I can't believe I just let him take my control of my skip this way. This is my skip, not his. I asked for his help, not for him to come in and control everything. Stephanie had watched Alex leave with Tank and Lester. She got up and looked at Ranger. "I would like to talk with you in the bedroom."

Ranger nodded and followed Stephanie into her bedroom. He shut the door behind them.

"Babe?"

Stephanie turned to look at him. "This is my skip. When I called I didn't think you would come in here and take all the control away from me on my skip."

"You asked for my help, what did you expect to happen?"

Stephanie put her hands on her hips. "Not for you to come in here and pull all that macho shit on me. I'm not some dog you can just command to sit down for you."

And Alex said I can control her. Little shit needs to see her like this. "Babe, you have stitches in your head and a concussion. Do you possible think you can keep yourself awake when your skip needs sleep? You know how I am, I run things my way when you ask for help, it's always been that way."

"Maybe I don't like your way!" Stephanie yelled at him. "I want my skip back here, and I don't want a babysitter."

Ranger walked closer to her, "I'm not about to leave you alone when you need to stay awake."

Bobby was in the living room. Even through the walls he could hear how bad of a mood Stephanie was in. Jeeze! I hate when Lester is right. Damn she is in a mood in a bad way. I think I should have went with Tank and Lester.

Hal looked at Bobby, "It doesn't sound like it's going to well in there."

"No shit Sherlock." Bobby stated the obvious. "Just be glad you don't have to deal with her when you and Ranger leave."

"I'll give you that I need to stay awake. But that doesn't give you the right to take my skip." Stephanie stated loudly.

"Babe, you never had control of your skip. Even as messed up as your skip is, Alex felt the need to come back and help you when you hurt yourself chasing after her. Alex has been in control of the situation ever since she started helping you. How long do you think she would have stayed?" Ranger growled back at her.

"Don't get angry with me. Get out of my apartment and take your merry ass damn men with you!" Stephanie wanted so much to hit him, she knew he was right and she was tired of being wrong. Tired of looking like the fool when he was around her. Tired of being a fool.

Ranger turned and stalked from the room. She asked for my help, she knows what I'm like. If she didn't want my help she shouldn't have asked for it. She knows I demand payment when she asks for things. He looked at Hal, "Let's go." He walked over to the door and opened it as Hal walked out. He looked back at Bobby who was looking at the bedroom door with trepidation. "Twenty-four hours." Then he left slamming Stephanie's apartment door.

"Damn him!" Stephanie stomped her foot on the floor in her room.

Bobby walked cautiously towards the bedroom door. Stephanie looked up as she heard footsteps coming. She strode over towards the door with her hands on her hips and glared at Bobby. "Get the fuck out!"

"No." Bobby told her in a calm voice. "Stephanie, be rational, you really don't need to be left alone with a concussion."

"I can call Lula to come over. I don't need you around." Stephanie pushed him out of the way and went to get her cell phone. She turned it on and didn't get a dial tone. "Fucking shit. She has my cell phone chip in her damn pocket."

Bobby snickered from behind her. He couldn't help himself, Alex had did this to her, this was something Ranger would have done for her not to have contact with the outside world. Stephanie whirled around and flung the phone at his head. Bobby didn't duck in time and took it in the right eye.

"Shit Stephanie, don't take it out on me." Bobby told her.

"Give me your phone!" Stephanie shouted at him.

"Not until you calm down." Bobby answered her. He bent to retrieve the vile object that had just connected with his face. "Ranger's right, you never had control of your skip."

Stephanie saw red and charged at him. She tackled him and they went falling, Bobby hit his head hard against the bedroom door frame. Stephanie barely missed hitting her head herself and then was sprawled across his lifeless body. She took a moment to assess herself and pushed off of him. "You should have left when I told you too."

Stephanie grabbed Bobby's cell phone that was snapped to the sides of his cargo pants and took it off. She got up and fished her keys to the Cooper off the coffee table where Alex had so graciously decided to leave them and then strode out of her apartment door. She turned back and locked Bobby inside it. She dialed Lula's number as she headed towards the elevator.

"Hello!" Lula answered, "Who's this?"

"It's Stephanie, I'm driving to the office, but I really need you to drive today and no music. I have a concussion and four damn stitches in my head because of my skip and I want to pay her back for it."

"Oh shit! What did she do?" Lula asked, "you know, this is what you get when you don't take a full figured woman such as myself along."

Stephanie stepped out of the elevator. "I'll be there in ten. I'll tell you all about it on the way to the little shit's apartment."

"This will be good, we'll do some serious cool shit in that place to fuck with this girl." Lula said, "I've got your back girlfriend."

Stephanie hung up Bobby's phone and then tossed it over into the dumpster. "Happy fucking dumpster surfing." Then she slid behind the Cooper and tore out of the parking lot.

Shiropolli's henchman just pulled the white van into the Gateway Apartments. He laughed at seeing the sign, it had been tagged to read Gateway to Hell, Apartments had been spray painted out but you could still read it through the paint. The brown paint looked like shit on the dilapidated buildings, they stood by a hairsbreadth of being condemned for the wretched sight they cast off on the city. He continued slowly over the speed bumps and even slower over the pot holes in the pavement. When he reached the third building he slowed down and scanned the lot.

"Go check out the apartment, and get a way in fast." He told the man sitting in the passenger seat.

The man got out, he had his work coveralls on. He placed the painters hat on his head and headed to building C apartment 1. It was a bottom floor apartment. He knocked on the door and looked down the corridors to the other doors. TV was blaring in 2 and he could hear the morning argument coming from door 3 right behind him. He took the picks out of his pocket and picked the lock on the front door and then opened it up.

Walking inside he saw the hovel didn't contain much but the bare minimum. He could see junkie remains scattered here and there in the living room, the only thing that looked odd in the room was a trashed out Triumph motorcycle. The gas tank looked like it had been previously painted not too long ago with a iridescent Chinese dragon in flight. The seat had been taped with black electrical tape to hold it in place and the chrome on the bike was covered in rust.

He moved through the living room and into the hall, the first door he opened led into a shabby green and white bathroom. The second door led to a bedroom that had two large mattresses on the floor and looked more like a junkies palace than a kid's room. He stepped back out and looked at door number three. Opening it up he smiled to himself.

This was the kids room. He looked at the black ceiling that had a mural of a white tiger, surrounding the white tiger was the Chinese zodiac signs and had lightening crashing all around it. He glanced at the bed that was decently made with dark purple sheets and a black bedspread. The floor was clean, nothing littered it unless you counted what appeared to be hundreds of karate trophies standing along the floor, on wood shelves and any place they looked like they could go. He spun back around and went to go get the guys.

The henchman got out when he saw his man coming back, both of them went to the back of the van and pulled the painters tarp that had the dead women inside of it out. Along with the third man in the van they hauled the body out. The third man carried paint buckets, the three of them looked like average painters just there to do a job. They got the body inside the apartment and then unwrapped her before taking the body into Alex's bedroom. They placed her mother's lifeless body on the bed naked.

The henchman took one of the black karate belts that had Ramono stitched in gold lettering off the top of the dresser and then tied it so it was inside her mother's mouth. He took her watch he never gave back to her layed it down on the dresser propped up against a photo of Alex at a karate tournament.

"Let's leave." He told them. They gathered up the tarp and paint cans and headed outside. The henchman had just stepped out of the apartment door when he saw the red firebird pull up and two women get out. He looked back at the last man as he pulled the door and was trying to lock the door with the picks. "Leave it."

They all three started walking down the corridor as both women walked purposefully their way. The glare that came from the curly brunette stated one angry bitch wasn't going to wait for them to get out of the corridor.

The chocolate woman with bright green hair pushed the henchman in the chest. "Get out of our way, we are on a mission."

"Get a grip," Stephanie told Lula, "Sorry about that." She strode away following Lula.

The henchman walked briskly to the van and all of them piled in. He cranked the ignition over as he saw the two women talking in front of the Ramono's apartment door. He pulled the van out and drove away.

Stephanie had a tingling down her spine as she had looked at the tall man with the scar that ran across his face. She had stopped with Lula just in front of Alex Ramono's apartment door and made Lula wait before trying the door. She looked back at the van and watched it pull away.

"We can't just walk in while they were out here." Stephanie told her.

"Sure we can, if we think our skip is in there. But, we know our skip isn't in there, we know she is with Ranger."

Stephanie growled, "I told you don't mention his name."

"Well, it's kind of hard not too. I didn't get my night with my man because he called my man away. And Tank is one fine man and I need my time with him as well. I don't like it when Ranger tells him to jump and he just dumps me back to second place. I'm not second place, I'm a first place woman."

"Damn straight you are, both of us are. We shouldn't take Ranger's shit anymore." Stephanie grasped the door knob and didn't even turn it and the door gave way. "I locked the door the last time I was here."

"Well, ain't that something, all we have to do is just do the entering now." Lula told her. "I was hoping to do some breaking."

Bobby came slowly awake, he reached for the back of his head and groaned as he felt the lump. His eyes came open and slowly he focused on his surroundings. "Stephanie's apartment, why am I in Stephanie's apartment?"

He sat up slowly and then put his arms across his bent knees and got up off the ground. He looked around the apartment. There didn't look like a struggle, "Stephanie?" He called out.

Bobby didn't get an answer. Slowly everything started to come back to him and he looked down for his cell phone. It was missing from the clip. "Oh Shit!"

Bobby stood up and picked up Stephanie's cell phone off the floor that was beside him and he looked at it. "I should have given her my damn phone. Ranger is going to kill me."

He strode to her door and turned the knob, she had locked it. Bobby unlocked the door and turned around, using his pick locking tools he locked her door back. He walked briskly to the stairwell and took the stairs. Going outside he saw her Cooper was gone, gone, gone.

"Fucking shit, I'm so dead. I'm deader than dead." He spun around and went back inside to the payphone in the foyer and called the control room.

Zero answered the phone, "Your dime."

"I need a readout on my phone, where is it?" Bobby asked Zero.

"You lost your phone?" Zero snickered at him.

"Something like that. Just tell me where the fuck it is." Bobby growled, he rubbed the goose knot on the back of his head. "I don't have all day."

Zero punched on the keys on the keyboard in front of him. He checked the monitor, "It looks to be in Stephanie's parking lot. How did you lose your phone?"

"Stephanie threw it out the window. She was a little mad." Bobby lied smoothly.

"Is she still mad at you?" Zero asked laughing.

"Yup." Bobby told him then hung up. No need in telling him he lost her. He just had to make sure he had his phone incase Ranger called. He was going to have to cover his ass big time.

Bobby went back out in the lot. "Okay, I'm a pissed off Stephanie Plum, so pissed off, I told Ranger off, and knocked out one of his men and took his phone. Now where would she put it?" Bobby scanned the lot. The bushes were too obvious, she was too pissed just to toss it in the bushes. His eyes kept roaming then landed on the dumpster, he groaned. "She wouldn't do that, would she?"

Bobby started walking over towards the dumpster, "Would any of us do this to her? Hell no. We wouldn't humiliate her like this. She does enough humiliating to herself without our help." Bobby kept talking to himself trying to fathom the depths of Stephanie's mind. He looked over the edge of the dumpster and was about knocked out because of the stench that flowed out from it. "Would she throw my phone in the dumpster?" He asked himself. He didn't want to know the answer to that, but he groaned when he thought he knew it. "Yes she would. Damn it!"

Bobby climbed into the dumpster placing his feet carefully inside on bags he thought didn't look like they would give way to noxious substances. He threw other bags aside until he caught a brief glimpse of silver. "Shit! That better not be shit that is covered all over my damn phone."

Bobby found an empty McDonald's bag that had been tossed in and gingerly picked up his phone with it after he used the bag to buffer his hands from the brown substance that was slathered all over his phone. He lifted and grimaced, but there was only one way to tell for sure, he brought it closer to his nose and gave a sniff. He smelled the sweet smell of chocolate and started laughing. "Thank you, there is a god." Then the bags below him gave way and Bobby lost his footing and tumbled head first in the decaying garbage.