My name is Stephanie Plum, and one afternoon not so long ago, someone knocked on my door selling magazine subscriptions. He was a round-faced, bug-eyed kid with freckles and a spotty mustache, and he started off with some spiel about wanting to study art.

"I earn enough points," he told me, "they'll send me to Europe. There's art in Europe. Lots of art."

I didn't know much about art, or about Europe, but I let him carry on, anyway.

"You don't have to buy anything," he said. "I just gotta meet so many people a day. It's a participation grade. I don't meet the people, I don't get a grade. And I don't get any points."

"And without the points, you don't go to Europe." The boy nodded. "What's the catch?"

The boy shrugged. "There is no catch."

"Okay," I told him. "What do I have to do?"

"Nothing," he said. "Just fill out this form. Your name and address, and your telephone number." I raised an eyebrow at him. "They call the people on these slips at random to make sure I didn't make them up."

I filled out the form and passed it back to him. He looked it over, added a few things at the top, and handed me a yellow carbon copy.

"My name's Adam," he said, pointing to his name written in the box on the right. "And the GBY stands for 'God Bless You!' Or if you're not religious, 'Go Big Yellow!'"

And then he laughed. It was the same nervous laugh I'd heard come out of my sister's fiancé, Albert Kloughn. A laugh fitting for a round-faced, bug-eyed kid.

"They make you say that, don't they?" I asked him.

The boy sighed. "Yeah."

I shook my head and closed the door behind him. A couple weeks later, I got a bitll in the mail for over five-hundred dollars worth of magazine subscriptions. No catch, my ass.

If there's one thing I've learned in life, it's that there's always a catch.

I was on my knees in front of the toilet, locked away in the bathroom of my cousin Vinnie's bail bonds office. Vinnie was on the other side of the door, mumbling obscenities. He gave the door a few solid whacks.

"Go away," I yelled through the door.

"We got three skips out here," Vinnie said. "Three. And you've locked yourself in that goddamn bathroom. What the hell are you doing in there?"

I opened my mouth to answer and horked up the last of the half-dozen Boston creams I'd had for breakfast. When I was done, I cleaned up in the sink and waited for Vinnie to shuffle back into his office.

Lula was waiting for me when I stepped out of the bathroom.

"Damn," Lula said, making a face. "You didn't eat at that new Chinese place, did you? I hear they got parasites."

I took a seat on the brown Naugahyde sofa and put my head between my legs. "I think I'm coming down with something," I said.

"Yeah, you're not looking too hot," Lula said.

I wasn't feeling too hot, either. The throbbing in my head was getting worse, and my chest was sore from all the heaving. I reluctantly dragged myself off the sofa and walked over to Connie's desk. Connie Rosolli is Vinnie's office manager. She's a little older than me, and a little taller. Her bust size is somewhere between my B-cup and Lula's double-Ds, and she's got bigger balls than most of the guys I've dated. Connie keeps the office in order when Vinnie locks himself in his office, which happens to be the majority of the time.

"Tell me about those skips," I said to Connie.

She gave me a tight-lipped smile. "Maybe you should sit back down."

"Yeah," Lula said. "You look like you're gonna throw up again."

"I'm not going to throw up," I said to Lula. "And I'm not going to sit down."

Connie shook her head and sorted through the files. "Two low bonds and one high bond. Take your pick."

I wasn't feeling particularly adventurous, so I asked about the low bonds first.

"Jackie Lieberman. Wanted for DUI," Connie said. "I don't think you want that one. He breeds ferrets in his apartment. Last time he was FTA, he dumped a bag of used pine shavings on the agent who brought him in."

I made a face. "Save that one for Joyce."

Connie nodded. "Good idea," she said. "The other one is Ramon Ruiz. Carrying charge. Chump change, but we need him brought in."

"I'll take Ruiz," I said, and Connie handed me the file. "What else?"

Connie cleared her throat and opened the last file. "Grayson Warner. Thirty-six. Wanted for sexual assault and battery. He jumped bail three days ago. The police are looking to bring him in for questioning about a couple murders. Seems he was seen with one of the victims the night she disappeared."

She handed the file to me, and Lula and I looked it over. Warner's picture was attached to the file. He was Caucasion. Blonde hair and blue eyes. Average height and weight. He looked normal.

"Vinnie's been holed up in that office ever since this guy skipped," Connie said, reaching for a bottle of red nail polish. "I haven't heard any mooing, so I figure it's because he's depressed."

Vinnie is an A-1 sleaze, the rotten apple of the Plum family tree whose transgressions include a duck, a goat, and my arch-nemesis Joyce Barnhardt. A couple years ago, I'd blackmailed Vinnie into giving me a job as a bounty hunter. Not that I'm at all qualified to be a bounty hunter. In all honesty, I'm not really qualified to be anything, but I don't see any reason why that should stop me from trying.

I passed the file to Lula and covered my mouth with the back of my hand. Lula held Warner's file like a shield and retreated behind Connie's desk. "Nuh-uh," Lula said. "You're not well enough to do no bounty huntering. I tell you what, you go take a nap, and I'll bring in Mr. Fifty Grand. Whaddya say?"

"I say get your ass back to work, that's what I say." Vinnie stuck his head out of his office and looked over at Lula. "She threw up, for chrissake. It's not like she's got another bullet lodged in her ass."

I glared at Vinnie. "This is out of my league. Give it to Ranger."

"Yeah," Lula said. "He's good at this high-stakes shit, being the wind and all."

Ranger is Ricardo Carlos Manoso, bounty hunter and security expert. He's my age. Second-generation Cuban-American. He was Special Forces, once upon a time, and has a nine-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. Ranger takes on Vinnie's high-risk skips, leaving Lula and me with the ones least likely to get us killed.

"You kidding me?" Vinnie said. "This nutjob gets his rocks off torturing women. Has a thing for brunettes. I figure I send you out there, he'll as good as turn himself in."

Vinnie winked in my direction, and then slunk back into his office.

Mental head slap. Vinnie didn't want me to find Warner. He wanted Warner to find me. He was using me as bait. I was the proverbial goat tied to the stake. I thought about that for a moment, just before I turned and threw up on Lula.

Grayson Warner lived on Cherry Street, in an old Craftsman-style house that had been cut up into five smaller apartments. His was an end unit on the lower level. Lula and I were parked two houses down, keeping a low profile in the black truck I'd gotten courtesy of Ranger. Well, as low a profile as possible with Lula, anyway. Last week, she'd dyed her hair blood red, chopped it off in a layered bob, and curled up the ends. She was decked out in faux-fur tiger-striped pants and one of my black work shirts. RANGEMAN was stretched tightly across her big boobs.

"I'm sorry about your shirt," I said. "I'll buy you another."

I shielded my eyes against the sun and looked over at Lula's head bobbing in time to the bass. "Naw, girl. This here's tight." She tugged at the RangeMan shirt. It was tight, alright. So tight you could bounce a quarter off it.

"Always wanted one of these T-shirts," Lula said. "Like, I'm a bad-ass bounty hunter now. Might as well start dressing like one." Lula unfastened her seatbelt and opened the door. Then she turned to me and said, "Let's go kick some ass."

Lula's a two-hundred pound ex-hooker held together by gratuitous amounts of Lycra, spandex and poly-cotton blend. She's hot-headed, irrational, and known to carry a loaded Glock. She was halfway to the house when my mind clicked into gear. I swiped the keys from the ignition, beeped the truck locked, and took off for her at a jog.

"No," I said. "There will be no ass-kicking."

"Hunh," Lula said. "You threw up on my shirt. It was purple, too. And it had all them sequins. That shirt was the shit. I loved that shirt. But I was okay with it because you said I could drive. Everyone knows that the driver chooses the music. And that means the driver determines the amount of ass to be kicked." I gave her a look, and she slipped the gun back in her purse and sighed. "Well, what now?"

I shrugged. "Let's check out his apartment."

We trudged up the walk to Warner's apartment and knocked on the door. No one answered. Lula peeked through one of the windows and shook her head. "Not home," she said. "That's too bad. And look, his window's broken."

"What are you talking about?"

Lula picked up an old terracotta pot and tossed it through the window.

"Omigod," I said. "Why did you do that?"

Lula leaned in through the broken window and looked around. Then she pulled her head back and shrugged.

"I thought we could get in this way," she said. "But there's glass all over the floor. I don't think I want to be going in with all that glass on the floor."

I backed away from the door and looked around. There were three apartments on the lower level, and a couple more on the top floor. The house was on a sloping lot, with the access to the upper-level apartments in the rear.

"Let's go around back," I said to Lula.

We made our way up the small concrete path to set of stairs leading onto a small deck outside the second floor apartments. I knocked on the first door. No one answered. Same with the second. I blew out some air and turned back to Lula.

"Damn," Lula said. "I know that look. Your pasty-ass is even whiter than usual. You gonna Linda Blair again?"

I shook my head and started back to the truck. "I think I'm okay."

"It's all that weird shit you been eating." Lula shuddered. "It's like you're taking after that dog of yours. Next thing you know, you'll be hunkering down, letting it roll twelve times a day."

Bob the Dog had a stomach of steel. He ate anything and everything, and pooped more in a day than an average elephant did in its lifetime. Technically, he wasn't my dog, but my on-again, off-again boyfriend, Joe Morelli's. Morelli and I were currently off-again, with our conversations colored with civility and brief flirtation. He didn't like that I chased bad guys for a living, and I didn't want to stay at home and take care of bambinos for the rest of my life. Probably there was a middle ground we could agree on, but neither of us had taken the time to find it. This was in part due to the Ranger issue. I had a fierce attraction to Ranger, and it was getting more and more difficult to push those hormonal urges aside. Ranger had a way of making women want him, and I was no exception.

Lula and I walked back to the truck and thumped with the bass back to the bonds office on Hamilton Avenue, screeching to a halt behind a black Porsche Turbo. Ranger's car. He was standing in front of Connie's desk when we walked in. He gave me a half-smile that turned into a grimace when he saw his name ripping at the seams across Lula's chest.

"Mm-hmm," Lula said to Ranger. "Check it out. It's almost like I'm bona-fide or something. Maybe I should come work for you, too. I got my own piece, even. And unlike Miss Thang here, I ain't afraid to use it."

I glared at Lula. It's not that I was afraid to use it. I had on several occasions managed to pull the trigger. I even shot a snake, once. I just don't like guns.

And, okay. I was afraid to use it. So sue me.

"Babe," Ranger said. Then he took me by the elbow and tugged me toward the door. The air was cool in the shade outside Vinnie's office. Ranger had his black hair secured at the nape of his neck. His eyes were all pupil, his mouth a line that twitched up at the corners. He was either highly amused, or highly aroused. Possibly both.

"It's not my fault," I said. "Her other shirt got ruined and I didn't have anything else in the truck."

Ranger gave his head an almost imperceptible shake. We glanced in at Lula through the plate glass window of the bonds office. She had taken a pair of scissors to the neckline so that the shirt now plunged into four inches of bulging cleavage. She gave her boobs a shift to expel even more and looked satisfied with the results.

"Can I shoot her?" Ranger asked.

"Wouldn't be wise," I said. "But you might be able to sue her for defamation of character."

I followed Ranger's Porsche to the RangeMan office on Haywood Street, parked in a slot in the underground parking garage reserved for non-company vehicles, and followed him into the elevator. It moved silently for a moment and then stopped. I waited for the doors to open and when they didn't, realized we were stuck between floors four and five. Ranger had his hand on the red Stop button. Next thing I knew, he'd hooked a finger into the belt loop of my cargo pants and pulled me to him.

Our hips touched and a warm feeling spread to the bottom of my stomach and beyond. He slid his free hand around my back, caressing the half-inch of skin between my shirt and pants. Then he leaned in and kissed my neck, and that warm feeling turned into something hot.

"That shirt was on loan," he said. He licked the spot he'd just kissed and went in for another.

Ranger shrugged out of his windbreaker and pinned me to the elevator wall with his weight. He was wearing a black T-shirt that hugged his torso like a second skin. I'd seen first-hand what was underneath. No Kevlar. No foam padding like the guy in those Spider-Man movies. Ranger was built solid. He was hard in places you wouldn't expect . . . and in some places you would.

I gasped when his hand slid under my bra. "Wait."

"Babe," Ranger said.

"We're in an elevator." I was trying to sound rational, but to be honest, I didn't give a fig about the elevator. Also, it's hard to sound rational when someone like Ranger is rounding second and closing in on third. "Someone might need to use it."

He nibbled my earlobe and my knees got weak. "They can take the stairs," he said.

"What about the cameras?"

Ranger's building was small and unremarkable on the outside. Easy to overlook. Easy to forget in passing. I guess that was the appeal. It consisted of seven floors and an underground lot, all of which were monitored closely, with the exception of Ranger's penthouse apartment. There's no way a tryst in the elevator would go unnoticed.

"I can fix that," Ranger said. He pulled a small black key fob from his pocket and hit one of the buttons. The light on the camera flashed twice green, then went to a solid red. Ranger had blocked the feed. "Better?"

I scrunched up my face and shrugged. The rational part of my brain was still saying sex with Ranger in an elevator was a bad idea. Hell, it was telling me that sex with Ranger anywhere was a bad idea. It had already happened a few times, and instead of relieving the sexual tension, had merely induced more. The irrational part of my brain knew all of this, but frankly, it didn't give a shit. All it cared about was loads of orgasms.

Ranger stared down at me for a while. Then he pulled away and collected his jacket off the floor.

"We're stopping by the control room," he said. "You might want to do something about that."

I gave him a questioning look and he nodded toward my waist. I looked down and realized my pants were unbuttoned. He'd somehow managed to unhook my bra, too, and I hadn't even noticed. Boy, he was good.

"You're a bad man, Carlos Manoso."

Ranger flashed a full-on smile and released the hold on the elevator.

It was a little after two in the afternoon and the control room on the fifth floor was swarming with big guys in the same black-on-black RangeMan T-shirts as the one I'd given Lula. We stepped out of the elevator and a hush fell across the room. That's how it was when Ranger was around. Quiet. Intense. Ranger stopped by one of the monitor banks where Tank was working and I crossed the floor to my cubby.

A few months ago, I'd decided to give up the bounty hunter life. At the time, I thought it was the best thing for everyone involved. No more fighting with Morelli. No more blown-up cars. No more death threats. And last but not least, no more rolling in the garbage with various failures-to-appear. It took being folded up in an above-the-counter cabinet and left for dead by a psycho undertaker for me to realize that trouble just seems to follow wherever I go, bounty hunter or not.

I rolled up to the desk, entered my LAN ID and password, and checked my email for search requests. Nothing, thank God. Instead, I opened one of the programs and ran a quick search on Grayson Warner.

I printed the report and looked it over. Most of the information was redundant. I made a couple follow-up calls and glanced at the clock behind me. Ranger was leaning against the cubby wall.

"New skip?"

I nodded and passed him the file. "Grayson Warner. You heard of him?"

The tight-lipped expression on Ranger's face told me he had. He closed the file and passed it back to me. "This guy's bad news. You need help?"

"I don't know yet."

Ranger nodded. "Have you had dinner?"

"No. Are you offering?"

"I could use the company."

I logged off the computer and stepped out of my cubby. I hadn't made it far when Ranger caught me by my ponytail. I rolled my eyes and blew out a sigh. Then I flipped open the top desk drawer, removed my gun and holstered it at my hip.

"There," I said. "Happy?"

The edges of Ranger's mouth tipped into an almost-smile. Then he crooked an arm around neck and kissed my temple, and dragged me into the elevator.

The best pizza in all of Trenton, by far, is at Pino's Deli. Unfortunately, most of the regulars there carry guns and badges, and unlike mine, they're legit.

Lucky for me, Ranger didn't do Pino's. Or pizza, for that matter. What he did do were protein bars and skim milk. And he routinely skipped on dessert. I'd tried the skipping-dessert thing before. It hadn't turned out as I'd planned. In essence, I'd given up sugar for sex. Lots and lots of sex. I figured maybe the same thing had happened to Ranger. That would explain the whole elevator thing. And also why he had his hand on my thigh.

We were seated side-by-side at a sandwich shop two blocks down from the RangeMan office. I ordered a meatball sub with extra cheese, heavy on the sauce. Ranger ordered a turkey club, plain. No mayo. No cheese. No salt. That's the difference between Ranger and me. Ranger knows how to rough it.

"When you invited me to lunch, I didn't know I was on the menu."

Ranger flashed me wolf grin. "This is just an appetizer," he said. "Wait until dessert."

I gulped down a mouthful of water and tried to keep my hands from shaking while I took another bite out of my sub.

"Let's talk about Warner," Ranger said. "What have you found out?"

I wiped my fingers on a napkin and fished the files out of my bag. "Not much. We went by his apartment, but he wasn't home. Lula wanted to climb through the window and take a look around, but there was glass on the floor and she didn't want to get cut."

Ranger threw me a look. "So you have the breaking part down. We just have to work on the entering." Ranger tilted the file in his direction and looked it over. "This is a high-bond," he said. "This should go to RangeMan. Did Vinnie say why he gave it to you?"

I swallowed the last of my sub. "You're not going to like it."

"Try me."

I told Ranger about Vinnie's theory and his face took on a blank expression. Then he folded the file and handed it back to me.

"I don't want you going after Warner alone," he said. I opened my mouth to object and instantly regretted it. My stomach was rolling, and there was a sour taste creeping up the back of my throat. I clasped my hands over my mouth and pushed past Ranger, heading straight for the Men's bathroom.