Hard Eight Read Online Free

“Isn’t he the guy with the good legs? I hear he’s got legs like Tina Turner.” She looked down at her own legs. “My legs are the right color but I just got more of them.”
    “Sebring’s legs are white,” Connie said. “And I hear they’re good at running down blondes.”
    I swallowed the last of my doughnut and wiped my hands on my jeans. “I need to talk to him.”
    “You’ll be safe today,” Lula said. “Not only aren’t youblonde, but you aren’t exactly decked out. You have a hard night?”
    “I’m not a morning person.”
    “It’s your love life,” Lula said. “You aren’t getting any, and you got nothing to put a smile on your face. You’re letting yourself go, is what you’re doing.”
    “I could get plenty if I wanted.”
    “Well, then?”
    “It’s complicated.”
    Connie gave me a check for the Paulson capture. “You aren’t thinking about going to work for Sebring, are you?”
    I told them about Evelyn and Annie.
    “Maybe I should talk to Sebring with you,” Lula said. “Maybe we can get him to show us his legs.”
    “Not necessary,” I said. “I can manage this myself.” And I didn’t especially want to see Les Sebring’s legs.
    “Look here. I didn’t even put my bag down,” Lula said. “I’m ready to go.”
    Lula and I stared at each other for a beat. I was going to lose. I could see it coming. Lula had it in her mind to go with me. Probably didn’t want to file. “Okay,” I said, “but no shooting, no shoving, no asking him to roll up his pants leg.”
    “You got a lot of rules,” Lula said.
    We took the CR-V across town and parked in a lot next to Sebring’s building. The bonds office was on the ground floor, and Sebring had a suite of offices above it.
    “Just like Vinnie,” Lula said, eyeballing the carpeted floor and freshly painted walls. “Only it looks like humans work here. And check out these chairs for people to sit in . . . they don’t even have stains on them. And his receptionist don’t have a mustache, either.”
    Sebring escorted us into his private office. “Stephanie Plum. I’ve heard of you,” he said.
    “It wasn’t my fault that the funeral parlor burned down,” I told him. “And I almost never shoot people.”
    “We heard of you, too,” Lula said to Sebring. “We heard you got great legs.”
    Sebring was wearing a silver gray suit, white shirt, and red, white, and blue tie. He reeked of respectability, from the tips of his shined black shoes to the top of his perfectly trimmed white hair. And behind the polite politician smile he looked like he didn’t take a lot of shit. There was a moment of silence while he considered Lula. Then he hiked his pants leg up. “Get a load of these wheels,” he said.
    “You must work out,” Lula said. “You got excellent legs.”
    “I wanted to speak to you about Mabel Markowitz,” I said to Sebring. “You called her on a child custody bond.”
    He nodded. “I remember. I have someone scheduled to visit her again today. So far, she hasn’t been helpful.”
    “She lives next door to my parents, and I don’t think she knows where her granddaughter or her great-granddaughter have gone.”
    “That’s too bad,” Sebring said. “Do you know about child custody bonds?”
    “Not a lot.”
    “PBUS, which as you know is a professional bail agents association, worked with the Center for Missing and Exploited Children to get legislation going that would discourage parents from kidnapping their own kids.
    “It’s a pretty simple idea. If it looks like there’s a goodchance either or both parents will take off with the child for parts unknown, the court can impose a cash bond.”
    “So this is like a criminal bail bond, but it’s a child who’s at risk,” I said.
    “With one big difference,” Sebring said. “When a criminal bond is posted by a bail bondsman and the accused fails to appear in court, the bondsman forfeits the bond amount to the
court.
Then the bondsman can