Smokin’ Seventeen(28)

“I appreciate the thought, but I don’t think Ziggy is a vampire.”

“Yeah, but you don’t know for sure, right?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“Pretty sure don’t cut it,” Lula said, wrapping the garlic around her neck. “I already got one foot in the land of the living dead, and I’m not taking no chances.”

I drove the short distance from the coffee shop to Ziggy’s house and parked. We got out, rang the doorbell, and waited. No answer. I left Lula at the front door, and I walked to the rear. I knocked. Nothing. I felt for the key. No key. I snooped around, trying to see in the windows but no luck there. I returned to Lula in the front of the house, and Ziggy’s neighbor stepped out with her dog.

“Are you looking for Ziggy?” she asked. “Because he isn’t home. I saw him leave in the middle of the night. I was up with heartburn that would kill a cow, and I saw Ziggy go out with a suitcase. And his car is still gone. I can’t ever remember Ziggy going anywhere before. He was a real homebody.” She squinted at Lula. “Is that garlic?”

“Yes,” I said. “Lula’s making marinara tonight. She’s getting into the mood early.”

I called Connie and told her about Ziggy. “Do you have anything on him?” I asked. “Any idea where he might have gone?”

“I’ll run a family history.”

I meandered through the Burg looking for Ziggy’s black Chrysler. After forty minutes I gave up and returned to the coffee shop.

“Whoa,” Lula said to Connie. “What happened to you?”

Connie’s hair was like the wild woman of Borneo. Her lipstick was smeared, and she had crazy eyes.

“What?” Connie asked. “What do you mean?”

“You look like you stuck your finger in an electric socket and took a bunch of volts.”

“It’s the coffee. I sit here all day drinking coffee. I’ve got an eye twitch, I’m having heart palpitations, and I can’t unclench my ass muscles. I need a different office.”

“Now that the bear’s gone you could move back into the bus,” I told her.

“Not the bus,” Connie said. “I can’t go back to the bus. All that black fur and Mooner smell.”

“It’s not gonna smell like Mooner,” Lula said. “It’s gonna smell like bear.”

Connie looked around the coffee shop. “It’s not so bad here. I could try switching to decaf.”

I gathered Connie’s files and stuffed them into her tote bag. “You could work from home.”

“I’ve got my mother with me,” Connie said. “She’s staying while she recovers from her hip operation. I love my mother, but I’ll slit my throat if I have to spend more than twenty minutes with her. She hums. Do you know what it’s like to live with someone who hums all day?”

“I guess it depends if she’s a good hummer,” Lula said.

A muscle worked in Connie’s jaw, and her right eye twitched. “There are no good hummers. It’s all hummm hum hummm hummm. That’s it. Fucking all fucking day fucking long. Hummmm.”

“ ’Scuse me,” Lula said. “I didn’t know there was a issue. Maybe you need a pill or something.”

I unplugged the laptop. “You can use my apartment. It’s quiet. And it has everything but food.”

• • •

I got Connie settled in at my dining room table, and Lula and I took off to find Merlin Brown. I pulled into the lot to his apartment building and we immediately spotted his car.

“I guess it’s a good thing we found him home,” Lula said, “so why does it feel like a bad thing?”

“Because we don’t have any idea how to capture him?”

“Yeah, that could be it.”

I’ve seen Ranger make captures. Eighty percent of all felons immediately surrender at seeing Ranger on their doorstep. He’s not a man you’d want to take lightly. The remaining twenty percent are instantly taken down and cuffed. He makes it look easy. Sad to say, I’m not nearly Ranger. My successes are the result of luck and dogged perseverance. And the dogged perseverance has more to do with desperation to make an overdue rent payment than an innate strength. Still, I usually get the job done, and I’m a better bounty hunter than I was last year.

I parked beside a broken-down van on the opposite side of the lot from Merlin’s black SUV. “He knows us now,” I said, “and he’s not going to let us into his apartment. Let’s sit and wait for a while and see if he goes out for lunch.”

“Then what?”

“Then we figure it out.”