Look Alive Twenty-Five (Stephanie Plum 25)

Now it was my turn to smile. “You never searched his house,” I said.

“That was an error on my part. Still, I trust you didn’t find anything significant.”

“Not significant.”

“Mildly important?” he asked.

“Nothing worth mentioning,” I said.

“Are you playing with me?”

“Not intentionally.”

He had crossed the room, and he was standing very close to me.

“I could suggest a game,” he said.

“I bet. No thank you. Maybe some other time.”

He touched the back of my hand with his fingertip, and I felt a burning sensation. I looked down and saw that a blister was forming where he’d touched.

“How did you do that?” I asked.

“Magic,” he said. “Would you like to see what else I can do?”

“Eugene!” I yelled.

Eugene walked in from the hall, and Wulf gave his head a small shake. “Disappointing,” he said. “I expected foolish self-reliance from you.”

“Are you going to disappear in a puff of smoke?” I asked him.

“No,” he said. “We’ve had enough theatrics for one night.”

Wulf left, and Eugene turned to me. “Would you like me to stay in the hall?”

“Not necessary,” I said. “The Rangeman control room monitors my hall. They’ll let you know if Wulf returns.”

I said good night to Eugene, and I locked my door. I had a brief conversation with Rex about the state of my life. I put some first-aid cream on my burn. I made a short phone call to Morelli. And I took my MacBook Air to bed with me and watched two episodes of House Hunters International before falling asleep.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

MY FIRST THOUGHT when I woke up was that it was Thursday, and I was going to have to go back to the Snake Pit. Maybe I’d get lucky, I told myself, and there’d be a cataclysmic ending of the world before Rockin’ Armpits took the stage. I was kidding, of course, because a cataclysmic ending of the world would be bad. On the positive side of the morning, Wulf wasn’t in my kitchen brewing coffee and scrambling eggs.

An hour later I rolled into the office. Lula had already snarfed up the best donut, and Connie was paging through a Costco flyer.

“How’d it go yesterday?” Connie asked. “Did you turn up anything new with Ranger?”

“We went to Skoogie’s house and found some short videos. If you put them all together they sort of told a story. It started with a normal day at the deli with Stretch and Raymond, and it moved on to the kidnappings, the forehead tattoo, Victor Waggle with a meat cleaver, and then it returned to the deli with someone getting served what looked like a penis in a hot dog bun.”

“A penis in a hot dog bun,” Lula said. “That’s sick. Did it fill the whole bun?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a good-size penis. What about condiments?”

“There weren’t any.”

“Hunh,” Lula said. “Everybody knows it’s all about the condiments. Who wants to eat a naked penis? If I’d been on the sandwich station that penis would have had mustard and relish on it, at the very least. Or it could have been a chili dog penis. Mustard and chili and chopped onion. That’s the way to serve a penis.”