what you said. I only gave her a couple pieces of fruit. Too bad, too, because I could have made a real killing. She had a lot of money on her. She took out a roll of twenties big enough to choke a horse."
I took the twenty from him and looked at it. It had the scratch mark in the corner.
Bernie was on tiptoe, trying to see the bill. "What's with the interest in the twenty. It marked or something?"
"No. Just checking to see if it's real."
"Well? Is it?"
"Yep." Real counterfeit.
"We need to go now," I said. "Thanks for calling me."
"My pleasure." He was gaping at Sally again. "It's been a real treat to meet you," he said. "I don't suppose I could have your autograph."
Sally took the black marking pen out of Bernie's shirt pocket and wrote "Best wishes from Sally Sweet" on Bernie's bald dome.
"There you go, dude," Sally said.
"Oh man," Bernie said, looking like he'd burst with happiness. "Oh man! This is so great."
"You do that a lot?" I asked Sally.
"Yeah, but usually when I do head writing I have to write a lot smaller."
"Hmm."
I wandered over to the cookie aisle to pick out some lunch, and I wondered if Morelli was still watching the 7-Eleven. I could save him a lot of trouble. I was pretty sure Maxine's mother had been the one to pass the phony twenties. It was her neighborhood store. And she didn't seem shy about floating the bad bills. The upside to telling Morelli about Francine Nowicki passing another bogus twenty dollars was that he'd probably abandon the store and watch Francine for me. The flip side was that if anything went down I couldn't trust him to include me. And if he brought Maxine in, and I wasn't along for the ride, neither Vinnie nor I would get our money.
Sally and I settled on a box of Fig Newtons and a couple of sodas. We went through checkout and ate in the car.
"So, lay this marriage gig on me," Sally said. "I always thought Morelli was just nailing you."
"We're not married. And he's not nailing me."
"Yeah, right."
"Okay, so he used to be nailing me. Well, actually, he only nailed me for a very short time. And it wasn't nailing. Nailing sounds like body piercing. What we had was . . . uh, consensual sex."
"Consensual sex is excellent."
I nodded in agreement and popped another Fig Newton into my mouth.
"I guess you got a thing going for Morelli though, huh?"
"I don't know. There's something there. I just can't figure out what it is."
We chewed Fig Newtons and thought about that for a while.
"You know what I don't get?" Sally said. "I don't understand why everyone was working so hard to throw us off the trail five days ago, and now old lady Nowicki is back in her house. We walked right up to her, and she didn't care."
He was right. Obviously something had changed. And my fear was that Maxine was good-bye. If Maxine was safely on her way to a new life, Mrs. Nowicki could afford to take more chances. And so could Margie. I hadn't stopped at Margie's house, but I was sure she was there, packing her valuables, explaining to her cat why Mommy was going to be gone for a long, long time. Probably paying the cat-sitting neighbor off in bad twenties.
But of course she wasn't ready to leave yet. She had a doctor's appointment. And so did Francine. Good thing for me, because I'd be hard-pressed to do surveillance. I wasn't exactly the FBI. I didn't have any of their cool surveillance equipment. For that matter, I didn't even have a car. A silver Porsche, a '53 Buick, and a red Firebird weren't gonna cut it as primo stealth vehicles. I was going to have to find a car that would go unnoticed, so I could sit in front of the Nowicki house tomorrow.
"NO!" MORELLI SAID. "You can't borrow my pickup. You're death on cars."
"I am not death on cars!"
"Last time you used my car it got blown up! Remember that?"
"Well, if you're going to hold that against me . . ."
"And what about your pickup? And your CRX? Blown up!"
"Technically, the CRX caught fire."
Morelli scrunched his eyes closed and smacked the heel of his hand against his forehead. "Unh!"
It was a little after four. Sally was watching television in the living room, and Morelli and I were in the kitchen. Morelli'd just gotten in, and he looked