Turbo Twenty-Three (Stephanie Plum 23)

“No red button,” I said to him.

He looked confused.

“She keeps saying that,” the woman said. “She keeps saying there’s no red button.”

Vicky ran in. “She’s new,” Vicky said. “My bad. I assumed she knew how to run the machine.”

“There’s no big red button,” I said to Vicky.

“No problem,” Vicky said. “I was coming to get you anyway. There’s a man here to see you.”

Ranger was waiting for me in the break room.

“Babe,” he said, his attention focusing on the orange shower cap.

“If you so much as crack a smile I’m going to hit you.”

“I have good news and bad news. The good news is that you can lose the orange after today. You’re going back to Bogart.”

“Gee, I just got here.”

“Yeah, I know you’re broken up about leaving, but we have a situation across town. The bad news is that the loading dock foreman was found dead in the freezer this morning.”

I felt myself go into suspended animation for a beat. Disbelief that another Bogart employee was frozen. A sense of dread that it was true and that I knew the man.

“Gus?” I asked.

“Yes. You worked with him yesterday.”

There was still disbelief. “How did it happen?”

“The ME didn’t see any sign of trauma. It looks like Gus got locked in and froze to death.”

“That’s impossible. The freezer door always opens from the inside.”

“Someone tampered with the lock. There’s no cell reception in the fre

ezer, but Gus left a message on his phone. He said he went in to do inventory and couldn’t get out. The time on the phone was five-ten.”

My heart was beating hard. It could have been me! “I was in and out of that freezer all morning. The door was working perfectly.”

“It was also working perfectly for most of the afternoon. A truck came in at one o’clock, and it took three hours to load it. No one had any problems with the door.”

“No one noticed that Gus was missing?”

“Butchy clocked out at four-thirty P.M. The Jolly clown clocked out at seven P.M. He said he tried to put his unsold ice cream back in the freezer but the number code wouldn’t work, so he used a small auxiliary freezer in the storeroom.”

“He didn’t think it was odd that he couldn’t get into the freezer?”

“He thought it was inconvenient but not odd. He said it wasn’t the first time he couldn’t get into the freezer. He said Gus was an idiot, and Bogart was a cheap bastard who never fixed anything. And he wondered who he should see to apply for the foreman job.”

“He’s been trying to get out of the clown suit for years.”

“Not going to happen. I asked Bogart about the denied requests to transfer. It’s company policy straight from Bogart not to move people around. No exceptions. He hires from the outside for new jobs or he promotes within departments. The clown is a department of one. He isn’t going anywhere.”

“What about Gus’s family?”

“He lived alone. Divorced. Two kids that live out of state.”