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Ten minutes later, Lula returned. She had a ham and cheese sandwich on wheat and tomato soup in a cardboard cup.
“His name is Marcus Ulman,” she said. “He smokes a lot of dope and drinks whatever he can get his hands on, but he doesn’t do anything hard. He’s been on the street for at least ten years. Lost his job when the condom factory closed. Wife left him. Has kids but doesn’t know where they are. Used to hang with Stump but nobody’s seen Stump and Marcus isn’t talking about it. Sometimes he crashes in a crack house on the next block. Apparently, he has friends there. Third floor.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s take a look at the crack house.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?” Nutsy asked.
“Not usually,” I said. “Mostly it’s just sad.”
We found the house and I didn’t want to involve Bob, so I left him on the sidewalk with Lula. Nutsy and I walked three flights up and knocked on the only door.
A wasted woman with straw hair and acne-pocked skin answered the door.
“Yuh,” she said.
“Is Marcus here?” I asked.
She made a motion with her head that said to come in.
The truth is that I was flying on bravado here, and I wasterrified. I was usually tagging along behind Ranger on this sort of mission. Once Lula and I had stumbled into an apartment guarded by an alligator, but that wasn’t a normal happening.
I stepped in and looked around. There were mattresses and quilts and sleeping bags on the floor. All soiled and haphazardly placed. All dumpster rescues. The smell was a mixture of stale French fries and human suffering. We stepped around the mattresses and found Marcus at a table in what might have been the dining room. He had a bottle of beer in front of him and he was eating his sandwich.
“Hi, Marcus,” I said. “Remember me?”
“And me,” Nutsy said.
He looked at me and then at Nutsy. “What do you want?”
“Information,” I said.
“I haven’t got any,” Marcus said.
“Maybe we should have brought Lula,” Nutsy said.
“I bet you’d like something better than that beer,” I said to Marcus. I pulled a twenty out of my messenger bag and held it out to him. “I want to know about Stump.”
“I don’t know anybody named Stump,” he said.
He reached for the twenty, and I pulled it away. “Tell me about Stump.”
“Fuck you,” he said.
It smelled really bad in the apartment, Nutsy looked like he was going to lose the Taylor pork roll he’d had for dinner, Lula and Bob were waiting on the sidewalk, and I was expecting a call from Morelli.
“I apologize ahead of time,” I said to Marcus, “but it’s turning into a very long day, and if I lose this opportunity, I might not be able to find you again.”
“Fuck you and fuck him too,” Marcus said.
I took my stun gun out of my back pocket and gave Marcus a bunch of volts. Marcus face-planted into his sandwich and slumped out of his chair.
“We need to get him out of here. Which end do you want?” I asked Nutsy.
“Holy crap,” Nutsy said.
I grabbed Marcus by the back of his shirt and dragged him to the door. There were seven other people in the crack house and none of them paid any attention to me dragging Marcus. I got him into the hall and looked at the three flights of stairs.
“Are you going to help, or what?” I asked Nutsy.
