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“I haven’t heard from Vinnie,” Connie said. Her eyes shifted to the street. “Holy mother!”
It was Lula behind the wheel of an ancient, rusted-out yellow school bus. She beeped the horn at us and parked behind the CSI truck. She opened the door and stepped out.
“I got us a mobile office,” she said. “It’s got a bathroom and everything. What do you think?”
I had no words.
“Um,” Connie said.
“I was sitting in the parking lot with the Rangeman guys, waiting for Stephanie, and I remembered seeing this when we went to get Stephanie a car. So, I called Andy and he came and picked me up and made me a real deal. Actually, he gave it to me because no one wanted it. It’s perfectly okay as long as you don’t drive it too far on account of it gets three miles to a gallon.”
“Ingenious,” I said to Lula.
“No shit,” Lula said. “You gotta go in and see it. Somebody decked it all out to make it a mobile home. They took the seats out and put in a couch and a TV and a teeny kitchen. And the refrigerator has a freezer. It’s got a bedroom in the back, only there’s no bed so we could put a desk there.”
Connie and I went in and looked around. It was sort of horrible but not entirely.
“It needs some cleaning up,” Lula said. “It’s been sitting in the junkyard.”
I opened a cupboard over the kitchen counter and found a dead mouse.
“At least it’s dead,” I said.
Connie picked it up in a tissue and threw it out the door. “If we park this in the back lot, we can hook it up to electric,” she said.
“I can do my decorating magic,” Lula said. “I might take it up professionally. I could specialize in old-school buses and crap-ass offices. I could have business cards made up.”
Connie’s phone rang and she looked at the number. “It’s the office number,” she said. “Unknown caller.” She put it on speakerphone.
“I guess you aren’t leaving messages in the window anymore,” the caller said.
Connie handed the phone to me.
“Lightning strike,” I said.
“Where’s our money?”
“No clue,” I said.
“Yeah, I almost believe you. Guess who I’ve got?”
“Who?”
There was some fumbling noise on the phone and the sound of someone growling.
“Vinnie?” I asked.
“Twenty-four hours and we start peeling his skin off.”
The phone went dead.
“Omigod,” I said. “They snatched Vinnie.”
“We should get a bottle of wine and some chips to celebrate our new office,” Lula said.
“But they have Vinnie,” I said.
“And?” Lula asked.
