food but for the giant rotating chicken impaled on a thirty-foot flagpole anchored in the parking lot.
I cruised into the lot and stopped short of the red Dumpster. The temperature had to be a hundred in the shade with a hundred percent humidity. My sunroof was open, and when I parked the car I felt the weight of the heat settling around me. Maybe when I found Nowicki I'd have my air-conditioning fixed, or maybe I'd spend a few days at the beach . . . or maybe I'd pay my rent and avoid eviction.
I walked to the Dumpster, thinking about ordering lunch. Two pieces of chicken plus a biscuit and slaw and an extra large soda sounded about right.
I peeked over the edge of the Dumpster, gave an involuntary gasp and staggered back a few feet. Most of the garbage was in bags, but some of the bags had split and had spewed out guts like bloated roadkill. The stench of vegetable rot and gangrenous chicken boiled over the Dumpster and had me reassessing my lunch plans. It also had me reassessing my job. There was no way I was scrounging in this mess for the stupid clue.
I returned to my car and called Eddie Kuntz on my cell phone. "I've deciphered the note," I told him. "I'm at Cluck in a Bucket, and there's another clue here. I think you'd better come see for yourself."
Half an hour later, Kuntz pulled into the lot. I was sitting in my car, slurping down my third giant-sized Diet Coke, and I was sweating like a pig. Kuntz looked nice and cool in his new sport utility vehicle and factory-installed air. He'd changed his clothes from the sweat-stained boxers he'd worn this morning to a black fishnet undershirt, black spandex shorts that didn't do much to hide Mr. Lumpy, two gold chains around his neck, and brand-new Air Jordans that looked to be about a size 42.
"All dressed up," I said to him.
"Gotta maintain the image. Don't like to disappoint the chicks."
I handed him the decoded note. "The next clue is in the red Dumpster."
He walked to the Dumpster, stuck his head over the edge and recoiled.
"Pretty ripe," I said. "Maybe you want to put on some old clothes before you go in there."
"What, are you nuts? I'm not wading through that shit."
"It's your note."
"Yeah, but I've hired you," Eddie said.
"You didn't hire me to go Dumpster surfing."
"I hired you to find her. That's all I want. I just want you to find her."
He had two pagers clipped onto his spandex shorts. One of them beeped and displayed a message. He read the message and sighed. "Chicks," he said. "They never stop."
Right. It was probably from his mother.
He went to his car and made a couple of calls on his car phone. He finished the calls and came back to me. "Okay," he said, "it's all taken care of. All you have to do is stay here and wait for Carlos. I'd stay, but I got other things to do."
I watched him leave, then I turned and squinted beyond the lot. "Hey Maxine," I yelled. "You out there?" If it had been me I'd have wanted to see Kuntz slopping around in the garbage. "Listen," I said, "it was a good idea, but it didn't work out. How about you let me buy you a couple pieces of chicken?"
Maxine didn't come forward, so I sat in my car and waited for Carlos. After about twenty minutes a flatbed truck pulled into the lot and unloaded a backhoe. The flatbed driver fired up the backhoe, rolled it to the Dumpster and put the bucket under the bin's bottom edge. The Dumpster tipped in slow motion and then crashed to the pavement and lay there like a big dead dinosaur. Garbage bags hit the ground and burst, and a glass jar clinked onto the blacktop, rolled between the bags and came to rest a few feet from where I was standing. Someone had used a Magic Marker to write "clue" on the outside of the jar.
The backhoe driver looked over at me. "You Stephanie?"
I was staring, transfixed, at the Dumpster and the mess in front of me, and my heart was beating with a sickening thud. "Unh huh."
"You want me to spread this garbage around some more?"
"No!"
People were standing in the doorways and staring through the windows of Cluck in a Bucket. Two high school kids dressed in yellow-and-red Cluck uniforms ran across the