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“What does he smell like?” Ranger asked.
“Burning sulfur.”
“I understand your emotion, but you’d serve no purpose today. You’d be a liability.”
“Gee, that’s so flattering. Let me get this straight. You only have me tag along when I serve some useful purpose, like being a dumb bimbo in a bar.”
“Yes.”
“You are such a jerk.”
“Babe.”
I was pretty sure this time “Babe” meant I was giving him a cramp in his sphincter.
He grabbed me by the arm and yanked me to his car. “She’s coming with me,” he said to his men. “Jose and Rodriguez, follow me. Stay a quarter mile back. Keep channel 1 open. Roger and Mario, help Briggs walk the dogs and then return to Rangeman.”
“I need my messenger bag,” I said to Ranger.
“Why?”
“Identification, lipstick, cellphone, and Morelli’s gun, which has bullets in it.”
“Get it.”
It takes about an hour and a half to get from Trenton to Atlantic City. For the most part it’s open highway, so if you’re riding in Ranger’s Porsche and he has his radar detector and laser scrambler up and running, you can make it in just over an hour.
We were flying low today, with Ranger in his zone, driving in silence. The Porsche had paddle shifters, but Ranger rarely used them. Not even Ranger could shift as efficiently as the Porsche computer.
I assumed that we were going to check on Viktor Volkov. I also assumed that Ranger had a full report on the trade show and that at some time in the near future he’d share that information with me. For the moment I wasn’t messing with his Zen by asking questions.
He turned off Route 30 onto Dr. Martin Luther King Boulevard and then left onto Fairview, into a neighborhood that was upper class if you were using ghetto standards.
Viktor Volkov lived in a small cinderblock bungalow stuck between two other small cinderblock bungalows. Across the street was a two-floor cinderblock motel that rented rooms by the hour. Viktor’s house was painted a bright turquoise, his windows had iron security bars cemented into place, and a rusted-out junker car of indeterminate paint color was abandoned half on the road and half on what would have been, in a better part of town, a lawn. In this part of town it was hardscrabble yellow dirt.
Ranger parked at the end of the block, and we sat watching the Volkov house and its surroundings for a half hour. One car pulled into the motel. That was it for traffic. No activity around any of the houses. No cats. No dogs. No kids. No gunshots.
“According to my information,” Ranger said, “Volkov has a van that he uses for his business. I don’t see it here, so he probably isn’t home.”
We left the Porsche and walked to Volkov’s house. The front door and back door were both locked. No answer to our knocking. No answer when we called his cellphone. Ranger used a pick on the front door lock and had it open in thirty seconds.
The house was dark inside. Living room, eat-in kitchen, two bedrooms, bathroom. Shabby furniture that you would expect in this level rental. Black heavy-duty plastic body bag in the second bedroom. Looked like there was a body in the bag.
“I have a box of disposable gloves in the car,” Ranger said. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
“No way. You stay here. I’ll get the gloves.”
I returned with the gloves and stood back while Ranger unzipped the bag. I saw that the body was covered with lime, but even with a thick layer of lime it didn’t smell great. I inched my way out of the bedroom and across the living room to the front door. I mean, someone has to guard the door, right?
Ranger came out after a couple minutes, snapped his gloves off, and bagged them.
“Male. Partially decomposed, but I could see enough to guess that it’s Volkov,” he said. “The corpse is clearly missing a heart, so that’s one mystery solved.”
He pulled on new gloves and went room by room, opening drawers and looking in closets. He bagged the gloves with the first pair when he was done, and we left the house, closing the door behind us.
“No way to lock up,” he said. “There weren’t any keys in the house. No house keys and no car keys.”
“Vlatko wanted the van.”
