20 Takedown Twenty Read Online Free PDF Page B

orange. Orange is a good all-purpose color. It’s the new neutral. And it goes good with my
favorite
color, which is leopard. I did a lot of accessorizing with leopard. I re-covered my most comfy chair in leopard, and I got a leopard bedspread. Now, if we want to talk about
your
apartment, it’s pretty bare-ass. You might want me to help you redecorate someday being that it’s one of my hobbies.”
    “I’ll think about it.”
    “It could even be a bonding experience.”
    “You don’t think we’re bonded enough?”
    “There’s all kinds of bonding,” Lula said. “This would be decorator bonding. We never done that before.”

FIVE
    CONNIE LOOKED UP from her computer when Lula and I walked into the bonds office. “How’d it go?”
    “We got skunked for the day,” Lula said. “We met the girlfriend, but we didn’t see no Sunny.”
    “You should try later tonight,” Connie said. “He has to be staying somewhere, and it obviously isn’t in his apartment on Fifteenth Street.”
    “Stephanie got a hot date tonight,” Lula said. “She can’t be staking out Sunny. She gotta be concentrating on Ranger.”
    “It’s not a date,” I said. “It’s work.” I was almost certain of it.
    A black shadow scuttled past the large plate glass window that faced the street, and we all sucked in air.
    “What was that?” Lula asked. “That better not be what I’m thinking it was, because I’m thinking it was something scares the heck out of me.”
    The front door banged open, and Joe’s Grandma Bella marched in. “I thought I would find you here,” she said, glaring at me.
    Her gray hair was pulled back into a bun. Her brows were thick and black. Her eyes were fierce, like the eyes of an eagle about to snatch up an unsuspecting rabbit and rip it to shreds.
    “I put the eye on you!” Bella said, pointing her finger at me.
    Connie ducked down behind her desk, and Lula jumped away and pressed herself against the wall.
    “You’re not supposed to be giving people the eye,” I said to Bella. “I’m going to tell Joe’s mother on you.”
    “Joe’s mother give you good too,” Bella said. “You no friend of this family. You hunt down Sunny.”
    “It’s my job.”
    “
My
job to give you the eye. Stop you in your tracks.” She scrunched up her face. “You ready?”
    I blew out a sigh. “Yeah.”
    Bella pulled her lower eyelid down with her finger and stared at me.
    “Okay,” she said, releasing the lid. “I got you for sure. I give you a big one.” She shook her finger at me. “You get new job.”
    She whirled around, marched out the door, and stalked down the street.
    “I think I wet my pants,” Lula said.
    Connie came out from behind her desk. “That is one crazy old lady.”
    “So what did she do to you?” Lula asked me. “Do you feel any different?”
    “No.”
    “Well, I don’t see your teeth falling out yet. And you haven’t grown a tail like a donkey,” Lula said. “That’s gotta be a good sign.”
    I hiked my messenger bag up onto my shoulder. “There’s no such thing as the eye.”
    “Sure,” Lula said. “We know that. But just in case, you might want to stop by the church and burn a candle or something.”

    It was a little after five when I got home. I hung my bag on a hook in the foyer and went into the kitchen. I said hello to Rex, asked him about his day, and gave him another Ritz cracker. Being that Rex lives in an aquarium and not much goes on, he didn’t have a lot to say.
    I looked around my kitchen and living room and had to admit there might be something to Lula’s assessment of my decorating. I really hadn’t done much to spruce things up after the last explosion when Ranger’s friend blew himself up in my foyer. I added
Decorate apartment to make it a special place
to my mental to-do list, then tabled the project for a better time.
    I wasn’t sure if my Ranger date involved dinner, so I made myself a peanut butter and olive sandwich. I know this combination