Explosive Eighteen: A Stephanie Plum Novel (Stephanie Plum Novels)

and he picked up after two rings.
    “Lewis Bugkowski?” I asked.
    “Yeah?”
    “Are you the home owner?”
    “Nah, that’s my dad.”
    “Is he at home?”
    “No.”
    “Your mother?”
    “They’re both working. What do you want?”
    “I’m conducting a survey on trash removal.”
    Click
.
    Great. I’d found out everything I needed to know. Buggy was in the house alone. I parked one house down from the Bugkowskis, walked to their front door, and rang the bell.
    A huge guy answered. He was easily 6′5″ and three hundred pounds. He was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt that could have provided shelter for a Vietnamese family of eight.
    “Yuh?” he asked.
    “Lewis Bugkowski?”
    He looked at me. “Is this about trash? You sound like that girl on the phone.”
    “Bond enforcement,” I told him.
    I whipped out my cuffs and attempted to clap one on his wrist. No good. The cuff wouldn’t close. His wrist was too big. The guy was a mountain.
    I sent him a flirtatious smile. “I don’t suppose you’d want to come downtown with me to reschedule your court date?”
    His eyes locked on to my messenger bag. “Is that what you use for a purse?”
    Uh-oh.
    “No,” I told him. “I use this for documents. Boring stuff. Let me show you.”
    He grabbed the strap and ripped the bag off my shoulder before I could locate my pepper spray.
    “Hey,” I said. “Give it back!”
    He looked down at me. “Go away or I’ll hit you.”
    “I can’t go away. The keys to my car are in the bag.”
    His eyes lit up. “I could use a car. I’m hungry, and there’s no food in the house.”
    I lunged for my bag, and he batted me away.
    “I’ll drive you to Cluck-in-a-Bucket,” I said.
    He closed his front door and stepped off the porch. “Don’t need you. I got a car now.”
    I ran after him and latched on to the back of his T-shirt. “Help!” I yelled. “Police!”
    He shoved me away, crammed himself behind the wheel, and the car groaned under the weight. He rolled the engine over and took off.
    “That’s grand theft auto, mister!” I shouted after him. “You’re in big trouble!”
    I watched Buggy disappear around a corner. I procrastinated a minute, then gave in and called Ranger.
    “Where are you?” I asked.
    “I’m at Rangeman.”
    Rangeman was the security company he partially owned. It was housed in a nondescript building in the center of Trenton, and it was filled with high-tech equipment and large, heavily muscled men in black Rangeman uniforms. Ranger kept a private apartment on the seventh floor.
    “Some big dopey guy just stole my car,” I said to Ranger. “And he has my bag. And he’s FTA.”
    “No problem. We have your car on the screen.”
    Ranger has this habit of installing tracking devices on my cars when I’m not looking. In the beginning, I found the invasion of privacy to be intolerable, but I’ve gotten used to it over the years, and there are times when it’s come in handy … like now.
    “I’ll send someone out to get your car,” Ranger said. “What do you want us to do with the big dopey guy?”
    “How about if you cuff him, cram him into the backseat, and drive him to the bonds bus. I’ll take it from there.”
    “And you?”
    “I’m good. Lula’s on her way to pick me up.”
    “Babe,” Ranger said. And he disconnected.
    Okay, so I fibbed to Ranger about Lula. Truth is, I wasn’t ready to face him. Especially since he sounded a tiny bit exasperated. I looked down at my naked ring finger, grimaced, and called Lula.

FOUR
     
    “YOU GOT SOFT IN HAWAII,” Lula said. “You lost your edge. That’s what happens when you go on vacation and do whatever the heck it is that you did. Which, by the way, I don’t even care about no more.”
    Lula had picked me up at Buggy’s house, and we were on our way to the bonds office.
    “I didn’t go soft in Hawaii,” I said. “I
never
had an edge.”
    “That could be true about the edge, but you’ve been out after two felons now, and they both whupped your butt. So I thought maybe it was on account of being distracted by whatever it is you’re distracted by. Not that I care what it is. And notice what a good friend I am, even though you don’t care to confide in me and I disturbed my nap to rescue you.”
    “I’m not distracted. You can attribute both whuppings to pure incompetence.”
    “Well, aren’t you little Miss Down-on-Yourself. I could fix that. You need a doughnut.”
    “I need more than a