“Good to know.”
“Yeah, if you want to be a butcher, schnapps is the way to go.”
He turned the burners on, then unwrapped the steaks and put them on the grill on top of the stove. He shook salt and pepper on them and added some hot sauce.
“I like my steaks good and salty, and then I give them some kick with the hot sauce,” he said. “I start them out on the grill, so they get seared and marked, and then I turn them over. If you didn’t know better you’d swear they got done outside on a grill.”
I sipped some more schnapps and looked down at the steaks.
“Yep,” I said. “They look grilled all right.”
“We’ll let these sit here and burn a little and then we’ll finish them off in the oven. I’ll set the table and you can put the bread on a bread board and get the butter out of the refrigerator.”
The refrigerator contained a pound of butter, a quart of milk, and schnapps. No vegetables. No juice. Just bottles and bottles of schnapps.
“I guess you like your schnapps cold sometimes,” I said to Randy.
“It’s awesome cold. I keep some in the freezer too.”
I looked in the freezer. It was packed wall-to-wall with schnapps and vanilla ice cream. I was starting to like Randy. I didn’t care if he killed old ladies, I was thinking he was okay. I looked at my glass and realized it was empty. Good deal. I could try some frozen schnapps.
I set the butter and the bread on the table and opened a bottle of the frozen schnapps. I filled our glasses, and we toasted the steaks.
“They’re ready to go into the oven,” Randy said. “All you do is pop them in, grill and all. You put them in, and I’ll slice the bread.”
“I don’t see any potholders.”
“Use a towel. There are kitchen towels by the sink.”
I grabbed a towel and wrapped it around the end of the grill. I pulled the grill off the burner, slid the grill into the oven, closed the oven door, and then realized I’d caught the end of the towel in the open flame and the towel was on fire. I had a moment of panic before my schnapps-soaked brain thought to toss the towel into the sink. I tossed the towel, missed the sink, and set a roll of paper towels on fire. Randy grabbed the schnapps bottle, poured it over the flaming paper towels, hoping to douse the fire, and after that it was mayhem.
Two hours later I was in the street with Randy and a fire department investigator, explaining how the fire started. In the interest of transparency, I have to say it wasn’t the first time I’d been in this position. Grandma and I had burned down a funeral home a while ago, and it had been much more spectacular.
“I guess I should have gone for the fire extinguisher instead of the schnapps,” Randy said. “I just grabbed the first thing I saw that was liquid.”
The glow from the schnapps was long gone, I was starving hungry, and I was finding it difficult to focus. I wanted to crawl into my bed and pretend the day had never happened. I’d called Morelli an hour ago, and he and Bob were close behind me, waiting to take me home.
The guy from the fire department closed his notebook, glanced at Morelli, and gave him one of those looks that said, You poor bastard, how did you ever get involved with this idiot woman?
“Really sorry about your apartment,” I said to Randy. “Probably I’m not cut out to be a butcher, but at least I know how to cook a steak now.”
Randy nodded, and Morelli maneuvered me across the street and into his SUV.
“Do you think he understands that I’m not going to show up for work tomorrow?” I asked Morelli.
“I don’t think it matters,” Morelli said. “The fire marshal found half a truckload of hijacked schnapps in Berger’s apartment. He had cases of it stacked up like cordwood in his bedroom. There’s a good chance Berger won’t be showing up for work either.”
Bob and Morelli and I trooped into my apartment and went straight to the kitchen. We made grilled cheese and ham sandwiches, and ate them with pickles and potato chips. Morelli had a beer, and I had a soda since I was sworn off alcohol for the rest of my life.
“I need to go back to Randy’s apartment tomorrow and get Ranger’s CR-V,” I said to Morelli.
“The black one in the laundromat lot?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sure Ranger will just have it towed.” Morelli fed the last half of his second sandwich to Bob. “You know it got totaled by a fire truck, right?”
“What?”
“I went over to talk to some of the guys while you were giving your report to the investigator. It looked like the truck rolled right over it.”
I dialed Ranger on my cellphone.