Wicked Charms

by Janet Evanovich

  “This is outrageous. I’m appalled. Truly appalled. You people have no honor. We had an agreement.”

  “Actually we had no agreement,” I said, running my hands over Rutherford. “We never discussed this.”

  “It was understood.”

  “He’s clean,” I said.

  “You will never get the stone,” Rutherford said. “Never. Mammon is guarding the stone.”

  “I thought Mammon was trapped inside Martin Ammon,” I said.

  “Yes, technically I suppose that’s true,” Rutherford said. “Still, you won’t be able to steal it away from him. We’ve taken precautions.”

  Glo had another spoonful of potion ready for Ammon. “Nice doggy,” she said.

  Ammon wriggled away from Diesel and for a moment looked like he was going to lick the spoon, but he leaned forward and licked Glo instead. He woofed, grabbed the jacket off the floor, and bolted for the balcony that surrounded the beacon room. He tripped over Broom when he went through the door, stumbled, and flipped over the wrought iron railing.

  Everyone gasped and froze for a beat before rushing out and looking down at Ammon. He was laying spread eagle on his back.

  “Holy bejeezus,” Glo said. “Do you think he’s okay?”

  Ammon’s eyes fluttered open. “Aaarooo,” he said.

  The two men that had been standing guard halfway down the jetty were running toward Ammon.

  “Bacon,” Ammon said. “What? Who?”

  Rutherford rushed into the beacon room, snatched the jar of potion off the table, hurtled down the stairs, and ran out of the building. We looked over the railing and saw Rutherford pouring the contents of the jar into Ammon’s mouth.

  “Whoa,” Glo said. “That’s a lot of gonad he’s giving him. He’s going to get diarrhea.”

  People were gawking from the restaurant at the water’s edge and from the ship museum. An EMT truck pulled onto the wharf with lights flashing. A cop hustled down the wharf toward Ammon.

  “Time to go,” Diesel said.

  We ran down the stairs, crammed ourselves into the electrical closet, and squeezed through the trapdoor.

  Clara was waiting for us in the tunnel. “How’d it go?” she asked.

  “It was mixed,” I said. “Ammon did a flip off the lighthouse balcony.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Okay is relative,” I said. “He’s not dead. And it looked like he might be coming out of the dog thing.”

  “I saw him move his foot,” Glo said. “And he sort of had a spasm when Rutherford was pouring the potion into him.”

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about all this. Ammon wasn’t a good person, but I didn’t wish him dead or paralyzed or thinking he was a dog for the rest of his life. I mostly just wished he would go back to being a self-absorbed billionaire and leave me alone.

  “Even if Ammon is perfectly okay, this is going to occupy everyone’s attention for a couple hours,” Diesel said. “We should use the opportunity to look for the stone. They have it someplace safe. The first safe place that comes to mind is Ammon’s bank vault.”

  “I’ll take you to the Wessel House exit,” Clara said. “Then I’m going back to the bakery.”

  “I’ll go to the bakery, too,” Glo said. “My bike is there, and Broom could use a cupcake.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  We left the tunnel system at the Wessel House and walked to the bank building. Two men in suits were lounging at the building’s front door. No assault rifles in sight. They didn’t look especially worried about an attack. In fact, they didn’t look worried about anything…maybe because they were both sucking in weed. I guess Mammon took a lenient view on recreational drug use. We were standing downwind, and I was getting a contact high.

  Diesel took the Blue Diamond out of its pouch and dropped it into my hand. “Anything?”

  “No.”

  “Won’t hurt to check anyway,” Diesel said.

  We moved to the side of the building where a paved driveway led to a rear metal fire door.

  “Can you open it?” I asked Diesel.

  “Yeah, and I’m guessing they’re not bothering to set the alarm. The building isn’t in use, and there’s a construction dumpster here. The guys out front are just window dressing. If Ammon is using the safe he probably feels it’s secure enough.”

  He slid his hand over the door, and I heard the lock click. He pushed the door open, and I held my breath and waited. All was silent. No alarm. I stepped in and looked at the control panel beside the door. No blinking lights. The alarm had been deactivated.

  The back door opened into an empty storage room. No windows. Dark interior. Another door stood open at the far end, and there was some dim light beyond it. We crossed the room and looked out into what used to be the bank lobby. Light was coming from a skylight and from two small windows in the front of the building. The lobby had been gutted. The floor tiles were chipped and covered with dust. There was an elaborately scrolled wrought iron gate on the back wall. We went to the gate and looked inside at a small foyer leading to a massive vault door with a lock that looked like it was straight off a movie lot.

  “Well?” I said to Diesel.

  Diesel opened the gate and walked up to the vault. He put his hand on the lock, fingers first, then the flat of his hand.

  “I’m guessing this is the original lock installed when the building was completed,” Diesel said. “That’s good because I can’t do a lot with a computer chip beyond scramble it.”

  He moved his hand a little and listened. He did this three times, spun the dial, and the door creaked open.

  Diesel grinned. “Am I good, or what?”

  It was a large walk-in vault. Plastic tubs with snap-on lids were stacked against the wall. The tubs were clear and I could see that they were filled with gold and silver coins. Some tubs were bigger than others, and the big ones looked like they held an assortment of jewels, hammered gold goblets, and fancy perfume and spice bottles. The treasure from the Gunsway. Very impressive, but not what caught my attention. Hatchet had my attention. He was sitting on a folding chair in the middle of the room. He was dressed up like an insurance salesman in a cheap suit, and he was holding a samurai-type sword. He had a mask attached to an oxygen tank on the floor beside him.

  “Hey,” Diesel said.

  Hatchet gave a curt nod.

  “So this is a new look for you,” I said.

  “I feel the fool,” Hatchet said. “ ’Tis a sorry day when I must wear such cloth as this. Hatchet is of another age, and this is foreign garb for Hatchet.”

  “Are you supposed to be guarding the treasure?” I asked him.

  He slumped in his seat. “I will guard nothing without tights and tunic.” He blew out a sigh. “Truth is, I have not been asked to guard the treasure. I am locked away here as part of the treasure.”

  “You have a sword.”

  “I found it in a bin.”

  “We need the stone,” I said to Hatchet.

  “It is not here. I would have captured it for my true liege lord if given the chance.”

  “Do you know where it is?”

  “Nay, I do not. It was on Ammon for a while, but the dog part of him grew too vicious under the stone’s influence. Rutherford sometimes transports it in a thick leather pouch. I believe it is currently locked away in a safe, but I don’t know where.”

  I looked at the plastic bins stacked against the wall. “So this is what one hundred and ninety million dollars’ worth of treasure looks like.”

  “Actually it is a lot less,” Hatchet said. “As in many tales of adventure, the facts have changed with the telling. When evaluated and tallied it was determined this amounted to a mere twenty-five million.”

  “Hardly worth worrying about,” Diesel said. “No wonder Ammon left it unguarded in this vault.”

  “It’s not unguarded,” Hatchet said. “The silly security men come to check on it from time to time.”

  “How long have you be
en locked in here?” I asked him.

  “Since midafternoon. ’Tis getting tiresome.” He looked over at the vault door, which was slightly ajar. “Am I to stay?” Hatchet asked.

  “Your choice,” Diesel said.

  Hatchet jumped off the chair and rushed to the door. For a moment I was afraid he would lock us inside, but he scurried away.

  “Sometimes he really creeps me out,” Diesel said. “He’s like a big, pudgy rodent.”

  “This stone search is dragging,” I said. “I vote we let Rutherford and Ammon have it. Not to mention, we don’t even get to keep it. You gave it away to Wulf. So let him get the stupid stone from Rutherford and Ammon if he wants it so bad.”

  “I like your thinking, and I’d like nothing better than to get zapped off to an island and a palm tree.”

  “But?”

  “But it’s not gonna happen. The stone is dangerous in the wrong hands. And it’s my job to put it out of circulation.”

  “Are you telling me you have a work ethic?”

  “No. I’m telling you my boss is almost as crazy as Rutherford, and I wouldn’t want to piss him off.”

  “What would happen?”

  “I’d have to fly commercial, for starters.”

  “Gee, that’s awful.”

  “You want to try it with a monkey?” Diesel was back on his heels, staring at the treasure bins. “We should take this.”

  “The treasure?”

  “Yeah. All twenty-five million of it.”

  “That would be stealing,” I said.

  “This stuff has been stolen so many times over the centuries I don’t think it matters anymore.”

  “What would we do with it?”

  “I guess we could eventually donate it to a museum, but in the short term it might turn out to be useful. We might be able to bargain with it. Or maybe we just use it to make the bad guys mad. Throw them off their game while we search for the stone.”

  I didn’t want to steal the treasure. I wanted to get out of the vault. I wanted to go home or back to the bakery. I wanted to be someplace that felt safe and happy.

  “Just thinking about stealing the treasure makes me nauseous,” I said.

  “You’re probably just hungry. I’ll buy you an ice cream cone when we’re done.”

  I glanced at my watch. If we were going to do this we needed to get it done quickly.

  “The bins look heavy,” I said. “How are we going to get them out of here?”

  “The same way they got them in here. Hand truck. There’s one in the corner. It’s still got three bins stacked up on it.”

  “Then what? We can’t truck them all the way to the Wessel House.”

  “Call Clara and tell her to bring the van.”

  Twenty minutes later we had all the bins, plus the hand truck, loaded into the van. Diesel locked the vault and the back door to the bank, and we took off.

  “Where am I going?” Clara asked.

  “We need to stash this somewhere,” Diesel said.

  Clara stopped at an intersection. “We could put it in the speakeasy. There’s a second entrance in Gramps’s garage. No one would see us unloading.”

  —

  Diesel shoved the last bin into place against the bar. “It should be okay to leave these here short-term. I have other, more pressing problems.”

  “Such as?” I asked him.

  “Food. I’m starving. I need a burger. One of those fancy little meat pies isn’t going to do it.”

  “I’ll drive you back to the bakery and you can get your car,” Clara said.

  We filed out of the speakeasy into the short sloping tunnel that led to the one-car garage. Clara was parked behind the Rascal scooter.

  “How does Gramps get his Rascal to the aquarium?” I asked Clara.

  “Benita has a van with a hydraulic lift. And I hate to say this, but sometimes Gramps sets off on his own.”

  “It doesn’t look like he’s home. There aren’t any lights on, and I didn’t hear anyone walking overhead.”

  “He has a heavy social calendar,” Clara said. “He’s probably at the senior center cheating at cards.”

  Ten minutes later Diesel parked his Porsche in a lot off Lafayette Street, and we walked the short distance to a pub.

  “They better have ice cream here,” I said. “You promised me ice cream.”

  “They have ice cream everywhere.”

  We slid into a corner booth and ordered burgers, fries, onion rings, and beer.

  Diesel waited for the waitress to leave before looking over at me. “Call Nergal and see what the deal is with Ammon. I’m sure he’s tapped in to hospital gossip.”

  “Why can’t you make the call?”

  “Nergal thinks you’re cute,” Diesel said. “He’s more likely to do something unpleasant for you.”

  This was obnoxious but probably true.

  “Hey,” I said when Nergal picked up.

  “Let me guess,” Nergal said. “You want to know about Martin Ammon.”

  “Yes! How did you know that?”

  “Everyone wants to know. My mother called me.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “No. He’s in a private room with some idiot in a suit standing guard at his door.”

  “Does he think he’s a dog?”

  “A what?”

  “Dog. Like, is he barking or anything?”

  “I haven’t heard anything about barking. The information I got is that they’re keeping him here overnight for observation. He has a concussion.”

  “Nothing unusual?”

  “There’s a rumor going around that he was covered in pink rabbit fur when he was brought in, but that’s about it.”

  I thanked Nergal and relayed the information to Diesel.

  “So the stone isn’t on Ammon, and it’s not with Rutherford, and it’s not in the vault,” Diesel said. “My second-best guess would be the Marblehead house.”

  “I see where this is going, and I’m not searching the Marblehead house until I’ve had my ice cream.”

  “You can take your time with the ice cream,” Diesel said. “I think it will be just about impossible to search the Marblehead house without the distraction of a party and a fire. We’re going to have to find a way to make the stone come to us.”

  “That shouldn’t be difficult. Ammon will get out of the hospital and retrieve the stone. All we have to do is snatch Ammon and rip the stone out of his demon hands.”

  “Yeah. Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “Or we could snatch Rutherford,” I said. “He probably helped hide the stone.”

  “Even better.”

  The waitress brought our food, and we stopped talking and concentrated on eating.

  “Anything else?” she asked when we were done.

  “Ice cream,” I said.

  “We have vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, coffee, tutti-frutti, butter pecan, and chocolate chip.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s what I want.”

  “Which one?”

  “All of them.”

  Twenty minutes later Diesel was slouched in the booth, smiling at me. “You ate all that ice cream,” he said. “Impressive.”

  “Yeah, but I’m feeling sick.”

  “My original plan was to have you lure Rutherford away from the hospital tonight, so you could sweet-talk the information out of him. I’m thinking that just went out the window.”

  Upchucking tutti-frutti seemed like an okay trade-off to sweet-talking Rutherford. He wasn’t as evil as Ammon, but he creeped me out. All that smiling and good cheer and the ha-ha laughing made me want to kick him in the knee. Not to mention, I was pretty sure I lacked the sweet-talking gene.

  “I need to go home and lie down or throw up or something,” I said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  It was five in the morning, I was at the bakery, and so far my day was looking good. I had woken up to a house that felt relatively normal. Just Cat and me in the velvety darkness. Di
esel had patched my doors the night before, so they would at least stay closed. He promised to get me new ones today. My kitchen felt welcoming when I switched the light on. No sign of Mammon. No Rutherford. No Wulf.

  Clara bustled in and went to her workbench. “Four dozen cupcakes for Mr. Dooley today,” she said.

  “Four dozen cupcakes coming up.”

  She looked over at me. “Have you heard any more about Ammon?”

  “So far as I know he’s in the hospital with a concussion.”

  “You seem very chipper today.”

  “I know. I woke up feeling terrific, and everything has been perfect this morning. Perfect coffee. Perfect toasted bagel. Every light was green on the way to work.” I gave up a huge sigh of contentment. “It’s going to be a good day.”

  Glo showed up a couple hours later. She was all in black, including lipstick and nail polish.

  “You look like goth girl,” I said to her.

  “I’m in mourning. The 8 Ball died.”

  “Gee, that’s awful,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “Yeah, condolences,” Clara said.

  “I sort of expected it,” Glo said. “He’d been leaking for a while. And to tell you the truth, I’m not so sure he was magical. Still, it’s sad. I paid two bucks for that 8 Ball. You’d think for that kind of money he would have lasted longer.”

  Glo took a tray of almond croissants out to the shop and unlocked the front door. Jennie Bell came in for a blueberry muffin, and Mrs. Kuzak bought a loaf of rye. I moved on to cookie dough, and I heard Nergal’s voice at the counter.

  “Hey,” Glo yelled back to me. “Guess who’s here?”

  Nergal smiled and gave me a finger wave when I came to the counter.

  “I felt like a cupcake this morning,” he said.

  “Red velvet?” I asked him.

  “Yes. I’ll take two. And a lemon chiffon.”

  “Wow, you must be having a good day.”

  “A suicide, an accidental overdose, a gang-related shooting, and Quentin Devereaux was found on the side of a road. And it’s only nine in the morning.”

  I gave Nergal his three cupcakes in a little box and pulled him aside. “Tell me about Devereaux.”

  “He was gutted, but all of his organs had been shoved back in. And that wasn’t the way he died. It happened some time after death.”