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I left the house and drove to the office. I was a block away when I saw the lone fire truck and some random cars. I inched closer and saw that there was no office. There was just rubble where the office used to stand. Connie and Lula were in front of the office remains. I parked and joined them.
“What?” I asked.
“Boom!” Lula said.
I turned to Connie. “Was it hit by lightning?”
“Hard to say for sure at this point,” she said. “My best guess is it was hit by Zane Walburg. It didn’t catch fire. It just imploded. At least that’s what they told me.”
I looked around. “Where’s Vinnie? Does he know?”
“I talked to Lucille,” Connie said. “She said he didn’t come home last night. Not that this is unusual for Vinnie.”
“Where was he?”
“He bailed out one of his father-in-law’s relatives and that was the last anyone heard from him. He’s probably passed out in a strip club.”
“I can’t believe this happened after I did all that decorating,” Lula said.
“What about your records?” I asked Connie.
“Everything is in the cloud,” she said. “I can get it all back. The only thing we can’t get back is what we had in the storeroom. Items we had in the file cabinets might be intact. I haven’t combed through the debris yet. They won’t let us any closer than this.”
“I suppose we should talk to Walburg,” I said to Lula.
“The mad bomber? I don’t think so,” Lula said. “Let the police piss him off this time.”
“I don’t want him blowing up any more things. Like my apartment.”
“You’ve got a point,” Lula said, “but I’m not going without Bella.”
Bella was in the front passenger seat of my Whatever. She was clutching her purse, staring straight ahead with her eagle eyes bright under her fierce eyebrows.
“I want to see what he did,” she said. “Before I give him the eye, I want to see damage.”
I drove her to the office and idled on the opposite side of the street.
“This is good,” she said. “This boy, he do good work.”
“He blew up the office,” Lula said from the backseat. “I just decorated that office, and I had all myStarmagazines there.”
“I likeStarmagazine,” Bella said. “That’s a mark against him. Vincent Plum I don’t like.”
“He put up your bail bond money,” I said to Bella. “You would be in jail if it wasn’t for Vinnie.”
“I want lunch when we’re done,” she said. “More chicken.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Chicken for lunch.”
Traffic was light at this time of the morning. People were commuting toward the city, and we were traveling away from it to Hamilton Township. I took the driveway into Curly Tree Gardens and parked in a slot reserved for Walburg’s neighbor.
“Now that we’re here, what are we going to do?” Lula asked.
“We’re going to bring him in for bond violation.”
“We going to sneak up on him?”
“There’s no good way to sneak up on someone in a garden apartment,” I said. “Go around back and make sure he doesn’t escape. We’ll go in the front door.”
