Janet Evanovich - Plum Spooky

I had the SUV keys in my jeans pocket. I swapped out the truck for the Subaru and laid down rubber, wasting no time getting the heck onto the Expressway. I called Diesel while I drove. No answer. Diesel was probably waiting for Flash and had no reception. I needed to go back and get Diesel. Crap. I really didn’t want to do that. I was afraid I’d run into Wulf.

“What do you think I should do?” I asked Carl.

Carl didn’t answer. Carl had discovered Super Mario stashed in the console and was beyond happy, eating his cereal and making Mario jump around.

I made a U-turn at the next interchange and headed back for Diesel. If I got to the pickup point and he wasn’t standing there with the two ATVs, I’d turn around and not stop driving until I pulled into my apartment building parking lot.

My heart started skipping beats a quarter mile away. I wanted Diesel to be waiting for me, unharmed. I wanted to get him in the car and make a safe retreat. And as far as I was concerned, Munch could stay in the wind forever. Vinnie would just have to deal with it. My rent was due, but better to be evicted than be dead… or even worse, be a Munch toy.

I was the only car on the road. I switched to my high beams and slowed to almost a crawl, looking for the dirt road, afraid I wouldn’t recognize it. Fortunately, it wasn’t an issue, because Diesel was at the edge of the road. He was standing hands on hips, mud splattered and wet through to his skin. I stopped, he opened the passenger-side door, and Carl gave him a thumbs-up.

“I get the feeling I missed something,” Diesel said, shooing Carl into the backseat and sliding in next to me.

I gave him the short version of my eve ning adventures.

“Take me to the house,” Diesel said.

“What, are you nuts? There’s one road in and one road out. And there are homicidal maniacs there.”

“I can only hope,” Diesel said. “I need to catch Wulf by surprise, preferably with his back to a wall. I’m sure they’ll abandon the house, but we might be able to get them in the pro cess.”

The only way I knew to find the house was to go back to the junk shop and retrace my route.

“This all looks the same to me,” I said to Diesel. “If you hadn’t been standing out in the open, I probably would never have found you.”

Headlights swung onto the road in front of me, and a police cruiser passed me going in the opposite direction. I took the road the cruiser had just left, and hooray, there was the double-wide. No doubt the police had been responding to the stolen-truck report.

I felt kind of bad about taking Sasquatch’s truck, but it wasn’t far away, and I’d left it in good shape.

I swapped seats with Diesel, and he cut the lights and drove the muddy road in the dark. He parked the Subaru just short of the clearing, and we got out. Carl stayed in the Subaru with his game.

There were no cars in the yard. This meant I was relieved, and Diesel was unhappy. We crossed to the house and looked inside. It seemed empty.

“Are you going in?” I asked.

“Maybe.” Diesel prowled the yard and found a large rock. “Get back,” he said. “Stand by those trees.”

He hefted the rock and pitched it through a front window. Seconds after the window shattered, the house was literally blown apart by an explosion.

“No need to go in,” Diesel said.

“What the heck was that?”

“Motion bomb. Remember the Sky Social Club? Classic Wulf. He loves that crap.” He took my hand and pulled me to the car. “We need to get out of here before the police and fire trucks clog the road.”

“But the house is on fire!”

“It’ll burn itself out. There’s no wind, and the woods are wet from the rain. There’s a large enough patch of cleared ground around the house, so the fire won’t spread. I’m sure there’s no one inside, and if there is, it’s too late to help them.”

We ran to the Subaru. Diesel opened the door and groaned. The SUV was full of monkeys. Six of them in all, plus Carl. They were all sitting in a row in the backseat. All but Carl were wearing hats.

“Get out,” Diesel said.

The monkeys sat tight and exchanged ner vous glances.

“I know you understand me,” Diesel said.

I looked at the monkeys. “They must be Carl’s friends.”

“I don’t care if they’re members of Congress. They have to go.”

“Carl did save my life,” I said.

Diesel rammed himself behind the wheel. “I don’t have time for this.”

He drove into the clearing, turned the Subaru around, and drove out. He hooked a right at the end of the road and headed for the Expressway. We could see the flashing lights of emergency vehicles in our rearview mirror.

“We can leave the trailer and the ATVs here,” he said. “I have to get out of these clothes. I’m starting to mildew.”

We stopped on the way home and got four large pizzas and a six-pack of beer. Diesel parked the Subaru in my lot, then we all got out and trooped into my apartment building and into the elevator.

“I feel like I married into the Brady Bunch,” Diesel said, monkeys hanging on to his pants legs.

I hit the button for the second floor and got my key out of my bag. “Last time you came to town, I ended up with a horse in this elevator. These things don’t happen when you’re not around.”

“I don’t believe that for a second,” Diesel said.

I opened the door to my apartment, and we all rushed inside. Diesel put two pizza boxes on the floor for the monkeys, and we ate ours off the counter. Who says I’m not civilized? I just hoped my mother never found out about this.

Diesel ate an entire pizza and chugged two bottles of beer. He kicked his boots off in the hall and dropped his still-wet jeans on the floor.

“I need a shower,” he said.

I was relieved to see he was wearing underwear and that his T-shirt covered almost all the good stuff.

“I could strip down further,” Diesel said.

“Not in front of the monkeys.”

He grinned, ruffled my hair, and sauntered off to the bathroom.

I cleaned up the monkey mess, sat them all in front of the tele vision, and tuned to the Cartoon Network. I nibbled on one last piece of pizza and called Morelli.

“How’s it going?” Morelli wanted to know.

“It’s average. Stole a truck. Blew up a house. Brought seven monkeys home with me. And now I have a naked man in my shower.”

“Yeah, same ol’, same ol’,” Morelli said.

“What’s new with you?”

“Pulled a double hom i cide. Shoveled dog shit off old man Fratelli’s lawn. Started drinking at three o’clock.”

“I assume Anthony is still with you.”

“He’s like a boil on my ass.”

I took a shower when Diesel was done. When I came out, he was in the kitchen. He’d removed all the monkey helmets and was studying them.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “It looks like a little antenna on the top, but I have no idea what it’s supposed to do.”

“Gail Scanlon rescued animals from labs. Hard to believe she would turn around and use them for experimentation.”

“She was a woman living alone in a secluded area. She didn’t have a phone. I don’t think she had a gun. She kept intruders away with a piñata. If she had something Wulf wanted, like land or monkeys, she’d be an easy target.”

“Why would Wulf want monkeys?”

“Don’t know the answer to that.”

“Wulf has Gail. Munch said they had her locked away and that she was serving a purpose.”

“Maybe she’s wearing a helmet,” Diesel said. “What are we going to do with the monkeys?”

“They’re watching tele vision.”

“They’re used to living in a habitat without flush toilets, and you just fed them pizza. It’s going to get ugly in here.”