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“If it’s any consolation, I don’t feel a disturbance in the force,” Diesel said. “She wasn’t in harm’s way when she left the house. Or maybe I’m just feeling mellow after all those sausages and eggs.”
Diesel and I have similar jobs. We look for people who have done bad things. Diesel tracks down people with special talents. He refers to them as Unmentionables. I track down people who pretty much have no talent at all. I call them Fugitives. Whatever name you use for the hunted, the hunter has a job that relies heavily on instinct, and after a while you become tuned in to the force. Okay, so that’s kind of Obi-?Wan Kenobi, but sometimes you walk into a building and get the creeps and know something ugly is waiting around the corner. My creep-?o-?meter is good, but Diesel’s is better. I suspect Diesel’s sensory perception is in the zone ordinarily reserved for werewolves. Good thing he isn’t excessively hairy or I’d have to wonder.
“I’m going back to my apartment to shower and change. And then I’m going to the office,” I told Diesel. “Can I drop you somewhere?”
“Yeah. My sources tell me the guy I’m looking for was on Mulberry Street yesterday. I want to look around. Maybe talk to a couple people.”
“Is this guy dangerous?”
“Not especially, but the idiots following him are.”
“I found a brochure for Daffy’s in Grandma’s room,” I told my mother. “She probably took a seniors’ bus to Atlantic City and will be back tonight.”
“Omigod,” my mother said, making the sign of the cross. “Your grandmother alone in Atlantic City! Anything could happen. You have to go get her.”
Ordinarily, I’d think this was a dumb idea, but it was a nice day, and I hadn’t been to Atlantic City in ages. It sounded like a perfectly good excuse to take a day off.
I had five open cases, but nothing that couldn’t wait. And I wouldn’t mind putting distance between Diesel and me. Diesel was a complication I didn’t need in my life.
An hour later, I was dressed in jeans, a long-?sleeved, V-?neck sweater, and a sweatshirt. I drove to the bail bonds office, parked at the curb, and walked into the office.
“What’s up?” Lula wanted to know. “We gonna go out and catch bad guys today? I’m ready to kick ass. I got ass-?kickin’ boots on today. I’m wearing a thong two sizes too small, and I’m feeling mean as hell.”
Connie Rosolli grimaced. Connie is the office manager, and she’s pure Burg Italian American. Her Uncle Lou was wheelman for Two Toes Garibaldi. And it’s rumored her Uncle Nunzo helped turn Jimmy Hoffa into a dump truck bumper. Connie’s a couple years older than me, a couple inches shorter, and a lot more voluptuous. If Connie’s last name was a fruit, it would be Cantaloupe.
“Too much information,” Connie said to Lula. “I don’t ever want to know about your thong.” Connie took a file off her desk and handed it to me. “Just came in. Kenny Brown. Wanted for grand theft auto. Twenty years old.”
That meant unless he weighed three hundred pounds, he could run faster than me and was going to be a pain in the ass to catch.
I stuffed the Brown file into my shoulder bag. “Grandma Mazur’s hit the road. I think she might be at Daffy’s, and I told my mother I’d check on her. Anyone want to tag along?”
“I wouldn’t mind going to Atlantic City,” Lula said.
“Me, too,” Connie said. “I can forward the office calls to my cell phone.”
Lula had her bag on her shoulder and her keys in her hand. “I’m driving. I’m not riding to Atlantic City in a car with no reverse.”
“I almost never need reverse,” I told her.
Connie locked the office, and we all piled into Lula’s Firebird.
“What’s Granny doing in Atlantic City?” Lula asked.
I buckled myself in. “I’m not certain she is in Atlantic City. It’s just my best guess. But if she is there, I imagine she’s playing the slots.”
“I’m telling you, she had a leprechaun in that duffel bag yesterday,” Lula said. “And she took him to Atlantic City. It’s just the place to take a lucky leprechaun.”
“You don’t really believe in leprechauns, do you?” Connie asked Lula.
“Who, me? Hell, no,” Lula said. “I don’t know why I said that. It just come out of my mouth. Everybody knows leprechauns aren’t real, right?” Lula turned onto Broad. “Still, there’s a lot of talk about them, and that talk has to come from somewhere. Remember that Christmas when Trenton was overrun with elves? If there’s elves, there might be leprechauns.”
“They weren’t elves,” I told her. “They were vertically challenged people wearing pointy rubber ears, and they were trucked in from Newark as a marketing strategy for a toy factory.”
“I knew that,” Lula said. “But some people thought they were elves.”
It takes about an hour and a half to get from Trenton to Atlantic City. Forty minutes, if Lula’s behind the wheel. It’s flat-?out highway driving until you get to Pleasantville. After that, it’s not all that pleasant since the Jersey poor back up to the Jersey Shore in Atlantic City. We drove past several blocks of hookers and pushers and empty-?eyed street kids, and then suddenly the landscape brightened and we were at Daffy’s. Lula parked in the garage, and we fixed our makeup, sprayed our hair, and hoofed it through the maze that leads to the casino floor.
“It’s going to be hard to spot Grandma Mazur,” Connie said. “This place is filled with old people. They bring them in by bus, give them a carton of cigarettes, a ticket to the lunch buffet, and show them how to stick their credit cards in the slot machines.”
