Wicked Appetite

by Janet Evanovich

  Twenty minutes later, we were idling in front of Lenny’s house. The black Ferrari was parked at the curb, and Wulf stood on the sidewalk, watching Hatchet kick through house debris.

  “They’re still here,” I said to Diesel.

  “Not exactly,” Diesel said. “The Ferrari’s been moved. It’s not in the same spot. Wulf went somewhere and came back.”

  “I bet if we sit and wait, he’ll lead us to Mark.”

  “It’s not that easy. Wulf is a master at slipping away.”

  “But we could try.”

  Diesel pulled to the curb and parked behind an Econoline van. “We could try.”

  The sun dropped to the tops of the buildings, the clouds glowed scarlet, and the sky darkened while we waited. When twilight deepened to nightfall, Wulf whistled to Hatchet. Hatchet stopped his search and made his way through the charred rubble, stirring up clouds of soot with every step. There was a brief exchange between Hatchet and Wulf that involved some kneeling on Hatchet’s part, and Hatchet got into the Ferrari.

  Wulf turned, walked directly to us, and bent a little to talk to Diesel through the driver’s side window.

  “You don’t need to waste your time following me,” he said. “I won’t lead you to him until I’m done with him.”

  The corners of Diesel’s mouth twitched into a small, humorless smile, and he looked ahead to Hatchet sitting in the Ferrari. “You’re going to have to get your car detailed,” he said to Wulf.

  Wulf flicked his eyes to his car and back to Diesel. “That’s so not funny,” Wulf said. He looked over at me, our eyes held for a moment, and he moved from the SUV to his Ferrari. There was a flash of light, smoke swirled in the glare of Diesel’s headlights, and the Ferrari was gone.

  “I hate when he does that,” Diesel said.

  There were still no Spook Patrollers standing vigil at my house when we rolled in, but Glo was hunkered down on the front stoop.

  “What’s up?” I said to her. “I thought you had a date.”

  “It turns out he’s allergic to mushrooms. I met him at the restaurant and everything was going great until he accidentally ate a chunk of portabello in his salad and did projectile vomiting. And then after that, he got all swollen and blotchy and couldn’t breathe, so I took him to the walk-in clinic to get a shot, and then he wanted to go home.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Yeah. Go figure. Anyway, I was in Marblehead, so I thought I’d stop in. I thought Diesel might be able to help me with my levitation spell.”

  “Spells aren’t my gig,” Diesel said.

  “Yes, but you’ve got special powers.”

  Diesel opened the front door. “I don’t have special powers. I have enhanced abilities.”

  Cat was sitting in the middle of the living room when we walked in. Carl did the scary smile and gave Cat a finger wave, Cat hissed at him, and Carl shrunk back and farted.

  “Chill,” Diesel said to Carl.

  “I’m hungry,” Glo said. “I didn’t get a chance to eat, what with the vomiting and swelling and stuff. Maybe we could order out for something.”

  “I haven’t got a lot in the house,” I said, “but I could make you a grilled cheese sandwich.”

  Glo’s eyes got big. “Grilled cheese would be awesome.”

  “I could use a grilled cheese,” Diesel said.

  “Eep!” Carl said. “Eep, eep.”

  “Three grilled cheeses coming up,” I said.

  I assembled the bread and butter and cheese, and Glo thumbed through Ripple’s.

  “I found a different spell from the uppity one,” Glo said. “I have it marked here. The description says it’s helpful for moving difficult objects.”

  “Have you read it out loud yet?” I asked her.

  “No. I thought I’d wait and do it here where Diesel can do damage control. Sometimes my spells don’t turn out exactly perfect.”

  I put my big fry pan on the cooktop. “What object are you going to move?”

  “I thought I’d try something small. Like a glass.”

  “No glass!”

  “Bread? Cheese?” Glo asked.

  “No. I’m using the bread and the cheese. I don’t want enchanted food.”

  Glo looked around. “How about the toaster?”

  “Sure. Do the toaster.”

  “Light as air, listen well, rise to the command on words spriggam, barflower, my will be done.” Glo pointed her finger at the toaster. “Spriggam, barflower, my will be done. I command thee to rise.”

  We all watched the toaster for a beat and BANG! The toaster burst into flames. Diesel pulled the plug and dumped it into the sink.

  “I think it rose a little before it caught fire,” Glo said.

  “It jumped when it exploded,” Diesel told her.

  Glo threw her arms up in exasperation. “I don’t get it. I know I read it correctly.”

  “You didn’t need powdered octopus suckers or anything, did you?” I asked her.

  “No. It’s all right here in black and white.” Glo read the spell out loud again, following along with her finger. “Spriggam, barflower, my will be done.”

  A shout went up from the street.

  “Oh no,” Glo said. “Now what?”

  We ran to the door and looked out at Mel Mensher. He was standing on my sidewalk, watching three other members of the Spook Patrol chase after the Spook Patrol van.

  “It just took off,” Mensher said. “We parked it, and we all got out and started checking our equipment, and next thing, the van’s going down the street all by itself.”

  The van jumped the curb at the curve in the road, bumped over Mrs. Dugan’s front yard, and crashed into her oak tree. The three Spook Patrol guys pulled up and stood hands on hips, looking at the van.

  “Honest to gosh, it was an accident,” Glo said.

  I pushed Glo back into the house and closed and locked the door. “The driver obviously forgot to put his parking brake on,” I said. “That’s our story, and we’re sticking with it.”

  Diesel was frying grilled cheese when we got back to the kitchen. “And?” he asked.

  “The Spook Patrol van took off down the street all by its lonesome,” I told him.

  “Nice,” Diesel said.

  He flipped a sandwich onto a plate, handed it to Glo, and put a second sandwich into the fry pan.

  “You can cook,” I said to him.

  “No,” Diesel said. “I can’t cook. I can make a sandwich if no one else is going to make it for me.”

  “I bet I could find a cooking spell,” Glo said.

  Diesel and I answered in unison. “No!”

  Diesel gave the second grilled cheese to Carl, and I took over the fry pan.

  “It really ticks me off that Wulf is going to get Mark’s charm,” I said to Diesel. “We should have been more aggressive with Mark. We let him slip through our fingers.”

  “Roughing up Normals is frowned upon by the BUM,” Diesel said. “Especially if the Normals haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “What about Wulf? Wulf kidnaps people and does who-the-heck-knows-what to them.”

  “Wulf doesn’t work for the BUM. He has his own set of rules.”

  “He killed a man. Why aren’t you ordered to capture him or something? Why are you only authorized to stop him from getting the Stones?”

  “Wulf has friends in very high places. Beyond that, I can only assume there are circumstances that justify my orders.”

  “You don’t look like a guy who would be good at taking orders,” I said, plating his sandwich.

  Diesel fixed his brown eyes on me. “It’s a struggle.”

  “Maybe I need to go to wizard school,” Glo said. “Someplace where I could take a course in spell recitation. Do you suppose there’s a wizard school? Maybe an online course?”

  “Wizards aren’t real,” I said to Glo. “There are no wizards. And wizard school would be a big scam.”

  “Criminy,” Glo said. “Just let m
e know how you feel.” She looked at Diesel. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know any wizards personally.”

  “But do you think there could be wizards?”

  Diesel finished his sandwich and put his dish in the dishwasher. “Could be covers a lot of ground.”

  “Well, I think there could be wizards,” Glo told him. “I bet Ripple was a wizard. And I bet the book is magical.”

  Diesel got a bottle of water from the refrigerator. “Have you ever let Lizzy hold it?”

  “No!” Glo scooped the book off the counter and handed it to me. “Do you feel anything?”

  “It might be a little warm.”

  “Is it glowing?”

  “No, but it has a faint green aura.”

  “What does that mean?” Glo asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m new to all this.”

  We looked at Diesel.

  “No clue,” Diesel said. “Not my area of expertise, but the grilled cheese was excellent.”

  “So maybe someone put a whammy on my book, and that’s why the spells don’t work right,” Glo said. “Maybe there was some rival wizard, and he jinxed Ripple’s book.” She took her book back and shoved it into her tote bag. “I’m going to talk to Nina from the Exotica Shoppe tomorrow. I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I walked Glo to the door, and we looked down the hill to Mrs. Dugan’s yard, where a tow truck and police car were parked, lights flashing. Mel Mensher had joined the rest of his crew at the crash scene, and all was quiet at my house.

  “Shoot,” Glo said.

  “Faulty parking brake,” I reminded her.

  Glo grimaced, got into her car, and drove away.

  “I like her,” Diesel said, standing behind me. “She has imagination.” He slid an arm around my waist and rested his chin on the top of my head. “I like you a lot more. No logical reason for it.”

  I thought it was great that he liked me, but it would be better if he knew why.

  “I know why,” he said, reading my mind, his lips brushing against my ear, “but I’d jeopardize my standing as a macho jerk if I gave you a big gooey list of reasons. And if I was honest, it would lean heavy to smooth skin and soft breasts.”

  “Unh.”

  “Is that a good grunt or a bad grunt?”

  “I thought you were reading my mind.”

  “Sometimes your mind is a mess.”

  “I was thinking your standing as a jerk is intact.”

  His arm tightened slightly around me, and he kissed me just below my ear. “That’s a huge relief.”

  The kiss sent a rush of pleasure humming through me, and I unconsciously murmured, “Mmmmmm.”

  Good grief, I thought. Did I just make that utterly rapturous sound? Did I actually moan out loud? Over a kiss, no less. And it wasn’t even a hot kiss. The kiss had been almost friendly!

  “I made that sound because I was thinking about cupcakes,” I told him.

  “Sweetheart, you wish a cupcake could make you feel that good.”

  I was speechless. I felt my mouth drop open and my eyes go wide.

  Diesel grinned down at me. “On a scale of one to ten, how offensive was that remark I just made?”

  “Seven.”

  “I’m off my game. I can be much more offensive than that.”

  Something to look forward to.

  He turned his attention to the Spook Patrol at the bottom of the hill. “I think we owe them a favor,” he said, pushing me out of the house, locking my front door behind us.

  “What kind of favor?” I asked. “I thought we didn’t like them.”

  He took my hand and tugged me down the sidewalk. “They’re okay. They’re just doing their job.”

  We walked past the cop car to Mel Mensher, and Diesel expressed his sympathy. “Too bad about your van,” Diesel said to Mensher. “How are you guys going to hunt spooks without it?”

  “The tow truck guy said the damage was minimal,” Mensher told him. “And in the meantime, Richie went to get his wife’s minivan.”

  “I have some information you might find interesting,” Diesel said. “Can I borrow your notepad and pen?”

  Mensher pulled his pad and pen from his jacket pocket. “What kind of information is this?”

  Diesel wrote something in Mensher’s book and handed it back to him. “See for yourself.”

  Mrs. Dugan was standing on the other side of Mensher. She had her arms folded in front of her, watching the van get towed off her tree. She was in her seventies, with short white hair and a fireplug body. Her husband had passed on, and she lived alone with an obese beagle named Morty. Mrs. Dugan and Morty walked by my house twice a day taking their constitutional.

  “Will your tree be okay?” I asked her.

  “It’s got some bark peeled away, but I think it’ll be fine,” she said. “I couldn’t help but notice Ophelia’s cat came back. I saw him sitting in your window earlier today. Isn’t that nice. I was worried about him. It’s not like he’s a normal cat. What with his eye and all.”

  “Do you know how he lost his eye?”

  “No. Ophelia would never talk about it. She was very sensitive when it came to that cat.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  She thought a moment. “I don’t believe I do.”

  I said good-bye to Mrs. Dugan, and Diesel and I made our way up the hill to my house.

  “I thought Cat 7143 came from the shelter,” Diesel said.

  “It did. But it turns out it was my Great Aunt Ophelia’s cat.”

  “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it,” Diesel said.

  “Compared to the rest of my life these days . . . it’s not even a four on the one-to-ten wonder scale. What information did you give to Mensher?”

  “I gave him Wulf’s Boston address,” Diesel said.

  That got a smile out of me. “Does Wulf have a sense of humor?”

  “He won’t have one about this.”

  “Not at all?”

  “The first time Mensher clicks off a picture, Wulf’s sphincter will get so tight his eyes will cross.”

  We were almost at my house when Richie motored past us in a green minivan. He stopped next to the tow truck, and in the glare of headlights, Mensher and his crew off-loaded equipment from the broken van to the new minivan. There was a short discussion between Mensher and the tow truck operator, Mensher and his crew piled into the minivan, and the minivan drove away and disappeared around the corner.

  “Off to Beacon Hill,” Diesel said.

  “You threw them under the bus.”

  “Yep.”

  “What if Wulf does the burning claw thing on them?”

  “They’d probably get a reality show out of it.”

  “The last guy to get the burning claw also got dead,” I told him.

  “Wulf won’t kill these guys. Unless he’s in a really bad mood. And even then, he’ll probably just maim one or two of them.”

  “Oh great. Now you’re making me an accessory to maiming.”

  “It’s not like it’s major maiming,” Diesel said. “It’s only a handprint.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “You’re such a girl,” he said, smiling at me, like I was dumb but redeemingly cute. He pulled me the short distance to the Cayenne, opened the door, and motioned me in.

  “Where are we going?” I asked him.

  “We’re going to stop a potential maiming.”

  ______

  Beacon Hill is a quiet, historic neighborhood in the heart of Boston. Streets are narrow and tree-shaded. Sidewalks are bumpy. Houses are pricey, ranging from shabby chic to totally renovated and opulent. Parking is impossible.

  The Spook Patrol had somehow managed to snag the last legal parking place on the hill, and Diesel settled for a space that wasn’t so legal. He parked blocking a driveway one house down and across from the green minivan.

  Months ago, when I first came to town, I took a wal
king tour of the area, so I knew we were on one of the more desirable streets. The houses were mostly Federalist style. Some were single-family and some had been converted to expensive multitenant condos and apartments.

  Wulf lived in the middle of the block in a single-family, perfectly maintained example of a Greek Revival brownstone. The small, manicured front yard was bordered by a fancy black wrought-iron fence. Curtains were drawn, but a bar of light was visible in a second-floor window. The Spook Patrol was parked smack in front of the house.

  “I don’t see Wulf’s car,” I said to Diesel.

  “He has parking in the rear.”

  “Do you think he’s home?”

  “I know he’s home,” Diesel said.

  “Do you have an ass cramp?”

  “Big-time.”

  Beacon Hill streets are lit by gas lamps. Not as efficient as halogens, but bright enough to watch the Spook Patrol guys organizing themselves. There were five of them, including Mel Mensher. There was Richie, a chubby guy I’d heard called Gorp, a Pakistani named Milton, and a skinny little guy no one ever talked to. Richie was on his cell phone. Mensher, Milton, and Gorp shuffled back and forth on the sidewalk, looking at the house through binoculars, taking readings with their ghost-o-meters. The skinny little guy hauled a camp chair out of the minivan, set it up on the sidewalk, and settled in with his computer.

  Diesel and I were snug in the Cayenne, in a dark spot on the street between gas lamps and under the shade of an oak tree. After ten minutes of watching the Spook Patrol, Diesel slid an arm around me and nuzzled my neck.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Yes! Stop it.”

  “The girls never said that when I was in high school.”

  “This isn’t high school. We’re supposed to be stopping a maiming. And besides, the monkey is watching.”

  Diesel stared out the window. “There’s no maiming going on.” He flicked a glance at the backseat. “And the monkey is sleeping. So what’s the problem?”

  I sucked in some air. “You make me nervous.”

  “I noticed.”

  “I go into a panic when you get close.”

  “Does that happen with all men or am I special?”

  “It’s you.”