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“I’m looking for Uncle Sunny,” I said.
“And?”
“I thought you might know where he is.”
“What do I look like, his mother? Do I look like I keep track of Uncle Sunny? And anyways, what do you want with him? Are you the police?”
“Bond enforcement,” I told her.
“Hey, Jake!” the woman yelled.
A big, slobbering black dog padded into view and stood behind the woman.
“Kill!” the woman said.
The dog lunged at us, Lula and I jumped back, and the dog clamped onto Lula’s purse and ripped it from her shoulder.
“That’s my new bag!” Lula said. “It’s almost a Brahmin.”
The dog shook the bag until it was dead, then he eyed Lula.
“Uh-oh,” Lula said. “I don’t like the way he’s looking at me. I’d shoot him, but he got my gun.” She cut her eyes to me. “You got a gun?”
I was slowly inching my way toward the stairs. “No,” I whispered. “No gun.” Not that it mattered, because I couldn’t shoot a dog even if its eyes were glowing red and its head was rotating.
The dog made a move toward us, and Lula and I turned tail and ran. Lula missed a step, crashed into me, and we rolled ass over teakettle down the stairs, landing in a heap on the foyer floor.
“Lucky I ended on top of you, or I might have hurt myself,” Lula said.
I hauled myself up and limped out the door. This wasn’t the first time Lula and I had crash-landed at the bottom of a flight of stairs. A window opened on the second floor, Lula’s purse sailed out, and the window slammed shut.
Lula retrieved the mangled bag. “At least I got my gun back,” she said. “Now what are we going to do? You want to go for breakfast? I wouldn’t mind having one of them breakfast sandwiches.”
“Vinnie’s going to hound me until I find Uncle Sunny.”
“Yeah, but this looking for Uncle Sunny is making us unpopular, and I think I got a bruise from landing on you. I hear bacon is real good for healing a bruise.”
I thumbed through Sunny’s file. He’d been charged with second-degree murder for running over Stanley Dugan… twice. I suspected he’d done a lot worse to a lot of people over the years, but this time he’d been caught on video by a kid with an iPhone who’d posted it to YouTube. Since everyone who knew Stanley Dugan (including his ninety-year-old mother) hated him, the video only served to enhance Sunny’s popularity.
Two men in their mid-fifties ambled out of the nail salon. They were balding, paunchy, wearing bowling shirts, pleated slacks, and pinky rings. One of the men had “Shorty” embroidered on his shirt above the breast pocket.
“Hey,” Shorty said, eyeballing me. “We hear you been asking about Sunny.”
“I work for his bail bonds agent,” I told him. “Sunny is in violation of his bail agreement. He needs to reschedule a court date.”
“Maybe he don’t want to do that,” Shorty said. “Maybe he got better things to do with his time.”
“If he doesn’t reschedule, he’s considered a felon.”
Shorty snickered. “Of course he’s a fella. Everybody knows he’s a fella. What are you, stupid or something?”
“Felon. Not fella. Felon. A fugitive from the law.”
“Watch your mouth,” Shorty said. “You don’t go around calling good people like Sunny names that could tarnish his reputation. He could sue you for slandering him.”
“So do you know where he is?” I asked.
“Sure. He’s where he always is at this time of the day.”
