Two for the Dough

My job was to drag felons back into the system, and Kenny Mancuso was worth a cool five grand. He'd shot his former best friend in the knee, jumped bail, and vanished. My first lead put me and my mentor, Ranger, behind a hydrangea bush in the dark, watching his girlfriend's house. We were not alone. When Trenton cop Joe Morelli showed up on the same tip, my simple skip trace got complicated. Morelli and I share a long, messy history from the old neighborhood, the Burg, and now he was looking for Kenny, too - a “family favor,” he claimed. I didn't buy it for a second, especially not after he goaded me into driving my Jeep onto a safety island, leaving me with a bent rim while he drove off into the night.

The case took a sharp turn from annoying to deadly the next morning. Kenny's victim, the gas station attendant Moogey Bues, was found with three bullets in his face. Suddenly, this wasn't just about bail money. Morelli, looking grim, admitted Kenny's mother was a Morelli, making the shooter his cousin. He suggested we team up, which in Morelli-speak meant I'd do the legwork and he'd swoop in for the glory. Still, I was out of leads, and he had access to family secrets. The partnership felt like a necessary evil, even if the last time we worked together, I'd gotten shot in the ass.

As if a murder investigation weren't enough, I took on a bizarre side job. Spiro Stiva, the rat-faced stepson of the Burg's premier undertaker, hired me to find twenty-four missing caskets. He'd bought them cheap - army surplus - and stashed them in a rental locker, only to find the locker empty. He didn't want to involve the police, which set off every alarm bell in my head, but a thousand-dollar finder's fee was too much to ignore. The search for the caskets led me to funeral homes all over Trenton, usually with my Grandma Mazur in tow. She treats viewings like social events, and at one, she managed to knock a vase of gladioli onto the deceased before accidentally pulling his finger off. It turned out to be wax, but the chaos was very, very real.

Kenny, meanwhile, decided to stop hiding and start haunting me. First came a note made of pasted-on letters: “Take a vacation. It will be good for your health.” Then my apartment was broken into, the walls spray-painted with crude messages and a silver letter ‘K.' The intruder left a parting gift: a massive black cat locked in my hamster Rex's glass cage. My heart nearly stopped, but Rex had burrowed into his soup can and survived the ordeal, only to bite me in terror when I tried to comfort him. The final straw was a business card - one of mine - impaled on my kitchen table with a carving knife. The message was clear, and it had Perry Sandeman's name all over it. Sandeman, a nasty piece of work from Moogey's garage, didn't appreciate me asking questions.

The two cases slammed together when the caskets were found in an abandoned factory, burned to ash. My grandmother, bless her heart, recognized a picture of one. “Only place they got caskets this ugly is the military,” she'd announced over soup. A quick call from Morelli confirmed it: Spiro had bought surplus caskets from Fort Braddock, the same army base where Kenny had been a shipping clerk. The same base missing a stockpile of illegal armor-piercing bullets and light anti-tank weapons. Suddenly, the picture sharpened. Kenny hadn't been stealing caskets; he'd been using them to smuggle munitions off the base. And now, someone had stolen his stolen goods. Then the case got even grislier. While snooping around Sandeman's apartment, I took a three-story fall off a rusted-out fire escape, landing in a pile of dog shit. When I got home to shower, I found Sandeman's severed foot in my refrigerator.

The game turned deadly serious when Kenny came after my family. He found Grandma Mazur outside the bakery and, in broad daylight, drove an ice pick clean through her hand. “This was just the beginning,” he told her. That was it. This was no longer about a paycheck. I moved back into my parents' house to protect her, my world shrinking to a constant, nerve-shredding stakeout of Stiva's Mortuary. Kenny believed Spiro had double-crossed him and stolen the guns, and he was getting increasingly violent in his attempts to get them back, slashing Spiro's arm and mailing me another one of his victim's dismembered parts - this time, to my parents' house.

The end came at Stiva's. I went to the funeral home looking for Grandma, who had vanished from a crowded viewing. I found her in the basement, locked in a refrigerated body drawer by Kenny. Spiro was there too, revealing they'd been partners all along. Kenny had been using the hearse, disguised as the gormless assistant Louie Moon, to move the munitions back into the mortuary cellar. As Kenny taunted my grandmother, she made her move. Hidden under her coat, she'd been holding a .45 long-barrel. “You just got to ask yourself one question,” she growled, channeling Dirty Harry. “Do you feel lucky today? Well, do you, punk?” She fired, hitting a crate of ammo and turning the cellar into an inferno.

In the chaos of sirens and smoke, I dragged Grandma out the back door just as Kenny stumbled out behind us, backlit by the flames. He lunged, and we went down in a tangle of fists and fury. I wasn't just trying to stop him anymore; I wanted to hurt him for what he'd done to my grandmother. He was bigger, but I was fueled by a rage I didn't know I had. I felt his hands close around my neck just as Morelli arrived, pulling us apart. Kenny was finally in custody, and Spiro was on the run. The next morning, back in my own apartment, Morelli showed up to debrief me. He told me I was the worst bounty hunter in the history of the world. I threw him out. “This is war,” I yelled through the door. His grin was visible even through the peephole. “Lucky for me,” he said. “I give good war.”