“I don't remember.”
Oh boy.
He flopped down on the couch. “This apartment is depressing. It makes me, like, nervous. How can you stand to live here?”
“Do you want coffee, or what?”
“Yes! I want coffee and I want it now.” His voice ratcheted up a notch. Definitely yelling now. “You can't expect me to wait forever for coffee!”
I slammed a mug down on the kitchen counter, slopped some coffee in it, and shoved it at Mooner. Then I dialed Morelli.
“I need drugs,” I said to Morelli. “You have to get me some drugs.”
“You mean like antibiotic?”
“No. Like marijuana. I flushed all Mooner's drugs down the toilet last night, and now I hate him. He's completely PMS.”
“I thought the plan was to dry him out.”
“It isn't worth it. I like him better when he's high.”
“Hang in there,” Morelli said. And he hung up.
“This is like bogus coffee, dude,” Mooner said. “I need a latte.”
“Fine! Let's go get a damn latte.” I grabbed my bag and keys and shoved Mooner out the door.
“Hey, I need shoes, man,” Mooner said.
I performed an exaggerated eye roll and sighed really loudly while Mooner grumped back into the apartment to get his shoes. Great. I wasn't even strung out and now I was PMSing, too.
Stephanie Plum 7 - Seven Up
5
SITTING IN A coffeehouse leisurely sipping a latte wasn't on my morning schedule, so I opted for the McDonald's drive-through, where the breakfast menu listed french vanilla lattes and pancakes. They weren't Grandma-caliber pancakes, but they weren't bad, either, and they were easier to come by.
The sky was overcast, threatening rain. No surprise there. Rain is de rigueur for Jersey in April. Steady, gray drizzle that encourages statewide bad hair and couch potato mentality. In school they used to teach us April showers bring May flowers. April showers also bring twelve-car pileups on the Jersey Turnpike and swollen, snot-clogged sinuses. The upside to this is that we frequently have reason to shop for new cars in Jersey, and we're recognized worldwide for our distinctive nasal version of the English language.
“So how's your head?” I asked Mooner on the way home.
“Filled with latte. My head is mellow, dude.”
“No, I mean how are the twelve stitches you have in your head?”
Mooner felt along the Band-Aid. “Feels okay.” He sat for a moment with his lips slightly parted and his eyes searching the back recesses of his mind, and then a light flicked on. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I was shot by the scary old lady.”
That's the good part about smoking pot all your life . . . no short-term memory. Something horrible happens to you and ten minutes later you can't remember a thing.
Of course, that's also the bad part about smoking pot, because when disaster strikes, like your friend goes missing, there's the possibility that important messages and events are lost in the haze. And there's the possibility that you could hallucinate a face in the window when the shot was actually fired by a passing car.
In the case of the Mooner, the possibility was a good probability.
I drove past Dougie's house to make sure it hadn't burned down while we slept.
“Everything looks okay,” I said.
“Looks lonely,” Mooner said.