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“Me?” Lula said. “Are you telling me I stink?”
“Yeah.”
Connie cut her eyes to Lula. “She’s right. You reek.”
“I might have spilled some on my shoe,” Lula said. “You just filled up old olive bottles, and they didn’t pour perfect. Next time, you want to invest in a beaker or something with a spout.”
“I don’t want to hear about next time,” I said. “I’m retiring from a life of crime.”
“But we’re so good,” Lula said. “I bet we made ourselves millionaires.”
“Only for half a day. Tomorrow, the money goes back to Sunflower,” I told her.
“Oh yeah, I forgot for a minute,” Lula said. “Are we sure we want to do that? I could buy a lot of shoes that don’t smell bad with that money.”
There was silence while the thought hung in the car. Keeping the money had a lot of appeal. If we had the money, we wouldn’t actually need Vinnie or the bonds office. Unfortunately, there was Grandma Plum and Aunt Mim to consider. Not to mention the nagging need to do the right thing, and the fear that God would get me if I didn’t.
Lula pulled into the Cluck-in-a-Bucket drive-through, and we got a large tub of extra crispy, triple coleslaw, and biscuits.
“Now where to?” Lula wanted to know.
“To the office,” Connie said. “We need to count the money. Park the car in the back.”
There was an alley behind the office with parking for a couple cars. The back door led to the storeroom, and beyond the storeroom were banks of file cabinets. You could sneak in through the back door and not be seen, unless, of course, you walked through the front office, where Connie held court. Vinnie parked in the back because Vinnie was always hiding out from someone. Vinnie didn’t pay his bills on time. He messed around with married women. And he dated barnyard animals.
Lula parked Connie’s car, and we hauled the chicken and money and assorted weapons inside and locked the back door.
“Take it all into Vinnie’s inner office,” Connie said. “There aren’t any windows in there.”
I cleared Vinnie’s desk and dumped the money out.
“We need a system,” Connie said, helping herself to an extra crispy mystery piece of chicken. “First, let’s divide the money by amount. All the twenties over there in the corner. All the hundreds here by the desk. Just pile it up on the floor. Then we’ll use elastic bands to bundle them, so all the bundles are worth the same amount of money.”
Two hours later, the bucket of extra crispy was empty and we had all the money bundled, stacked, and counted.
“The latest demand was for one million three,” Connie said. “We have a little over one million two.”
“Ordinarily, Sunflower might be willing to make a deal,” Lula said, “but he just got robbed, and he’s probably in a bad mood now.”
“I’ll call him tomorrow,” Connie said. “I can’t imagine him not taking one million two.”
I looked at the pile of money heaped on Vinnie’s desk. “What are we going to do with this until tomorrow? It’s not going to fit in Vinnie’s safe.”
“We’ll put the stacks of high-denomination bills in the safe,” Connie said. “The rest can get hidden from view under his desk. I’ll lock Vinnie’s office door and set the alarm when we leave.”
I STOPPED AT the all-night supermarket on the way home and got everything on my list but bullets. I parked in the lot behind my apartment building, grabbed the grocery bags from the backseat, turned, and bumped into a rock-solid guy. Morelli.
“Jeez!” I said. “You scared the heck out of me. Don’t sneak up on me like that.”
“I didn’t sneak. You parked next to me and didn’t even notice.”
“I have a lot on my mind.”
“Want to share it?”
I paused for a minute, hugging the bags to me, debating. “No,” I said. “I can’t.”
“You smell really bad,” Morelli said. “Like a stink bomb.”
