Takedown Twenty (Stephanie Plum 20)
“Since when?”
He pulled me into him and kissed me. There was some highly skilled groping and use of tongue, and on a fun scale of 1 to 10 it was an 11.
“Call me when you’re ready to do the takedown,” Ranger said.
I locked the door after him, took the slow cooker out of the box, and set it on my kitchen counter. I had no clue what I was supposed to do with it. I thumbed through the instructions and did a quick scan of the little recipe book that came with the cooker. It sounded simple enough. Throw a bunch of stuff in the pot and turn it on.
TWELVE
LULA ROLLED INTO the office five minutes after I did. Her hair was a big orange frizzball, and she had bags under her eyes.
“How was the date?” Connie asked her. “You look like you got run over by a truck.”
“First off, there were no good corners left. I’ve never seen so many hookers. They’re all over the place. And then there’s a real impact on the trade being that the economy is in the toilet.”
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“Did you make enough money for the Brahmin bag?”
“I didn’t make nothing. I stood out there until the sun come up and the only bite I had all night was some fool wanted a hand job and was gonna pay me in food stamps. I’m telling you there’s a lot of food stamps floating around out there. I mean, what the heck is this country coming to? Food stamps aren’t gonna buy me no genuine Brahmin, you see what I’m saying?”
“Maybe you don’t need a Brahmin,” I said.
“Of course I need a Brahmin,” Lula said. “You carry a Brahmin and everybody knows you got class and fashion flair. They got ads in Vogue.”
“Mary Treetrunk is still in the wind,” Connie said. “She’s not a big ticket bond, but she’ll get you pizza money.”
“What did she do this time?” Lula wanted to know.
“She got raided for having a pot farm behind her doublewide. And then when they tried to take her in she kicked one of the cops in the nuts and offered to kiss it and make it a lot better.”
“You see what I mean,” Lula said. “Everybody’s a ’ho these days. How’s a professional supposed to compete in the marketplace?”
I pulled Mary’s file out of my messenger bag and paged through it. “It looks like she’s still living in that patch of mud and scrub down by the river.”
“So far as I know,” Connie said. “She’s probably there even as we speak, planting a new crop of cannabis.”
“I’m not having her smell up my Firebird,” Lula said to me. “If we do this we gotta take your P.O.S.”
We’d busted Mary twice before, and neither time was pretty. She weighed upwards of two hundred pounds, she smelled like dead fish, and she was cranky about leaving her doublewide.
“Sure,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
I took Hamilton to Broad and turned onto the narrow rutted road that led down to Mary Treetrunk’s homestead. She owned a half acre of land that was part floodplain and part garbage heap. Her doublewide was rusted out and listing, propped up on cinderblocks. An electric line ran to the mobile home that was anything but mobile, and a satellite dish was precariously attached to the roof. A Ford Crown Vic was parked off to the side. A lot of years ago it had been a police car, but it was now a wreck. A pirate’s skull-and-crossbones flag had been tied onto the antenna.
“This here’s a mess,” Lula said. “I’m glad I dressed down today and I’m not wearing my Louboutins.”
Lula was wearing a shocking-pink tank top, a poison-green spandex skirt that came two inches below her ass, and gold sequined sneakers. If you put her in a room and turned the lights off, she’d glow in the dark.
“Are you still dressed from last night?” I asked her.
“Of course not. If I was dressed like this I wouldn’t draw no attention. As it was I could have stayed home. Did I tell you I’m thinking about getting a cat?”
“You’re allergic to cats.”
“Yeah, but I saw one in the pet store that didn’t have no hair, and they said it was a nonallergic cat.”
Lula and I got out of my car, the door to the doublewide crashed open, and Mary looked out at us.