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“I mean about the kidnapping and the death and torture threats.”
“I don’t know. I guess I have to wait for them to make a move. We’re at a stalemate. I can’t give them what they want, and they refuse to believe that I don’t have it.”
“Is Ranger making any progress?”
“Nothing significant. Anything on your end?”
“We aren’t officially involved,” Morelli said.
The CSI guys went to their truck, and the fire marshal walked over to us.
“The site seems to be stable,” he said. “The explosion didn’t scatter the structure, and it was single-story frame construction so there isn’t a lot of the debris that you would see in higher-rise buildings. This basically just collapsed in on itself. There was no fire and all utilities have been disconnected. I see no reason why you can’t sort through this. Just be careful where you walk.”
“We need to salvage what we can from the storeroom,” I said to Morelli. “Connie said all the records are in the cloud, so things could be worse.”
“At least Vinnie isn’t available to bond out Walburg again.”
For a moment I’d forgotten about Vinnie. No matter what wassaid in the bus, the thought of Vinnie being held hostage wasn’t a good one. He was pimple pus, but he wasourpimple pus.
“I need to get back to work,” Morelli said. “There’s preseason hockey tonight if you want to come over and share a pizza.”
“Sounds good. I’ll bring the pizza.”
“Game is at eight o’clock.”
I watched Morelli drive away, and I went into the bus to tell Connie and Lula that we had permission to sort through the office remains.
“I can’t go climbing over all that junk in my Louboutins,” Lula said. “I’m going to the hardware store to get boots.”
“I’m okay in my sneakers,” I said.
“I’ve got running shoes in my tote,” Connie said, “so I’m okay too, but as long as you’re going out you can get some big plastic bins.”
“And air freshener,” I said. “Something to get rid of the dead-mouse smell.”
Connie changed her shoes and we stood on the sidewalk and looked at the mess in front of us.
“Vinnie had a safe in his office,” Connie said. “We want to make sure it’s secure. I don’t know what he had in his desk drawers, and I don’t want to know. I want the gun from my desk. Beyond that everything would be easier to reach from the alley.”
“I’ll walk around to the back and start looking for the file cabinets. You can start looking for your gun,” I said.
The Rangeman SUV was parked behind my Whatever. The two men got out of the SUV and walked over to us. I recognized one of them. Raul. The other man was new. His name tag said he was Bek.
“Are you looking for something?” Raul asked.
“We need to salvage what we can from this wreck,” I said.
“We can help.”
“That would be amazing,” I said. “Bek can go with Connie. She’s working in the front of the office, and you can come with me. I’m going to walk around to the back so it’s easier to get to the items we took in as security.”
By five o’clock we had everything from the file cabinets in bins, plus we had assorted larger items that we found in the rubble. The gun safe was located and cleaned out. The guns were all packed off to Rangeman for storage. Connie had her desk gun, and we were waiting for the safe company to finish hauling Vinnie’s safe through the debris to their truck. This would also go to Rangeman.
I was standing by the bus with Connie and Lula, watching the Rangeman guys stuff the bins in our cars.
“It’s a good thing we had Raul and Bek helping us,” Lula said. “We couldn’t have done this without them.”
“We would have been done a half hour ago if your skirt wasn’t so short,” Connie said. “Every time you bent over Raul’s eyes almost fell out of his head.”
