THE LAST PEEP.

Janet Evanovich.

A Stephanie Plum story.

FIRST APPEARANCE: One for the Money, 1994.

Janet Evanovich struck gold with her lady bounty hunter Stephanie Plum. Readers and critics alike hailed both appearances on the scene with open arms and enthusiasm. Having appeared in five novels to date, Stephanie-and her creator-show no sign of slowing down and continue to forge their own path in the mystery genre, rather than follow someone who came before. Such originality is welcome, and refreshing.

This story first appeared in the Mary Higgins Clark anthology The Plot Thickens.

"Oh-oh," Lula said. "There's something crawling on me. I think it's big and black and ugly. And it's not my boyfriend, you see what I'm saving?"

Lula is a former hooker turned bounty hunter in training. She looks like George Foreman with hair by Shirley Temple, and she has the disposition of a '54 Buick. Lots of power under the hood, headlights the size of basketb.a.l.l.s, plus you can hear her coming a mile away.

I don't look at all like George Foreman. I'm more Wonder Woman with a B cup. I'm the bounty hunter who's training Lula, but the truth is, I'm not exactly the bounty hunter from h.e.l.l. A year ago, I blackmailed my bail bondsman cousin, Vinnie, into giving me this job, and now I'm going one day at a time, hoping the bad guys are all out of bullets.

"This is your fault," Lula said. "You're the one wanted to see what was in this dumb-a.s.s cellar. Let's go down those rickety stairs and have a look, you said. Let's see if Sammy the Squirrel is down there. And then slam the door got closed and locked, and you drop your dumb flashlight and can't find it, and here we are in dark so thick I can smell it. Here we are standing on a dirt floor with things crawling on us."

"I told you to be careful of the door! I told you to make sure it stayed open!"

"Well, excuse me, Ms. Stephanie Plum," Lula said. "I was concentrating on not breaking my neck on the first step which happens to have a board missing."

"We should feel around for a light switch," I said. "There must be a light switch here someplace."

"I'm not feeling nothing. I'm not putting my hands to places I can't see."

"Then give me your gun. Maybe I can blast the lock off the door."

"I don't have no gun. I'm wearing spandex. I'm making a fashion statement here. I haven't got no room for gun bulges. I thought it was your turn to carry the gun."

"I didn't think I'd need it. I wasn't planning on shooting anyone today."

"Yow!" Lula said. "There's something just dropped on me again, and it's moving. s.h.i.t! There's another one. There's things all over me, I'm telling you. I bet they're spiders. I bet this place is filled with spiders."

"Just brush them off," I said. "Spiders won't hurt you."

I could be real brave as long as they weren't dropping on me.

"Ahhhh!" Lula yelled. "I hate spiders. There's nothing I hate more than spiders. Let me out of this place. Where's the door? Where's the freaking door?"

The door was at the top of the stairs, but the door was locked. We'd already tried the door.

"Outta my way," Lula said, somewhere in the blackness. "I'm not staying down here with no spiders."

Stomp, stomp, stomp. I could hear her on the stairs. And then crash! There was the sound of splintering wood and hinges popping. And a shaft of light cut through the dark.

I ran up the stairs and angled myself through the broken door.

Lula was spread-eagle on her back, on the floor, breathing heavy. "I don't like spiders," she said. "I got any on me?"

"Don't see any."

In all honesty, I wasn't looking too closely because my attention was diverted to a pile of rags on the other side of the room. We'd done a fast, room by room check of the house, but I hadn't looked under the soiled mattress or kicked around in the clutter. Some filthy blankets had been flung against the far wall, and from this angle I could see fingertips sticking out from under the blankets. I crossed the room in two strides, lifted the top blanket and found Sammy the Squirrel aka Sam Franco. He was dead. And he was naked.

The court wanted him for fleeing a charge of indecent exposure. I wanted him for the apprehension fee which was ten percent of his bond amount. Lula wanted him for her share of my share. And so far as I know that was the extent of Sam's being wanted. He was a societal dropout of the first magnitude.

"Uh-oh," I said to Lula. "Sam's turned up."

Lula opened her eyes and rolled her head to the side. "Yikes!" she shrieked, jumping to her feet.

The Squirrel had a hole in the middle of his forehead and a toe tag tied to his Mr. Happy. Someone had printed "Get a life" on the toe tag.

"Looks like the Squirrel flashed the wrong person," Lula said. "Someone didn't like him wagging his wonkie around."

Seemed like a high price to pay for wonkie wagging. "He wasn't shot here," I said. "No blood and brains on the floor."

"Yeah, and he's been dead awhile," Lula said. "He's pretty stiff." She took a closer look. "Most of him, anyway."

We were in a broken-down, boarded-up bungalow on Ryker Street in Trenton, New Jersey. The house backed up to the Conrail track and was a block from the old Milped b.u.t.ton Factory. There were scrubby fields on either side of the house and beyond that more abandoned bungalows. Very isolated. Excellent place to dump a body.

Everyone knew Sam lived in the house, and everyone knew he wasn't dangerous. Lula and I hadn't expected complications.

Lula cut her eyes side to side. "All of a sudden, this house is giving me the creeps. I don't like dead guys. I especially don't like them with their head ventilated like this."

There was a rattle at the back door and Lula and I exchanged glances.

"Probably the wind," I said.

"I'd go take a look, but one of us should call the police about the body. It's not that I'm afraid, or anything, it's just I got other things to do."

Unlike Lula, I was perfectly willing to admit I was spooked. No way was I staying there all by myself, waiting to get fitted for one of those toe tags using some innovative attachment process. "I'm sure there's no reason to be alarmed," I said. "But just in case, we'll both call the police."

"No need to panic," Lula said.

"Right. No need."

Then we whirled around almost knocking each other over trying to get out the front door. We scuttled across the yard of hard-packed dirt and weeds, to my black CRX and took off, laying rubber.

I usually carry a cell phone, but today it was home, recharging on my kitchen counter, so we drove around, looking for a place to make a call. I used to have one of those gizmos that let my phone charge in my car, but someone stole it, and I hadn't had a chance to get a replacement. If it had been an emergency I'd have stopped and rapped on a stranger's door, but I didn't think five minutes here or there would matter to Squirrel. All the king's horses and all the king's men weren't going to put Squirrel back together again.

I turned onto State Street, drove two more blocks and found a 7-Eleven with a pay phone. I put the call into police dispatch, identified myself and reported the body. Then Lula and I retraced our route back to the bungalow.

A blue and white was already on the scene. Two uniforms stood beside the car. One was Carl Costanza. I've known Carl for twenty-five years, ever since kindergarten. When Carl was nine he could burp in time to the "Star Spangled Banner." This was an acccmplishment I unsuccessfully tried for years to emulate.

Carl gave me his long-suffering cop look. "Let me guess," Carl said. "You were the one who made the call."

"Yep."

"Is this the right house?"

"Yep."

"Well, I don't know how to break this to you... but there's no body here."

"It's laying in the living room," Lula said. "You can't miss it. It's a naked body with a big hole in its head."

Carl rocked back on his heels, thumbs stuck in his utility belt. "I went all through the house, and there's no body."

Two hours later, Lula and I were eating french fries and sucking milkshakes in the McDonald's lot just outside center-city.

"I know what I saw, and I saw a dead guy," Lula said. "That Squirrel was dead, dead, dead. Someone came and s.n.a.t.c.hed that body. And it wasn't the polite thing to do either, because that was our body. We found it, and it was ours." She crammed some fries into her mouth. "This whole thing is creeping me out."

I was creeped out, too. But more than that I was slack-jawed and bug-eyed with dumbfounded curiosity. What the h.e.l.l happened to Squirrel? We'd been gone thirty minutes tops. Why would someone dump a body and then remove it?

"I had plans for my share of the recovery fee," Lula said. "I don't suppose Vinnie's gonna give us the money now that some loser came and took our body."

It seemed unlikely since we hadn't recovered anything.

"You know Squirrel?" Lula asked.

"I went to school with him. He was four years older than me. Stayed back a couple times and finally dropped out in junior high. I've only seen him in pa.s.sing lately."

"He used to talk to me sometimes when I was on the corner doing my previous profession. Used to ride up on that rickety red bike of his. Bet that bike was a hundred years old."

I'd forgotten about the bike. Most street people never ventured farther than a couple blocks. Because Squirrel had a bike he was able to live in an abandoned house and range far and wide for recreational peeping.

"Do you remember seeing the bike at the house?" asked Lula.

"Nope. That bike wasn't there. And we walked all over with the cops. We looked in the back and the front, and we looked all through the house."

We both thought about that for a moment.

"Squirrel wasn't a bad person," Lula said, serious voiced. "Was just that his train stopped a few feet from the station. He liked to watch people. Liked to look in bedroom windows at night. And then one thing would lead to another, and pretty soon Squirrel wouldn't have no clothes on, and sometimes he'd get caught and get his bony white a.s.s hauled off to jail."

Lula was right about Squirrel not being a bad person. He could be d.a.m.n annoying. And seeing his nose pressed against your window at one in the morning could be scary as h.e.l.l. But Squirrel wasn't mean. and he wasn't violent. And I didn't like that someone had killed him. And, I also didn't like that I'd lost the body. What were the police going to tell Squirrel's mother? Someone said they saw your son with a bullet hole in his head, but we can't find him. Sorry.

"This has gotten ugly," I said to Lula.

"d.a.m.n skippy. I'm feeling downright cranky about the whole thing. In fact, the more I think about it, the crankier I'm getting.

I finished my milkshake and stuffed the straw under the lid. "We need to find Sam."

"Not me," Lula said. "I'm not looking for no dead guy. I don't like dead guys."

"I thought you had plans for the recovery money."

"Well, now that I think about it I guess dead guys aren't so bad. At least they don't shoot at you."

Usually, I relied on the bond agreement to provide some leads. In this case it wasn't much help. Squirrel's brother, Bruce, had put up the bond to get Squirrel out of jail. Bruce worked at the pork roll factory and was an okay guy, but I didn't think he knew much more than we did about Squirrel. Squirrel was a brother who lived on the fringe. He was a thirty-four-year-old man with faulty wiring. A man who related to people through panes of gla.s.s. A man who lived in an abandoned house, filled with treasures gleaned from the city's trash cans. A man who kept no calendar to remind him of holiday dinners. Squirrel and Bruce could have lived on different planets for all the interaction they'd had in the last ten years.

Myra Smulinski had filed the indecent exposure charge. I knew Myra, and I knew Squirrel must have made a royal nuisance of himself for Myra to call the police. Myra lives on Roosevelt, in the heart of the burg. And mostly Squirrel is tolerated in the burg. After all, that's where he was born and that's where his family still lives.

The burg is a tight Trenton neighborhood of second- and third-generation Italians, Hungarians and Germans. It's roughly shaped like a piece of pie, and it exists only in the minds of its residents. Windows are kept clean. Numbers runners never miss ma.s.s. And at an early age, men learn to change their own oil in the alleys and single car detached garages that hunker at the back of their lots.

Like Squirrel, I was born in the burg and lived there most of my life. Four years ago, at age twenty-six, I moved into an apartment beyond burg boundaries. Physically I'm at the corner of St. James and Dunworth. Mentally, I suspect I'll always be anch.o.r.ed in the burg. This is an admission that caused my sphincter muscle to tighten in terror that someday I'll turn into my mother.

I shoved the last french fry into my mouth and cranked the engine over. "I think we should visit my grandma Mazur," I told Lula. "If there's anything going through the burg rumor mill about Sam Franco, Grandma Mazur will know."

Grandma Mazur moved in with my parents two years ago when my grandpa went to his final lard-enriched, all-you-can-eat breakfast bar in the sky. Grandma is part of a chain of burg women who make the internet look like chump change when it comes to the information highway.

My mother opened the door to Lula and me. She'd never met Lula, and she was making a good effort not to look dazed at seeing a huge blond-haired black woman wearing brilliant azure eye shadow speckled with silver sparkles, shocking pink spandex shorts and a poison green spandex tank top, standing on her porch. Grandma was jockeying for position beside my mother and wasn't nearly so circ.u.mspect.

"Are you a Negro?" Grandma asked Lula. "I didn't know Negroes could have yellow hair."

"Honey, we can have any color hair we d.a.m.n well want to have. I've got yellow hair because blondes have more fun."

"Hmm," Grandma said, "maybe I need to make my hair blond. I could use some fun."

My father was in the living room with his nose pressed to the sports section. He mumbled a few words about my grandmother having fun on the moon and sunk lower in his chair.

"I've got a couple big thick steaks for supper," my mother said. "And I made a cake."

"We can't stay," I told my mother. "I just stopped around to see if you'd heard anything about Sammy Franco."

"What about him?" Grandma wanted to know. "Are you looking for him? Is this a case you're on?"

"He got arrested for indecent exposure again and didn't show up for his hearing."

"I knew he got arrested," Grandma said. "Poor Myra didn't have no other choice. She said he was always in her backyard. Said he trampled her marigolds into the ground."

"And that's it? That's all you've heard?"

"Is there more?"

"Sammy's been shot. Someone killed him."

Grandma sucked in air. "No! How terrible!"

My mother made the sign of the cross. My father went very still in his chair.

I told them the whole thing.

"I saw a TV show once on body s.n.a.t.c.hers," Grandma said. "The reason they wanted the bodies was so they could eat their brains."