TWENTY-FIVE
MORELLI, BOB, AND I sat at the little kitchen table, drinking coffee and eating donuts fresh from the bakery. The two Rangeman guys in the backyard were also drinking coffee and eating donuts. And the two Rangeman guys in the SUV in front of Morelli’s house were drinking coffee and eating donuts.
“They better hope Ranger doesn’t catch them eating donuts on the job,” I said to Morelli. “The closest you come to dessert at Rangeman is an apple.”
“At the risk of seeming unappreciative, four armed guards patrolling my property feels excessive.”
“Welcome to my world. I’ve got Rangeman tracking devices mysteriously dropped into my pockets and stuck to my cars.” I pushed back from the table, rinsed my coffee mug, and put it in the dishwasher.
“It’s my Uncle Lou’s birthday today,” Morelli said. “The whole family will be at my cousin Maddie’s house for dinner tonight. You’re invited.”
“No way. Your Grandma Bella will be there. She scares the heck out of me. And I’m sure she’s still got a vendetta against Grandma over the pie thing. She’ll secretly put the eye on me, and I’ll get my period nonstop for a month. Besides, I have my own chores. I need to do some food shopping for Briggs, and I’m going to help him walk the dogs.”
“What dogs?”
“The ten Chihuahuas that were living in a box with Forest Kottel.”
I grabbed my messenger bag, waved at the two men in the backyard, gave Morelli a fast kiss, and headed out.
I stopped at the supermarket, and two Rangeman guys watched over the Buick and two followed me around the store. I got a week’s worth of staples for Briggs plus some ice cream and chips and a paperback mystery.
One of the Rangeman guys carried my groceries to my apartment while another followed close behind, his hand on his holstered gun, ever ready.
I knocked once, opened the door, and Briggs came forward, surrounded by prancing dogs.
“Groceries,” I said.
“What’s with the armed guards? You win the lottery?”
“Ranger thinks I need security.”
Briggs stood on a small step stool and emptied the bags.
“A book?” he asked.
“Yeah, remember before television and computers we used to do this thing called reading?”
The dogs were milling around in the kitchen, watching Briggs.
“How’s it going with the minions?” I asked him.
“Most of them have the leash figured out. Gracie is hopeless. She always wants to run. I have to find a dog park for her. Bernie should be a circus dog. He can walk on his back legs forever. The bony one with the white tip on her tail is a real picky eater, but if I put a little cheese in with her food she gobbles it. Give me a couple days and I’ll have her fattened up.”
“You like them!”
“Except for Blinky. He bit me in the ankle. I think he has trust issues.”
“I was going to help you walk them.”
“That would be great! Maybe you can run a little with Gracie. I can’t keep up with her.”
We got Gracie and three of the others hooked up and took them outside. Me, Briggs, four teeny-tiny dogs, and two heavily armed men. A new black Porsche 911 Turbo was parked next to the two Rangeman SUVs, and Ranger was standing beside it talking to his men.
“What’s up?” I asked Ranger.
“It’s a nice day. I thought I’d go to Atlantic City.”
“You weren’t going to sneak off without me, were you?”
“That was the plan.”
“Can I talk to you in private?”
I handed the dogs off to a Rangeman guy, and Ranger and I walked a short distance away.
“A sick psychopathic freak broke into Morelli’s house and left his gruesome message on the kitchen counter,” I said to Ranger. “I don’t like it. I don’t like that he wants to kill me. I don’t like that he wants to kill you. And I don’t like that Morelli is now involved. I want this creep found and eliminated. I’m in. I know what he looks like and what he sounds like and what he smells like.”
“What does he smell like?” Ranger asked.
“Burning sulfur.”
“I understand your emotion, but you’d serve no purpose today. You’d be a liability.”
“Gee, that’s so flattering. Let me get this straight. You only have me tag along when I serve some useful purpose, like being a dumb bimbo in a bar.”
“Yes.”
“You are such a jerk.”
“Babe.”
I was pretty sure this time “Babe” meant I was giving him a cramp in his sphincter.
He grabbed me by the arm and yanked me to his car. “She’s coming with me,” he said to his men. “Jose and Rodriguez, follow me. Stay a quarter mile back. Keep channel 1 open. Roger and Mario, help Briggs walk the dogs and then return to Rangeman.”
“I need my messenger bag,” I said to Ranger.
“Why?”
“Identification, lipstick, cellphone, and Morelli’s gun, which has bullets in it.”
“Get it.”
It takes about an hour and a half to get from Trenton to Atlantic City. For the most part it’s open highway, so if you’re riding in Ranger’s Porsche and he has his radar detector and laser scrambler up and running, you can make it in just over an hour.
We were flying low today, with Ranger in his zone, driving in silence. The Porsche had paddle shifters, but Ranger rarely used them. Not even Ranger could shift as efficiently as the Porsche computer.
I assumed that we were going to check on Viktor Volkov. I also assumed that Ranger had a full report on the trade show and that at some time in the near future he’d share that information with me. For the moment I wasn’t messing with his Zen by asking questions.
He turned off Route 30 onto Dr. Martin Luther King Boulevard and then left onto Fairview, into a neighborhood that was upper class if you were using ghetto standards.
Viktor Volkov lived in a small cinderblock bungalow stuck between two other small cinderblock bungalows. Across the street was a two-floor cinderblock motel that rented rooms by the hour. Viktor’s house was painted a bright turquoise, his windows had iron security bars cemented into place, and a rusted-out junker car of indeterminate paint color was abandoned half on the road and half on what would have been, in a better part of town, a lawn. In this part of town it was hardscrabble yellow dirt.
Ranger parked at the end of the block, and we sat watching the Volkov house and its surroundings for a half hour. One car pulled into the motel. That was it for traffic. No activity around any of the houses. No cats. No dogs. No kids. No gunshots.
“According to my information,” Ranger said, “Volkov has a van that he uses for his business. I don’t see it here, so he probably isn’t home.”
We left the Porsche and walked to Volkov’s house. The front door and back door were both locked. No answer to our knocking. No answer when we called his cellphone. Ranger used a pick on the front door lock and had it open in thirty seconds.
The house was dark inside. Living room, eat-in kitchen, two bedrooms, bathroom. Shabby furniture that you would expect in this level rental. Black heavy-duty plastic body bag in the second bedroom. Looked like there was a body in the bag.
“I have a box of disposable gloves in the car,” Ranger said. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
“No way. You stay here. I’ll get the gloves.”
I returned with the gloves and stood back while Ranger unzipped the bag. I saw that the body was covered with lime, but even with a thick layer of lime it didn’t smell great. I inched my way out of the bedroom and across the living room to the front door. I mean, someone has to guard the door, right?
Ranger came out after a couple minutes, snapped his gloves off, and bagged them.
“Male. Partially decomposed, but I could see enough to guess that it’s Volkov,” he said. “The corpse is clearly missing a heart, so that’s one mystery solved.”
He pulled on new gloves and went room by room, opening drawers and looking in closets. He bagged the gloves with the first pair when he was done, and we left the house, closing the door behind us.
“No way to lock up,” he said. “There weren’t any keys in the house. No house keys and no car keys.”
“Vlatko wanted the van.”
“And the identity. If you don’t have a stooge to bring airborne poison into a building, you might come in as an HVAC tech. I’m sure Vlatko learned from Rangeman. He’ll be smarter if he attempts to use the polonium again.”
“Are you going to call this in to the police?”
“I’ll have someone make an anonymous call from a phone card. I don’t want to be involved.”
We walked the short distance to the Porsche, Ranger made a U-turn back to Dr. Martin Luther King Boulevard, and we headed for the beach.
“The trade show is at the Roland Atlantic Hotel,” Ranger said. “It gets a lot of the smaller conventions. There are seven hundred attending this one. Approximately half are from overseas. There’s a large bloc from Eastern Europe. I combed through the registration list and came up with several possible targets for Vlatko. He could also be here to take out someone who looks benign but is secretly an enemy of the state.”
“The eye patch puts him at a disadvantage,” I said. “There aren’t a lot of men walking around who look like they’re seventeen and only have one eye. I doubt the woman in the consulate would have remembered him if he hadn’t had the eye patch. Maybe you should be working with the police to find him.”
“If the police arrest him he’s inaccessible to me,” Ranger said, “and I don’t trust the system to permanently lock him away. It will be hard to tie him to the Rangeman incident, since the only witness is dead. If they catch him with the polonium he could be charged as a terrorist, especially if I testify against him. For obvious reasons, I’d prefer not to do that. I’d rather not have my black ops history made public. If they suspect him of murdering Volkov but can’t prove it, he’ll have his visa revoked and he’ll come back under a new identity to kill me and everyone associated with me.”
“So we’re on our own.”
“More or less. I have an FBI contact I trust. He’ll be working with me. And I have Rangeman.”