Hot Six (10 page)

Hot Six

Page: 61

I glanced up at the traffic coming toward us on Hamilton and focused on a blue car. Looked like a Crown Victoria. Looked like Morris Munson behind the wheel!

"Yikes!" I yelled as Munson yanked the car over the white line and aimed it at me.

"Shit!" Mitchell yelped, panicked, dancing in place like a big trained bear.

Munson swerved to avoid Mitchell at the last second, lost control, and crashed into the Town Car. For a moment the cars seemed fused together, and then there was the sound of Munson gunning his engine. The Crown Vic jumped back a couple feet, its front bumper clattered to the ground, and it sped away.

Mitchell and I ran back to the Town Car and looked in at Habib.

"What by everything holy was that?" Habib shouted.

The Town Car's left front quarter panel was crumpled into the wheel, and the hood was buckled. Habib seemed okay, but the Town Car wasn't going anywhere until someone crowbarred the fender away from the wheel. Too bad for them. Lucky break for me. Habib and Mitchell weren't going to be in following mode for a while.

"He was a madman, " Habib said. "I saw his eyes. He was a madman. Did you get his license plate number?"

"It happened so fast, " Mitchell said. "And cripes, he was coming right at me. I thought he was aiming for me. I thought . . . Jeez, I thought . . . "

"You were frightened like a woman, " Habib said.

"Yeah, " I said, "like the daughter of a pig. "

Now here was a dilemma. I dearly wanted to tell them who was behind the wheel of the car. If they killed Munson, I was off the hook. No more flaming shirttails. No more maniac with a tire iron. Unfortunately, I'd also be sort of responsible for Munson's death, and that didn't feel entirely comfortable. Better to leave him to the court.

"You should report this to the police, " I said. "I'd stick around and help out, but you know how it is. "

"Yeah, " Mitchell said. "Things to do. People to see. "

IT WAS ALMOST noon when Bob and I rolled past Hannibal's town house. I parked at the corner and dialed Ranger's number to tell his answering machine I had news. Then I chewed on my lower lip some while I worked up enough nerve to get out of the car and snoop on Hannibal.

Hey, it's no big deal, I told myself. Look at the house. Nice and quiet. He isn't home. Just like yesterday. You go around back, take a peek, and leave. No sweat.

Okay, I can do this. Deep breath. Think positive. I grabbed Bob's leash and headed for the bike path behind the houses. When I got to Hannibal's backyard I stopped and listened. Very quiet. Plus, Bob looked bored. If someone was on the other side of the wall Bob would be excited, right? I studied the wall. Daunting. Especially since I'd gotten shot at the last time I was here.

Hold it, I said to myself. None of that negative thinking. What would Spiderman do in a situation like this? What would Batman do? What would Bruce Willis do? Bruce would get a running start, plant his sneaker, and scale the wall. I tied Bob's leash to a bush and ran at the wall. I got my size eight Skechers halfway up, slapped my palms onto the top of the wall, and dug in and hung there. I took a deep breath, clenched my teeth and attempted a pull-up . . . But nothing pulled up. Damn. Bruce would have made it to the top. But then, Bruce probably goes to the gym.

I dropped to the ground and cut my eyes to the tree. The tree had a bullet lodged in its trunk. I really didn't want to climb the tree. I did some pacing and knuckle cracking. What about Ranger? I asked myself. You're supposed to be helping him. If the situation was reversed Ranger would climb the tree to take a look.

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Bob gave me a long look.

"Okay, fine, " I said. "I'll climb the stupid tree. "

I went up fast, looked around, saw nothing going on in the house or the yard, and scrambled down. I untied Bob and skulked back to the car, where I settled in and waited for the phone to ring. After a couple minutes, Bob moved to the backseat and got into nap position.

At one o'clock, I was still waiting for Ranger's call back, and I was thinking I needed lunch, when Hannibal's garage door slid open and the green jag backed out.

Holy cow, the house hadn't been empty!

The door closed; the jag turned away from me and rolled down the street, toward the freeway. Hard to tell who was behind the wheel but I bet it was Hannibal. I cranked the engine over and raced around the block, picking the jag up just as it was leaving the subdivision. I stayed as far back as possible without losing sight.

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.

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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.

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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.

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"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.