Janet Evanovich: Plum Lovin'

"Can you connect to me?"

"Sometimes."

"So you didn't bug my car?"

"No, I didn't bug your car. I dropped the bug into your purse. GPS is more reliable than this hocus-pocus crap. Unless it's raining. I have real problems in the rain. Nothing works in the rain."

We were off Route 1 and heading north toward Yardley Traffic was moderate. Diesel drove into Yardley and pulled to the side of the road.

"What's up?" I asked him.

"Lost Flash. It feels like he's behind me."

Diesel punched a number into his cell phone. "Lost you," he said. He turned in his seat and looked out the back window. "Yeah," he said, "I see the sign. Get me a couple of those glazed sticks and coffee." Diesel looked over at me. "Everyone stopped to get doughnuts. Do you want anything?"

"Double your order."

"Make that four glazed sticks and two coffees," Diesel told Flash.

Five minutes later, Diesel pulled back into traffic. "We have a visual," he said. "That's Flash in the blue Honda Civic in front of us. Two cars ahead of him is a black Lincoln with Jersey plates. I imagine that's our man, Delvina."

We followed Flash and Delvina for an additional ten minutes, taking a road that hugged the Delaware River. There were houses on either side of the road. Large older houses on partially wooded lots mixed with small summer cottages. We saw the black Lincoln turn into a riverside driveway and disappear behind a six-foot-high privacy hedge. Flash slowed and parked on the shoulder one house down. We parked behind him and got out of the Vette. Flash met us halfway with the coffee and doughnuts.

"I don't think you've met," Diesel said. "Flash, Stephanie. Stephanie, Flash."

Flash was maybe five foot ten with spiked red hair and a bunch of diamond studs in his ears. He was slim, and you might place him in high school until you looked closely and saw the fine lines around his eyes. He was wearing jeans and sneakers and a ski jacket with a bunch of lift tickets hooked onto the zipper tag. I suspected he was a boarder.

I took a doughnut and coffee and thought this would be really nice if it was a social occasion. We stood there for a while, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts, waiting to see if the Lincoln was just dropping off or picking up. Fifteen minutes went by.

Diesel finished his coffee and put his cup into the empty doughnut bag. "Time to go to work," he said.

Flash crumpled his cup and added it to the bag. I tossed my remaining coffee and trashed my cup.

"There were two guys in the Lincoln," Flash said. "Del-vina and a driver. Delvina came home under his own power last night and parked in the garage. This morning, the Lincoln picked him up. The driver looks like old muscle."

"It would be better if we could do this in the dark," Diesel said, "but I don't want to wait that long."

We were standing in front of Delvina's next-door neighbors house. It was a large colonial with a shake roof and cedar siding, no gated drive, and no privacy hedge. No lights on inside the house. There was still a dusting of snow left on the driveway. No tire tracks in the snow. The walk hadn't been salted or shoveled. Clearly, no one was living there at this time of the year. There was a patch of woods, maybe thirty feet wide, between the two houses.

"No one's in this cedar house," I said. "We can sneak along the tree line and scope things out."

Diesel beeped the Vette locked, and we walked the cedar house property until Delvina's house could be seen peeking through the vegetation. We moved into the patch of woods to get a better look, trying to stay hidden behind scrubby evergreens.

The Delvina house was large and rambling. Two stories. The house had a four-car garage, but the Lincoln was parked in a circular drive, by the front door. There weren't a lot of windows on this side of the house. A small window up and a small window down. Most likely bathrooms. Interior plantation shutters, closed tight. Another upstairs window with drapes. Bedroom, no doubt. A large swath of frozen lawn lay between us and the house.

"We need to see inside the house," Diesel said. "We need a head count."

"Hang tight," Flash said. "This is a job for the Flashman."

Flash ran across the lawn, plastered himself against the building, and stood listening.

"Is speed his Unmentionable thing?" I asked Diesel.

"So far as I know he's not Unmentionable. He just runs fast."

Flash was creeping around the house, periodically stopping and listening, looking in windows. He turned a corner and disappeared, and Diesel and I waited patiently. Five minutes passed and my patience started to evaporate.

"Chill," Diesel said to me. "He's okay."

A couple minutes later, Flash popped into view and sprinted across the lawn, back to us.

"Delvina and his driver are in there. They're both covered with hives. They've got some kind of white cream on, but it's obviously not helping. Annie is there. She looks okay, except she has hives, too. She's wearing an ankle bracelet with a long length of chain that's attached to something in another room. I think it's a powder room. I couldn't really be sure from my angle. Everyone is in the back of the house, in the family room that's part of the kitchen. And there's another guy in chains. I think it must be Bernie. I've never seen Bernie in person, but I've seen his picture, and I think this is Bernie. I can't see the birthmark because he's also covered in hives, and his face is dotted with the white cream."

"That's weird," Diesel said. "Why would Bernie give himself hives?"

"I don't know," Flash said, "but these aren't happy people. They're all talking at the same time and waving their hands around and scratching."

"Anyone else in the house?" Diesel asked.

"Not that I could see."

"I need to get in the house, and bring Annie and Bernie out," Diesel said. "I don't want to go in like gangbusters and take a chance on someone getting hurt. I need a diversion."

Now I knew why I'd been invited along. "I guess that would be me," I said.

Diesel handed me the keys to the 'vette. "Do a damsel in distress routine. If you can draw them to the front of the house, we can go in the back."

I ran to the 'vette and took the wheel. I waited until there were no cars in sight, pulled around the Civic, and right-turned hard into Delvina's drive. The property wasn't gated, but the hedge had been carved into a topiary column on either side of the driveway entrance. I deliberately put the 'vette into a skid that took out Delvina's topiary column and positioned the car well into the yard. I fought the airbag and lurched out of the slightly bashed-in 'vette.

I pasted what I hoped was a dazed expression on my face and started up the driveway toward the house. I was halfway there when the door opened, and Delvina's driver looked out at me.

"What the hell was that?" he asked.

I did my best lower-lip tremble, and thought about sad things like roadkill and orphaned birthday cakes left at the bakery, and managed to sort of get a tear going down my cheek. Truth is, the tear was a challenge, but the trembling was easy. It was starting from my knees and working its way up all by itself. For the better part of my life I'd heard stories about Lou Delvina, and they all involved a lot of blood.

"I don't know what happened," I said. "All of a sudden the car went into a skid, and I h-h-hit the hedge."

Delvina appeared behind his driver, and my heart jumped into my throat.

"What the fuck happened to my hedge?" Delvina yelled.

"She skidded into it," his driver said.

"Sonovabitch. You know how hard it is to grow a hedge that size?"

"I'm really sorry," I said. "I must have hit some ice on the road."

Delvina was power-walking down his driveway, swinging his arms, head stuck forward. He was a sixty-year-old bandylegged fireplug with a lot of black hair and black caterpillar eyebrows. Hard to tell the normal color of his complexion as it was all red hives and white salve and looked to be purple under the salve.