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I pulled his file out of my messenger bag. “Steven Plover. Caucasian. Twenty years old. Student. Lives with his parents.”
“I hate to lock a kid up over the weekend,” Lula said. “What about the armed robbery guy?”
“Sylvester Brown. Lots of tattoos and piercings. Nasty-looking dreads. Lives on Sally Street.”
“He wouldn’t be expecting us on a Saturday afternoon,” Lula said. “Probably sitting around in his shorts and wifebeater shirt getting high and drinking warm beer out of a plastic glass.”
“Did you get that from the course you took on criminal profiling?”
“No. I just know a lot of guys who do that every Saturday,” Lula said.
We locked the office and looked across the street at a faded gray Ford Escort.
“Ranger’s version of plainclothes stealth surveillance,” I said.
“They going to follow you around?”
“Probably.”
“It’s kind of comforting being that you got a big target on your back now.”
I didn’t want to think about the target. I glanced at our cars. “Do you want to drive?”
“Hell no. I’m not putting some smelly beer-drinking idiot in my Firebird. I just had it detailed.”
I never had my car detailed and I needed the money from the capture, so driving was okay with me. Lula was on salary, but I only made money when I delivered an FTA.
“Sally Street is a couple blocks away from Stark Street,” Lula said. “It’s not as bad as Stark Street, but it’s not Rodeo Drive, either. There’s a bunch of little bungalows in not such good condition all packed in together. One of my friends from a previous life used to live there. It was okay during the day, but it could get dicey at night.”
“Where is she now?”
“I don’t know. She just disappeared and never came back. Somebody said they saw her get on a bus to Tucson.”
I drove through the city center and took Grove Street to Sally Street. Brown’s house was on the third block. It was atiny bungalow with stucco siding and a shingle roof. Small hardscrabble front yard. No sidewalk. A driveway but no garage. A backyard that was enclosed with chain-link fence.
“Probably got a big dog in the backyard,” Lula said. “There’s always a big dog with these houses. And bars on the windows.”
“What do we know about Mr. Brown?” I asked Lula.
“It says here on his bond application that he’s in the music business. He’s twenty-eight years old. Has some priors for petty theft. Did a couple months on destruction of personal property. No details on that. Looks like his girlfriend turned him in on the armed robbery charge.”
I parked and unbuckled my seat belt. “Let’s do it.”
I got out, nodded to the Rangeman guy who was parked two houses down, and walked to the front door. Lula was standing beside me.
“There’s no doorbell,” she said. “We’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way.”
Bang, bang, bang.Lula hammered on the door.
A scrawny guy opened the door and looked out at us.
“Sylvester Brown?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s me,” he said.
I introduced myself and told him we were there to help him reschedule his court date.
“Hah,” he said. “That’s a good one.” He looked over his shoulder and yelled, “Francine, come here. You gotta see this.”
