“Well, I guess our business is done here,” Lula said. “Now what?”

“Now we ride around and try to spot Butch.”

And we get out of the parking lot before someone remembers Lula was the one who opened the gate.

“I kind of worked up an appetite being around all those cows,” Lula said, climbing into the Jeep. “I wouldn’t mind getting a burger.”

I plugged the key into the ignition. “After we find Butch.”

“What are we gonna do if we find him?” Lula wanted to know. “Are you gonna run him over with the Jeep? Looks to me like that’s the only way you’ll catch him. He’s as big as one of those cows.”

I drove out of the lot, turned at the corner, and stopped to let a cow cross the street in front of me.

“I bet this happens all the time,” Lula said. “These people are probably used to having cows in their yards. It’s probably like living next to the jail. I bet there’s people escaping from the jail all the time, too.”

Anything was possible, but for all the time I’ve lived in Trenton, which was all my life, I’ve never heard of cows making a run for it out of the packing plant.

Two cop cars raced through an intersection one street over. I could hear men shouting to one another, and I heard a cow bellow not far off. A man bolted from between two houses with a cow hot on his heels. The guy scrambled on top of a car, and the cow ran off in another direction.

I doubled back to the plant and spotted Butch getting into his car. The lot was filled with crazed cows and crazed cow catchers, so I decided to follow Butch and attempt a capture somewhere else.

Butch took Broad to Hamilton, found his way to Cluck-in-a-Bucket, and went straight to the drive-through window. He was driving a white Taurus that was a bunch of years old. Easy to follow.

“This is enough to give me religion,” Lula said. “How good is this? We follow some idiot to Cluck-in-a-Bucket. Just when I’m hungry, too. I bet it’s the bottle. You got your bottle, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I knew it,” Lula said. “The bottle’s working for us.”

Butch put his order in, pulled up to the next window, and I hung back.

“I got a order,” Lula said to me. “Pull up to the window.”

“I’m not getting stuck in the drive-through. If he parks, you can go inside and get your order while I make the capture. If he leaves with his food, you’ll have to wait.”

“Okay, I could do that,” Lula said. “That sounds like a plan.”

Butch got his food and parked nose-in, facing the side of the building. Lula jumped out of the Jeep and hustled inside, and I parked directly behind Butch, blocking his exit. My first choice was to talk to him and convince him to come downtown with me. My second choice was to give him a shot with my stun gun and handcuff him to his car. Then I’d pay a tow truck to drag him to the police station. I’d still be way ahead. Ordinarily, I’d stun a guy and Lula and I would wrestle him into my backseat. Since Butch was three hundred pounds soaking wet, wrestling wasn’t practical.