low profile

"...Who we breaking in on, anyway?"

"Hannibal Ramos."

"Say what? You mean like the brother of the dead Homer Ramos? And the number one son of the Gun King, Alexander Ramos? Are you freakin' nuts?"

"He's probably not home."
"How are you gonna find out?"
"I'm going to ring his doorbell."
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[excerpt, Hot Six. Janet Evanovich. 2000. St. Martin's Press. N. Y.]
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...Lula and I stood on the sidewalk and studied Hannibal's house. Drapes still drawn. Very quiet. The houses on either side of Hannibal were quiet, too. Sunday afternoon. Everyone was out at the mall.

"You sure this is the right address?" Lula asked. "This don't look like no big-ass arms-dealer house. I was expecting something like the Taj Mahal. Like where the Donald lives."

"Doanld Trump doesn't live in the Taj Mahal."
"He does when he's in Atlantic City. This turkey don't even have no gun turrets. What kind of arms dealer is he, anyway?"
"Low profile."
"Fuckin' A."

...I hadn't found any weapons in the upstairs rooms. Since I knew, firsthand, that Hannibal had at least one gun, this probably meant he had the gun with him. Hannibal didn't seem like the kind of guy to leave his armaments in the cookie jar.

...I went to the refrigerator and looked at the wrapper on the cold cuts. They'd been bought at the ShopRite two days earlier. "This is really creepy," I said to Lula. "Someone's living in this house." And my unspoken thought was that they could be home any minute.

"Yeah, and he don't know much about cold cuts," Lula said. "He got turkey breast and Swiss cheese when he could have got salami and provolone."

...There was the sound of a lock clicking open,a nd Lula and I both stood up straight.
"Uh-oh," Lula said.
The door opened. Cynthia Lotte stepped into the room and squinted at us in the dim light. "What the hell are you doing here?" she asked.

...She kicked at a pair of red silk paisley boxers lying on the floor. "You see these boxers?" She took aim and fired five rounds into the shorts. "These were Homer's."
"Dang," Lula said. "Don't hold back."
"He could be very charming," Cynthia said. "But he had a short attention span when it came to women."

...
Cynthia opened the door and flicked the light on in the garage. And there it was . . . the silver Porsche.
"My Porsche! My porsche!" Cynthia yelped. "I never thought I'd see it again." She stopped yelping and wrinkled her nose. "What's that smell?"
... Cynthis ran to the car. "I hope he left me the keys. I hope --" She stopped short and looked in the car window. "Someone's sleeping in my car."
Lula and I grimaced.
And Cynthis started screaming. "He's dead! He's dead! He's dead in my Porsche!"

..."Do you recognize him?" I asked Cynthia.
"No. I never saw him before. This is terrible. How could this happen? There's blood on my upholstery."

..."Hey, wait a minute," I said. "This is a crime scene. You should leave everything alone."
"The hell I will," Cynthia said. "this is my car, and I'm driving away with it. I work for a lawyer. I know what happens. They'll impound this car until the world comes to an end. And then his wife'll probably get it."

------------ ... The garage door slid closed, and Lula and I were left with the dead guy.
Lula shifted foot to foot. "Think we should say something over the deceased? I don't like to disrespect the dead."
"I think we should get the hell out of here."
"Amen," Lula said, and she made the sign of the cross.
"I thought you were Baptist."
"Yeah, but we don't got any hand signals for an occasion like this."

-30-