Takedown Twenty(5)

We stood on the sidewalk, looking up at the second-floor windows.

“I don’t see nothing happening up there,” Lula said.

Meantime, a balding, overweight, fiftyish man went into the nail salon and was shown into the back room.

“I bet he’s gonna get the special,” Lula said. “You come in before noon and you get a pedicure and a BJ for half price. Mindy wanted me to work for her back when I was a ’ho, but I declined. I didn’t want to have to deal with the whole pedicure thing. I don’t do feet. A girl’s gotta draw a line somewhere, you see what I’m saying?”

I punched Sunny’s number into my cellphone and listened to it ring. No answer. I marched into the building with Lula a step behind me. We took the stairs to the second floor and found Sunny’s apartment. Easy to do since there were only two apartments on the floor. I knocked on the door and waited. Nothing. I knocked again.

“Maybe he’s dead,” Lula said. “He could be stretched out on the floor toes up. Probably we should go in and see.”

I tried the door. Locked.

“I’d bust it in, but I got heels on,” Lula said. “It wouldn’t be ladylike.”

I went across the hall and rang the bell. “Go away,” someone yelled from inside the apartment.

“I want to talk to you,” I yelled back.

The door was wrenched open, and a woman glared out at me. “What?”

“I’m looking for Uncle Sunny,” I said.

“And?”

“I thought you might know where he is.”

“What do I look like, his mother? Do I look like I keep track of Uncle Sunny? And anyways, what do you want with him? Are you the police?”

“Bond enforcement,” I told her.

“Hey, Jake!” the woman yelled.

A big, slobbering black dog padded into view and stood behind the woman.

“Kill!” the woman said.

The dog lunged at us, Lula and I jumped back, and the dog clamped onto Lula’s purse and ripped it from her shoulder.

“That’s my new bag!” Lula said. “It’s almost a Brahmin.”

The dog shook the bag until it was dead, then he eyed Lula.

“Uh-oh,” Lula said. “I don’t like the way he’s looking at me. I’d shoot him, but he got my gun.” She cut her eyes to me. “You got a gun?”

I was slowly inching my way toward the stairs. “No,” I whispered. “No gun.” Not that it mattered, because I couldn’t shoot a dog even if its eyes were glowing red and its head was rotating.

The dog made a move toward us, and Lula and I turned tail and ran. Lula missed a step, crashed into me, and we rolled ass over teakettle down the stairs, landing in a heap on the foyer floor.

“Lucky I ended on top of you, or I might have hurt myself,” Lula said.

I hauled myself up and limped out the door. This wasn’t the first time Lula and I had crash-landed at the bottom of a flight of stairs. A window opened on the second floor, Lula’s purse sailed out, and the window slammed shut.

Lula retrieved the mangled bag. “At least I got my gun back,” she said. “Now what are we going to do? You want to go for breakfast? I wouldn’t mind having one of them breakfast sandwiches.”

“Vinnie’s going to hound me until I find Uncle Sunny.”

“Yeah, but this looking for Uncle Sunny is making us unpopular, and I think I got a bruise from landing on you. I hear bacon is real good for healing a bruise.”

I thumbed through Sunny’s file. He’d been charged with second-degree murder for running over Stanley Dugan… twice. I suspected he’d done a lot worse to a lot of people over the years, but this time he’d been caught on video by a kid with an iPhone who’d posted it to YouTube. Since everyone who knew Stanley Dugan (including his ninety-year-old mother) hated him, the video only served to enhance Sunny’s popularity.

Two men in their mid-fifties ambled out of the nail salon. They were balding, paunchy, wearing bowling shirts, pleated slacks, and pinky rings. One of the men had “Shorty” embroidered on his shirt above the breast pocket.

“Hey,” Shorty said, eyeballing me. “We hear you been asking about Sunny.”

“I work for his bail bonds agent,” I told him. “Sunny is in violation of his bail agreement. He needs to reschedule a court date.”

“Maybe he don’t want to do that,” Shorty said. “Maybe he got better things to do with his time.”

“If he doesn’t reschedule, he’s considered a felon.”

Shorty snickered. “Of course he’s a fella. Everybody knows he’s a fella. What are you, stupid or something?”