Hot Six

  We bypassed the center of town, heading south, and then went east on the interstate. The horses weren't running at Monmouth yet, and Great Adventure was still closed for the season. That pretty much narrowed the field to the house in Deal.

  Bob was taking the excitement in stride, sound asleep in the backseat. I wasn't feeling nearly so relaxed. I don't usually tail mobsters. Although technically, Hannibal Ramos wasn't a Mob member. Well, actually I didn't know that for sure, but my understanding was that the Mob was a different fraternal order from the gun cartel.

  Hannibal exited Route 195 at the Parkway, drove two exits north, then cut over to Asbury Park, where he left-turned onto Ocean Avenue and followed the road to Deal.

  Deal is an oceanside town where gardeners coax grass to grow in the inhospitable salt air, nannies commute in from nearby Long Branch, and property value supersedes all issues of national origin. The houses are large and sometimes behind gated drives. The residents are mostly plastic surgeons and rug merchants. And the only truly memorable event ever to take place in Deal was the gunning down of crime boss Benny “The Roach” Raguchi in the Sea Breeze Motel in 1982.

  Hannibal was two cars ahead of me. He slowed and signaled for a right turn into a walled compound with a gated drive. The house sat back on the dune, so the second story and roof were visible from the road and the rest of the property was hidden behind the pink stucco wall. The gate was fancy wrought-iron scrollwork. Alexander Ramos, international arms dealer and all-around macho man, lived in a pink house behind a pink wall. Go figure. Never happen in the Burg. Living in a pink house in the Burg would be right up there with castration.

  Probably the pink stucco was very Mediterranean. And probably in the summer, when the awnings were unrolled and the porch furniture was uncovered, and the sun and the heat washed over the Jersey shore, the pink house felt like life itself. In March it looked like it was waiting for the Prozac to kick in. Pale and cold and stolid.

  I caught a glimpse of a man exiting the jag as I cruised past the house. Same build and hair color as Hannibal, so it must be Hannibal. Unless, of course, Hannibal saw me in the tree again, and then saw me watching from the street and had a look-alike next-door neighbor sneak over through the backyards and drive the jag to Deal, just to throw me off.

  “What do you think?” I asked Bob.

  Bob opened an eye, gave me a blank stare, and went back to sleep.

  That was what I thought, too.

  I drove about a quarter-mile down Ocean Avenue, hung a U-turn, and made another pass by the pink house. I parked out of sight, around the corner. I tucked my hair up, under a Metallica ball cap, put on some dark glasses, grabbed Bob's leash, and set off toward the Ramos compound. Deal was a civilized town with pristine cement sidewalks designed with nannies and baby strollers in mind. Also very nice for snoopers masquerading as dogwalkers.

  I was a few feet from the gate when a black Town Car rolled up. The gates opened and the Town Car slid through. Two men in front. The back windows were tinted. I fussed with Bob's leash and let him sniff around some. The Town Car stopped at the porticoed house entrance, and the two men in front got out. One went around to get bags from the trunk. The other man opened the door for the passenger in back. The passenger looked to be in his sixties. Medium height. Slim. Dressed in sports coat and slacks. Wavy gray hair. From the way people were dancing attendance I guessed this was Alexander Ramos. Probably flew in for his son's burial. Hannibal came out to greet the older man. A younger, slimmer version of Hannibal appeared in the doorway to the house but didn't descend the stairs. Ulysses, the middle son, I thought.

  No one looked especially happy at the reunion. Understandable, I guess, considering the circumstances. Hannibal said something to the older man. The older man stiffened and smacked him on the side of the head. It wasn't a hard smack. Not something designed to knock a guy out. It was more of a statement. Fool.

  Still, I reflexively flinched. And even at this distance I could see Hannibal clamp his teeth together.

  Stephanie Plum 6 - Hot Six

  6

  HERE'S THE THING that stuck in my brain all the way home. If you were a father grieving over losing a son, would you greet your firstborn with a smack in the head?

  “Hey, what do I know,” I said to Bob. “Maybe they're going for Dysfunctional Family of the Year.”

  And to tell the truth, it's always a comfort to discover a family more dysfunctional than my own. Not that my family is all that dysfunctional, by Jersey standards.

  When I got to Hamilton Township I stopped at the Shop Rite, hauled out my cell phone, and dialed my mother.

  “I'm at the meat counter,” I said. “I want to make a meatloaf. What do I need?”

  There was silence at the other end, and I could imagine my mother making the sign of the cross, wondering what could possibly have inspired her daughter to want to make a meatloaf, hoping against hope that it was a man.

  “A meatloaf,” my mother finally said.

  “It's for Grandma,” I told her. “She needs a meatloaf.”

  “Of course,” my mother said. “What was I thinking?”

  I CALLED MY mother again when I got home. “Okay, I'm home,” I said. “Now what do I do with this stuff?”

  “You mix it together and put it in a loaf pan and bake it at three hundred and fifty degrees for an hour.”

  “You didn't say anything about a loaf pan when I was at the store!” I wailed.

  “You don't have a loaf pan?”

  “Well, of course I have a loaf pan. I just meant . . . Never mind.”

  “Good luck,” my mother said.

  Bob was sitting in the middle of the kitchen, taking it all in.

  “I don't have a loaf pan,” I told Bob. “But hey, we're not gonna let a little thing like that stop us, are we?”

  I dumped the ground beef into a bowl along with the other essential meatloaf ingredients. I added an egg and watched it slime across the surface. I poked it with a spoon.

  “Eeeeyeu,” I said to Bob.

  Bob wagged his tail. Bob looked like he loved gross stuff.

  I mashed at the mess with the spoon, but the egg wouldn't mix in. I took a deep breath and plunged in with both hands. After a couple of minutes of hand squishing, everything was nice and mushy. I shaped it into a snowman. And then I shaped it into Humpty Dumpty. And then I smashed it flat. Smashed flat, it looked a lot like what I'd left in the McDonald's parking lot. Finally I rolled it into two big meatballs.

  I'd bought a frozen banana cream pie for dessert, so I slid the pie out of its aluminum plate onto a dinner plate and used the pie plate for the giant meatballs.

  “Necessity is the mother of invention,” I told Bob.

  I put the meatballs in the oven, cut up some potatoes and set them to cooking, and opened a can of creamed corn and dumped it in a bowl so I could heat it up in the microwave at the last minute. Cooking wasn't so bad, I thought. In fact, it was a lot like sex. Sometimes it didn't seem like such a good idea in the beginning, but then after you got into it . . .

  I set the table for two, and the phone rang just as I was finishing.

  “Yo, babe,” Ranger said.

  “Yo yourself. I have some news. The car that came to visit Hannibal last night belongs to Terry Gilman. I should have recognized her when she got out of the car, but I only saw her from the back, and I wasn't expecting her.”

  “Probably carrying condolences from Vito.”

  “I didn't realize Vito and Ramos were friends.”

  “Vito and Alexander co-exist.”

  “Another thing,” I said. “This morning I followed Hannibal to the house in Deal.” Then I told Ranger about the older man in the Town Car, and the smack in the head, and the appearance of a younger man who I thought was Ulysses Ramos.

  “How do you know it was Ulysses?”

  “Just a guess. He looked like Hannibal, but slimmer.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Do you want
me to keep watching the town house?” I asked.

  “Do a spot check once in a while. I want to know if anyone's living there.”

  “Don't you think it's strange that Ramos would smack his son?” I asked.

  “I don't know,” Ranger said. “In my family we smack each other all the time.”

  Ranger disconnected, and I stood without moving for several minutes, wondering what I was missing. Ranger never gave much away, but there'd been a moment's pause and a small change of inflection that had me thinking I'd told him something interesting. I reviewed our conversation and everything seemed ordinary. A father and two brothers gathered together at a time of family tragedy. Alexander's reaction to Hannibal's greeting had seemed odd to me, but I got the impression that wasn't what had caught Ranger's attention.

  Grandma staggered through the front door. “Boy, have I had a day,” she said. “I'm all done in.”

  “How'd the driving lesson go?”

  “Pretty good, I guess. I didn't run anybody over. And I didn't wreck the car. How was your day?”

  “About the same.”

  “Louise and me went to the mall to do some senior citizen power walking but we kept getting sidetracked into the stores. And then after lunch we went looking at apartments. I saw a couple I might settle for, but nothing that really floated my boat. Tomorrow we're gonna look at some condos.” Grandma snooped into the potato pot. “Isn't this something. I come home from a hard day of running around and here's dinner all waiting for me. Just like being a man.”

  “I got a banana cream pie for dessert,” I said, “but I had to use the pie plate for the meatloaf.”

  Grandma peeked at the pie in the refrigerator. “Maybe we should eat it now before it defrosts and loses its shape.”

  That sounded like a good idea to me, so we all had some pie while the meatloaf was baking.

  When I was a little girl I'd never thought of my grandmother as the sort of person to eat her pie first. Her house had always been neat and clean. The furniture was dark wood and the upholstered pieces were comfortable but unmemorable. Meals were traditional Burg meals, ready at noon and at six o'clock. Stuffed cabbage, pot roast, roast chicken, an occasional ham or pork roast. My grandfather wouldn't have had it any other way. He'd worked in a steel mill all his life. He had strong opinions, and he dwarfed the rooms of their row house. Truth is, the top of my grandmother's head comes to the tip of my chin, and my grandfather wasn't much taller. But then I guess stature doesn't have much to do with inches.

  Lately I've been wondering who my grandmother would have been if she hadn't married my grandfather. I wonder if she would have eaten her dessert first a lot sooner.

  I took the meatballs out of the oven and set them side by side on a plate. Sitting there together they looked like troll gonads.

  “Well, will you look at these big boys,” Grandma said. “Reminds me of your grandfather, rest his soul.”

  When we were done eating I took Bob for a walk. Street lights were on, and light poured from the front windows of the houses behind my apartment building. We walked several blocks in comfortable silence. It turns out that's one of the good things about a dog. They don't talk a lot, so you can go along, thinking your own thoughts, making lists.

  My list consisted of Catch Morris Munson, Worry about Ranger, and Wonder about Morelli. I didn't exactly know what to do about Morelli. My heart felt like it was in love. My head wasn't so sure. Not that it mattered, because Morelli didn't want to get married. So here I was with my biological clock ticking and nothing around me but indecision.

  “I hate this!” I said to Bob.

  Bob stopped and looked over his shoulder at me, like, What's the big deal back there? Well, what did Bob know. Someone had whacked off his doodles when he was a puppy. Bob was just left with some extra skin and a distant memory. Bob didn't have a mother waiting for grandchildren. Bob didn't have all this pressure!

  When I got back to the apartment Grandma was asleep in front of the television. I wrote a note saying I had to go out for a while, pinned the note to Grandma's sweater, and told Bob to behave himself and not eat any of the furniture. Rex was buried under a mound of shavings, sleeping off his piece of pie. All was well in the Stephanie Plum household.

  I drove directly to Hannibal's town house. It was eight o'clock, and the place looked like no one was home, but then it always looked like no one was home. I parked two streets over, got out of the car, and walked to the back of the house. No light shining from any of the windows. I climbed the tree and looked down into Hannibal's yard. Totally dark. I dropped out of the tree and retraced my steps on the bike path, thinking this was very spooky. Black trees and bushes. No moon overhead to light the way. Only the occasional streak of light spilling from a window.

  Wouldn't want to meet a bad guy out here. Not Munson. Not Hannibal Ramos. Maybe not even Ranger . . . although he was bad in a very intriguing way.

  I moved the car to the end of Hannibal's block, where I had better visibility. I pushed the seat back, locked the doors, and watched and waited.

  It didn't take long for waiting to get old. To pass the time, I dialed Morelli on my cell phone. “Guess who?” I said.

  “Is Grandma gone?”

  “No. I'm working, and she's home with Bob.”

  “Bob?”

  “Brian Simon's dog. I'm baby-sitting him while Simon's on vacation.”

  “Simon's not on vacation. I saw him today.”

  “What?”

  “I can't believe you fell for that vacation scam,” Morelli said. “Simon's been trying to pawn that dog off ever since he got him.”

  “Why didn't you tell me?”

  “I didn't know he was gonna give you the dog.”

  I narrowed my eyes at the phone. “Are you laughing? Is that laughter I hear?”

  “No. I swear.”

  But it was laughter. The rat was laughing.

  “This is no laughing matter,” I said. “What am I going to do with a dog?”

  “I thought you always wanted a dog.”

  “Well, yeah . . . someday. But not now! And the dog howls. He doesn't like being left alone.”

  “Where are you?” Morelli asked.

  “It's a secret.”

  “Christ, you aren't staking out Hannibal's house again, are you?”

  “Nope. I'm not doing that.”

  “I have a cake,” he said. “Do you want to come over and have some cake?”

  “You're lying. You don't have a cake.”

  “I could get one.”

  “I'm not saying I'm staking out Hannibal's house, but if I was, do you think there'd be any value to it?”

  “As far as I can tell, Ranger has a handful of people he trusts, and he has those people watching the Ramos family. I've spotted someone at Homer's house in Hunterdon County, and I know there's someone in place in Deal. He's got you sitting over there on Fenwood. I don't know what he expects to find, but my guess is, he knows where he's going. He has information about this crime that we don't have.”

  “Doesn't look like there's anyone home, here,” I said.

  “Alexander's in town, so Hannibal has probably moved into the south wing of the Deal house.” Morelli let a beat go by. “Probably Ranger's got you sitting there because it's safe. Make you feel like you're doing something, so you don't stumble into a more important surveillance situation. Probably you should give up on it and come over to my house.”

  “Nice try, but I don't think so.”

  “It was worth a shot,” Morelli said.

  We disconnected, and I hunkered in to do my surveillance thing. Probably Morelli was right, and Hannibal was living at the shore. There was only one way to find out: watch and wait. By twelve o'clock Hannibal still hadn't appeared. My feet were cold, and I was sick of sitting in the car. I got out and stretched. A final check of the back, and then I was going home.

  I walked the bike path with my pepper spray held in my hand. It was stygian. No lights anywhere. Everyon
e was in bed. I got to Hannibal's back door and looked up at his windows. Cold, dark glass. I was about to leave when I heard the muffled sound of a toilet flushing. No question which house the sound emanated from Hannibal's. A chill raced the length of my spine. Someone was living in the dark, in Hannibal's house. I stood dead still, barely breathing, listening with every molecule of my body. There were no more sounds, and no further sign of life in the house. I didn't know what this meant, but I was totally creeped out. I scurried down the path, crossed the grass to the car, and took off.