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“Gotta go,” I said to my mom. “Things to do.”
“Me too,” Joyce said, following me to the door.
I couldn't have Joyce tail me to my meeting at the Marriott, so as I saw it I had two options. The first option would be to handcuff her at gunpoint to a dining room chair. The second would be to lose her on the road. I decided to go with option two. Mostly because I had the box of bullets in my purse, but no gun.
Joyce was driving a black Mercedes sedan, which I was pretty sure represented husband number two. She got behind the wheel and gave me a thumbs-up. I got into Ranger's Porsche and responded with a stiff middle finger.
I drove off, and after a block I realized Joyce wasn't following. I checked her out in my rearview mirror and saw that she was out of the car, looking under the hood. I turned around and pulled alongside her.
“What's up?” I asked.
“I don't know much about cars,” Joyce said, “but I think someone took my engine.”
EIGHT
I parked in the hotel garage and walked to the hotel. It was a few minutes before eight, and there was a corporate party going on in the ballroom. Lots of women in cocktail dresses and men in suits congregating in the public areas. Lots of drinking and laughing and flirting. I suspected some of it would get nasty in a couple of hours.
The bar was packed, but Smullen wasn't there. I found a chair in the lobby and waited. After half an hour, I did a tour of the bar and restaurant. Still no Smullen. I called Ranger at nine.
“I've been stood up,” I told him.
“Lucky you,” Ranger said.
“Did you take Joyce s engine?”
"My instructions were to disable the car, but one of my men bet Hal a burger he couldn't
get the engine out. So Hal removed the engine."
I knew Hal. He'd been with RangeMan for a couple of years, and he was one of my favorite people. He looked like a stegosaurus, and he fainted at the sight of blood.
I left the hotel and walked past a few desperate souls hunkered in a corner by the entrance, trying to smoke without freezing their asses off. No one coming or going to the parking garage. Just me, my steps echoing on the cement floor. I approached the Cayenne, and Ranger moved out of a shadow.
“I'll drive,” he said. “I want to make sure no one's waiting for you in your apartment.”
“I appreciate the thought, but I wasn't going home. I was going to hang out in the cemetery and see if Diggery relieves Lorraine Birnbaum of her diamond.”
“It's seventeen degrees,” Ranger said. “If Diggery is desperate enough to rob graves in this weather, the least you can do is let him have the diamond.”
Ranger crossed Broad and turned onto Hamilton. A dark figure scuttled from between parked cars, and quick as a flash it scooped something off the road with a shovel. The figure was momentarily caught wide-eyed in Ranger's headlights. And then the figure was gone, sucked back between the parked cars, lost in the night. I gasped and did a whole body shiver.
“Someone you know?” Ranger asked.
“Crazy Carl Coglin. He's on my FTA list.”
“Babe.”
If I was any kind of bounty hunter, I would have chased Coglin down, but I really didn't want to see what was on the shovel. So I decided to go with Ranger's philosophy. If Coglin needed roadkill that badly, the least I could do was let him keep it.
/> Three traffic lights later, Ranger cut off Hamilton and parked in my lot. He looked up at my dark apartment windows, shut the Cayenne off, and turned to face me. “Tell me about your kitchen discussion with Joyce.”
"She realized you would be helping me find Dickie and decided it was smarter to follow me around than to go off on her own. So she's my new best friend.
“I told her I didn't think it was likely you'd turn Dickie over to her, and she said she had a way with men. She said men were basically scrotum and ego, and they were happy when they got stroked.”
Ranger reached across the console and traced a line down the side of my face. His fingertip was warm and his touch was gentle. “I'd like to think I'm more than just scrotum and ego, but she was right about the stroking.”
An SUV crept into the lot and parked behind us.
