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“Could be worse,” I said. “According to Vinnie, this office is about a million in the red.”
Connie froze for a beat. “Vinnie said that?”
“Yeah. Didn’t you know?”
“I don’t do the books. Vinnie has an accountant for that.”
“Maybe we should talk to the accountant.”
“The accountant’s dead. He got run over by a truck last week. Twice.”
“That’s not good.”
“No,” Connie said. “It’s really not good.”
“Does Sunflower know we were the ones to spring Vinnie?”
“Yeah, but I think it’s too embarrassing to let go public. And I think he’d rather have the money than to see us shot full of holes.”
I drank some coffee and took a doughnut from the box on Connie’s desk. “So we need to raise money.”
“It’s up to a million two.”
“Chopper is a pretty high-bond. The toilet paper guy isn’t worth much, but he might be easy to capture.”
“Butch Goodey is worth something,” Connie said. “I thought he skipped to Mexico.”
“I heard he got back last week, and he’s working at the meatpacking plant.”
Butch Goodey is 6'6? tall and weighs about three hundred pounds. He’s wanted for exposing himself to thirteen women over a period of two days. He said they were lucky to get to see Mr. Magic, and he blamed it on a sex-enhancement drug that gave him a thirty-two-hour erection. The judge who set Goodey’s bond asked for the name of the drug, wrote it on a piece of paper, and slipped the paper into his pocket.
“I’ll put Goodey at the head of the list,” I said.
Lula swung into the office. “At the head of what list?”
“The catch ’em list,” I told her. “We need to make money today.”
“So we’re going after Butch Goodey? I thought he was in Mexico.”
“He’s back. He’s working at the meatpacking plant.”
“I hate that place,” Lula said. “It gives me the creeps. You drive by with your windows open, and you can hear cows mooing. You’re only supposed to hear stuff like that on a farm. I mean, what the heck’s the world coming to when you can hear cows mooing in Trenton? And who the heck would work at a meatpacking plant anyway?”
“Butch Goodey,” I said.
The meatpacking plant was down by the river, south of town, on the edge of a residential area that was blue-collar or no-collar. It took up half a block, with some of that space devoted to holding pens, where the cattle went in, and some to loading docks, where the hamburger meat came out.
At nine-thirty in the morning, the plant was in full swing. It was going to be a glorious, sunny, warm day and the area around the plant smelled faintly of cow.
“You know what this makes me think about?” Lula said, jumping down from the Jeep, standing in the parking lot. “It makes me think I could use a new leather handbag. If we get done early today, we should go to the mall.”
I didn’t think we were going to get done early. I expected this was going to be a very long day. It was Thursday, and there was no way we could get all of the money by bringing in a few skips. If we didn’t come up with over a million dollars by tomorrow, Grandma Plum and Aunt Mim were going to be wearing black.
THIRTEEN
LULA AND I entered a small reception area and approached the woman at the front desk. I gave her my business card and told her I wanted to speak to Butch Goodey. The woman ran her finger down a roster of names attached to a clipboard and located Goodey.
“He’s helping unload cattle right now,” she said. “The easiest way to find him would be to go around the building from the o
