Wicked Business

by Janet Evanovich

  “Hatchet was showing her his prowess with a knife and he sliced a little deep,” Wulf said. “He gave her an herb to stop the bleeding, but it has some side effects. She should be fine in a few minutes. Hatchet acts the fool, but he’s one of the world’s leading experts on medieval torture and toxins.”

  “Thank you, sire,” Hatchet said.

  We led Glo out to the car and buckled her in.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her.

  “Peaches,” she said. And she drooled on her shirt.

  We stopped at Diesel’s apartment, got Carl, and put him in the backseat with Glo.

  “Eeh?” he said to Glo.

  Glo nodded her head like a bobble-head doll. “Pigeon.”

  “Maybe we should take her to the clinic and get her checked out,” I said to Diesel.

  Diesel drove to the clinic, but by the time we got there, Glo was coming around.

  “That was f-f-f-freaking scary,” Glo said, her teeth chattering. “Hatchet is nuts!”

  “Do you want a doctor to look at your cut?” I asked her. “Do you think you need stitches?”

  “No. I want to go home. I want to take a shower. I can’t get the smell of dirt out of my nose.”

  “They must have had you in a cellar with a dirt floor,” I said.

  “Maybe, but I think the smell was coming from Hatchet. I don’t think there’s any electricity in that house. It was dark, except for a lantern-type flashlight Hatchet used to show me his knives. He had them all laid out on a table. Some had curved blades, and some had wavy blades, and they were all different sizes, and they were all razor sharp. He said he’s been collecting knives since he was seven years old. And he had a suitcase like traveling salesmen use, and it was filled with powders and potions you could use to poison someone. And he had poisonous spiders in jars and vials of snake venom.

  “It might have been cool to see all that stuff if I wasn’t handcuffed. I always thought it would be fun to be handcuffed in certain situations, but turns out it isn’t fun to be handcuffed in any situation. It’s scary, scary, scary. Especially when someone picks out a knife and deliberately cuts you with it. And after I talked to you, he wanted to try out another knife and make another cut, but Wulf walked in.”

  “Wulf stopped him.”

  “Yeah. Wulf got real mad. And let me tell you, when Wulf gets mad, you’re afraid to even breathe. I could see him from the light of the lantern, and he didn’t have any expression on his face, except his eyes were black and hard, like black glass. And when he spoke, his voice was soft, but every word was clear and precise, like he knew he was talking to an idiot. And I got the feeling if the idiot didn’t do the right thing, he could be drinking the snake venom.”

  “Did Wulf say anything about the Luxuria Stone?” Diesel asked Glo.

  “No. He doesn’t talk much. He asked Hatchet if I made the call. He looked at my arm to see if I needed stitches and decided it wasn’t necessary. Then he told Hatchet to clean it and bandage it. And when Wulf was near me, he smelled like Sambuca. Totally terrifying and at the same time I had this crazy desire to lick him.”

  “I’ve noticed that same scent,” I said. “Whenever Wulf is near, I always catch a faint hint of anise. You always smell like Christmas,” I said to Diesel. “You smell like butter cookies, fir trees, and cloves.”

  “It’s a curse,” Diesel said. “Women and small children follow me around.”

  Glo looked out the window. “This is your street,” she said to me.

  “I thought you’d be more comfortable spending the night here with us.”

  “Thanks. That would be great. I’m still pretty freaked out. I never even saw Hatchet coming. I parked my car, and I was walking to my apartment, and all of a sudden he grabbed me. I guess he used a stun gun on me, because in an instant I was on the ground. Next thing I knew, I was handcuffed and there was something over my head so I couldn’t see. I’m surprised I didn’t have a stroke or a heart attack, because my heart was pounding like it was going to jump out of my chest. I had no idea who kidnapped me or where we were going. And then there was the dirt smell. When you’re handcuffed and have a bag over your head, dirt smells like death. I was sort of relieved when I found out it was Hatchet, until he insisted on doing knife demonstrations.”

  Diesel pulled to the curb and cut the engine. We all got out and Diesel stopped us at the door.

  “Someone’s been here,” he said, opening the door, going in first. “I locked the door when we left, and it wasn’t locked just now.”

  I followed him in and my first thought was of Cat. Everything I owned could be stolen or destroyed as long as Cat was okay. Diesel flipped the light on, and I looked down and saw drops of blood on the floor. My breath caught in my chest for a beat, until Cat strolled in from the kitchen. I scooped Cat up and inspected him, relieved that he wasn’t bleeding.

  “The plaque is gone,” Diesel said. “It was on the coffee table. Check on the other empowered objects to see if they’ve been stolen as well.”

  I went to the laundry, and then I ran upstairs and looked under my bed. Diesel and Glo were in the kitchen when I came down.

  “Everything else is here,” I said.

  Diesel was at the cookie jar. “Someone broke one of the windowpanes and unlocked the back door.”

  “So we know it wasn’t Hatchet, because he was with Glo. And we know it wasn’t Wulf, because, like you, he can unlock doors.”

  “Yeah,” Diesel said. “That leaves Deirdre Early. I should have known the instant I stepped in and smelled smoke.”

  “And the blood on the floor . . .” I said.

  We all turned to Cat, who was sitting, calmly grooming. Ninja Cat strikes again.

  “He deserves a steak dinner,” Diesel said.

  Cat looked over at him and blinked. And I’m pretty sure Cat was smiling.

  I sent Glo and Carl into the living room with the cookie jar, and put Glo in charge of the channel changer. I scrubbed the blood off the floor, and Diesel tacked a board over the broken window.

  “We need to get an early start for Dartmouth tomorrow,” Diesel said. “Fortunately, you have the day off. Maybe Glo will stay here with Carl.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Diesel’s idea of an early start is sometime before noon. I made French toast and a gallon of coffee for everyone, and asked Clara if she would please retrieve my license plate when she returned to the bakery. I’d deal with the rest of the car carcass when I got back. I expected that would be sometime before dark. I had no idea what we’d find when we got to the Sphinx, but I couldn’t imagine there would be much left. I was sure Wulf had a good head start on us.

  It takes about two and a half hours to drive to Hanover, New Hampshire. The beginning of the trip is almost as enjoyable as the drive to Boston. Which is to say, it sucks. Little towns, lots of traffic, annoying ways to get lost. Once you hit Route 89, it all changes, and the closer you get to Hanover, the more jaw-droppingly beautiful it becomes. Forested foothill mountains with granite cliffs and long vistas, an occasional marshy bog, beautifully maintained roads with little traffic.

  We took Route 91 from 89, got off at the exit for Norwich, Vermont, crossed the Connecticut River, and rolled into Hanover. The first impression is that this is a movie set for a small Ivy League, New England college town. Autumn was in the air and leaves were dropping from trees. Students were everywhere in hooded sweatshirts, jeans, and trail shoes. Everyone looked healthy, and you could imagine them eating sprouted wheat bread and drinking lots of stale beer out of plastic party cups.

  The college was to the left, with domes and spires and classroom buildings that date back as far as the late 1700s and early 1800s.

  Main Street, with shops and pubs, shot off to the right. It was lined with redbrick buildings, benches and trees, and parking meters.

  The Hanover Inn occupied the corner of Main and East Wheelock. It’s a big, blocky, redbrick structure with rocking chairs on its wide porch. And opposite the
Inn is the Dartmouth Green.

  We were on East Wheelock Street, and there were dorms to the left and right of me. I was thinking this was incredibly appealing, and maybe I would want to live here some day. Open a bakery of my own and make healthy treats and homemade granola for the college faculty. And then I saw the Sphinx, and I had second thoughts about Hanover.

  The building was a temple, a tomb, a forbidding gray stone bunker. It could have been a bomb shelter. It was nicely proportioned but cold and unwelcoming. And it looked forgotten, sitting forlorn in a scraggly copse of undernourished trees, perched on hardscrabble grass without a single azalea bush to soften its appearance. A hundred years ago, it had no doubt been the pride of a secret society when secret societies flourished. But that time had come and gone, and the Sphinx now looked like a beautifully designed but lone monument in an unattended boneyard.

  Diesel found parking a block away, and we walked back to take a closer look. No sign of Wulf or Hatchet. No sign of Deirdre Early. No sign that anyone ever used the building. The heavy wood door looked completely unused. Diesel ran his hand over it and wasn’t able to find a lock he could open. There was no give when he pushed against it.

  We circled the building and found a simple, unassuming door on the east side. It had a five-button security lock that had been pretty well bashed in and what appeared to be the tip of a sword wedged between door and jamb.

  “Looks like Hatchet’s been here,” Diesel said.

  “Can you open it?”

  He put his hand to it. “It’s jammed.”

  We circled the building several times but couldn’t find a way to get in. I had the scrap of paper with the hieroglyphics and scrambled letters on it. We compared the hieroglyphics on my paper to the markings on the tomb’s cornerstone and they were exactly the same.

  “Do you get any vibes when you touch the building?” Diesel asked me.

  I put my hand to the stone. “Nope. Nothing.”

  I heard sirens and I turned to see a police car race down Wheelock, moving toward Main Street. It was followed by a fire truck and another police car. We left the Sphinx and went to the sidewalk. It was impossible to see exactly what was going on, but smoke billowed into the sky from somewhere on campus.

  Diesel and I walked toward the smoke and saw that it was coming from a building on the far side of the Green. We crossed the Green and joined the crowd of students watching the building burn.

  I was standing next to a guy with a two-day beard and hair that was in worse shape than Diesel’s.

  “What building is this?” I asked him. “How did the fire start?”

  “This is Parkhurst,” he said. “It’s an admin building. The Office of Student Life is in here. Don’t know how the fire started.”

  An older woman who looked like she might work in the building leaned toward us. “I was told some crazy woman came in demanding a list of Sphinx members. And when she didn’t get it, she torched the office and ran away.”

  “The gang’s all here,” Diesel said to me.

  “Now what?” I asked him.

  “Lunch,” Diesel said. “I’m starving.”

  We crossed Wheelock, bypassed The Hanover Inn, thinking it looked too classy for us, and settled on Lou’s. My rule of thumb is always go with the diner that has a pastry counter right up front. Especially if the pastries are homemade and look like the ones in Lou’s case.

  There was counter seating and booth seating and we were able to take our pick, since everyone else in town was gawking at the fire. I ordered a burger, and Diesel ordered something called The Big Green, which it turned out meant they emptied the kitchen onto as many plates as it took and tried to cram them onto the small booth table. It was the equivalent of ordering half a cow at Fat Bubba’s Steak House. Eggs, pancakes with real maple syrup, bacon, hash browns, sausage, English muffin, and whatever else was buried under the eggs and potatoes.

  Diesel shoveled it all in and got a maple-glazed cruller on the way out.

  “Impressive,” I said to him.

  “The food?”

  “That, too.”

  We walked back to the Sphinx and stared at it.

  “I’ve got nothing,” I said to Diesel.

  “It bothers me that Hatchet and Fire Woman are here, and we’re not seeing them.”

  “Are we talking about Deirdre Early or Anarchy?”

  “I’m counting on them being the same person.”

  “Works for me. We haven’t seen Wulf, either.”

  “I’m sure he’s here, somewhere. He’s probably napping in his Batmobile, waiting for the moon to come out.”

  “You don’t like him.”

  “There was a time when I admired and envied him. His skills came earlier than mine. But we made different life choices, and it’s placed us in an adversarial position.”

  There were some guys and dogs playing with Frisbees on the lawn of a neighboring fraternity.

  “Is that Alpha Delta?” I asked Diesel.

  “Yeah. It’s the fraternity that inspired Animal House.”

  “It’s also mentioned in a lot of references as having a secret tunnel to the Sphinx.”

  Diesel looked at the Sphinx, and he looked at the frat house. He shrugged and set out across the grass. “We’ve run down every other ridiculous idea, and some of them got us to this point. We might as well run down this ridiculous idea, too.”

  “No stone unturned,” I said, jogging to keep up with him.

  He went straight to the front door and walked in, with me trailing behind. Two guys turned to look at us.

  “Is Scott here?” Diesel asked.

  “Yeah, somewhere.”

  “I’ll find him,” Diesel said. “Thanks.” And he walked toward the back of the house and down a staircase.

  “How do you know where to go?” I asked Diesel.

  “They’re all the same,” Diesel said. “There’s always a guy named Scott, and there’s always a downstairs party room. And if there’s a tunnel, it’s not going to originate on the second floor.”

  The downstairs party room was deserted at this time of the day. The light was dim and the room smelled like beer and salami. It had a bar at one end. Some leather couches. Photographs, banners, plaques, and paddles hung on the walls.

  I opened a door to a utility closet and found a trapdoor in the floor. “Trapdoor,” I said to Diesel.

  Diesel poked his head in and looked down at the door. “Shows promise.”

  There were flashlights on a shelf in the utility closet. We each took one, closed the door to the closet, eased ourselves through the trapdoor, and descended into the cramped, dark sub-cellar. Copper water pipes and electrical cables snaked overhead, the floor was dirt, and a metal box sat in a far corner. Danger—High Voltage was written on the box, but the box didn’t look like it connected to anything. Diesel pushed the box aside and uncovered a wooden hatch. He opened the hatch and flashed some light into it. There was a ladder going down about ten feet to another dirt floor.

  I wasn’t feeling wonderful about where I was at present, and I really didn’t want to go down to another level.

  “How about if I go back to the closet and stand guard,” I said to Diesel. “And you can push on.”

  “Not necessary,” Diesel said. “No one knows we’re down here.”

  “Did I ever mention my slight claustrophobia?”

  “Yes. Did I ever mention my face your fears philosophy?” Diesel slipped into the opening and dropped out of sight. “There’s more headroom here,” he called up. “And it looks safe.”

  I’d broken into a sweat, and my brain was screaming, Air! Get me fresh air! I turned toward the stairs that would take me back to the closet, Diesel’s hand wrapped around my ankle, and next thing, I was halfway down the ladder. His hands were at my waist, and I was the rest of the way down.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “You’re with me. I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you.”

  “I don’t want you
to get too offended by this, but that’s not doing it for me. I’m having a panic attack. I can’t breathe. I’m suffocating. It’s too much dirt. There’s dirt everywhere.”

  He pulled me flat against him, and he kissed me. His lips were soft, and his tongue touched mine, and I felt heat move through me. His arms wrapped around me, pressing me into him, the kiss deepened, and when he broke from the kiss, I wasn’t thinking about being buried alive under the Alpha Delta house anymore. I was thinking I wanted more kisses. A lot more. In fact, I wouldn’t mind if he put his hand on my breast. I wouldn’t even mind if he slipped his hand inside my . . .

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Do you still feel panicky?”

  “You kissed me because I was having a panic attack?”

  “Yeah. Did it work?”

  I kicked him hard in the shin.

  “Are you sure it’s not that time of the month?” Diesel asked.

  I smacked the heel of my hand against my forehead. “Unh! Men.”

  He grabbed my wrist and tugged me along a narrow tunnel. At least, I’m pretty sure it was narrow, because I had my eyes closed, but every now and then my arm brushed against the side. After what seemed like an hour but might have been minutes, Diesel stopped and I could sense the flashlight on me.

  “You can open your eyes now,” he said. “We’re at the end of the tunnel. We’re going up.”

  Praise the Lord.

  Diesel climbed the ladder first. He shoved the overhead door open, and light flooded into the tunnel. I was so relieved, I almost burst into tears. I scrambled up the ladder after him and found myself inside what had to be the Sphinx. I’m not sure exactly what I’d expected, but it wasn’t what I found. I’d hoped it would be like Cleopatra’s barge, but it looked more like the Alpha Delta taproom.

  One of the walls contained a fresco depicting St. Peter holding the keys to heaven. Odd for an Egyptian-themed temple, and in direct contrast to the opposing wall, which featured a poster of Jane Fonda as Barbarella.

  “I like this fresco,” I said to Diesel. “It doesn’t completely belong in the room, but it’s very handsome.” I ran my hand across it and felt the energy. “And it’s empowered.”