AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You look bored,” I said. “Would you like me to bring you a cookie?”
“Babe,” Ranger said with enough of a sexual threat to have me moving along.
An hour into the viewing I caught sight of a black-frocked woman scuttling toward the cookie table. Bella. I instantly called Morelli.
“Are you kidding me?” he said. “She’s really there?”
“Yep. She’s making her way to the cookie table and she’s going to be really pissed off again because Grandma already scarfed up all the pignoli.”
“Your grandma is almost as evil as my grandma.”
“True, but my grandma knows enough to get to the cookie table early.”
“I’m on my way.”
I hung back, not wanting to get involved. Mooch lived in the Burg so Morelli was about seven minutes away. Three minutes if he put the Kojak light on. Grandma had returned to the viewing room, so she wasn’t in Bella’s sights. Thank you, God.
After a couple minutes I saw Ranger cut his eyes to the front door and I knew Morelli was here. He walked straight to the cookie table and seconds later he was escorting Bella out of the funeral home. We all have our crosses to bear, and Morelli had a bunch of them. It was impressive that he’d been able to deal with it all and achieve a level of maturity that I hadn’t been able to find for myself.
At nine o’clock there were the usual chimes and the announcement that visitation hours were over. The viewing had been sedate. No drunken brawls. No grieving hysteria. Mori’s sister had been stoic. Most people left early with a sense of mild disappointment.Ranger and Tank disappeared just before the chimes. Schmidt stayed to the end. Grandma and I were among the last stragglers to leave the building. I saw that Ranger and Tank had positioned themselves across the street and were watching the cars that were exiting the lot.
The night air was cool, and the sky was dark and moonless. I used my cell phone flashlight to guide us to my Honda.
We were approaching my car when a stocky man stepped out of the shadows and blocked my way. He was wearing a hoodie and a surgical mask. There was a second man behind him, also in a hoodie and surgical mask. My heart gave a couple hard thumps in my chest, and I went breathless for a beat. The second man lunged at me with a stun gun, and I instinctively jumped away.
Grandma was quicker on the draw. “Son of a peach basket,” Grandma said, and she fired off a shot at the man with the stun gun. She missed the man and took out my driver’s-side window. She got off another round that whistled past my ear, and I hit the ground. The two men bolted out of the lot and disappeared into the night.
I felt my ear to make sure it was still there, and I looked up at Grandma. “Are you done shooting?”
“I guess so,” she said. “Are you okay?”
I stood and dusted myself off. “You almost removed my ear.”
“My gun got stuck in my pocketbook, so I just started shooting. It’s hard to take aim when your gun’s in your pocketbook.” She turned her purse upside down and examined it. “I’m going to need a new bag,” she said. “This one got all torn up.”
Ranger ran over to us. “We heard gunshots,” he said.
“Two guys jumped us,” I said. “Grandma took a couple shots at them, and they ran away.”
“Anyone injured?”
“Not that I could tell,” I said, “but she took out my window.”
“They were big brutes, and they were armed,” Grandma said.
“I saw a stun gun, but I didn’t see any weapons beyond that,” I said.
“Well, I shot at them so they must have shot at me first,” Grandma said.
It was very dark, but Ranger’s teeth are very white, and I could see that he was smiling. “That sounds logical,” Ranger said.
I nodded. “My mistake. Now that I think about it, I do remember seeing guns.”
Tank joined us. “Everything okay?”
“What did these guys look like?” Ranger asked me.
“Average height. Stocky. Wearing dark hoodies and surgical masks. Caucasian. Couldn’t see much more than that,” I said. “It’s dark and it went down fast. No one said anything.”
