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“I guess I have to go back to Trenton to do that. I want to go back anyway. I miss Sissy and my goldfish. I even miss my job. I thought I didn’t like it, but now I miss it.”
“Duncan Dare didn’t like it,” I said.
“You know about Duncan Dare? That’s embarrassing. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“You were test-driving a new you,” I said.
He smiled for the first time. “Yeah. Duncan Disaster.”
I smiled with him. “You should stick with Duncan Dugan.”
“Am I going to jail?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It’s possible that since you were such a complete failure as a criminal, the judge will be lenient.”
His eyes closed for a second. “Sorry I’m falling asleep,” he said. “They gave me a pill at the doctor’s office.”
I left Duncan and returned to Nutsy.
“I need to go back to Trenton, and I don’t have a car,” Nutsy said. “The van has to stay here, so Duncan can get to the doctor. I’d like to ride back to Trenton with you if you have room for me, except you have to promise not to tell Plover I’m in Trenton.”
I wanted more of an explanation from Nutsy, but this wasn’t the time. I’d have to get him alone when Lula wasn’t going to distract him with clown questions.
“Whatever,” I said. “We’ll check out of the hotel and come back to pick you up.”
I looked to the front door. Beyond the door, Bob was waiting in Ranger’s car. If the back seat was intact and there were no more tooth marks on the gearshift, Bob was going to get a double bacon hold-the-cheese burger for lunch.
We reached Jersey a little after ten o’clock that night. There’d been some long meal stops and a couple shorter snack stops and an accident on I-95. I was numb from the ass down, and I couldn’t blink my eyes.
“Are we almost home?” Lula asked.
“Yes,” I said. “We just left New York.”
“That wasn’t an entirely satisfying trip to Maine,” Lula said. “I didn’t get to shop for charming country crafts, and I didn’t get to eat a lobster roll.”
Bob had a better opinion of the trip because he’d gotten his double bacon burger.
An hour later, I turned onto Lula’s street and my heart skipped a beat when I saw fire trucks in front of her apartment house. There were no flames shooting into the sky, but the air smelledsmoky and the street was wet. I got closer and saw that the trucks were packing up to leave. A cop was roping the house off with yellow crime scene tape. The second-floor windows to Lula’s apartment were blackened. A small clump of people stood on the sidewalk.
“That’s my house!” Lula said. “Let me out. I gotta go see my apartment. All my clothes are in there. My Marilyn Monroe wig collection is in there.”
“It looks like they’re sealing the house off,” I said.
“Marilee is one of the people standing on the sidewalk. She has the apartment under me. She’ll know what’s going on.”
I angle-parked next to a fire truck, and we all got out.
Lula rushed over to Marilee. “What happened? I just got here. I was out of town,” Lula said.
“Nobody’s sure, but it looks like the fire started in your apartment,” Marilee said. “Word is your apartment is toast, but the rest of the house mostly only got smoke and water damage.”
“How could it start in my apartment?” Lula said. “I wasn’t even home.”
“Somebody was up there,” Marilee said. “It sounded like the guy who comes to see you every night and stomps on the stairs. I heard him go up and then he was moving around up there. And then the fire started.”
“It was Grendel,” Lula said. “He’s burning and pillaging. It’s one of his specialties. Did he get burned along with everything else?”
“No one got burned,” Marilee said. “Your apartment was empty. Everyone got out of the house.”
