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“I can get by. I don’t have a lot of time to cook what with working at the dealership and hijacking trucks.”
“I hear you,” Lula said. “Cooking takes time. And you gotta have a stove.”
“I like your hair,” Scargucci said to Lula. “If you don’t mind my asking, is it natural?”
“I got it online,” Lula said, “but I got natural hair too.”
“You’re next door to the Dirty Car Wash,” I said to Scargucci. “Is that owned by Ray Geara?”
“Yeah,” he said. “They’re all over the state.”
“Does he buy cars from your dealership?”
“No. He’s a Mercedes guy. Likes them new. Buys them from the Mercedes dealership. Sometimes we get one of his used to sell. One of his VPs buys from us. Frankie Plover. He likes flash but he has limited funds. He’ll come in all excited about a Lamborghini but he’s gotta feed his coke habit. Between you and me, he’s kind of a whack job. I mean, I don’t sell him cars. I just fix them, so what do I care, right?”
Right. But I cared. Frankie Plover had just moved to the top of my list of crazy people who might do anything.
“I could see you’re a mechanic with integrity,” Lula said to Scargucci.
“And you’re a lady with class,” Scargucci said. “When I make bail, we should get together.”
“I’m all about it,” Lula said.
We checked Scargucci in at the police station and called Connie to come bail him out.
“That was easy,” Lula said when we were walking back to the SUV. “He was okay. I figure he might be good as a backup.”
“He hijacks trucks,” I said.
“Eighty percent of all the men I know hijacked a truck at one time or another,” Lula said. “If I had to eliminate men who hijack trucks I’d never get to go out. And it’s not like he deals drugs. We’re talking about toasters and sneakers.”
My phone buzzed and the fire marshal’s name and number appeared on my screen.
“Yo, Jeremy,” I said. “What’s the word?”
“The word is that it’s not as bad as the last time you got firebombed. I assume you already know this since the tape on your door has been disturbed.”
“I took a quick look this morning. Is it officially safe to go in?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have information on the cause?”
“It looks like it was a good old-fashioned Molotov cocktail fired from a can cannon. There were shards of what I’m guessing was a beer bottle and the charred remains of half of a can. From the amount of destruction, I’m thinking there wasn’t a lot of accelerant and you didn’t have a lot of fast-burning material in the room. Your bed and a chest of drawers. Once the fire got to the living room it had more to work with, but you had a citizen go in with a handheld extinguisher and then the fire department arrived.”
“Thanks for the call,” I said.
“Do you ever think about finding a different line of work?”
“Constantly.”
I hung up and called Connie. “Do you have time to make a phone call and get someone in to clean up my fire damage?”
“Absolutely. How soon can you use them?”
“Now.”
“No problem.”
