Fearless Fourteen - Janet Evanovich [70]
I hurried to my car, rammed myself behind the wheel, and motored off. Depressing news about sixty-one-year-old men. Probably it didn’t apply to Morelli and Ranger. I called Lula when I was half a block away.
“Don’t let anyone shoot vegetables at me,” I told her. “I’m about to park in front of the house.”
“Copy,” Lula said. “Cease all operations,” she yelled out.
This wasn’t a desirable sign. I was hoping Lula would confiscate weapons, but it sounded like she’d signed on to Star Fleet.
“Where’s my chicken?” Lula wanted to know, opening the door to me. “I don’t see no bags or buckets. All I see is you wearing dinner.”
“It’s complicated,” I said.
“I bet. Is that my mashed potatoes in your hair?”
“I never got that far. I was in line and there was a riot.”
“Yeah, but after the riot you should have tried the drive-through.”
Mooner was holding his position at the front window.
“He hasn’t shot anyone, has he?” I asked Lula.
“Since you been gone? He lobbed a tomato at an old guy with a shovel. Got him in the head and it was instant salsa. That was about it.”
The news van pulled to the curb behind my car.
“Whoa,” Mooner said. “It’s the news. I hate the news. It’s never good.”
“I’ll get rid of them,” Lula said. “Give me the big boy.”
Gary ran forward and handed Lula a monster spud gun. It was made from wide bore black pipe and had to be four feet long. Lula opened the door, set the pipe on Mooner’s shoulder, Gary dropped a honeydew melon into the pipe, rammed it down, and sprayed it.
“Fire in the hole,” Lula yelled, and turned the ignitor knob.
POW! The melon exploded out of the pipe, Lula and Mooner were knocked off their feet, and the melon sailed over the news truck like a cannonball and took the top off a flowering crabapple tree on the other side of the street.
“Did I hit the target?” Lula asked.
“No, but you scared the crap out of them. They’re already in the next county.”
“I need a sight,” Lula said to Mooner. “All us expert marksmen have sights.”
“It would be awesome if we had monkey shit,” Mooner said.
“Forget the monkey shit,” Lula told him. “I’m not getting you no monkey shit. I hate monkeys.”
“This isn’t a good idea,” I said. “Someone’s going to get hurt with this stuff. I want it all put away. Put it in the cellar.”
“Mooch and some other guy are in the cellar digging,” Lula said. “Zook accidentally beaned Mooch with a half-baked when he saw him in the yard, and we might not want to get too close to Mooch until he calms down.”
“Then put the spud guns someplace else. Just stop using them.”
“Yeah,” Lula said, “but what if we see people trespassing? Morelli’s paying these men good money to protect his property. You wouldn’t want them to be derelict in their duties.”
My eye was twitching like mad. I put my finger to it and looked at Lula out of the other eye. “I’m going to take a shower. Use some common sense.”
“Sure, I got lots of common sense,” Lula said. “You can count on me.”
I threw my clothes into the laundry basket in Morelli’s room, wrapped myself in his robe, and ran across the hall to the bathroom to take a shower. When I came back to the bedroom with clean hair and body, I found Bob eating my clothes. Couldn’t blame him. They smelled like fried chicken and gravy.
I wrestled what was left of the clothes away from Bob and assessed the damage. T-shirt half there. Jeans had chunks missing. Socks and underwear, gone. Not the first time Bob had eaten my underwear, so I knew the drill. Bob would be spending a lot of time in the backyard tomorrow, letting nature take its course.
I got dressed and blasted my hair with the hair dryer. I took a close look at myself in the mirror. The blue was fading. I was now a ghoulish shade of pale. I went back to the bedroom and dialed Morelli.
“Yep,” Morelli said.
“Have you got a minute to talk?”
“Thirty seconds, tops. This is a royal mess. Two kids dead. A shooter who is related to a councilman. Two more at large. And the neighborhood is in a state of siege. What’s up?”
“You have three lunatics