“Hey!” Lula yelled. “Open this here door. I got Girl Scout Cookies.”
There was the sound of locks being released, the door opened, and a woman looked out at us. She was somewhere in her thirties. Brown hair that was parted in the middle and needed conditioning. Thin, with tattoos covering her arms. Nose ring. Cigarette hanging out of her mouth.
“Where’s the cookies?” she asked.
“It was sort of a fib,” Lula said. “We just wanted you to open the door.”
A guy who looked like the Travis file photo came up behind the woman and draped an arm around her. “What’s up?” he asked.
“They haven’t got any cookies,” the woman said.
“Travis Wisneski?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “So, what?”
I introduced myself and told him he needed to get rescheduled for court.
“How about you kiss my ass,” he said. “And then how about you and your fat friend go away and leave me and my old lady alone.”
“Excuse me?” Lula said, leaning forward, in Wisneski’s face. “Fat? Did you just refer to me as fat?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You’re fat.”
Lula sucker punched him in the face, kneed him in his jollies, and he fell to the floor like a sack of sand.
“I’m a big, beautiful lady,” Lula said. “I got class and style and all that shit. Don’t you ever forget it.”
Wisneski was bleeding from his nose and curled into a fetal position. I cuffed him, and Lula and I dragged him out of his house.
“He’s gonna bleed all over your car,” Lula said. “And on top of that he looks like he could be diseased, if you
know what I mean.”
“I’ve told you a hundred times not to punch the FTA in the face. They always bleed like this.”
“I know,” Lula said. “I wasn’t thinking. I got carried away.” She looked back at Travis’s insignificant other. “Could we get a towel here? We got a bleeder.”
The woman took a drag on her cigarette, stepped inside the house, and closed and locked the door.
“Don’t think she’s gonna be any help,” Lula said.
We stood over Travis for a couple minutes, and the bleeding eventually slowed to a trickle. I got two pairs of disposable gloves from a box in the trunk of my car, and we pulled them on.
“Where do you want him?” Lula asked. “My vote is to put him in the trunk, but that’s just me.”
“We can’t put him in the trunk. We only put dead guys in the trunk.”
Lula grabbed the back of his shirt, I went for his feet, and he kicked out at me. He narrowed his eyes and growled.
“I hate when they growl,” Lula said. “Freaks me out. It’s like we got rabies in front of us.”
I pulled my stun gun out of my pocket and tagged Travis on his arm. His eyes glazed over, and his entire body went flaccid. We wrestled him into the back of my car, and I took off for the police station.
“He smells bad back there,” Lula said. “I think he pooped himself.”
CHAPTER THREE
CONNIE WAS AT HER DESK, touching up her nail polish, when we walked into the office twenty minutes later.