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“There’s a liquor store next to Shop and Bag.”
“This is a really nice car,” he said. “I like riding in it. These seats are real leather, too. Do you get it on with Ranger in this car?”
“Ranger isn’t my boyfriend. Ranger and I have a professional relationship.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you can’t play hide the salami once in a while.”
I punched XM Radio on, tuned in to an electronic dance station, and turned the volume up. Ten minutes later I swung into the Shop and Bag strip mall parking lot.
“You work on your grocery list, and I’ll get the wine,” I said. “What kind of wine do you want?”
“I want a cabernet. California is okay. And get me a Russian River pinot noir.”
“Sure. What’s your price point? Do you want something in a box or in a bottle?”
“How about you get the food and I’ll get the wine,” Briggs said.
I took his shopping list and looked it over. Seemed simple enough. Bread, milk, cereal, butter, coffee, some deli meat, cookies, and cheese. I added a bag of chips, a frozen pizza, a jar of peanut butter for me, and a chew toy for Bob. I was at the checkout when an explosion rattled the store windows. I left my shopping cart and ran outside. Black smoke billowed off a flaming inferno, and people were running toward something lying in the parking lot.
“Briggs,” I said on a sigh. “And Ranger’s Porsche.”
A couple people got Briggs to his feet and walked him away from the fire toward the store. I met them halfway.
“What happened?” I asked Briggs.
“Boom,” Briggs said. His eyes were glazed, and his hair was smoking. “Big boom.”
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “How do I look?”
“You look good,” I told him.
That was a lie. He looked like an overcooked marshmallow. The one that got dropped into the fire and retrieved and was all sooty.
“Yeah,” he said. “I feel okay. Did you get the cookies?”
“Yeah, I got cookies.”
“I think the wine got blown up.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll get more wine. Maybe you should sit down over there by the store.”
“It went boom,” Briggs said. “There was a big boom.”
I stayed with Briggs until the paramedics came and checked him out. He had some superficial burns and scrapes, but he was basically okay. I went back inside the store, paid for my groceries, and returned to Briggs with the bag of cookies.
Briggs selected a cookie. “I put the wine in the car and sat down in the passenger seat, and then I decided to see if you were finding everything okay in the store. So I got out of the car and next thing I hear WHOOOSH! and KABBAM! and I was flying through the air.”
What was left of the car had been hosed down, and the fire truck was packing up. I’d given the police a preliminary report.
Ranger called on my cellphone.
“The tracking mechanism on my Porsche went dead,” Ranger said. “Is there a problem?”
“There are some mechanical difficulties,” I said. “It would be great if you could send someone to pick me up.”
Fifteen minutes later, Briggs had eaten the entire bag of cookies, and Ranger arrived in a black SUV. He got out and stood looking at the smoldering lump of melted, mangled Porsche.
