Top Secret Twenty-One by Janet Evanovich Read Free Book Online Page A

scores, sock sizes, cheese preferences, and colonoscopy reports.
    “First up is Silvio Pepper,” I said to Lula. “Do you want to ride shotgun?”
    “Is short stuff going?”
    I looked at Connie.
    “Yeah,” Connie said, “he’s going.”
    “I guess I’ll go anyway,” Lula said. “If someone takes a potshot at him, I don’t want to miss it.”
    Silvio Pepper lived in a small two-story house on the northern edge of the Burg. He was sixty-three years old, married, and the owner of a long-haul trucking company with offices on Broad Street.
    I took Hamilton Avenue to Broad Street and turned left. Pepper Trucking was a relatively small operation several blocks down Broad. The single-story redbrick building had a small parking lot attached to it. Not big enough for an eighteen-wheeler, so the trucks were obviously keptelsewhere. I parked in the lot and told Lula and Briggs to wait 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 said. “Two people are partners. Three people make a parade.”
    “So why can’t we leave Briggs here? We can crack a window for him.”
    “Jeez,” Briggs said. “What do I look like, a golden retriever?”
    “I want Poletti, and Briggs is my bait. I don’t want to come back and find Briggs gunned down or missing and Poletti long gone.”
    “I guess I could see that,” Lula said, “but how do you expect me to pull off this Briggs rescue?”
    “I guess you could shoot Poletti in a nonvital area.”
    “Like his knee?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Okay, I’m cool with that,” Lula said.
    I slung my messenger bag over my shoulder, crossed the lot, and pushed my way through the front door of Pepper Trucking. The woman at the front desk was in her forties and looked overworked, overfed, and underpaid.
    “I’d like to talk to Silvio,” I told her.
    Looking like she could care less, she punched a button on her multiline phone.
    “There’s a woman here to see you,” she said. She rolled her eyes and looked over at me. “Who are you?”
    “Stephanie Plum.”
    “Stephanie Plum,” she repeated into the phone. She hung up and looked down the hall. “Second door on the right.”
    Silvio looked like his photo but more wrinkled.
    “You’re the bounty hunter, right?” he said. “I know you from around. I guess you’re looking for Jimmy.”
    “Do you know where he is?”
    “No, but I know where he should be. He should be in the nuthouse. He was always this smart guy. Businessman. Good poker player. Okay, maybe he had a weakness for the ladies, but who doesn’t? And so he made some bad business decisions, but hey, that’s no reason to go off the deep end and kill people.”
    “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, but we knew stuff.”
    “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.”
    “I guess you’re worried.”
    “Damn right I’m worried. 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 somewhere. He could have been the first one Jimmy took out.”
    I gave him my card. “Let me know if you hear anything.”
    He took the card and stared at it, blank-faced. “Sure.”
    I went back to the Buick and got behind the wheel.
    “Well?” Lula asked. “How’d it