I felt my heart constrict, and I bit into my lower lip. Before I met Diesel, the only danger I’d experienced was exposure to carving knives and horny line cooks. Now I was involved in explosions and abductions and who-knows-what-else. My stomach got sick just thinking about it.
Diesel dialed Mark’s number and let it ring. No answer.
> “We need to go over there,” Diesel said.
“I don’t want to go over there. I wasn’t cut out for this. I never wanted to be G.I. Joe or Wonder Woman. I wanted to be Julia Child.”
Diesel took one last muffin, turned to leave, and spotted Cat sitting in the doorway. “Cat looks hungry.”
I put half a muffin in Cat’s food dish and plastic-bagged the rest. Carl climbed down from the top of the refrigerator, gave wide berth to Cat, and followed us out the door to Diesel’s SUV.
“I’m having an identity crisis,” Diesel said, pulling away from the house. “I’m used to flying solo. Now, every time I look in my rearview mirror, I see a monkey. It’s like having a hairy little kid back there. I’m starting to feel like a family man with a mutated gene pool.”
“Do you like it?”
“No.”
“Maybe you could think of him as a partner.”
“No.”
“Pet?”
Diesel flicked a glance at Carl. “There’s no place in my life for a pet.”
No place for a woman, either, I thought.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
There were fire trucks and cop cars angled to the curb in front of Mark’s apartment building when we drove up. The downstairs door was open and hoses snaked out from the fire trucks, but the hoses didn’t look like they were in use. Firemen and cops milled around, and after a couple beats, I realized what I was seeing. They were chasing ferrets.
Diesel parked halfway down the block, we locked Carl in the car, and we made our way to a fireman holding an extinguisher.
“What’s going on?” Diesel asked.
“There was a small fire on the second floor. We put it out, and then we realized there were about forty ferrets running loose in the apartment. It took them two minutes to figure out we left the door open. We’re trying to catch them, but I think it’s hopeless. Those suckers are off on the great adventure.”
A ferret ran up the fireman’s leg, jumped from him to Diesel, catapulted itself off Diesel to the ground, and disappeared into the night.
“Tricky little devils,” the fireman said.
“Were any people in the apartment?” I asked him.
“No. Just the ferrets.”
We got back into the SUV and drove to More Is Better. No lights shining from the office. No cars in the lot.
“Stay here with Carl,” Diesel said to me. “I’m going to do a fast walk-through.” Five minutes later, Diesel jogged to the SUV and slid behind the wheel. “Nobody home.”
“Where do we go from here?”
“We go to Lenny.”
“It’s after work hours. Do you know where Lenny is living?”
“I had Gwen find him. He’s living with his cousin Melody.”
Melody lived in a small, lopsided, worn-out house in north Salem. The house didn’t have a historic plaque tacked to the front and the windows were circa 1970 aluminum, so probably the condition of the house couldn’t be explained away by age. We rang the bell and a frazzled woman in her late thirties answered the door. She had short, curly brown hair that had gone to frizz. She was medium height, plump but not obese, dressed in jeans and a too-big shirt. She had a baby in one of those baby slings attached to the front of her, a toddler hanging on to her pants leg, and two more kids who looked to be in the seven-to-eight-year range. It was hard to tell who was a girl and who was a boy. From the toddler on up, they all had pretty much the same chopped-off haircut and were wearing jeans and sneakers and T-shirts, none of which were pink.