Explosive Eighteen (Stephanie Plum 18)

“You have a black eye, a cut lip, a broken nose, and you’re flirting with me?”

“That’s not the worst of it,” I told him. “I’ve decided I’m off men.”

“All things considered, that’s not a bad plan,” Ranger said. “I have to go. Call if you need help, or anything else.”

“Now you’re flirting,” I told him.

“That wasn’t flirting,” Ranger said. “That was an open invitation.”

I locked the door when he left. I slid the chain into place and flipped the dead bolt. None of those locks ever prevented Ranger from entering, and I’d long ago stopped wondering how he did it.

• • •

I made myself a sandwich and took it to the dining room table. Chewing was painful, but I managed to get the whole thing down. I pulled up a search program on my computer and started working my way through Brenda’s husbands.

Brenda married Herbert Luckert right out of high school. The marriage lasted ten years and ended in divorce. A year later, she married Harry Zimmer. That marriage lasted seven months and ended in divorce. She was unmarried for nine years after that, eventually marrying Bernard Schwartz. The Schwartz marriage ended after three years when Schwartz emptied his medicine chest into the blender along with half a pint of vodka and drank himself into a blissful final slumber.

When Brenda married Schwartz, he owned thirty-five car washes spread throughout the state. When he killed himself, he owned four, and they were in foreclosure. He’d lost his house a couple months before. I had no idea if or how this related to the photograph, but it seemed like something to file away.

I got out of the search program and checked my email. Mostly spam. I gingerly touched my lip and my nose. Tender. I went to the bathroom and took another look. Not good, but at least I didn’t have a foot-long, inch-deep gash in my thigh. I hoped Razzle Dazzle was in a lot of pain. And I really wouldn’t mind if the cut got infected and his leg fell off.

My cell phone rang, and I was hoping for Joyce so I could tell her I had the key, but it was my parents’ number that came up on the display.

“The Korda viewing is at seven o’clock tonight,” Grandma said. “I figure you want to go and snoop around, and I was hoping I could have a ride.”

“Sure.”

“Are you coming for dinner? Your mother’s making chicken and rice.”

My mother would have a coronary incident if she saw my face. “I’m going to skip dinner,” I said.

“Okay, but make sure you’re not late. There’s gonna be a crowd tonight, and I don’t want to get muscled to the back of the room. All the action’s gonna be up by the casket.”

I said good-bye to Grandma, and I went to get ice. Lots of ice, I thought. The more the better.

By six-thirty, it was clear there was only so much improvement I could expect from ice. I got dressed in a black pencil skirt, black heels, a cream sweater with a low scoop neck and matching cardigan. I wore my hair down and fluffed out, hoping it would distract from my monster bruise and cut lip. I smeared on a lot of concealer, tried to balance out the black eye with extra blush, and I was wearing my push-up bra for maximum cleavage. I took one last look in the mirror and thought this was as good as it was going to get.

I dropped my new Glock into my purse, along with the stun gun on steroids. I was wearing the GPS watch, pearl earrings, a Band-Aid where the knife had knicked my neck, and a huge Band-Aid on my skinned knee. I was the All-American Girl.

FIFTEEN

GRANDMA WAS AT THE DOOR, waiting for me. I pulled to the curb, and she hustled over to the truck. She was wearing chunky black heels, a lavender suit with a white blouse, and she was carrying the black leather purse that I knew was big enough to hold her .45 long barrel.

She hoisted herself up and into the truck, buckled her seat belt, and looked over at me.

“Don’t you look pretty,” Grandma said. “That’s such a nice sweater set.”

No comment on my face or the various Band-Aids.

“Anything else?” I asked her.

“I like your hair down like that. I hardly ever see it down anymore.” Grandma looked at her watch. “We gotta get a move on.”

“What about my face?”

“What about it?”

“For starters, I have a black eye.”