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“Is that food? God bless whoever brought food. I’m starved.”
“I have meatball subs and potato salad and macaroni from Pino’s,” I told her.
Connie took a sub and kept working, plugging numbers into the calculator.
“How are we doing?” I asked her.
“I think we’re going to make it. The guns and the motorcycle helped a lot.”
“That whole back room is just about empty,” Lula said. “Only thing left is dust bunnies.”
I sat back and ate my lunch and watched traffic move past the bonds office. The rhythm on the street was normal again. I imagined the militiamen were on their way back to Idaho with their dynamite, and some woman in the Burg was setting her new service for eight in her china closet.
“That’s it,” Connie said. “We have a million three for Sunflower and fifty-two dollars left over. I have the fifty-two dollars on my desk. Everything else can get packed. Count it as you go. We want to give Sunflower a million three. No more. No less.”
“What are we gonna put it in?” Lula asked.
Connie collected the lunch wrappers and stuffed them into the Pino’s bag. “We have a couple duffel bags in the back that were holding guns. We sold the guns, but I kept the bags.”
“Do you think Sunflower will recognize his money?” Lula asked.
“No. It’s all been rebundled,” Connie said to Lula. “So far as we know, we weren’t seen at Chopper’s, and you were the only one seen at the funeral parlor. I doubt they’d attribute the robberies to you.”
“Yeah,” Lula said. “Sunflower’s one of them chauvinistic underestimators.”
Lula and I set to work packing the duffel bags, being careful to count as we packed, and Connie called Sunflower.
“He sounded happier this time,” Connie said when she got off the phone. “I think he needs the money.”
“Where are we making the switch?” I asked her.
“He wants us to bring the money to the back door of the bar. I told him we wouldn’t go inside, so he’s going to have his man waiting for us.”
“We’ll take the Mercedes,” I said to Connie. “Ranger monitors all his cars. If anything bad goes down, we’ll have Ranger backing us up.”
I drove the Mercedes to the parking area behind the bonds office, and Lula and Connie lugged the duffel bags out and put them on the backseat. Connie got in the front passenger seat and set her Uzi on the floor, between her feet. Lula squeezed herself onto the backseat next to the duffel bags filled with money. Lula had her Glock in her purse and a sawed-off shotgun wedged between her legs.
I had my gun with two bullets.
“Vinnie better appreciate this,” Lula said. “I’m expecting a raise. And I want a company car. Not just any car, either. I want a good one. And I want one of them tower of treats at Christmas. You know, where you get it in the mail, and it’s a stack of boxes with all kinds of shit in ’em.”
“I don’t want a raise,” Connie said. “I want to rescue Vinnie, and then I want to kick his perverted ass all the way from the bonds office to the hospital.”
I drove across town and turned up Stark Street. I had my eye on my rearview mirror. No Rangeman tail in view, but I knew Chet was following my blip on his screen. Connie and Lula were silent. We were all in alert mode. I rolled past the bar, took the next cross street for half a block, and turned into the alley.
Three goons were waiting outside the bar’s back door. No Vinnie. I crept down the alley and stopped at the bar. Connie powered her window down, and the men stepped forward. Connie poked her Uzi out the window, and the men stopped in their tracks.
“Do you have the money?” one of the men asked.
“Yes,” Connie said. “Do you have Vinnie?”
“No. Why would we have Vinnie?”
“You recaptured him.”
“Not that I know of,” the guy said. “I’m just supposed to get the money from you. You give us the money, and we don’t blow up the bail bonds office with all of you in it, including Vinnie.”
“I need a moment,” Connie said to the men. And she powered her window up.
