14 Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich Read Free Book Online

spotted
Andy. He was slouched into a broken-down overstuffed chair facing
the television. He was wearing a white dress shirt buttoned to the
neck and black socks and black shoes, and that was it. No pants. He
looked like a bag of bones with skin cancer. He was milk-white skin
and red splotches everywhere. And I mean everywhere. There was a
lot of nose and a lot of ears, and gonads hanging low between his
knobby knees.
    “Come on in,” he said, gesturing with big boney hands. “What can
I do you for?”
    “I knew it,” Lula said. “I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. This
here's gonna haunt me forever. This is what I got to look forward
to after a hundred years of marriage. This here's what happens to
outdoor plumbing when a man gets old. I don't know if I can go
through with the wedding.”
    “Age don't got nothing to do with it,” Bernie said. “He's always
looked like that.”
    “You're not wearing any pants,” I said to Andy
Gimp.
    “Don't like them. Never wear them.”
    “Fine by me,” I said, “but you didn't show up for your court
appearance.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Yep.”
    “I had it marked on my calendar,” Andy said. “Bernie, where's
the calendar?”
    “Lost it,” Bernie said.
    “They say I didn't show up for my court
appearance.”
    Bernie shrugged. “So what? They'll give you another
one.”
    Andy was on his feet, looking for the calendar. He walked body
bent, arms akimbo, feet planted wide for balance, his nuts
practically dragging on the floor.
    “I know it's here somewhere,” he said, shuffling through
magazines on the coffee table, rifling through a pile of newspapers
on the floor.
    “I'm feelin' faint,” Lula said. “If he bends over one more time,
I'm gonna pass out. I can't stop lookin'. It's a train wreck. It's
like the end of the universe. You know, when you get sucked into
that thing. What do you call it?”
    “Black hole?”
    “Yeah, that's it. It's like staring into the black
hole.”
    Andy was distracted by the calendar hunt, so I gave my business
card to Bemie and introduced myself.
    “Lula and I need to take Andy to the courthouse so he can
reinstate his bail bond,” I told Bemie. “Can you get him to put
some pants on?”
    “He don't own none,” Bernie said. “And I'm not loaning him any
of mine. You don't know where he's been sitting.”
    “Hell, I'll buy him some pants if he'll stop bending over,” Lula
said.
    “Won't do no good,” Bernie said. “He won't wear them. He made up
his mind.”
    Since I've had this job, I've hauled in a naked, greased-up fat
guy, a half-naked homie, and a naked old pervert, and I've worked
with a little naked guy who thought he was a leprechaun. A
geriatric nudist wasn't going to slow me down.
    “Get a jacket,” I said to Andy. “We're going
downtown.”
    “I'm not wearing pants,” he said.
    “Not my problem.”
    I walked him out of the house and settled him onto a newspaper
on my backseat.
    “The desk sergeant is gonna love this,” Lula
said.
    An hour later, Andy was in line at the courthouse, waiting to
see the judge, and Lula and I were back on Hamilton Avenue, coming
up to Tasty Pastry.
    “Pull over!” Lula said. “I want to go into the bakery. I gotta
look at wedding cakes, and I wouldn't mind getting an eclair to
settle my stomach. I think I got wedding jitters.”
    I thought that was a great idea. I didn't have wedding jitters,
but I had guy-in-basement jitters, and Loretta jitters, and Joe
Morelli fatherhood jitters. I might need three
eclairs.
    I parked the Sentra, and Lula and I marched into the bakery.
Betty Kuharchek was behind the counter, setting out a cookie
display. Betty is an apple dumpling woman who has worked at Tasty
Pastry forever. If you pass her on the street, there's the
lingering scent of powdered sugar icing.
    “I'm gonna be a June bride and I need to consider some wedding
cakes,” Lula said to Betty. “I like the one in the window with the
three tiers and the big white roses with the