Hot Fudge (A Loretta Kovacs thriller) Page 14

  “This way,” Vissa said, pointing with her head to a walkway that led to a cement staircase. “The steps go down to the street.”

  They went as fast as they could with the cumbersome dog, but it was hard keeping a hold on him. His skin was loose, and his coat was slippery. Getting him down the stairs was like trying to carry a leaking sack of sand.

  “I want you to know one thing,” Vissa said, as she strained to hold up her end.

  “What’s that?” Loretta was trying to keep Dragon’s head from flopping around too much without dropping him.

  “I want you to know that I wasn’t trying to steal Marvelli away from you. That was never my intention. Ira Krupnick’s the one I really want.”

  Loretta’s eyes shot open. She almost dropped Dragon. “What did you say?”

  18

  “I don’t believe this.” Loretta was still reeling from Vissa’s revelation. She was sitting in the passenger seat of the rented Pontiac, Vissa, behind the wheel, racing down a steep San Francisco hill. As she sped through an intersection, the muffler hit bottom and scraped the pavement. “Hey, take it easy,” Loretta said.

  “Sorry.” Vissa had both hands on the wheel, every knuckle white. She was biting her bottom lip.

  Loretta watched Vissa’s face. Originally Loretta had thought that Vissa was a straight arrow when it came to parole work, but her confession had come as a complete shock. Vissa just didn’t seem like the type who’d get involved with a jumper.

  “Stop staring at me like that,” Vissa complained. “You know what it’s like to be in love. You do stupid things.”

  “Not that stupid,” Loretta said. “You told me yourself that Krupnick was dangerous. Why would you ever get involved with him?”

  Vissa cringed. “Smart women, stupid choices?” Loretta frowned. “Too easy. Try again.”

  A loud groan came from the backseat. Loretta peered over the headrest and saw Dragon trying to untangle his legs and sit up. His eyes were open, and his nose was wet.

  “I think he’s coming to,” Loretta said. “He looks a lot better than he did before.”

  “You think he still needs a vet?” Vissa asked. “Maybe if we hold on to him, he’ll lead us to his mistress.”

  “That’s not a bad idea. Forget the vet. Go straight to the icecream plant,” Loretta said. “Now getting back to Krupnick.”

  “Come on, don’t beat me up with this.”

  “I’m just trying to understand,” Loretta said. “You fell in love with him, then you set it up so that he could escape?”

  Vissa was nodding guiltily. “That’s why I left him with Marvelli and didn’t tell him who Ira was. I knew Marvelli would just assume he was all right and let him walk away.”

  “But why did you arrest him in the first place if you were in love with him?”

  “I was mad at him. But by the time we got to the office, I had changed my mind.”

  Loretta noticed that Vissa referred to Krupnick as Ira. She also recognized the distressed note in Vissa’s voice. Loretta had heard it in her own more than a few times. The girl had it bad for that man, and in this case that definitely wasn’t good.

  “You know how it is,” Vissa said. “You try to be intelligent about men. You try to stay away from the jerks, the ones you know are gonna be nothing but trouble. You look for the nice guys, the ones like Marvelli. But then someone like Ira Krupnick comes along, and you know he’s all wrong for you, but you can’t help yourself. There’s just something about him.”

  “And you thought you could change him,” Loretta said half-sarcastically. She’d once tried to do the same thing herself with a computer nerd she’d dated once upon a time.

  “Yeah, I suppose I did think that,” Vissa grumbled. Her cheeks were flushed from embarrassment.

  They fell silent for a moment, but Loretta just had to ask. “He was great in bed, right?”

  The color of Vissa’s cheeks went a few shades toward scarlet. “Yeah,” she admitted, “something like that.” She jerked the steering wheel and took a hard left onto a three-lane major artery, making the tires screech. “I feel like a real idiot.”

  Loretta sighed. “You’re not the only one.”

  Sometimes she wondered if men were just a bad idea in general. They weren’t like ice cream—they weren’t guaranteed to make you happy. Although, like ice cream, sometimes they made you regret that you’d had too much of them. At one time Loretta had thought about giving up men entirely—or at least until they came out with a new and improved model. But then good things started to happen with Marvelli, and her feelings changed. She glanced at Vissa’s forlorn expression and wondered if perhaps there wasn’t a little bit of Ira Krupnick in every man.

  “How far are we from the plant?” Loretta asked. The tone of her own voice startled her. She sounded like someone in distress, but someone else. She was anxious to find Marvelli before something happened to him. If it hasn’t happened already, she fretted.

  “Arnie and Barry’s is just across the bridge, except I can’t find a damn entrance for the freeway.”

  They were on a major thoroughfare full of stores and businesses, and Loretta could see the elevated freeway on their left, but there were no signs that showed where they could get on. They drove along this avenue for more than a mile, Vissa cursing all the way. Loretta clawed the upholstery at every interminable red light they had to endure. Finally Loretta spotted a red, white, and blue sign for Interstate 80.

  “There! There!” Loretta pointed frantically. “Turn! Left!”

  “I see it, I see it,” Vissa said.

  As soon as Vissa made the turn, a big green sign with white letters hanging over the road pointed the way to SAN FRANCISCO BAY BRIDGE and OAKLAND.

  “Take this right,” Loretta shouted. “Right here!”

  “I’m not blind, Loretta.” Vissa was getting annoyed with her, but Loretta didn’t care. Marvelli’s life was at stake.

  Vissa steered the car onto the entrance ramp, and soon they were sailing down the freeway with sparkling expanses of deep blue water on either side of them. Oakland was in the distance at the end of the long bridge. The women fell into a tense silence. The sounds of the road and the cars around them became white noise, buffering their separate anxieties. Only the roar of an occasional trailer truck invaded their private thoughts.

  “Can I ask you something?” Loretta said after they had been on the bridge for a few minutes

  “What’s that?” Vissa kept her eyes on the road.

  “What did you intend to do when you found Krupnick? Before all this happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Were you going to arrest him or run away with him?” Vissa gave her a dirty look.

  But Loretta wanted to know. “You can tell me the truth. I don’t care.”

  Vissa made a sour face. “I don’t know what I was going to do. I just wanted to find him.”

  Loretta nodded, her brows slanted back in sympathy. “I know just what you mean.”

  From the backseat Dragon made a sound that seemed like a yawn, a groan, and a sigh all in one. It was exactly how Loretta felt.

  • • •

  By the time they reached the Arnie and Barry’s plant, it was quitting time, and workers were walking through the parking lot in small groups, heading for their cars. Some of the women were brushing their hair as they walked, fluffing it out after having it imprisoned in hair nets all day. A tall bald man had kept his light blue lab coat on, the tails flying behind him as he hurried across the lot. Most of the employees were too busy smoking and gabbing to notice Loretta and Vissa moving against the tide back toward the plant. And if any of them noticed the grimace on Loretta’s face or the fact that she was carrying something heavy under a black jeans jacket, they didn’t show it. All they wanted was to get home.

  “God, this dog is heavy,” Loretta grunted through clenched teeth. Dragon was curled in her arms like a puppy, his muzzle snuggled up against her breast. She shifted her shoulde
rs to get his nose off her nipple. “Don’t get any ideas, junior,” she warned.

  “I think he likes you,” Vissa said.

  “Lucky me.”

  “Go that way,” Vissa said as they came up to the building. All the workers were coming out of one doorway. Unfortunately it locked whenever it slammed shut, and now Loretta and Vissa had to wait for someone to come out.

  “Come on, come on,” Loretta said. “My back is breaking.”

  Dragon groaned contentedly.

  Finally the door opened, and two men in light blue lab coats came out. One was too busy lighting a cigarette to pay any attention to them, and the other just didn’t care.

  “Good night,” Vissa said to them with a smile.

  “Good night,” Loretta echoed, forcing a smile.

  “ ’Night,” the man with the cigarette said, not even looking at them.

  The other man was in his own world, heading off by himself. Vissa held the door open, and Loretta rushed into a long corridor with cinder-block walls painted marigold yellow. A few more workers were coming down the hall, the stragglers, but like the others they were tired from a day’s work and didn’t pay much attention to the two women.

  “Maybe they think we’re the cleaning ladies,” Vissa whispered.

  “I don’t care what they think,” Loretta whispered back. “I have to put this damn dog down.”

  “Not here,” Vissa said.

  “I know that,” Loretta said, beginning to get testy.

  “Let me find an empty room,” Vissa said. As soon as the last of the workers had passed them by, she started trying doors at random, hoping to find one that was unlocked. The first few she tried were locked tight.

  “Come on, come on,” Loretta urged. “I’m dying here.”

  Dragon moved his nose back onto Loretta’s nipple.

  “Stop it!” she snapped, and shrugged him off.

  The dog emitted a weak cry from under the jacket.

  “Oh, break my heart,” Loretta said sarcastically. She didn’t want to admit that she was beginning to like him.

  “In here,” Vissa hissed from farther down the hall. She’d found an open door.

  Loretta speed-walked over to the door and slipped in, setting Dragon down on the concrete floor as soon as she was inside. “Oy, my back!” she muttered. As she bent backward to stretch, she realized where she was: the factory floor where the big vats of ice cream stood. The lighting was dim now, only a few fluorescent lights casting long shadows across the floor. The mural of smiling Arnie and Barry under a rainbow took on a sinister aspect in this light. Loretta studied their faces. They were both schmucks, she thought angrily.

  Vissa found a huge spindle of plastic baling cord that was used to tie the stacked trays of pints together after they were shrink-wrapped. She helped herself to a twelve-foot length, cutting it off with the sharp metal nib that was attached to the spindle.

  “I’m making a leash for Dragon,” she said as she doubled the cord and tied one end to the dog’s collar. “Okay, boy, let’s go find Marvelli.” She ruffled the dog’s ears, trying to encourage him. “Come on, let’s find Sunny.”

  “Hang on,” Loretta said, her voice echoing through the cavernous space. She focused on the gray metal door with the red PRIVATE sign. That was Krupnick’s room, the place where he kept the secret ingredient for Elmer Fudge Whirl. Loretta remembered the stealthy way Krupnick had added his secret ingredient to the vats the first time she’d been here. She also remembered how the real Arnie Bloomfield had surreptitiously dumped a pint of Fudge Whirl into the trash back at the Jump Squad in Newark. And how Barry had kept Dorie from serving it at his house. And how Krupnick had insisted she have some back at his place. She glanced at Dragon who was still woozy after having devoured a whole bowl, which was the same bowl that Krupnick had given to her. Dragon had eaten the ice cream the same way Marvelli always ate it, like there was no tomorrow. She gazed across the factory floor, and her eye caught the little golf-cart contraption that shuttled the stacks of pints out to the freezer. Loretta tapped her upper lip with her index finger. She had to find out what the hell was in that ice cream.

  “Loretta, let’s go,” Vissa called to her in a stage whisper. “One minute,” Loretta said, as she walked toward the golf cart.

  “What’re you doing?” Vissa said. “We have to find Marvelli.”

  “This won’t take long,” Loretta said with determination. She had a sneaky suspicion that she knew what was behind that door, but she had to make sure.

  “Loretta, what’re you doing?”

  But Loretta was already in the driver’s seat of the cart. She turned the key in the ignition and stomped on the only pedal on the floor. The golf cart jerked forward, the empty trailer jolting into its rear end. The cart was heading straight for one of the vats. Loretta spun the wheel and changed course. The golf cart stopped bucking and the ride evened out, but by now Loretta had her sights set on that gray metal door. The PRIVATE sign was in her crosshairs. “Loretta!” Vissa hissed.

  Dragon sensed the excitement and lifted his sleepy head to track the golf cart whizzing across the factory floor.

  “Loretta!”

  SMASH! The cart plowed into the metal door, a head-on collision.

  Loretta was jolted out of her seat, hit the steering wheel with her belly, then plopped back into place. She blinked, wondering for a second if she was hurt, but she didn’t feel any pain, so she decided she was okay. The door, however, had a huge dent in it. Loretta tried to find the gear shift so she could put the cart into reverse, but there didn’t seem to be one. She got out and pushed the cart away from the door until there was enough clearance for her to make a U-turn.

  “I feel like I’ve been here before,” Vissa said, coming over with Dragon to survey the damage.

  “Yup,” Loretta said tersely, as she got back into the cart. “It worked the last time. No reason why it won’t now.”

  She turned the cart around and drove all the way back to the far end of the room. “Look out,” she called to Vissa, as she came barreling across the floor, heading for the door again.

  “Be careful!” Vissa shouted.

  But Loretta was a golf-cart kamikaze with just one objective in mind.

  “Be careful!” Vissa yelled. SMASH!

  The cart knocked the door off its hinges, breaking the dead-bolt. It kept on going and got through the doorway, but the caboose cart was too wide, and it brought the train to an abrupt halt. Loretta was jolted out of her seat again, and this time the steering wheel knocked the wind out of her.

  “Loretta! Loretta! Are you all right?” Vissa called to her, unable to get into the room through the pileup.

  Dragon managed to crawl under the wreckage and make it into Krupnick’s room, barking his high-pitched bark as he jumped into the golf cart and put his paws on Loretta’s chest. He was barking in her face, showing doggy concern.

  Loretta scratched his head to settle him down. “I’m okay, boy. Don’t worry,” she said. She was going to be bruised and sore from this, but she didn’t think anything was broken.

  She sat there for a few moments to catch her breath, and gradually she began to focus on what was in the room. She blinked several times to clear her vision, expecting a small room with a desk and file cabinets and a bin full of sugary granules, the secret ingredient, but that wasn’t what she saw at all. The room was much bigger than she’d expected, and the only things in it were barrels, heavy brown cardboard barrels with metal lids. There must’ve been almost a hundred of them stacked three high straight up to the ceiling. Each one had POWERED SUGAR stenciled on it.

  Loretta got out of the cart, Dragon trailing behind her. The lid on the closest barrel had been pried open and was just resting on top. Loretta lifted it and peered inside. Two metal measuring cups were half-buried in white powder.

  “What is it?” Vissa said as she climbed over the carts to get inside.

  “I’m not sure,” Loretta said. She licked her pinkie and
touched the powder, then brought her finger to her lips and tasted it. It wasn’t sweet. She remembered the taste from her days as an assistant warden. Prisoners were always smuggling in contraband. No wonder Elmer Fudge Whirl was so addictive: The secret ingredient was heroin.

  “All right, put your hands up,” someone shouted.

  Loretta looked up to see Barry Utley moving out of the shadows behind the stacks of barrels. He must have come in another way. He was holding a gun, a Luger.

  “I said, put your hands up. Both of you.” His face was gray, and his eyes were bugging out of his head. The gun was shaking in his hand.

  Loretta looked back at Vissa, who had just made it over the pileup. Vissa shrugged. Barry had the drop on them, so they had no choice but to do what he said.

  Dragon flopped onto his haunches, looked up at Loretta, and whined for attention.

  “Shut up!” Barry snapped. “Stupid flea bag.”

  Dragon started to whimper.

  Loretta’s nostrils flared. “Take that back,” she said. Barry stared at her. “What did you say?”

  “I said take it back.”

  Barry’s eyes became wild, and his gun hand was shaking more than before. A twisted grin grew across his fleshy face like a root. “What did you say?” he repeated.

  19

  Marvelli was in the dark, his hands cuffed behind him, his knees tucked up toward his chest. His face was drenched in sweat beneath the leather mask, and he wasn’t getting enough air because the nose holes weren’t exactly generous. He was lying on his side in the trunk of some big sedan. He didn’t get a real good look at it, but he was pretty sure it was an American-made car, the color sort of a taupe brown. Krupnick had shoved him in as soon as Sunny unlocked the trunk. That must have been at least a half hour ago. Maybe more. It was hard to tell.

  The rumble of the engine vibrated the trunk floor, and every time the transmission shifted gears, he felt it. He could also hear the whir of the tires on the pavement. He imagined them spinning right under him. Every so often the car stopped.