ONE
LIVING IN TRENTON in July is like living inside a big pizza oven. Hot, airless, aromatic.
Because I didn’t want to miss any of the summer experience I had the sunroof open on my Honda CRX. My brown hair was pulled up into a wind-snarled, curls-gone-to-frizz ponytail. The sun baked the top of my head, and sweat trickled under my black spandex sports bra. I was wearing matching spandex shorts and a sleeveless oversized Trenton Thunders baseball jersey. It was an excellent outfit except it gave me no place to stick my .38. Which meant I was going to have to borrow a gun to shoot my cousin Vinnie.
I parked the CRX in front of Vinnie’s storefront bail bonds office, lunged out of the car, stalked across the sidewalk, and yanked the office door open. “Where is he? Where is that miserable little excuse for a human being?”
“Uh oh,” Lula said from behind the file cabinet. “Rhino alert.”
Lula is a retired hooker who helps clean up the filing and sometimes rides shotgun for me when I do my fugitive apprehension thing. If people were cars, Lula would be a big, black ’53 Packard with a high-gloss chrome grille, oversized headlights, and a growl like a junkyard dog. Lots of muscle. Never fit in a compact space.
Connie Rosolli, the office manager, pushed back at her desk when I entered. Connie’s domain was this one front room where friends and relatives of miscreants came to beg money. And to the rear, in an inner office, my cousin Vinnie slapped Mr. Johnson around and conversed with his bookie.
“Hey,” Connie said, “I know what you’re bummed about, and this wasn’t my decision. Personally, if I were you, I’d kick your cousin’s pervert ass around the block.”
I pushed a clump of hair that had strayed from the ponytail back from my face. “Kicking isn’t good enough. I think I’ll shoot him.”
“Go for it!” Lula said.
“Yeah,” Connie agreed. “Shoot him.”
Lula checked out my clothes. “You need a gun? I don’t see no gun bulges in that spandex.” She hiked up her T-shirt and pulled a Chief’s Special out of her cut-off denim shorts. “You could use mine. Just be careful; it sights high.”
“You don’t want a little peashooter like that,” Connie said, opening her desk drawer. “I’ve got a forty-five. You can make a nice big hole with a forty-five.”
Lula went for her purse. “Hold on here. If that’s what you want, let me give you the big stud. I’ve got a forty-four magnum loaded up with hydroshocks. This baby’ll do real damage, you see what I’m saying? You could drive a Volkswagen through the hole this sweetheart makes.”
“I was sort of kidding about shooting him,” I told them.
“Too bad,” Connie said.
Lula shoved her gun back in her shorts. “Yeah, that’s damn disappointing.”
“So where is he? Is he in?”
“Hey, Vinnie!” Connie yelled. “Stephanie’s here to see you!”
The door to the inner office opened and Vinnie poked his head out. “What?”
Vinnie was 5’7”, looked like a weasel, thought like a weasel, smelled like a French whore and was once in love with a duck.
“You know what!” I said, hands fisted on hips. “Joyce Barnhardt, that’s what. My grandma was at the beauty parlor and heard you hired Joyce to do skip tracing.”
“So what’s the big deal? I hired Joyce Barnhardt.”
“Joyce Barnhardt does makeovers at Macy’s.”
“And you used to sell ladies’ panties.”
“That was entirely different. I blackmailed you into giving me this job.”
“Exactly,” Vinnie said. “So what’s your point?”
“Fine!” I shouted. “Just keep her out of my way! I hate Joyce Barnhardt!”
And everybody knew why. At the tender age of twenty-four, after less than a year of marriage, I’d caught Joyce bare-assed on my dining room table, playing hide-the-salami with my husband. It was the only time she’d ever done me a favor. We’d gone through school together, where she’d spread rumors, told fibs, ruined friendships and peeked under the stall doors in the girls’ bathroom to see people’s underpants.
She’d been a fat kid with a terrible overbite. The overbite had been minimalized by braces, and by the time Joyce was fifteen she’d trimmed down to look like Barbie on steroids. She had chemically enhanced red hair done up in big teased curls. Her nails were long and painted, her lips were high gloss, her eyes were rimmed in navy liquid liner, her lashes gunked up with blue-black mascara. She was an inch shorter than me, five pounds heavier and had me beat by two cup sizes. She had three ex-husbands and no children. It was rumored she had sex with large dogs.
Joyce and Vinnie were a match made in heaven. Too bad Vinnie was already married to a perfectly nice woman whose father happened to be Harry the Hammer. Harry’s job description read “expediter,” and Harry spent a lot of his time in the presence of men who wore fedoras and long black overcoats.
“Just do your job,” Vinnie said. “Be a professional.” He waved his hand at Connie. “Give her something. Give her that new skip we just got in.”
Connie took a manila folder from her desktop. “Maxine Nowicki. Charged with stealing her former boyfriend’s car. Posted bond with us and failed to show for her court appearance.”
By securing a cash bond Nowicki had been free to leave the lockup behind and return to society at large while awaiting trial. Now she’d failed to appear. Or in bounty-hunter speak, she was FTA. This lapse of judicial etiquette changed Nowicki’s status to felon and had my cousin Vinnie worrying that the court might see fit to keep his bond money.
As a bond enforcement officer I was expected to find Nowicki and bring her back into the system. For performing this service in a timely manner I’d get ten percent of her bond amount. Pretty good money since this sounded like a domestic dispute, and I didn’t think Maxine Nowicki would be interested in blowing the back of my head off with a .45 hollow tip.
I riffled through the paperwork, which consisted of Nowicki’s bond agreement, a photo, and a copy of the police report.
“Know what I’d do?” Lula said. “I’d talk to the boyfriend. Anybody pissed off enough to get his girlfriend arrested for stealing his car is pissed off enough to snitch on her. Probably he’s just waiting to tell someone where to go find her.”
It was my thought too. I read aloud from Nowicki’s charge sheet. “Edward Kuntz. Single white male. Age twenty-seven. Residing at Seventeen Muffet Street. Says here he’s a cook.”
I PARKED in front of Kuntz’s house and wondered about the man inside. The house was white clapboard with aqua trim around the windows and tangerine paint on the door. It was half of a well-cared-for duplex with a minuscule front yard. A three-foot-tall statue of the Virgin Mary dressed in pale blue and white had been planted on the perfectly clipped patch of lawn. A carved wood heart with red lettering and little white daisies had been hung on the neighboring door, proclaiming that the Glicks lived there. The Kuntz side was free of ornamentation.
I followed the sidewalk to the porch, which had been carpeted in green indoor-outdoor carpet, and rang the Kuntz doorbell. The door opened and a sweaty, muscle-bulging, half-naked man looked out at me. “What?”
“Eddie Kuntz?”
“Yeah?”
I passed him my business card. “Stephanie Plum. I’m a bond enforcement officer, and I’m looking for Maxine Nowicki. I was hoping you could help me.”
“You bet I can help you. She took my car. Can you believe it?” He jerked his stubbled chin toward the curb. “That’s it right there. Lucky for her she didn’t scratch it up. The cops picked her up driving through town in it, and they brought the car back to me.”
I glanced back at the car. A white Chevy Blazer. Freshly washed. I almost was tempted to steal it myself.
“You were living together?”
“Well, yeah, for a while. About four months. And then we had this disagreement, and next thing I know, she’s gone with my car. It wasn’t that I wanted her arrested … it was just that I wanted my car back. That was why I called the police. I wanted my car.”
“Do you have any idea where she might be now?”
“No. I tried to get in touch with her to sort of patch things up, but I couldn’t find her. She quit her job at the diner and nobody’s seen her. I stopped around her apartment a couple times, and there was never anybody home. I tried calling her mother. I called a couple of her girlfriends. No one seems to know anything. I guess they could have been lying to me, but I don’t think so.” He winked at me. “Women don’t lie to me, you know what I mean?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Well, I don’t like to brag, but I have a way with women.”
“Uh huh.” It must have been ...
