A/N: I sincerely apologize to you readers for the long hiatus. I promised I would finish this story, and when MomofPhoenix tells you to finish, you do it! Kuddos to parents raising toddlers; you barely have time for a shower let alone hobbies like writing FanFiction. It's been so much fun writing this story. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have writing it. Full disclosure: I haven't read any of JE's novels since Tricky Twenty-Two.

Chapter 12

"Hello," I said.

"Is this Stephanie?" the female voice said.

"Yes," I said.

"This is Chantel," she said. "Enrique's girlfriend. I want to help."

I've been a bounty hunter for a few years now and if there's one thing I've learned is that persistence pays off. And when that doesn't work, it sure helps to be lucky.

"How?" I answered.

Chantel paused, as if not really sure.

"It's okay," I said. "I won't bring in the cops."

"You need to promise," Chantel said. "Promise on Ranger's grave that you won't tell anyone. If you do, I'm dead."

"Promise."

Chantel took a deep breath. "Meet me at Enrique's apartment at 9 o'clock tonight. Don't bring anyone."

With a click, she hung up.

"That was ominous," I said to my empty, but clean apartment.

A knock sounded on my front door. I shot up into the air about 4 feet with fright. I pulled my gun out, checked it for bullets, and slowly made my way to the door. I peeked through my peep hole. It was Morelli.

"Are you going let me in or what?" he said.

I tucked my gun into the waistband of my jeans, undid my locks, and opened the door.

Morelli looked as if he had just showered after spending some time at the gym. He was wearing a Trenton PD T-shirt and was also holding a paper bag from Pino's. By the smell of things, I couldn't tell which was more yummy, his cologne or the meatball sub aroma wafting into the foyer.

"I brought dinner," he said, letting himself in.

I eyed him suspiciously.

"It's a peace offering," he explained. "I'm not good at saying sorry, so it comes in the form of meatballs." Morelli walked into my kitchen and opened up the bag.

It was unfair. He knew I couldn't resist Pino's subs. I sighed. I guess I couldn't be mad at him forever, especially since we're supposed to be working together on the FBI cocaine case together.

Morelli had placed the subs onto plates and sat down on the couch. I picked up mine and joined him. I noticed that he hadn't turned on the TV.

Morelli looked me in the eye. "I've known you a long time," he said. "And I know you know something that I don't know."

I took a big bite of my sub to stall.

"You know something about the cocaine case," he guessed. "And you need to tell me."

I swallowed. "I don't have to tell you anything."

Morelli paused. "That's true. But I could help you."

I thought to myself. I knew that Ranger was still alive. I knew that his friend, José, had died. I knew that it was an inside job and that someone in the FBI was corrupt. I knew that Enrique's girlfriend, Chantel, knew something. I knew that the hitman using armor-piercing bullets was military, but had recently died. I knew that the cocaine boss used a burner phone system to communicate with her dealers, and that the boss was female despite what Karen O'Reilly had to say.

"I smell smoke," Morelli said with a half-smile.

I rolled my eyes. Chances were that Morelli wasn't the mole, and he probably wasn't trying to kill me considering he had recently proposed to me with a diamond ring.

I sighed. I turned on the TV and turned the volume up loud. Just in case my apartment was bugged, I leaned in close to Morelli and whispered, "There's a mole in the FBI. They were responsible for Ranger's death. He was the one working undercover."

Morelli's jaw dropped. I guess he wasn't expecting that one. He rearranged his face into cop-mode and I could see the gears turning inside his head. He scooted closer to me on the couch and furrowed his brow.

"That's a dangerous accusation, Cupcake," he spoke quietly. "But I've known you long enough not to question your gut instinct."

I nodded.

"I know you know it's not me," he continued, "but we need to be very careful."

I got up to get the Rangeman search files on Suzanne Moutis and handed Morelli Richard Black's file. Rangeman was a top-notch security company, with morals that ran towards the better good rather than legal. The files were as invasive as a catheter.

The file on Suzanne Moutis pegged her as a 42-year-old white female born in Philadelphia. Her parents were a mailman and a receptionist. She went to FBI academy after a degree in psychology at the University of Maryland with average grades. She worked her way up from desk work to logistics and has been an FBI field agent stationed in Trenton for 2 years. No criminal history. Not married, but a string of girlfriends. She gets her short dirty blond hair cut at Clip 'N Curl's rivals, Shear Delight and is on a medium dose of anxiety medication. She currently lives in a modest two-bedroom apartment near Giovanni's deli, drives a Ford sedan, and frequents a café with numerous health code violations.

"I knew I shouldn't have eaten that chicken salad sandwich," I blurted.

The file on Richard Black was substantially thicker. Morelli was skimming through pages and gave up on the last half of the file.

"Richard Black is so dirty, it's a miracle that he hasn't been fired, or put in jail," Morelli said over the sound of the baseball game on TV. "If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on him."

"I agree," I said. I was still reeling from the Strip Club incident and he certainly was living a life larger than his Newark PD salary.

After Morelli and I watched the end of the game, he left. Ranger was still out doing Ranger-knows-what, so I got in the Porsche Cayenne and drove to Enrique's apartment, a block over from Clinton Street. I parked and within a few minutes, Chantel was seated in the passenger seat.

"You need to wear this," she said, passing me a handful of clothes and shoes.

I looked at the scraps of fabric, a glittery red top and leather shorts. "Huh?" I asked.

"Every so often," she explained, "Enrique would invite me to these parties. I think that's where they deal. That's where you'll get your answers."

After Chantel had dressed me up as best as she could to look like a drug dealer's whore, we drove in her silver Mercedes to the bad part of town.

I followed her as she got out of the car and walked down a deserted alleyway. We took a left turn and found ourselves in a dimly-lit alcove with a door bookended by two guys big enough to be the linebackers of a NFL football team. Chantel nodded at them and they let us in.

Music echoed off the walls as we walked down a set of stairs and a hallway. It appeared to be some exclusive backdoor club. As we entered the main room, a DJ was spinning some beats and people were dancing on the floor, lounging on couches, talking, making-out, and shooting drugs.

Amongst the crowd, I had lost Chantel.

"Hey curly," an obviously drugged out guy said to me. "Come on sit down on my lap and we'll talk about what pops up."

I backed away and heard a familiar voice carry over the noise.

"Hey dudette!" It was Mooner.

I made my way over to him and found him manning a food table with his friend Dougie, and another guy who was blond with a shaggy haircut, thin, and had a pair of thick glasses.

"This is Chem," he introduced me.

"Chem?" I repeated.

"It's short for 'Chemistry'," Chem said. "It's because I'm a walking HPLC and MALDI-TOF."

"A what?" I asked.

"High-performance liquid chromatography and matrix-assisted laser desorption and ionization time-of-flight," Chem answered.

I just stared at him. I wasn't sure if he was speaking English anymore.

Mooner explained, "Chem is like, quality assurance. He makes sure that the drugs are primo pure-o."

"There's a lot of fentanyl-laced products out there," Chem explained. "That's dangerous stuff."

"Chem's services are in high demand," Mooner added. "He can tell what's what by just a little taste."

"I can tell whether anything is laced with additives, or where it came from," Chem stated proudly.

"How can you do that?" I asked.

"I was born with it," Chem said. "And I can tell by the drug's terroir what region of what country it came from. Like professional wine tasters."

I nodded. I felt like I was in the twilight zone. I looked down at the food table. It was covered in cupcakes.

"We've started a new business," Mooner said, gesturing to the blue and pink-frosted desserts. "Thanks to that little mistake with the icing sugar, we're now like those cupcake chicks on the Food Network."

Except that those TV cupcakes weren't flavored with contraband substances. I looked down at the blue and pink frosting and then up at Mooner. Chantel was nowhere to be seen.

"Can you tell me what this party is about?" I asked.

"That requires a different location," he said, moving away from the food table.

We stopped near a dark corner, and Mooner turned to me.

"Look dudette," he started, "this is the club where the middleman and the middle-middlemen do their business."

I looked around the room. There were a mix of male and females, predominantly Hispanic.

"What kind of business?" I probed.

"All kinds," he answered. "Mostly cocaine. This is where the middlemen deal with the middle-middlemen to make deals."

I wasn't sure if Mooner knew he was repeating himself.

"Who are the middle-middlemen?" I asked.

"The middle-middlemen are the men between the middlemen and the middle-middle-middlemen."

He was totally stoned.

"Gotta get back to business," he said. "Table's looking busy."

I leaned against the wall for a few minutes, taking in the scene. Then two men lounging on a couch caught my eye. I recognized them as the two men who were talking with Richard Black at the bar over by the Super 8 Motel on Broad.

I was debating between walking over there to get some answers or walking out the door so I wouldn't have to suffer through lap-pop-up guy who was making his way over to me.

A commotion started near the front door, and someone shouted, "Raid! It's the cops!"

Pandemonium broke out and bodies started flying out of the room. I was caught up with the tide.

"Ow," I yelped as someone elbowed my side boob.

The back door opened to an alleyway that wasn't the one I entered. Chantel was gone and so was my ride home. I tried to look normal as I made my way to the road and pulled up my phone to call an Uber. Not sure if an Uber operated in this side of town. I continued walking when a bright red sports car pulled up next to me with the window rolled down.

"Hey Plummy." It was Richard Black. His gaze did a slow sweep up and down my body. "Need a ride Sweetheart?"

I swallowed down my bile and glanced back at the cop cars and the flashing lights flooding the street.

"Yeah," I conceded and got in.

"Fancy seeing you on this side of town," he said driving on Main Street. "Is the bounty hunter business not paying enough?"

"I'm not going home with you." I stated. "You can drop me off on Clinton Street."

He chuckled. "You were lucky I was in the neighborhood. You make any progress on your leads for the cocaine case?"

He was fishing for information. "I might have." I said. "How about you?"

"I've got my feelers out," he answered.

It was another morning at the FBI office with the joint taskforce and as it turns out, none of us had any leads. Karen was pacing back and forth, her glossy hair swishing with every turn.

"This isn't working," she stated. "We're getting nowhere with this case except for more bodies in the morgue."

Suzanne Moutis piped up. "But that means someone is feeling the heat and cleaning house. We're so close."

Karen stopped and stared down at Suzanne. "And if more dead bodies show up, this operation is going to be shut down and given to another team."

"We may need to try something different," Morelli piped up from his chair next to mine.

"Good idea," agreed Karen. "New partners. Moutis, you're with Morelli. Black, you're with Plum. And Hernandez, you're with me."

After the meeting, Morelli pulled me aside outside the washrooms.

"I'll get the dirt on Suzanne," he said. "And you can get info on Richard."

"He's a scumbag," I scowled. I told Morelli about how Richard and his associates were at the club last night.

"Just be careful," he said.

I pulled up to the sidewalk of the bonds office behind Lula's new Mercedes SUV. Lula was sitting on the couch, a pair of bright pink glasses on, reading a celebrity magazine.

"She gave up on the marketing textbook," Connie said.

"I need to rest my brain," Lula replied. "All that learning makes me tired. This magazine is mental sleep."

"Any new skips?" I asked Connie.

"Nope," she answered. "Everyone's still afraid of the Plum curse."

My normal job as a bounty hunter means that I track down people who have failed to appear for their court date and return them to the system. Lately, an uncanny number of people have been shot as soon as their file hits my hand.

"It's not my fault," I replied.

The front door to the office opens and in walks Grandma. Her face covered in something which can only be described as theatrical make-up. Half her face is done up like a marionette clown and the other half is a-la-Grandma hooker.

"Well, what do you think?" Grandma asks.

Connie is silent. I am silent. Lula is the first to speak.

"Hmm," Lula ponders. I give her credit for her professionalism in wedding planning.

"Nope," Lula concludes. "Neither one of these works."

"But they were the top hit on TikTok!" Maybe for bad grandma make-up.

"This is the look we want," Lula passes the magazine to Grandma. "Classic, timeless, Hollywood."

"Let's ride Granny," Lula said. "Let my people talk to your people."

"Ooh," exclaimed Grandma. "Is that Mercedes new?"

A/N – Talk to me folks, is this worth continuing? What questions do you have? I've got about 2 or 3 more chapters left.