AU of Top Secret 21, contains canon plot points and some dialogue.


Chapter Fifty

I was in the car before Ramon or Briggs. Fighting my seatbelt with shaking hands. Buckling with the belly had been getting harder over the last month, but now I was cursing the stupid strap out loud, twisting for all I was worth trying and get it buckled. Ramon grabbed onto it and clicked it in place. I shot him a grateful look. Threw the Mercedes in gear and hit Ranger on speed dial.

He didn't answer.

"What's a Code Black?" I asked Ramon.

Ramon measured me like he regretted he wasn't driving. "Hard to say."

"Spill it or I really will freak out on you."

Yep. He definitely wished he was driving. "Code Black is a total shutdown and evacuation event. Fucking doomsday."

"Bomb?" I squeaked.

"Or an infectious outbreak. Or a contaminant. Ranger would want me to keep you away."

I dial Ranger again.

"Maybe you should pull over and let me—"

"Unless you want to deal with a jumble of panic and pregnancy hormones, you will not finish that sentence."

Ramon, ever the wise man, bit his tongue.

It only took us six minutes to get across town and onto Haywood, but I couldn't get any closer. The street was blocked by a mix of Rangeman vehicles and emergency personnel. A pair of ambulances were parked closest to the building's front entrance. People in hazmat suits wheeled out a person in a giant containment bubble and headed for a waiting ambulance.

Oh god. They had hazmat suits. What the hell did that mean?

The elevator opened into the lobby again, letting out another gurney. This time a familiar figure in black kept pace with it. I nearly burst into tears when I saw him. I bailed out of the Mercedes and heard Ramon swear. "Steph, wait!"

I could hear Ramon behind me. Saw the uniforms pause when I passed like they wanted to stop me too. But I couldn't take my eyes off of Ranger. He saw me when I was halfway through the chaos. The blank face slipped just a little. Not enough that anyone else would have notice. He excused himself from the medic he was speaking to and stepped away, catching me when I jumped on him like a spider monkey. "Babe, you shouldn't be here."

"What happened? What the fuck is a Code Black?"

"I don't have time to explain, but the building's been evacuated and quarantined."

"Chemical?"

"Radiation."

"Omigod, are you—"

"I wasn't inside when it happened."

"Did everyone make it out okay?"

"Gardi and Bruce McCready were at the center of it. We called in containment units to ferry them to the hospital. Everyone else made it out safely."

I let out a breath of relief, but it was short lived. "Rex!"

"Ella has him," he said, brushing my hair back so that he could look in my eyes. "Steph, I have a lot to do and no time. You need to stay at your apartment tonight, you'll be safe there."

"I want to stay with you."

"As much as I would love that, it's not practical. I'm not on solid ground right now. Knowing you're out of harm's way will free up a considerable amount of my focus."

That made sense, it really did. But I didn't think it was a solution that would do much for my focus. I cut my eyes around the chaos, hoping for a reason he should change his mind. Saw something else instead. "What's Special Agent Carson doing here?"

Ranger followed my eye line. "Fuck. Hospital must have reported the incident. I was hoping to avoid FBI involvement. My luck, Homeland will be here by morning." His eyes held mine again. "Babe, I've gotta go. I'll find you when I've stopped the hemorrhaging." He kissed me with a lot of meaning and cut his eyes over my shoulder. It was the only reason I knew Ramon was standing behind me. Then Ranger turn back to the chaos. Giving orders like he had complete control.

I could only hope to god that he did.

ooo

The ten minutes it took for Ramon to drive us from the Rangeman building to my apartment felt much longer and emptier than it ever had before. And strange. It still felt like going home. But sort of detached, like when I went home to my parents' house. They were familiar places, comfortable in a way that would always be home. But they weren't were my heart was. I'd left that back at Rangeman.

Ramon let us into my apartment to do his bodyguard thing and I was left to ghost in behind him. It wasn't until I'd crossed the entry that I realized something was different. Briggs paused too. "Holy moly. Do you have a fairy godmother or something?"

I was used to Ella being the fridge fairy, but this was a whole other level. There was furniture in my living room. Nothing fancy, and nowhere near the coordinated interior designed perfection of the penthouse, but the lines were clean and modern. Comfortable. Couch and chairs. Coffee table. A flatscreen television. I turned the corner into my kitchen and found all the essentials, including pots, pans, a coffee maker, and the toaster that I'd never had.

And sitting on the counter beside the toaster was Rex's aquarium.

I'd swear on the bible that it was the pregnancy hormones that made me break down. But under the denial I knew better. I'd had apartment fires before. I'd been blown out by rockets. I'd been homeless and floating with nowhere to go. And each incident had brought with it a sense of shock and loss and failure that brought me to tears. And yet this was so much worse. I reached into the glass case and picked up Rex's soup can to hold it close to my chest, the stupid tears turning to sobs.

"Oh jeez. What's with the waterworks?" Briggs said. "It's just a rat."

"He's not a rat, he's a hamster!" I balled.

"Oh man. Oh jeez. I didn't sign up for this." Briggs looked up at Ramon. "Do something!"

To Ramon's credit, he didn't grimace or run away. It might have helped that of all Ranger's guys, Ramon and Hal were the closest I had to friends. Ramon opened the fridge and came to my side. Offered a grape to Rex where he huddled in his soup can. I watched Rex chow down, Ramon's hand squeezing my shoulder. "I saw a cheesecake in the fridge."

I looked at him with watery eyes and hiccupped. "Really?"

"Swear to god. And if that doesn't help, I know where an all night grocery store is."

Ramon was a quick learner too.

ooo

I didn't sleep well that night. Not even after half a cheesecake and an order of garlic chicken from the Chinese place on the corner. I'd stayed awake until three waiting for Ranger to show up and rest my worries. Woke up to streaming sunshine and an empty bed. Heart aching in my chest.

I tried calling him, rubbing my belly, but the call went straight to voicemail. Ranger never let his phone die unless there were extenuating circumstances, like going for an unexpected swim in the Delaware. Likely meant he was already on an important call. Got a text a second later. Patience.

Only a slight consolation that I knew he was okay.

It was a little after nine when I got to the office, Briggs and Ramon in tow. Lula looked me over like she wasn't impressed. "You look like crap," she said to me. "I'd guess you either had a really bad night or a really good one, but you been havin' mostly good nights last few months and ain't none of 'em make you look like that."

"I woulda had a bad night too if I were in her shoes," Connie said. "Her night was probably as bad as Ranger's."

"Why, what's up with Ranger?"

Connie's eyebrows went up. "You didn't hear? His building is sealed off. I don't know the details, but I do know they had to evacuate. Gardi and one of the Rangeman guys are in the hospital. It's all a big secret, no one's saying anything."

Both Lula and Connie turned expectant eyes to me. I went with a shrug, since anything more was libel to trigger the tears again.

"I bet it was anthrax," Briggs said. "It's always anthrax when they seal off a building."

"It wasn't anthrax," I told him. "Ranger said it was radiation."

"He didn't tell you any more than that?" Lula asked. I shook my head. "Huh. He might be a real hotshot in bed, but he sure don't waste a whole lotta words explaining things. That's gotta be real frustrating."

At the moment it was more scary than frustrating. "He has a lot to deal with."

My phone rang and I saw Morelli's face on the display. I stepped outside to answer it.

"I just heard about Rangeman," Joe said. "Are you alright?"

"Yes. I was across town when it happened."

"Thank god for that. I haven't been briefed on what went down, but it must have been serious if the building was sealed and the feds are in charge. Gardi is in St. Francis in isolation with a security guard in front of his door."

"Did they say anything about Ranger's guy, Bruce McCready? He was at the center of whatever happened along with Gardi."

"Not that I heard, but I'm not really in the loop yet. Did you stay at your parent's place last night?"

"No, I stayed at the apartment. I was hoping Ranger would meet me there, but I haven't heard more than one word from him since last night."

"Not surprising. He'd be in crisis mode. Probably hasn't come up for air yet."

"It's making me crazy. I don't like being on the outside of this, not knowing what's going on. Wishing I could help."

"Welcome to my world. This is what it was like living with you when your life went haywire. Before long you're gonna start understanding why I always offered to chain you to the radiator in my basement."

"How did you deal with it? This is awful."

"If I'm being honest, the only reason I still have stomach lining is because of Ranger. He might be crazy and a loose cannon, but he was made for shit like this. He'll be okay. Sometimes all you can do is have faith and keep moving. Focus on something else so the worry doesn't eat at you."

I pulled in a deep breath, and let it out all at once. Praying I could find the headspace to focus. "Anything new on the two murders? Did Buster ever turn up?"

"Buster came home at ten o'clock. He said he'd been in Atlantic City all day. One of those package deals with a bus trip included. He went with his girlfriend. It checked out."

"How did Jimmy get into his apartment?"

"Jimmy had a key. Buster gave it to him years ago when he first bought the building. Said they were using the apartment like a storeroom, but I'm guessing it was used to house the girls they imported."

"Did you find the murder weapon?"

"No. Not yet."

That was a problem, and a pretty good indicator that Jimmy didn't pull the trigger. I've seen more than my share of crime scenes and violent deaths. I could tell at first sight that Bernie hadn't been dead long, and that he'd been killed in the bedroom. If the police hadn't found the gun on scene, it was a fair bet it had walked away with the murderer. "Have you talked to the remaining poker players?" I asked Joe.

"Kreider questioned Silvio Pepper. He said Pepper was nervous. We can't find Siglowski. Kreider interviewed his neighbors and got nothing. Ditto on his relatives."

"I get why Pepper would be nervous. I'd be nervous too. Somebody's cleaning house. Most likely Siglowski is already dead, and just hasn't turned up yet. That leaves Pepper and Briggs."

"Is Briggs still hiding out in your apartment?"

"Yes."

"That's gotta be fun."

"Yep. It's a real barrel of laughs. Last night we played Pretty Pretty Princess and braided each others hair."

I could hear Morelli's grin. "Maybe we should tie him to a parking meter downtown and see if Poletti takes the bait."

"If I thought Poletti would be that stupid I might take you up on it."

"I gotta run. Let me know if you come up with anything better than the parking meter."

"I've got you on speed dial."

I heard him laugh and actually managed a smile when I hung up. Feeling better despite myself. I went back inside. "Can you run background checks on Silvio Pepper and Ron Siglowski?" I asked Connie.

"Sure. If you make a donut run I could have them both ready for you when you get back."

"Deal."

ooo

Silvio Pepper owned a long-haul trucking company with offices on Broad Street. That seemed like the best place to start. I was expecting to see a fleet of eighteen wheelers when we drove up, but all I saw was a little single story redbrick building and a small parking lot. Operations offices. Must have kept the trucks elsewhere.

I parked in the small lot and told Lula and Briggs to stay in the car.

"Why do I have to wait in the car?" Lula asked. "Waiting in the car is boring."

"I don't want to drag everyone in there with me," I told her. "Two people are partners. Four is a parade."

"So how come Zorro gets to go and I have to stay here with short stuff?"

"Because Zorro has to deal with Ranger if I come to harm in his absence."

"Yeah, I could see that being a problem. How about just three then? We could leave Briggs in the car and crack a window."

"Jeez. What do I look like, a golden retriever?" Briggs said.

"Naw. More like one of them grunty little bulldogs. The drooley ones."

"At least I'm not a big fat Saint Bernard."

"Saint Bernards got a nice, fluffy, beautiful coat. I take that as a compliment."

I rolled my eyes and got out of the car before I was subjected to any more. I'm not sure they even noticed. I slung my messenger bag over my shoulder and crossed the lot. The woman at the front desk looked to be in her forties. Overworked, overfed, and underpaid. "I'd like to talk to Silvio," I told her.

She punched the intercom button like she couldn't care less. "There's a woman here to see you," she said. She listened a second and then rolled her eyes. Looking over at me. "Who are you?"

"Stephanie Plum."

"Stephanie Plum," she repeated, taking no interest at all in investigating or explaining Ramon's presence. She hung up and cut a look down the hall. "Second door on the right."

Silvio Pepper wasn't quite as disinterested in Ramon as his receptionist. Trying to hide the warry. He was sixty-three. Looked just like his picture but with more wrinkles. And he wasn't in any way happy to see us.

I get that a lot.

"You're the bounty hunter, right? I guess you're looking for Jimmy."

"Do you know where he is?"

"No, but I know where he should be. The nuthouse. He's out there killing people because his life fell apart due to his own bad business decisions."

Bad business decisions was a pretty generous way to describe trading in human suffering. "So you think he's the one who killed Bernie and Tommy?"

"Who else would kill them?"

I shrugged.

"I think it's Jimmy," Silvio said. "I think he's afraid he'll get ratted out. We were all pretty close. Not that we were involved or anything, but we knew stuff."

I bet. "What about Buster? Was he in business with Jimmy?"

"I don't know exactly. Jimmy would send him on trips, and we figured it was business, but it could have been just to get cars."

"You're worried?"

"Wouldn't you be? Two of my best friends are dead. It's terrible. How does stuff like this happen?"

"Maybe you should disappear for a while, like Ron."

"Ron's retired. He can go wherever he wants. I got a company to run. I've got people depending on me."

"I don't suppose you know where Ron is?"

He shook his head. "He just took off. No goodbye or anything. I hate to say it out loud, but he could be dead too. He could have been the first one Jimmy took out."

I gave him my card, and Ramon and I headed back to the car, interrupting Lula and Briggs mid argument when I slid behind the wheel.

"Well?" Lula said. "How'd it go?"

"As expected. He knows nothing. He wasn't involved. He thinks Jimmy's gone postal."

"Do you think all that's true?"

"I don't think any of it is true."

"I think the part about going postal is true," Briggs said.

I called Connie and asked her to do some snooping on Pepper Trucking. I wanted to know if he smelled as fishy on paper as he did in real life. I looked at Ron Siglowski's printout again. Seventy. Widowed, no children. Sold his insurance business five years ago and moved to a golf course community in Cranberry. His credit check didn't turn up any airline purchases or hotel bills. In fact, they didn't show any activity at all. Either he was being very careful, or he was dead. The latter seemed most likely.

Silvio Pepper's house was in the Burg, but I didn't know his wife Miriam personally. She was in her sixties. Sort of chubby, with short brown hair streaked silver. She answered the door in a fuzzy pink bathrobe with rosy cheeks and a drink in her hand that looked like Coke but smelled like hundred proof.

"You must be Stephanie Plum," she said. "Silvio called and said you might be stopping by. He said I shouldn't talk to you because goodness knows what I might say."

It wasn't even eleven o'clock yet and the woman was in her bathrobe, getting cozy with Jim Beam. That's the secrets goldmine.

"You seem like an intelligent woman," I told her. "I'm sure you wouldn't say anything inappropriate."

"Thank you. I'm very discreet."

"And that's a lovely pink bathrobe."

"Pink is my favorite color. It's a happy color."

"That's so true. And I can see you're a happy person."

"Especially when I have a little nip of something." She leaned closer, and waved me into her confidence, the hundred proof hitting me full in the face. "I'm an alcoholic," she stage whispered. "Would you or your gentleman friend like a Manhattan? I make an excellent Manhattan."

I put a hand on my obvious belly and gave it a rub. "Thanks, but no. My gentleman friend is on duty, and I'm pregnant."

"Oh dear, isn't that wonderful! You're a lucky man," she said to Ramon, ignoring his discomfort at the implication.

"Yes, we're very happy," I told her. "I wanted to ask you about Jimmy Poletti."

Miriam knocked back some of the Manhattan. "He's a pig."

"In what way?"

"He's a man, isn't that enough? No offense," she added for Ramon.

"I was hoping for more specifics."

"Well, there's his wife."

"Yes?"

"She's thin."

"I know, I've met her."

"How am I supposed to compete with that?"

"I'm sure Silvio loves you just the way you are."

"Who?"

"Silvio. Your husband?"

"Pfft. Him? All he thinks about is that trucking company. I've had it up to here with that trucking company."

"What sort of stuff does he haul?"

"He has a contract with a plant in Mexico that makes salsa and a plant in Newark that makes the containers. He carts the containers to Mexico and comes back with them full of salsa."

Ha! I knew it. Another Mexican connection. Silvio could pretend he wasn't in on it until he was blue in the face, I would have still known he was lying. "Does he ever haul anything other than salsa?"

"I only know about the salsa. I've got a garage filled with five gallon cans of the stuff. What the heck am I supposed to do with it all? I mean, do they pay him in salsa?"

"Did he ever haul anything for Jimmy?"

She stared at the empty whiskey glass. "It's empty. I hate when that happens."

"About Jimmy."

"Boy, I could use a cigarette," she said. "Do you have any cigarettes on you?"

"Again. Pregnant."

"Oh that's so wonderful! We really should celebrate. We should get cupcakes!"

That wasn't a bad thought.

I heard a car pull up behind us and cut a look to the driveway. Silvio. I gave Miriam my card. "Call me if you want to talk."

"Sure," she said, "but you have to bring the cupcakes."

We passed Silvio on the sidewalk. "Your wife is lovely," I said to him. "You're a lucky man."

"Yeah," he said. "Lucky me."

ooo

Now that I was out of goals, the anxiety was building again. Like the volume of worry had just been turned down. Lula suggested driving by Rangeman, and I wasn't about to pass on the chance to see for myself. We turned down Broad on our way to center city, but we were stopped from getting any further when we ran into orange cones and yellow crime scene tape. The entire block around Rangeman was cordoned off. An eighteen-wheeler mobile crime scene lab was parked in front of the building, plus a bunch of cop cars, and EMT truck, a fire truck, and a hazmat unit truck.

A uniformed cop from the sheriff's office was manning the barricade.

"What happened?" I asked him.

"There's a contaminant in one of the buildings here," he said. "No one's allowed on the street until the building checks out."

"How long is that going to be?"

The cop didn't know.

A helicopter beat at the air overheard. Local news. Rangeman was going to top the five o'clock hour. Ranger would hate that.

"I don't get how something could contaminate this building," Lula said. "This building is scary secure."

Lula didn't know the half of it. Rangeman was the most secure building I'd ever seen. State of the art surveillance, highly trained and armed staff in the lobby and throughout every floor. Ranger even told me once that the glass that surrounded the ground floor could take a hit from an armored truck and not shatter. How there'd been a radiation leak, I couldn't begin to guess, and not knowing had my stomach in so many knots I was queasy.

Ranger would have called me if he had a spare moment, but I was still getting radio silence.

I called Morelli.

"I'm idling at the barricade to Ranger's street," I said. "The whole street is blocked off, and there's an eighteen-wheeler crime scene lab parked here. I've never seen and eighteen-wheeler crime scene lab. Do you know what's going on yet?"

"I can't talk now," Morelli said. "Meet me for lunch at Pino's. Twelve o'clock."