She hit the button, and I got a faceful of pepper spray. Martin gave an enraged bellow and wrenched the hand truck away from Lula and me. I was blinded and gagging, and I could hear the hand truck banging down the stairs like a toboggan. There was some scuffling at ground level, the door opened, and then it was quiet at the bottom of the stairs. At the top of the stairs, Lula and I were gasping for breath, feeling our way down, trying to get away from the droplets that were still hanging in the torpid air on the second-floor landing.
We stumbled over the hand truck when we got to the bottom. We pushed through the door and stood bent at the waist, waiting for the mucus production to slow, eyes closed and tearing, nose running.
“Guess pepper spray wasn't a good idea,” Lula finally said.
I blew my nose in my T-shirt and tried to blink my eyes clear. I didn't want to touch them with my hand in case I still had some spray left on my skin.
Martin was nowhere to be seen. The wrapping was in a heap on the sidewalk.
“You don't look too good,” Lula said. “You're all red and blotchy. I'm probably red and blotchy, too, but I got superior skin tone. You got that pasty white stuff that only looks good after you get a facial and put on makeup.”
We were squinting, not able to fully open our eyes, my throat burned like fire, and I was a mucus factory.
“I need to wash my hands and my face,” I said. “I have to get this stuff off me.”
We got into Lula's Firebird, and Lula crept down Stark to Olden. She turned on Olden and somehow the Firebird found its way to a McDonald's. We parked and dragged ourselves into the ladies' room.
I stuck my entire head under the faucet. I washed my face and hair and hands as best I could, and I dried my hair under the hot-air hand dryer.
“You're a little scary,” Lula said. “You got a white woman Afro thing going.”
I didn't care. I shuffled out of the ladies' room and got a cheeseburger, fries, and a bottle of water.
Lula sat across from me. She had a mountain of food and a gallon of soda.
“What's with you?” she wanted to know. "Where's your soda? Where's your pie?
You gotta have a pie when you come here."
“No soda and no pie. I'm off sweets.”
“What about cake? What about doughnuts?”
“No cake. No doughnuts.”
“You can't do that. You need cake and doughnuts. That's your comfort food. That's your stress buster. You don't eat cake and doughnuts, and you'll get all clogged up.”
“I made a deal with my mother. She's off the booze as long as I'm off the sugar.”
“That's a bad deal. You're not good at that deprivation stuff. You're like a big jelly doughnut. You give it a squeeze and the jelly squishes out. You don't let it squish out where it wants and it's gotta find a new place to squish out. Remember when your love life was in the toilet and you weren't getting any? You were eating bags of candy bars. You're a compensator. Some people can hold their jelly in, but not you. Your jelly gotta squish out somewhere.”
“You've got to stop talking about doughnuts. You're making me hungry.”
“See, that's what I'm telling you. You're one of them hungry people. You deprive yourself of cake and you're gonna want to eat something else.”
I shoved some fries into my mouth and crooked an eyebrow at Lula.
“You know what I'm saying,” Lula said. “You better be careful, or you'll send Officer Hottie to the emergency room. And you're working for Ranger now. How're you gonna keep from taking a bite outta that? He's just one big hot sexy doughnut far as I'm concerned.”
“What are you going to do about Willie Martin?”
“I don't know. I'm gonna have to think about it. Taking him down in his apartment doesn't seem to be working.”
“Does he have a job?”
“Yeah, he works nights, stealing cars and hijacking trucks.”
I drained my bottle of water and bundled my trash. “I need to go back to Morelli's house and get out of these clothes. Call me when you get a new plan for Martin.”