“They’re lucky.”
“Is there someone like that for you? Someone you really like?”
“Right now I really like you. And I’d like you even better if you’d swap places with Bob.”
“No way.”
“Had to try,” Diesel said.
At one o’clock, Diesel’s cell phone rang. By the time I was awake and oriented, Diesel was in the middle of a conversation with the caller.
“Don’t lose him,” Diesel said. “Double-team if you have to and call me if he moves.”
I was half sitting, propped on one elbow. “What was that?” I asked when Diesel put his phone back on the night table.
“Lou Delvina just rolled in. Parked in the driveway and scratched himself all the way from the car to his house. Flash said he got a good look at him through the kitchen window, and Delvina is covered with hives.”
“Bernie!”
“Yeah, looks like it. Don’t know how they’re connected, but it can’t be friendly if Delvina is scratching.”
Bob had moved off the bed sometime during the night, and there was a big empty space between Diesel and me.
Diesel patted the space. “You could move over here,” he said.
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s warm and comfy.”
“I’m warm enough.”
“I could make you warmer.”
“Jeez,” I said. “You never give up.”
“It’s one of my better qualities.”
It was bright sunshine when I opened an eye to Diesel. He was standing at bedside, showered and shaved and wearing a clean shirt.
“Where’d the clean shirt come from?” I asked.
“Flash brought me some clothes this morning.”
“Where’d Flash get the clothes?”
“I don’t know. Didn’t ask.”
“And you shaved. What’s the occasion?”
“It’s Valentine’s Day. I wanted to be ready in case you got all romantic on me.”
Valentine’s Day. How could I forget! I dragged myself out of bed and looked at the clock. Nine. I did a sigh.
“Have a tough night?” Diesel asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I could have made it a good night.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “I said I don’t want to talk about it. I’m feeling cranky. Give me some room. And stop smiling at me with those damn dimples.”
He handed me a mug of hot coffee. “I’m just trying to get your blood circulating. We have a man in motion. Lou Delvina left his house ten minutes ago. Flash is a beat behind him. I’m heading out. Do you want to be in on this?”
“No. Yes.”
Diesel was hands on hips, looking down at me.
“Yes,” I said. “Give me a minute.”
“Forty seconds would be better.”
I picked some clothes off the floor and ran into the bathroom with them. I was dressed and out in record time with a hairbrush in my hand. I grabbed a ball cap off the dresser and rammed my feet into boots. Diesel stuffed me into my jacket and handed me a new mug of coffee, and we were out of the apartment, down the hall to the elevator.
“Bob!” I said. “What about Bob?”
“I walked him and fed him. He’ll be fine. He’s sleeping in a patch of sun in the dining room.”
We took the ’vette with Diesel driving. He peeled out of the lot and headed west on Hamilton Avenue to Route 1. He took the Route 1 bridge into Pennsylvania, and I looked across to the Warren Street bridge. TRENTON MAKES—THE WORLD TAKES was the message on the bridge. I hadn’t a clue what it meant.
“How do you know where you’re going?” I asked him.
“I can feel Flash in front of me. There are a couple people I connect to, and Flash is one of them. I can’t always connect, but it’s strong today. Probably because he’s excited to be on the chase.”
“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. “Delvina 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 neighbor’s 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 s
ee 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 bandy-legged 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.
“I don’t fucking believe this,” Delvina said. “Is there anything else that could friggin’ go wrong? This whole week is caca.”
Delvina marched past me and went straight to his hedge. “Oh jeez, just look at this,” he said. “One of the plants is all broken. There’s gonna be a big hole here until this grows.”
I’d sort of gotten over the weak-knee thing, since I’d had a chance to check both guys out and knew they weren’t packing. Maybe an ankle holster, but that didn’t worry me so much. I’d seen cops try to get their gun out of an ankle holster and knew it involved a lot of swearing and hopping around on one foot. I figured by the time Delvina could get his gun off his ankle I’d be long gone, running down the road. In fact, I was having a hard time not going narrow-eyed and pissy because I’d gone to all the trouble to manufacture a tear and no one was noticing. I mean, it’s not every day I can pull that off.
The driver had joined Delvina. “Maybe you could do a transplant or something,” the driver said. “You know, one of them grafts.”
“Christ, my wife’s gonna go apeshit on this. This is gonna ruin her whole garden club standing if we can’t get this fixed.” Delvina had his hand under his shirt and down the front of his pants. “Oh man, I got hives inside and out. I swear to God, you should just shoot me.”
“It’s them people,” the driver said, scratching his ass. “They’re putting the juju on us. I say we dump them in the Delaware.”
Delvina looked back at the house. “You could be right. I’m getting tired of them anyway. And I’m starting to think the heartsy-fartsy lady doesn’t have what we want.”
Delvina and the driver started to walk back to the house, and so far, I hadn’t gotten any kind of a sign from Diesel, mystical or otherwise, that the coast was clear.
“Hey,” I yelled to Delvina. “What about my car?”
“What about it?” Delvina asked. “Don’t it drive? It don’t look so bad to me.”
“You got a cell phone, right?” the driver said. “Call your club. You got a new ’vette. You probably belong to a club. Like AAA or something.”
The right side of the ’vette was scraped, and the front right light was smushed in. Pieces of hedge were stuck in the headlight and slightly crumpled hood. I got behind the wheel and raced the motor.
Delvina and his driver were hands on hips, looking at me like I was another hive on their backside. It was cold, and they were standing there in shirtsleeves. They weren’t excited about doing the backyard mechanic thing. Fortunately, they were full-on chauvinists who couldn’t see me for anything more than a dumb bimbo. If Flash had run into the hedge, neither of them would have left the house without a nine rammed into the small of his back. Still, I was trying their patience, and it was only a matter of time before they figured it out and they went for the ankle holster.
I had one eye on Delvina and one eye looking beyond him to the patch of woods. Finally Diesel emerged and gave me a thumbs-up. I did a small head nod to Diesel and blew out a sigh of relief.
“You’re right,” I said to Delvina. “I guess the car’s okay. Sorry about your hedge.” And I carefully backed up, changed gears, and rolled down the driveway and out onto the road. I had my teeth clamped into my lower lip, and I was holding my breath. Sprigs of hedge were flying off the grille, and the right front tire was making a grinding sound, but I kept going until I was around a bend in the road.
12
I pulled to the shoulder and sat and waited, and after a couple minutes, the blue Honda Civic came into view. Diesel got out and jogged over to me.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yes. Do you have Annie and Bernie in the Civic?”
Diesel picked some hedge off the windshield wiper. “Yes. Is this car driveable?”
“The right-side tire is making grinding noises.”
Diesel checked out the right-side tire and pulled a large piece of hedge from the wheel wel
l.
“That should help,” he said. “Hop over the console. I’m driving.”
I scrambled into the passenger seat, and Diesel took the wheel. He eased onto the road, drove a short distance, and made a U-turn. Flash did the same. Diesel waved Flash on, and Flash took the lead. We flew past Delvina’s house and retraced our route until we were over the bridge and back in Jersey.
“So far as I can tell, Delvina doesn’t know about Annie’s apartment,” Diesel said. “I’m going to bring Annie and Bernie there to regroup.”
“Did Bernie give himself hives?”
“Apparently he went out of control and infected everyone around him, including himself. I didn’t get a chance to find out much more than that.”
We motored through town, parked in the underground garage, and took the elevator to Annie’s floor. Diesel opened the door, and I turned and looked at Flash and grimaced. His face was breaking out in hives.
“Oh shit,” Bernie said to Flash. “I’m really sorry. I’m not doing it on purpose, I swear. The rash is just leaking out of me.”
Flash scratched his stomach. “They’re coming out all over. What do I do?”
“Get away from Bernie and try a cortisone cream,” Diesel said.
Flash ran down the hall and punched the elevator button.
Bernie limped into Annie’s apartment. “I’ve got hives on the bottom on my feet,” he said to Diesel. “I’ve got them everywhere. You have to help me. I don’t ever want to see another hive.”
I was keeping as far away from Bernie as possible. I was in the hallway leading to the bedroom, looking at everyone else in the living room.
“What about Annie?” Diesel said. “Are you going to leave her alone?”
“I’ve been chained to Annie for two days. I don’t ever want to see her again either.”
“I thought we bonded,” Annie said.
Bernie scratched his arm. “Yeah, maybe. I guess you’re okay. I don’t know. I can’t think straight. I just want to soak in some cold water or something.”
“I talked to Betty,” I said to Bernie. “She’d like to stay married, but she has some requests.”
Between the Plums Page 20