Ranger picked the dress up and handed it to me.
“Okay,” I said, blowing a strand of hair off my forehead. “Guess I know what you think of the dress.”
“If you knew, you wouldn't be standing here,” Ranger said. “If you knew, you'd have yourself barricaded in the bedroom with your gun in your hand.”
Gulp.
Ranger's attention strayed to the note on the counter. “Someone else shares my opinion of the dress.”
“The note was left on the windshield of Lula's Firebird. We found it when we came out of the mall.”
“You know who wrote it?”
“I have a couple ideas.”
“You want to share them with me?”
“Could just be some guy who saw me at the mall.”
“Or?”
“Or it could be Ramirez.”
“You have reason to think it's Ramirez?”
“Touching it makes my skin crawl.”
Stephanie Plum 5 - High Five
Stephanie Plum 5 - High Five
Stephanie Plum 5 - High Five
6
“WORD ON THE street is that Ramirez got religion,” Ranger said, relaxed against my kitchen counter, arms crossed over his chest.
“So maybe he doesn't want to rape and mutilate me. Maybe he just wants to save me.”
“Either way, you should carry a gun.”
When Ranger left I listened to the single message on my phone machine. “Stephanie? This is your mother. Remember you promised to take your grandmother to the funeral parlor tomorrow night. And you can come early and have something to eat with us. I'm going to have a nice leg of lamb.”
&n
bsp; The lamb sounded good, but I would have preferred the message to have been about Fred. Like, guess what, the funniest thing just happened . . . Fred showed up.
There was another knock on the door, and I looked out the peephole at Bunchy.
“I know you're lookin' out at me,” he said. “And I know you're thinking you should go get your gun and your pepper spray and your electronic torture device, so just go get them all because I'm getting tired of standing here.”
I opened the door a bit, leaving the security chain in place.
“Give me a break,” Bunchy said.
“What do you want?”
“How come the Rambo guy gets in and I don't?”