"I'm going to the kitchen to get some hot gravy," I told everyone. "Joyce, why don't you help me?"

I closed the kitchen door behind us, nuked the gravy boat, and turned to Joyce. "What's going on?"

"I realized I was going about this wrong. We're both looking for Dickie, right? But you have Studman out there working with you. That gives you a real advantage over me. So instead of forcing you to butt out, I'm going to stick to you like glue. You and Studman will find Dickie for me."

"Ranger won't turn Dickie over to you."

"I'll worry about that when he finds him. Ranger’s a man, and I know what to do with a man. You get them undressed, and they're all basically the same. Scrotum and ego. If you stroke them, they're happy. And I don't see you doing much stroking with Ranger. Looks to me like he's open season."

I took the gravy boat out of the microwave and carried it back to the table. Ranger's chair was empty.

"Where's Ranger?" I asked Grandma.

"He said he had business to take care of, but he left you the keys to the car. They're by your plate. He said he'd catch up with you later."

I put the keys in my pocket and wondered about Ranger's needs. It wasn't as if I was fulfilling them. And it wasn't as if he was a low-testosterone kind of guy.

"That's some outfit you got on," Elmer said to Joyce. "I bet you put out."

"Behave yourself," Joyce said.

"And you got a nice pair of melons there. Are they real?"

Joyce smacked Elmer on the head and his toupee flew off and landed on the table in front of my mother. She jumped in her seat and beat the toupee to death with the empty wine bottle.

"Omigod," my mother said, looking at the mangled hair. "It startled me. I thought it was a giant spider."

Elmer reached over, retrieved his hair, and settled it back onto his head. "This used to happen all the time at the home too."

I made it through the chicken and the chocolate cake. I helped my mom clear the table and do the dishes, and that brought me up to seven-thirty.

"Gotta go," I said to my mom. "Things to do."

"Me too," Joyce said, following me to the door.

I couldn't have Joyce tail me to my meeting at the Marriott, so as I saw it I had two options. The first option would be to handcuff her at gunpoint to a dining room chair. The second would be to lose her on the road. I decided to go with option two. Mostly because I had the box of bullets in my purse, but no gun.

Joyce was driving a black Mercedes sedan, which I was pretty sure represented husband number two. She got behind the wheel and gave me a thumbs-up. I got into Rangers Porsche and responded with a stiff middle finger.

I drove off, and after a block I realized Joyce wasn't following. I checked her out in my rearview mirror and saw that she was out of the car, looking under the hood. I turned around and pulled alongside her.

"What s up?" I asked.

"I don't know much about cars," Joyce said, "but I think someone took my engine."

I parked in the hotel garage and walked to the hotel. It was a few minutes before eight, and there was a corporate party going on in the ballroom. Lots of women in cocktail dresses and men in suits congregating in the public areas. Lots of drinking and laughing and flirting. I suspected some of it would get nasty in a couple of hours.

The bar was packed, but Smullen wasn't there. I found a chair in the lobby and waited. After half an hour, I did a tour of the bar and restaurant. Still no Smullen. I called Ranger at nine.

"I've been stood up," I told him.

"Lucky you," Ranger said.

"Did you take Joyce's engine?"

"My instructions were to disable the car, but one of my men bet Hal a burger he couldn't get the engine out. So Hal removed the engine."

I knew Hal. He'd been with RangeMan for a couple of years, and he was one of my favorite people. He looked like a stegosaurus, and he fainted at the sight of blood.

I left the hotel and walked past a few desperate souls hunkered in a corner by the entrance, trying to smoke without freezing their asses off. No one coming or going to the parking garage. Just me, my steps echoing on the cement floor. I approached the Cayenne, and Ranger moved out of a shadow.

"I'll drive," he said. "I want to make sure no one's waiting for you in your apartment."

"I appreciate the thought, but I wasn't going home. I was going to hang out in the cemetery and see if Diggery relieves Lorraine Birnbaum of her diamond."

"It's seventeen degrees," Ranger said. "If Diggery is desperate enough to rob graves in this weather, the least you can do is let him have the diamond."

Ranger crossed Broad and turned onto Hamilton. A dark figure scuttled from between parked cars, and quick as a flash it scooped something off the road with a shovel. The figure was momentarily caught wide-eyed in Ranger's headlights. And then the figure was gone, sucked back between the parked cars, lost in the night.

I gasped and did a whole body shiver.

"Someone you know?" Ranger asked.

"Crazy Carl Coglin. He's on my FTA list."

"Babe."

If I was any kind of bounty hunter, I would have chased Coglin down, but I really didn't want to see what was on the shovel. So I decided to go with Ranger's philosophy. If Coglin needed roadkill that badly, the least I could do was let him keep it.

Three traffic lights later, Ranger cut off Hamilton and parked in my lot. He looked up at my dark apartment windows, shut the Cayenne off, and turned to face me. "Tell me about your kitchen discussion with Joyce."

"She realized you would be helping me find Dickie and decided it was smarter to follow me around than to go off on her own. So she's my new best friend.

"I told her I didn't think it was likely you'd turn Dickie over to her, and she said she had a way with men. She said men were basically scrotum and ego, and they were happy when they got stroked."

Ranger reached across the console and traced a line down the side of my face. His fingertip was warm and his touch was gentle. "I'd like to think I'm more than just scrotum and ego, but she was right about the stroking."

An SUV crept into the lot and parked behind us.

Ranger looked back at it. "That's Tank. He's giving me a ride back to RangeMan after I check your apartment. I'll leave the Cayenne with you."

Caesar rang my bell precisely at nine a.m. He was dressed in RangeMan black, and he was slimmer than most of Ranger's men. Caesar wouldn't single-handedly haul an engine out of a Mercedes. I placed him in his late twenties. He handed a tote bag plus winter jacket over to me and politely stepped into my apartment.

"I'll just be a minute," I told him. "Make yourself at home."

He nodded, but he remained standing just inside the door, hands folded in front of him. Parade rest.

I'd worked for RangeMan once before, and Ranger's housekeeper, Ella, knew my size. She'd sent black leather cross-trainers, black cargo pants, a long-sleeved black T-shirt with the RangeMan logo in magenta, and a black webbed canvas belt. The black winter jacket was identical to the one Ranger wore with the logo in black.

I got dressed and looked at myself in the mirror. I was mini-Ranger. I said good-bye to Rex, locked the apartment, and followed Caesar to an immaculate black Ford Explorer. No logo.

Caesar drove to a large rambling colonial north of town. The grounds were perfectly landscaped even in winter, and the house had a sweeping view of the river. We parked in the circular drive, Caesar took a clipboard from the back-seat, and we went to work.

"The owners are off-site," Caesar said, keying us into the house. "A vacation in Naples. We're installing a new security system while they're away. The husband does a lot of travel, and the wife stays home with two school-age children. So we need to make the system meet the wife's needs. Ranger thought you would be helpful since you see things from a woman's perspective.'"