Plum Lucky (Stephanie Plum 13.50)

“We haven’t got any milk,” I told her.

“I’m so mad, I don’t know what I’m eating. I’m beside myself. I gotta take a breath. I gotta calm down. I’m probably giving myself a stroke.” She scarfed down some more cereal. “So what’s happening around here? I miss anything while I was getting scammed?”

“Lou Delvina kidnapped Grandma.”

“Get out! Why’d he want to do that?”

“He figured we didn’t want the horse back bad enough, so he took another hostage.”

“He took the wrong one,” Lula said. “No offense. I like your grandma and all, but she’s gonna make their life a living hell.”

That was my fear. If Grandma got too cantankerous, Delvina might think she wasn’t worth the effort and get rid of her... permanently.

Diesel was slouched on the couch. “How did Delvina find Grandma?” he asked Snuggy.

“It wasn’t me,” Snuggy said. “I swear.”

Diesel kept looking at him. Not saving anything. Just looking.

Snuggy squirmed in his seat. “He must have followed me here.”

Now we were all looking at Snuggy.

“Okay!” Snuggy said. “He did follow me. I saw him. I didn’t have a choice. He was gonna kill Doug, and he had me by the short hairs. And I figured it didn’t matter that he was here. I figured he was just watching me. And then he started pressuring me, calling me, so I told him I couldn’t get my hands on the money because it was in the vault. I didn’t know he’d kidnap Grandma. He had Doug. Who’d think he’d kidnap an old woman?”

“I don’t want to be an alarmist or anything,” I said to Diesel, “but we need to get Grandma back now.”

“We can bring the police in, but that would get messy for Snuggy and Doug. And Delvina might panic and make Grandma disappear.”

I bit into my lower lip to keep from sniveling, and told myself to get a grip. I didn’t want Grandma to disappear.

“Looks like we’ll have to get the money without Briggs,” Diesel said.

“Oh boy,” Lula said. “Are we gonna rob the vault?”

“No,” Diesel said. “We’re going to help them return our deposit.”

We took the elevator and followed Daffy’s footprints through the casino gaming floor to hotel reception.

“I want to know the safety deposit box routine,” Diesel said. “Someone needs to go to the desk and ask to get walked through the process.”

“I’ll do it,” Lula said. “Us supermodels are always carrying a shitload of jewelry. I’ll tell them I need to know everything’s okay before I hand over my valuables for safekeeping. And if they disrespect me, I’ll scream discrimination. It’s illegal to discriminate against a supermodel. We got rights like everyone else.”

Lula strutted up to the desk, and we all watched while she talked to one of the clerks. The clerk turned Lula over to a manager, and the manager led Lula into a back room. Ten minutes later, Lula emerged, thanked the manager and clerk, and crossed the lobby to where we were waiting.

“You gotta get behind the desk and through the door,” Lula said. “Once you’re through the door, you walk down the hall and take a special service elevator two flights down. It opens into another hallway with a guard at a desk. You gotta show the guard your ID and do one of them fingerprint scans like at Disney World. If I was by myself, I wouldn’t have got anywhere, but I was with the manager, so he took me halfway down the hall to a door marked guests.

That’s the door that leads to the guest security boxes. There’s other doors down there that lead to the money-?counting room and all, but they’re locked up tight. Once you get into the room with the security boxes, you can only open them with a key and a code. You get the code wrong, and the Marines come and cut your balls off. Oh yeah, and another thing, you’re always on television,” she said to Diesel, “so maybe you want to comb your hair.”

“How do I know which box is mine?” Diesel asked.

“The guy at the desk with the fingerprint machine has a book with everyone’s name and box number. Plus, did I tell you he’s got a gun? A big one.”

“The armed guard is a problem,” Diesel said. “I can scramble television transmissions, and I can open locks. I can’t make myself invisible.”

“I got a stun gun,” Lula said. “How about you jump out of the elevator and real quick you give him some jolts? You just gotta move fast before he shoots you. How fast can you move?”

“I can’t move as fast as a bullet.”