Look Alive Twenty-Five (Stephanie Plum 25)

Ranger and I returned to his car, and I asked him to ride past the deli. I was thinking about Hal. I had an unrealistic but hopeful fantasy that we’d drive down the alley behind the deli, and Hal would be standing there looking confused.

Ranger cruised past the front of the deli and went around to the alley. He stopped and idled for a moment by the dumpster and the parking lot. I looked at the lot and the deli’s charred back door, and I had an epiphany.

“Omigod,” I said. “I know the sunshine truck. It’s Central GP. It has a big sun on the side of the truck. The slogan is WE SELL EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN. And if Vinnie was transported in it, the inside of the truck might have smelled like bananas. Frankie is the snitch who always knew when a manager was hired. He was at the deli every day.”

Ranger called his control room and asked for information on Frankie and the location of the Central GP truck.

“Are you going to call Morelli?” I asked.

“Not yet. Morelli’s a good cop, but he’s held back by procedural rules and layers of bureaucracy. I can move faster.”

This was true. It was also true that Ranger frequently operated in the gray zone of not quite legal.

We were about to pull into the Rangeman garage when Ranger’s control room got back to him. Frankie’s full name was Frank Russel Lugano. He lived in a second-floor apartment not far from the deli. His Uncle Constantine owned Central GP. Leonard Skoogie was his cousin on his mother’s side. Frankie’s live-in girlfriend was a waitress at Hooters. And Frankie didn’t report in for work this morning.

“He’s running,” I said. “He’s probably on a flight to Guatemala.”

Ranger cut across town and turned onto Whitson Avenue. He drove two blocks and parked in front of Frankie’s building. It was three stories. Brick. Smushed into the middle of a row of similar Practical Pig sturdy but uninteresting buildings. We took the stairs to the second floor and got there just as Frankie was leaving.

“Back it up,” Ranger said to Frankie. “We’d like to talk to you.”

“I’m in kind of a hurry,” Frankie said.

“This won’t take long,” Ranger said, motioning Frankie back inside.

It was a small, nicely furnished apartment with no girlfriend in sight.

“Tell me about the kidnappings,” Ranger said.

“You know as much as I do,” Frankie said.

“Not true,” Ranger said. “We just finished talking to Victor Waggle.”

Frankie rolled his eyes and dropped the duffel bag he’d been carrying. “Waggle. I had reservations about this gig from the beginning. We all did. We knew sooner or later Waggle was going to screw it up. He’s an incredible talent, and he’s batshit crazy. You give him drugs to try to calm him down, and he gets even crazier. Lenny didn’t want to cut him out. He had no choice.”

“I’m not interested in the details,” Ranger said. “I want to know where the kidnapped victims are being held.”

“That’s a problem,” Frankie said. “I don’t know where they are. I was a minor player in this fiasco. They wanted to use my truck to help make a movie. It sounded like fun. And they were going to pay me. All I had to do was show up, they’d load some guy into the back, and then I’d drive him to a pickup point. The Colombians took over from there. One time they were doing a big scene with a helicopter and I had to borrow a van to transport everyone. They thought a van was a better visual with the helicopter.”

“It was okay with you that you were part of a kidnapping?” I asked.

Frankie shrugged. “Yeah. It didn’t seem so bad. It wasn’t like anybody was going to get hurt. It wasn’t like they were going to ransom them off or anything. They just wanted to make a movie. Lenny figured he could get some publicity with the kidnappings, and he could make this reality show thing, and get people to look at it. And it worked. Was a shame he died just when he should have been celebrating. Or maybe he died because he did too much celebrating.”

“Where do I find the C

olombians?” Ranger asked.

“I don’t know,” Frankie said. “They always found me. I’d meet them in a parking lot somewhere and transfer the body. They only spoke Spanish. I never knew what they were saying.”

“Who was in charge of the Colombians?” Ranger asked.

“Should I have a lawyer or something?” Frankie asked.

“We aren’t police,” Ranger said. “I’m just trying to find Hal.”

“Okay, I get that,” Frankie said. “I’d like to help you, but this started out simple and just got more and more complicated. We were only supposed to take one guy, but Lenny wasn’t getting enough publicity. Nobody was watching the little movie. There’s too much stuff out there on YouTube. So, Lenny kidnapped more guys and kept making bigger and better movies. You gotta give it to Lenny. He wasn’t a quitter.”

“The Colombians,” Ranger said.