“You might need some squeegees to keep things clean. You know. During the apocalypse.”
“Naw,” Rudy drawled, showing a lot of teeth in his grin. “We Wolfes like it messy.”
He tipped a couple fingers at his forehead and eased back out toward the road.
“He’s going to wish he had a squeegee,” Pablo said sadly before he instantly brightened. “So you want to talk about poor Mr. Rossi being dead in the equipment shed?”
“Can we go inside?” I asked.
Myra was already opening the door for us.
Pablo pivoted on his heel and practically bounced into the building. “Hi Stan! I know you like me out there waiting for cars, but Ms. Reed and Ms. Reed need to talk about the dead guy.”
Stan was middle-aged, heavy in the face and belly and one of the most cutthroat bowlers I’d ever met. He smelled of cigarette smoke and Old Spice. He gave Myra and I a seven-ten split nod.
“Help yourself to the office. Can I get you coffee?”
His coffee was number three on the ten most toxic substances in Ordinary.
“No thanks,” Myra and I said at the same time.
Apocalypse Pablo took us past the snacks, toilet paper, and cold remedies, along the dimly lit wall of soda, beer, and energy drinks to the narrow door in the back.
Stan’s office was also a storage room complete with a desk in the middle that was a relic from an age when aluminum was the exciting new material.
“So.” Pablo glanced over at the chair behind the desk, where he should be sitting, then looked at us expectantly.
“Go ahead and have a seat,” Myra said.
“Right. Sure.” Instead of walking around the desk, he dropped down into one of the folding chairs next to the shelf of beach towels and sunglasses and cupped his knees with his palms.
Myra somehow managed not to roll her eyes and took the seat behind the desk.
That left me the other folding chair. I picked it up and placed it a little closer to Pablo.
“I know Myra already talked to you but we just wanted to go over a few questions.”
“I understand.”
Since Myra had already gone through this, I took point. “When did you start your shift that day?”
“Three o’clock. I work the swing shift.” He enunciated like I had a microphone in my hand.
“Were you working alone?”
“No, Stan was here until five o’clock, and then Lulu came in.”
Lulu was Stan’s eldest daughter. “I thought she was going to community college.”
“She is. She still pulls a shift now and then when she needs spending money.”
“Was she here all night?”
“No. She left after being here only fifteen minutes.”
That seemed weird.
“Why?”
He reached out and dragged one finger over the open top of a box near his knees. “Well, she got invited to a party at a friend’s house. Netflix and beer. Since it was so slow, I told her to go.”
“Does Stan know that?”
“Oh, sure. He’s fine with me covering the till and the pumps if it’s quiet enough.” His finger had finished tracing the edge of the box and he dunked his hand in. His eyes were wide and innocent and locked on mine.
I glanced at his hand.
He was holding a squeegee.
“So why did you go to the shed if you were covering the till and the pumps?”
“That was after my shift. I closed up at midnight sharp, just like we always do.” He punctuated that with a little poke of the squeegee. “Then I checked the shed to make sure it was locked. We don’t get into it that often, but it’s our property, and you never know when someone might decide to get up to some mischief. It was locked. But when I came in to open the next morning, I saw it was unlocked.”
“Did you see anyone by the shed? During your shift or in the morning?”
“I did not. We have a camera on it.”
“What?” Myra and I said at the same time.
“Oh, yes. Didn’t you know? Stan has this crazy idea that he saw Bigfoot stealing our light bulbs the other day. Bigfoot.” He waved the squeegee around like he was scrubbing that image out of the air. “I think he’s just been to that quaint little local-color museum down in Newport one too many times.”
Apocalypse Pablo had a real knack for being polite. “Quaint” was actually “cheesy” and “local-color” was “outdated snake skin oil and hokum” shop.
Not that it wasn’t a fun place to visit for precisely those reasons.
Still, Stan was on to something. Bigfoot did have a light bulb fetish, and he was a bit of a klepto.
“Can we see the video?” Myra asked.
“Why sure!” He stood, but not before snagging three more squeegees out of the box. “I’ll just ring up your squeegees, and then we can take a look at it on the computer out front.”
There wasn’t a computer in the office. They probably only had one tablet or laptop that they kept at the counter with them.
He jiggled two squeegees at me, waiting for me to take them from him. I didn’t know if it was Stan’s idea to have him push the squeegees, or if it was Apocalypse Pablo’s idea. But it was an effective way to move stock.
I gave in and took the squeegees.
He lit up like we’d just executed the passing of the Olympic torch.
“Fantastic,” he said. “We are going to be so ready for the end of the world.”
He handed Myra the other two, and she didn’t resist either.
“Follow me, Ms. Reed, and Ms. Reed.” He practically glided out of the room, humming some pretty little tune under his breath.
“You buy, I’ll check the tape.” I handed her my squeegees. Or was it squeegi? Squeeguses?
“Give me your card,” she said.
I pulled my cash card out of my wallet. “They’re on sale.”
“I’m not paying for them.”
“They are all the rage in apocalypse accessories. Useful. Like umbrella hats, apparently.”
“I don’t need a squeegee. I already have two.”
I threw a look over my shoulder as I walked out the door. “You hoard squeegees?”
“I have one for the car and one for the bathroom. It takes more than two of one thing to constitute hoarding.”
“Like six?”
From the crinkle of her nose and corners of her eyes, I knew she would have slapped me upside the head if we weren’t on duty. Being professional. Officers of the law.
“Two of these are yours, idiot.”
Apoca-blo was already behind the counter making himself busy at the register. Stan, who was leaning one hip on a tall stool near the lottery tickets, raised an eyebrow at the cleaning utensils in Myra’s hands.
Then he grinned. Yep. This had to be his idea.
She tipped her chin up and gave him the dare-you look I’d last seen on her face when she bought her first pack of tampons from Scott Holderman, the hunky senior running back who used to work the grocery store.
Stan, just like Scott, wisely averted his eyes and made no comment.
“We need to take a look at your video from the last couple days,” I said. “Can you queue that up for us?”
“Sure. No guarantee we’ll get a good shot. The rain has really been messing with my equipment.”