A metal trough was shoved through the window, and wet cement began pouring into the room. I pulled Grandma against the far wall and tried to unscramble my thoughts and calm myself. The door was locked. I couldn’t reach the window. I watched the cement creep toward us, and I wondered how long it would take for the cement to fill the room. We had some time, right? They’d need a lot of cement. They might even need to get a second truck.
The cement reached our feet and then the entire floor was covered. There was no longer any trace of Rita. The tuft of hair and the red shoes were covered in wet cement.
“This is a bitch,” Grandma said. “I have one of them top-of-the-line caskets put on layaway at the funeral parlor. This is not the way I wanted to go out. Even if they find us and chip me out, it’ll be closed casket, and you know how I hate that.”
The cement was pouring in, and my heart was pounding in my chest. It was above my ankles, and then it was almost to my knees. And suddenly it stopped. The trough got pulled away, and Moe stuck his head into the open window and looked around.
“This is good,” he said. “Tell Fitz he can get back to his job.”
I heard engine sounds, heard the barrel of the cement mixer churning cement, and then I heard the truck leave.
Moe stuck his head through the window again. “This is what we call shooting fish in a barrel,” he said.
He leaned in a little farther, with his gun in his hand, and before he could aim there was a scream from somewhere in the alley. The scream was followed by a gunshot that sounded like it came out of a cannon.
Moe yelped and pitched forward. I slogged across the room, grabbed his arm, and used my weight to pull him through the window. He fell on top of me into the wet cement, and we rolled around until Grandma got hold of the gun and fired off a shot.
I was head-to-toe cement, but I managed to get to my feet. Moe was still down, holding his leg, with Grandma training the gun on him. Her hand was shaking, but her eyes were narrowed and steady.
“I’m feeling mean as a snake,” she said to Moe. “And I’d love to have an excuse to shoot you, so go ahead and make a move.”
Lula looked in through the window. “Holy horse pucky,” she said. “What the heck?”
Red lights were flashing in the alley. Men’s voices. The rumble of a big truck. Blue strobes flashing with the red lights.
“What’s going on out there?” Grandma asked.
“I saw Moe and Shorty standing there with the cement truck and I got worried, so I called everyone. We got police and a fire truck and EMTs and Ranger and half of Rangeman here.”
There was scraping at the door and the door opened, oozing cement onto the dirt floor. Morelli was the first one I saw. He grabbed me and pulled me out of the room. Cement was dropping off me in globs, but the cement on my legs was beginning to harden. He half dragged, half carried me up the stairs and out into the alley. A uniform followed with Grandma.
Morelli yelled for water, and an instant later Grandma and I were getting hosed down. Grandma went to the hospital to get checked out, but I refused. I shucked my clothes behind the fire truck and wrapped myself in a blanket. When I came out from behind the truck I saw that Moe had been hosed down and cuffed, and his leg was bandaged. Shorty was strapped to a backboard.
“What happened to Shorty?” I asked Lula.
“He got trampled,” Lula said. “I guess the lights from the police cars scared Kevin out of his hidey-hole, and he came barreling down the alley and ran right over Shorty.”
“Sunny is dead,” I told Morelli. “Heart attack.” I gave him the short version of the night and asked him to retrieve my messenger bag. I would have gotten it for myself, but I didn’t think my legs could get me up the stairs. I felt like I was still encased in cement.
Morelli gave me a kiss on the forehead and handed me over to Ranger to take home.
“I need to stay and do my cop thing,” Morelli said, “but I’ll stop around when I’m done.”
It was past midnight when Morelli let himself into my apartment.
“You did it, Sherlock,” he said. “You solved the Dumpster murders.”
I was on the couch, watching television, waiting for him. “It was an accident. Dumb luck.”
“Better to be lucky than smart,” Morelli said, slouching onto the couch next to me, handing me the messenger bag I’d left in Sunny’s bachelor pad. “Shiller already questioned Moe and Shorty, and they blabbed everything. Turns out there were old ladies getting left in Dumpsters for the last ten years, over a three-state area. It was how Sunny got his kicks.”
“Sick.”
“Yeah. Big-time. There’s a name for it. ‘Granny grabbers.’ They’re like chubby chasers, but they like to do old ladies. Sunny added his own twist to it by killing them after.”