It was too late to catch Chopper at his lunch stops, and I wasn’t in the mood to start looking for the toilet paper bandit, so I headed back to the office. I needed to talk to Connie anyway. It was one thing to find Vinnie, it was a whole other deal to rescue him. As much as I would love to see Connie shoot off a stink bomb, I had serious doubts about it as a rescue aid. Seemed to me a stink bomb, like a fire bomb, got everyone out of the building, but didn’t give us an opportunity to snatch Vinnie.

I was halfway across town when Grandma Mazur called. “I think I broke my foot,” she said. “I was dancing to one of them workout videos, and I accidentally stubbed my toe on the coffee table, and now I think something’s broke. At first, I thought it wasn’t broke, but it’s turned purple, and it’s all swelled up.”

“Where’s Mom?”

“She’s at the beauty parlor. And your father’s playing pinochle at his club. And I hate to call the ambulance people, because then I’ll be a spectacle. There’ll be rumors I’m dead. I just need you to give me a ride to the emergency room.”

ELEVEN

LULA AND I stood in the living room, looking at Grandma’s foot.

“It looks broke all right,” Lula said to Grandma. “That’s one heck of an ugly foot you got there, but I like the polish you got on your toes. What’s the name of that?”

“Red Hot Rapture. Lucky I just painted them yesterday. Imagine breaking your foot when your toes weren’t done up.”

“Yeah,” Lula said. “I’d hate that. Does it hurt?”

“It used to, but I took a couple snorts of Jack Daniels, and I’m pretty happy.”

“We need to get her to the car,” I said to Lula.

“Okay,” Lula said. “Do you want to carry her or drag her?”

“Can you hop?” I asked Grandma.

“I could before the Jack Daniels, but now I’m not so sure.”

Lula got on one side of Grandma, and I got on the other, and we scooped Grandma up and got her out the door, down the sidewalk, and to the Jeep. I was afraid to alley-oop her, so I dragged her up onto the passenger seat.

“It’s a shame we gotta go to the hospital,” Grandma said. “I feel like having some fun. I wouldn’t mind seeing some naked men.”

“How much Jack did you have?” Lula asked.

“I don’t need Jack to want to see naked men,” Grandma said. “You get to be my age, and there’s not a whole lot of opportunity. I signed up for one of those porn movies on TV once, and it was all girls. You only got to see the men from the back. What good is that?”

“I hear you,” Lula said.

Saint Francis Hospital is about three minutes from my parents’ house. I pulled into the emergency room drive-through, off-loaded Grandma into a wheelchair with Lula in charge, and hustled to the parking garage.

By the time I got back to the emergency room, Grandma had been wheeled off somewhere to be evaluated, and Lula was busy reading magazines.

“This is an excellent emergency room,” Lula said. “They got a good selection of magazines. And people tell me they know what they’re doing here when it comes to shootings and knifings, on account of they get so much practice.”

An hour later, they wheeled Grandma back to the waiting room with a big black boot thing on her foot.

“It’s broke, all right,” she said. “I got to see the X-ray.”

“What have you got on your foot?” Lula wanted to know.

“The bone was just cracked a little, so they wrapped my foot up in this boot thing instead of putting it in a cast. I can walk on it and everything.”

Grandma got out of the wheelchair and took the boot for a test-drive.

Step, stomp, step, stomp, step, stomp.

The boot came to mid calf, was foam-padded and held secure with thick Velcro straps. The bottom of the boot was two inches of hard molded plastic. When Grandma walked, she was tipped to one side, since one leg was two inches longer now than the other.

“I feel gimpy in this boot,” Grandma said. “And my butt cheeks don’t match up. One feels higher than the other. I can’t squeeze to keep the breezers in.”

“We’ll keep the windows open on the way home,” Lula said.

Grandma looked down at the boot. “It’s pretty nifty, though. I can’t wait to show this to your mother. I bet this could get us one of those handicap parking signs. And I got some pills for when the Jack Daniels wears off.”

I brought the Jeep around to the drive-through, boosted Grandma up into it, and drove her home. I’d called ahead, and my mother was waiting at curbside.

“Here she is,” I said, lowering Grandma down to my mother. “Almost as good as new.”

“For the love of Pete,” my mother said.

“I was doing a lunge, and I broke my foot,” Grandma told her. “But it’s only a little bit broke.”

“I have to go,” I said to my mother. “I have to get back to the office.”

“Can you walk?” my mother asked my grandmother.

“Of course I can walk,” Grandma said. “Look at this.”

Step, stomp, step, stomp, step, stomp.

“Whoops,” Grandma said. And she face-planted on the grass.

Lula and I jumped out of the Jeep and rushed over.

“It’s the dang boot,” Grandma said. “It’s got me all lopsided.”

CONNIE WAS AT her desk when we walked into the bonds office.

“We would have been here sooner,” Lula said, “but we had to go on a mission of mercy. Grandma Mazur broke her foot dancing to an exercise video, and we had to get her fixed up.”

“Is she okay?” Connie asked.

I took my usual seat in front of the desk. “Yes. They put her in an orthopedic boot and sent her home.”

“And we got more news,” Lula said. “We got good news, and we got bad news, and it’s all the same news. We found Vinnie.”

Connie’s eyebrows rose a couple inches. “Are you serious?”

“They’ve got him in a back apartment in Sunflower’s building on Stark Street,” I said. “Lula heard him through the door. They’ve got a guy in there with him, and there’s a guy at the entrance downstairs. There aren’t any bars on the back windows, and there’s a rusted fire escape, but you’d die trying to get Vinnie out that way.”

“Do you have any ideas?” Connie asked me.

“No. None. And I don’t think the stink bomb will work. They’ll haul Vinnie out of the building under armed guard, and they won’t let go of him.”

“We need a diversion,” Lula said. “We need to get the guard out of the apartment. Then someone can go in and drag Vinnie’s worthless ass out of there.”

“A diversion’s a good idea,” I said, “but how are we going to get Vinnie down the stairs and out the door past the door guard?”

“We could disguise him,” Lula said. “Put him in a wig and a dress or something.”

I looked at Connie. “Do you think that’ll fly?”

“Maybe if we have a diversion at the front door, too,” Connie said.

“I can divert the guy at the front door,” Lula said. “He likes me.”

“I’ll be the second diverter,” Connie said. “That leaves Stephanie to get Vinnie out.”

“How are you going to divert him enough for me to get Vinnie down the stairs? I don’t think a wig’s going to do it. And suppose you divert him out of the apartment, but he locks the door behind him? What then?”

“See, that’s the problem with you,” Lula said. “You’re bein’ a glass-is-half-empty person. One of my outstanding qualities is my positive personality. You’ve just gotta take precautions, like you need to bring a gun with bullets in it.”

I PULLED TO the curb in front of the bonds office at precisely nine o’clock. Connie was already there, and Lula slid to a stop behind me. I was dressed in black. I had a loaded gun pressed against my backbone, stuck into the back of my jeans. I had pepper spray in my pocket. I had my cell phone clipped to my jeans waistband, set to dial Rangeman. I had a stun gun also clipped to my jeans waistband. And I had premonitions of disaster. I had no confidence in the mission. Truth is, we sucked at this stuff. We were like the Three Stooges at Camp Commando. The only reason I was attempting it was because I knew Chet would spot me on Stark Street and send out a back up Rangeman car.