??There’s a string attached.”
I felt myself go slack-jawed and bug-eyed for a moment. “Seriously?”
“Hal was wearing a tracking device attached to his belt. We began chasing the tracker down minutes after Hal disappeared. We found it two blocks from the deli. It was in a dumpster along with the rest of his clothes. He didn’t have a tracking device in his shoe, so we don’t know if he was allowed to keep it. Having the transponder buried inside you is the best way I know to keep you safe.”
“Morelli almost had a cow when you taped a wire to me. How am I going to explain this?”
“You can begin by telling him it was the best twenty minutes of your short life.”
“Twenty minutes?”
“I could do the job in less time, but it wouldn’t be as memorable,” Ranger said.
“It’s tempting, but I think I’m going to stick with the shoe.”
“You could also swallow the transponder.”
“What if it gets stuck somewhere?”
“It’s unlikely that it would get stuck, but you would check to make sure it leaves your body.”
“Eeuuww.”
“Babe,” Ranger said.
* * *
¦ ¦ ¦
It was almost five o’clock when we carried everything into the deli. Raymond and Stretch were at their stations doing prep work. Ranger’s housekeeper, Ella, was at the sandwich station.
I looked over at Ranger. “You brought Ella in to make sandwiches.”
“I can’t watch the customers if I’m making sandwiches,” Ranger said. “And at some point, we’re going to have to send you out to the dumpster while I’m watching the monitor.”
Oh crap. The suicide mission. If it went wrong, I’d be stripped naked, written on with a marker pen, and I couldn’t even imagine what happened next.
“Are you sure you’ll be able to get to me in time if you’re watching in here?” I asked him.
“I have men doing undercover surveillance from the building behind the deli. And I have men on constant patrol, circling the block, in unmarked cars.”
“And the instant someone lays a hand on me all hell will break loose, right?”
“Wrong,” Ranger said. “We want them to lead us to the other captives.”
Double crap. I really hated the strip-naked part, and I feared it happening sooner rather than later.
“If you captured the kidnappers right away, you could force them to tell you about the rest of the stuff,” I said.
“Are you sure you don’t want to swallow the transponder?” Ranger asked.
“I’ll think about it.”
“Don’t think too long,” he said.
People were lining up outside the deli, and Lula pushed her way in through the front door.
“You’re not going to believe what I just saw,” she said. “I was coming back here from getting my nail repaired, and I was looking for a parking place. I was driving all over creation being that those idiot people waiting to get in here took up the parking places. Anyways, I went down one of the alleys and all of a sudden something black caught my eye. It was crawling out of a window on the third floor of a building. And then it stood up on the ledge, and I could see it was a man all dressed in black. And then he spread his arms out, and he had bat wings. And next thing he stepped off the ledge and flew away.”