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“Babe,” Ranger said.
The inflection was the equivalent of an eye roll. Ranger had respect for Morelli as a cop, but he wasn’t impressed with him as a boyfriend. Possibly because he’d never slept with him or watched a hockey game with him or scarfed down Morelli’s mother’s lasagna.
“Anyway,” I said, “this isn’t a good place to… you know.”
“Kiss you?”
“Yeah.”
“Babe, that barely counted as a kiss.” He wrapped his hand around my wrist and tugged me forward, toward his car. “I want to see what’s on the flash drive. I’ll call to have Bob brought to your apartment and we can use your computer to access the drive.”
Fifteen minutes later Ranger parked in my building’s lot and a Rangeman car pulled up next to us. Hal got out and handed Bob over to me.
“Thanks for Bob-sitting,” I said to Hal.
“No problem,” Hal said. “He was great.”
“He ate my hat,” Rodriguez said from behind the wheel.
“We took our dinner break at Joey’s BBQ,” Hal said. “Rod sat in front of the smoker and his hat smelled like cooked cow. If Bob hadn’t eaten it, I would have ripped it off his head and thrown it out the window.”
I walked Bob around the parking lot until I thought he was empty and then the three of us went upstairs. I said hello to Rex and gave him half of a Ritz cracker. I gave a whole Ritz cracker to Bob. I gave a bottle of water to Ranger.
I went to the dining room table and opened my laptop. Ranger pulled a chair up next to me and inserted the flash drive, and a list of files appeared on the screen.
The first file was titled “Big Below.” It was a short story by someone named Emmett. There were a few other short stories and two screenplays, also by Emmett. The last three files were storylines for a video game.
“At first glance it doesn’t seem like we got a lot out of this night,” I said.
The beginnings of a smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. “I could turn that around.”
“I’m talking about Nutsy.”
Ranger pushed back in his chair. “Does the name Emmett mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“Emmett Kelly was a famous clown, Weary Willie. He wore old clothes, and he had a sad face, and he depicted the hobos of the depression. I’m guessing Emmett is Manley’s pen name.”
“How do you know about Emmett?”
“I grew up in a multigenerational household in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood in Newark. My grandparents loved the circus and they loved Emmett the clown. On our living room wall, next to the television, there was a picture of Emmett. He had equal billing with a crucifix and a picture of Jesus Christ.”
“Wow, I have a whole new insight into you now.”
“Fortunately, I know you’re being a wiseass.”
“Okay, so moving along, Andy is writing short stories and screenplays and maybe video games.”
“Maybe,” Ranger said. “I’ll take a closer look at his story andhis screenplays tonight. If you want to really improve the evening, we can do it together.”
“Tempting, but no.”
“Right now, it’s only tempting,” Ranger said. “In the not-so-distant future it will be all-consuming.” Ranger stood and kissed the top of my head. “Think about it.”
Jeez. Truth is, it was pretty consumingnow, but I was a good Catholic girl. Okay, so I never went to church, and I wasn’t sure about God. I mean, who was he anyway? What I had was fear of eternal damnation and a set of values that were burned into my soul. Mostly they were the ten commandments and the Constitution of the United States. I couldn’t repeat verbatim what any of them were, but they were stuck in the dark recesses of my brain, keeping me on the straight and narrow… most of the time. At least some of the time.
Ranger pocketed the flash drive and looked at Bob sprawled on the couch. “Where does he sleep?”
