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“Are you sure you want to take me? I’ve got a big bull’s-eye painted on my back.”
This was true. And it was the only reason I was even talking to him. Still, I didn’t want to hang him out there unless I absolutely had no other choice. No point putting myself in harm’s way of stray bullets, right? On the other hand, I didn’t feel comfortable leaving him alone in my apartment.
“You can stay in the office while I go look for Poletti. I’ll drop you off and pick Lula up.”
“No,” Connie said. “No way. No how. You can’t leave him here.”
“I can’t take him with me,” I told her. “People will shoot at us.”
“Why can’t you leave him in your apartment?”
“He’ll buy pay-per-view porn and go through my underwear drawer.”
We all looked at Briggs.
“He can’t even reach your underwear drawer,” Lula said.
“I can stand on a chair,” Briggs said.
“How about we take my Firebird and lock him in the trunk,” Lula said.
“How about we auction you off by the pound for a pig roast,” Briggs said.
Lula shoved her hand into her purse and started rummaging around. “I got a gun in here somewhere.”
“You can’t shoot him,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I need him to get Poletti. Anyway, you know you can’t just go around shooting people. It isn’t nice.”
“Yeah, but he insulted me.”
“You insulted me first,” Briggs said. “How’d you like to get locked in a trunk?”
“People wouldn’t want to lock me in a trunk on account of I got a pleasing personality,” Lula said.
“Maybe for a rhinoceros,” Briggs said.
I stepped in front of Briggs to keep Lula from hurling herself across the room at him. “I haven’t got time for this. I need to get Poletti. We’ll take Randy with us, and we’ll disguise him somehow. A hat or something, and he can scrunch down in the backseat.”
Ten minutes later Randy was in the backseat of my Explorer. He was wearing a platinum blond wig and large black-rimmed glasses. He looked like Andy Warhol if Andy Warhol was only three feet tall.
Lula, looking like a ’ho all dressed up for Let’s Make a Deal, was riding shotgun. And weird as it might seem, she made it look pretty good. When I’m with Lula, I always feel like she’s chocolate cake with a lot of fancy frosting and I’m more in the ballpark of a bagel.
FOUR
I TOOK STATE Street to the parking garage and idled at the entrance. There was a lot of police activity on the second level. I leaned out my window, took a ticket from the machine, and rolled into a ground-level spot.
“Stay here,” I said to Lula and Briggs. “I’ll go investigate and report back.”
I took the stairs and walked to the back of the garage, where cop cars were angle-parked and yellow crime scene tape was already in place. I spotted Joe Morelli standing inside the taped-off area. He’s part of the Crimes Against Persons unit, mostly working homicide cases, so someone was probably dead on the cement floor.
Morelli also happens to sort of be my boyfriend. He’s six feet tall and all lean muscle. He has a lot of wavy black hair, his brown eyes can be soft and sexy or hard and assessing, he’s got a dog and a toaster, and his grandmother is even crazier than mine. Today he was wearing a blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, jeans, and running shoes. He had his Glock clipped to his belt, and his hands were on his hips as he stared down at the guy sprawled on the pavement.
I ducked under the crime scene tape and moved next to him. The guy on the ground was facedown in a pool of dried blood. He had a hole in the back of his head the size of a potato.
“Holy crap,” I said to Morelli, “he looks like he’s been shot with a cannon.”
