Takedown Twenty (Stephanie Plum 20)

I looked over her shoulder, into the house. “I don’t suppose he’s here.”

“No. And it’s a good thing, because if he was here and you tried to apprehend him, I might panic over the home invasion and accidentally empty a clip into you.”

“Then you would be in jail.”

“Only if they found your body. And the probability would be slim to none.”

I believed her. Sunny was good at making people disappear.

“Okey dokey,” I said. “Good talk. You have my card. I get paid dead or alive, so if Sunny drops dead from whatever, I’d appreciate a call.”

“Yeah, I’ll be sure to do that. You’ll be next in line, right after my dog groomer.”

Lula was already in the car when I slid behind the wheel.

“Well?” she asked.

“I don’t think she’s going to be helpful.”

“I looked in all the windows, and I didn’t see no sign of Sunny. She got a nice house, though. Everything looked new and neat. I bet she got a cleaning lady.”

I put the car in gear and headed for the office.

“I sure would like a cleaning lady,” Lula said. “Wouldn’t you like to have a cleaning lady?”

I have a small one-bedroom, one-bath apartment I share with a hamster. I have the bare minimum in furniture, one fry pan, one pot, and once a month I borrow my mother’s vacuum cleaner. I suspect a cleaning lady would be overkill.

“You know what the first thing I’d have a cleaning lady do?” Lula said. “Baseboards. I hate doing baseboards. Most people would probably say they wanted the cleaning lady to do the toilet, but not me. It’d be baseboards.”

I wasn’t sure if my apartment even had baseboards. “I don’t spend a lot of time in my apartment.”

“Yeah, but when you’re there you want it to be your favorite spot, right? It has to reflect your personality. Like, wall treatment is important. It gotta put you in a good mood. That’s why my walls are orange. Orange is a good all-purpose color. It’s the new neutral. And it goes good with my favorite color, which is leopard. I did a lot of accessorizing with leopard. I re-covered my most comfy chair in leopard, and I got a leopard bedspread. Now, if we want to talk about your apartment, it’s pretty bare-ass. You might want me to help you redecorate someday being that it’s one of my hobbies.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“It could even be a bonding experience.”

“You don’t think we’re bonded enough?”

“There’s all kinds of bonding,” Lula said. “This would be decorator bonding. We never done that before.”

FIVE

CONNIE LOOKED UP from her computer when Lula and I walked into the bonds office. “How’d it go?”

“We got skunked for the day,” Lula said. “We met the girlfriend, but we didn’t see no Sunny.”

“You should try later tonight,” Connie said. “He has to be staying somewhere, and it obviously isn’t in his apartment on Fifteenth Street.”

“Stephanie got a hot date tonight,” Lula said. “She can’t be staking out Sunny. She gotta be concentrating on Ranger.”

“It’s not a date,” I said. “It’s work.” I was almost certain of it.

A black shadow scuttled past the large plate glass window that faced the street, and we all sucked in air.

“What was that?” Lula asked. “That better not be what I’m

thinking it was, because I’m thinking it was something scares the heck out of me.”