“Are you playing?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said, “but that could change.”

I felt my fingers curl into his shirt, and I made an effort to uncurl them. I put a couple inches between us, and I smoothed out the wrinkles I’d made.

“I need to find Vinnie,” I said.

Ranger looked over at the building. “Get in your car and lock the doors. I’ll go inside and look around.”

“I’m sure the funeral parlor has an alarm system.”

“Even with the best alarm system, there’s a ten to fifteen minute window before anyone responds. And in this part of town, the response is a lot longer . . . if at all.”

Ranger jogged to the back door, and within seconds, he had the door unlocked. He slipped inside, and a couple minutes later, I heard the alarm go off. I gripped the wheel and watched the building, keeping track of the time. Five minutes went by. Ten minutes. I had my teeth sunk into my lower lip, and I was thinking get out, get out, get out! The door opened at fourteen minutes. Ranger emerged alone and jogged back to the car.

“I’ll follow you home,” Ranger said. “I don’t want to talk here.”

I pulled away from the curb, and when I got to the corner, the stretch Lincoln slid to a stop in front of the funeral home and three men got out and went to the front door. Ranger and I drove past them and continued on down Stark.

RANGER WALKED ME to my apartment and stepped inside.

“Obviously, Vinnie wasn’t being held at Melon’s,” I said to him.

“The embalming room is in the basement, and it isn’t pretty. The upstairs rooms are being used as a cash drop. There’s a counting table and a safe in one of the rooms. The other rooms are storerooms. No sign of Vinnie.”

“What about Mickey Gritch? Did he make any more stops?”

“I checked with Chet. Mickey Gritch went straight home from Melon’s. Looks like he’s settled in for the night.” Ranger unzipped my sweatshirt. “We could be settled in for the night, too.”

I moved a step back from him. “Are you feeling domestic?”

The corners of his mouth softened into the smallest of smiles. “I’m feeling friendly.” He closed the distance between us, lifted my bag off my shoulder, and his focus moved from me to the bag.

“Are you carrying?” he asked. “This bag is heavy.”

“It’s the bottle.”

I took Uncle Pip’s bottle out of my bag and set it on the kitchen counter. Rex came out of his soup can house and looked through the glass aquarium at the bottle. His beady black eyes glistened, his whiskers whirred, and he put two little pink feet on the side of his cage. He blinked once and turned and scurried back into his soup can.

“Why are you carrying this bottle?” Ranger asked.

“This is the bottle I inherited from my Uncle Pip. It’s supposed to be lucky, and Lula decided we needed to carry it with us . . . just in case.”