Look Alive Twenty-Five (Stephanie Plum 25)

“What about me?” Lula asked. “What do I get?”

“You get lunch,” Vinnie said. “You already draw a salary for doing nothing.”

“Works for me,” Lula said. “I like lunch. It’s one of my favorite things.”

I’m five foot seven with blue eyes, shoulder-length curly brown hair, and a body that won’t get me a job walking the Victoria’s Secret runway but is good enough to get me a boyfriend. Lula is two inches shorter than me and has a lot more volume. Much of the volume is in boobs and booty, giving her a voluptuousness that would be hard to duplicate with surgery. Lula achieved her voluptuousness the old-fashioned way. Pork chops, fried chicken, biscuits and gravy, tubs of mac and cheese and potato salad, barbecue ribs, chili hot dogs. Her hair was magenta today. Her skin is polished mahogany. Her dress and five-inch stiletto heels are from her Saturday night ’ho collection and two sizes too small. The overall effect is spectacular, as usual.

I stuffed the new files into the deli bag, and Lula and I headed out.

“I think we should take your car,” Lula said. “I just had my baby detailed, and that neighborhood is gentrified from what it used to be but that don’t mean it’s perfect.”

Lula’s baby is a shiny, perfectly maintained red Firebird with a sound system that could shake the fillings loose from your teeth. My car is an ancient faded blue Chevy Nova. It has a lot of rust, and a while back someone rudely spray-painted pussy on it. I covered the writing with silver Rust-Oleum glitter paint that was on sale. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough paint to cover the whole car.

I got into the Nova and pulled the Gurky file out of the bag.

“We don’t have to be at the deli until ten,” I said to Lula. “We have time to do a drive-by on Annie Gurky. According to her file she lives in an apartment complex in Hamilton Township. Married with two adult children. Age seventy-two.”

“What did she shoplift?”

“A box of Tastykake Butterscotch Krimpets, a family-size bag of M&M’s, a carton of Marlboros, two bags of Fritos, and a box of Twinkies. Apparently, she had them shoved into her tote bag and walked out of the store. An employee chased her across the parking lot, and she punched him in the nose.”

“Did she drive away?” Lula asked.

“No. The police report says she couldn’t remember where she parked her car. She was working her way through the box of Butterscotch Krimpets when she was arrested.”

“Well, at least she’s got good judgment when it comes to dessert. You can’t do much better than Tastykakes and Twinkies.”

CHAPTER TWO

I MADE A U-turn in front of the bonds office and drove to Hamilton Township. Gurky lived around the corner from Delio’s gas station. She was in a large, sprawling complex of two-story buildings that each housed six garden-level apartments and six second-floor apartments. Gurky was in a garden-level apartment. She answered the door with a smile. I introduced myself and explained to her that she’d missed her court date and would need to come with me to reschedule.

“I’m in the middle of breakfast,” she said. “Maybe some other time.”

Lula grinned. “Lady, you smell like you’re having a hundred-proof breakfast.”

“I like a splash of vodka in my orange juice,” Gurky said.

“This won’t take long,” I told her. “We’ll put the orange juice in the fridge, and you can finish it when you get back.”

“This is all a misunderstanding,” she said. “I wasn’t stealing anything. I just forgot to pay. And then that horrible man attacked me.”

“The one you punched in the nose?” Lula asked.

“Yes. That’s the one. The purse snatcher. He tried to rob me. He grabbed my tote bag.”

“You might have been confused on account of you had too much orange juice,” Lula said.

“I need a lot of orange juice,” Gurky said. “I have a lot of anger. I’ve been married to the same man for fifty-two years and last month he decided I wasn’t ‘doing it for him anymore,’ so he ran off with my sister. My sister! I always knew she was a slut. And he took my cat, Miss Muffy. He never even liked Miss Muffy.”

“Boy, that’s so crummy,” Lula said. “What a pig. You know what we should do? We should get Miss Muffy back. We should catnap her.”

“We’re not in the catnap business,” I said to Lula. “And you’re allergic to cats.” I looked at my watch. Time was ticking away. We had to open the deli’s doors for the cooks at ten o’clock. “We need to take you downtown to check in with the court,” I said to Gurky. “We’ll help you lock up the house.”

“I won’t have to stay in jail, will I?” Gurky asked.

“No,” I told her. “Court is in session. We’ll get you rescheduled and rebonded.”

A half hour later we buckled Gurky into the back seat of my Nova. She’d put on lipstick, changed her shoes, slurped down some more orange juice, checked her door locks fifteen times, and tried to sneak out her back door.