Free Hard Eight by Janet Evanovich Page B

left them?”
    “I guess I could make a list.”
    “Jesus,” he said, “you’ve got a list. Not one or two people. A whole list. You have a whole list of people who might want to leave snakes on your doorknob.”
    “The last couple days have been sort of busy.”
    “Is that pizza in your hair?”
    “I accidentally rolled on Andy Bender’s lunch. He would be on the list. A guy named Martin Paulson isn’t too happy with me. There’s my ex-husband. Then I had an unfortunate encounter with Eddie Abruzzi.”
    That caught Morelli’s attention. “Eddie Abruzzi?”
    I told him about Evelyn and Annie and the Abruzzi connection.
    “I don’t suppose you’d listen to me if I told you to stay away from Abruzzi,” Morelli said.
    “I’m
trying
to stay away from Abruzzi.”
    Morelli grabbed me by the front of my shirt, pulled meto him, and kissed me. His tongue touched mine, and I felt liquid fire slide through my stomach and head south. He released me and turned to go.
    “Hey!” I said. “What was that?”
    “Temporary insanity. You drive me nuts.”
    And he stalked off down the hall and disappeared into the elevator.
     
    I took A shower and dressed in clean jeans and T-shirt. I did the makeup thing this time and put some gel in my hair. Sort of like locking the barn after the horses have escaped.
    I went into the kitchen and stared into the refrigerator for a while, but nothing materialized. No cake. No hot sausage sandwich. No macaroni and cheese magically appeared. I took a bag of chocolate chip cookies out of the freezer and ate one. You were supposed to bake them first, but that seemed like unnecessary effort.
    I’d talked to Annie’s best friend and that hadn’t given me a lot. Okay, so what would I do if I needed to protect my daughter from her father? Where would I go?
    I wouldn’t have a lot of money, so I’d need to rely on a friend or relative. I’d need to go far enough that my car wouldn’t be recognized, and I wouldn’t run the risk of bumping into Soder or one of his friends. This narrowed the search down to the entire world, except for the Burg.
    I was contemplating the world when my doorbell rang. I wasn’t expecting anyone, and I’d just received a bag of snakes, so I wasn’t all that crazy about answering the door. I looked out my peephole and grimaced. It was AlbertKloughn. But wait a minute, he was holding a pizza box.
Hello.
    I opened the door and gave a quick look up and down the hall. I was pretty sure there’d been four snakes in the bag . . . still, doesn’t hurt to keep your eyes open for renegade reptiles.
    “Hope I’m not disturbing anything,” Kloughn said, stretching his neck out to look around me into my apartment. “You aren’t entertaining or anything, are you? I didn’t know if you were living with anyone.”
    “What’s up?”
    “I’ve been thinking about the Soder case, and I have some ideas. I thought we could, like, brainstorm.”
    I looked down at the box he was holding.
    “I brought a pizza,” he said. “I didn’t know if you’d eaten yet. Do you like pizza? If you don’t like pizza I could get something else. I could get Mexican or Chinese or Thai . . .”
    Please, Lord, tell me this isn’t a date. “I’m sort of engaged.”
    He vigorously nodded his head. Up and down, up and down, like one of those dogs people put in their back car windows. “Absolutely. I knew you would be. Understood. I’m almost engaged, too. I have a girlfriend.”
    “Really?”
    He took a deep breath. “No. I just made that up.”
    I took the pizza box from him and dragged him into my apartment. I got some napkins and a couple beers, and we sat at my small dining room table and ate pizza.
    “What are these ideas you have about Evelyn Soder?”
    “I figure she’s with a friend, right? So she had to getin touch with the friend somehow. She had to tell her she was coming to stay. I figure she did this on the phone. So what we need is a phone