave Manny a certain amount of security in spite of the precarious location.
I found the trailer that served as an office and asked for Andy, the son of Grandma’s friend Mrs. Kulicki. I was told he was stacking cars, and I was directed to the part of the lot where cars were stored when they came out of the compactor. Fortunately, the compactor wasn’t currently in use, so I was spared the sound of cars getting crushed to death.
It was easy to find Andy since he was the only one there. Plus, he was wearing a bright orange jumpsuit with his name embroidered in black. He was a gangly tattooed guy with multiple piercings. I was guessing nineteen or twenty years old.
“You got a ankle bracelet on, too?” Lula asked him.
“This isn’t prison clothes,” Andy said. “It’s so the crusher guy can see me, so I don’t get a car dropped on me.”
“I’m looking for Joyce Barnhardt,” I told him.
“You might have a hard time finding her,” he said. “She could have got compacted. I was cleaning up, and I found her driver’s license on the ground, along with a smashed lady’s high heel shoe and a lipstick. You’d be surprised what gets shook loose after the crusher. There’s all kinds of stuff falling out of these cars when they get picked up and stacked.”
“Where’s the car now?”
“Dunno. No way to tell which car it came from.”
“Did you tell the police?” I asked him.
“Nope. I told the office. But they said when it comes to suspecting bodies in the crusher, we have a ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy.”