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“I don’t suppose you’d want to take him home with you,” I said to Ranger.
Ranger glanced at Vinnie in the rear view mirror. “We could negotiate. The price would be high.”
“Would I have to dress up like a geisha and rub your feet?”
Ranger cut his eyes to me. “It wasn’t what I had in mind, but it would be a place to start.”
“Cripes,” Vinnie said. “You two want to get a room?”
“Tell me again why you rescued him,” Ranger said.
I slid the Maglite back under the driver’s seat. “Grandma Plum and Aunt Mim.”
“Maybe he can stay with them,” Ranger said.
“Unfortunately, that’s not an option,” I said. “He can stay with me tonight.”
I GAVE VINNIE a quilt and a pillow. “You can spend one night here,” I said. “One night. Tomorrow, you have to find a different place to live.”
Vinnie dropped the quilt and pillow onto the couch. “I can’t believe Lucille kicked me out.”
“You were caught with a hooker!”
“I was doing Lucille a favor. She’s a good woman, but she’s picky about a lot of stuff. Don’t do this, and don’t do that. And what about me? I got needs. Okay, so I’m a pervert, but perverts got rights, too. There are places where I’d be considered normal. Borneo, maybe. Atlantic City.”
Good grief. I was going to have to set off a roach bomb in my apartment after he left.
“Anyway, the big problem isn’t Lucille,” Vinnie said. “The big problem is Bobby Sunflower. You whacked one of his guys in the head, and you snatched me out from under him. He’s not gonna like it.”
“Would he have killed you if I hadn’t gotten you out of there?”
“For sure. I was a dead man.”
“All because you made some bad bets.”
Vinnie remoted the television on, flipped through about twenty channels, and gave it up. “Sunflower’s in trouble. He needs money, and he needs respect. He’s in the middle of a war, and he can’t show weakness.”
“What war? Who’s he fighting?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I should go into therapy at one of those sex addiction places. Do you think that would get me off the hook?”
“Maybe with Lucille. I don’t think Harry’ll buy it.”
My arm was scraped and the knee was torn out of my jeans from the fall. It would have been a lot worse if we hadn’t crashed into the SUV. I limped out of the living room, closed the door on Vinnie, started to undress, and noticed I’d missed a call from Morelli on my cell phone.
“Hey,” Morelli said when I called him back.
“Hey, yourself.”
“Just checking to see if you’re home. Shots were fired at Sunflower’s apartment building tonight.”
“Is that unusual?”
“Good point,” Morelli said. “We also got a report of shots being fired from Vinnie’s house. Lucille said she was shooting at a rat.”
“That neighborhood’s going to hell in a handbasket.”
“Should I be worried?” Morelli asked me.
