Fortune and Glory (Stephanie Plum 27)

Mostly I wanted to look around for Charlie Shine and his flunkies. Probably I didn’t need to look for Lou Salgusta, since the police would notice an old guy carrying a flamethrower.

“Follow me,” Lula said. “I’ll muscle us through the folks who are sweating it out in the lobby. It wasn’t pretty when we were stuck in the middle of them. I thought they were never going to open the doors to the viewing room.” She nudged a couple of people out of her way. “Coming through. S’cuse us. We got an emergency here.”

We reached the cookie table in the lobby. I took an Oreo and told Lula I was going off on my own.

“Okay,” she said, “but don’t get kidnapped or anything.”

I inched my way through the crowd, scanning the room. I reached the far side of the lobby and someone wrapped an arm around me and pulled me aside. It was Morelli.

“I almost didn’t recognize you,” he said. “No ponytail.”

“It’s job related. Uncooperative FTA.”

“Did you make the capture?”

“Yes.”

That got a full-on smile. “You look pretty. How’s the treasure hunt going?”

“It’s going slow.”

“I never thanked you for walking Bob. Maybe I could thank you over dinner tomorrow,” Morelli said.

“Bob looked like a sissy dog.”

“He rolled in something disgusting. I put him under the hose, but it didn’t help, so I had to take him to a groomer.”

Duh. I should have thought of that instead of jumping to conclusions. Not sure Morelli being all smiley and chatty with Gabriela would be so easy to explain away.

“I imagine you and forty other cops will be at the funeral tomorrow,” I said.

“You got that right. We’re hoping Shine will be dumb enough to show. And Benny still has a few enemies. Most of them have cataracts, but Benny is a big, slow-moving target.”

“He has his wise guys with him.”

“Dumb and Dumber,” Morelli said.

“Shine has some of his own.”

“They aren’t as dumb. Two of them are seasoned soldiers.”

He still had his arm around me, and I was having conflicting feelings. The contact felt warm and comforting and delicious, but at the same time there was the knowledge that it wasn’t especially healthy.

“I should be getting back to Grandma,” I said.

“About dinner?”

“I was under the impression that you had other dinner partners.”

Morelli looked at me for a long moment. “Do you really want to have a dinner partner discussion right now?”

I looked over his shoulder and saw Ranger watching from a distance. “No,” I said. “You make a good point. I’d like a rain check on the dinner. I have a lot going on.”

What went unsaid was that we had a conflict of interest on several fronts… romantic, professional, and personal.

I stopped at the cookie table, filled a to-go cardboard coffee cup with cookies, and made my way back to the front row. I gave the cup of cookies to Benny, and he looked like he was going to burst into tears.

“You’re an angel,” he said, shoving the cookies into his mouth. “God bless you.”