Plum Lucky (Stephanie Plum 13.50)

“Doug says he’s hungry,” Snuggy said. “He said he had to eat grass, and there wasn’t hardly any. He says he thinks he could be more helpful if he wasn’t hungry.”

Diesel dialed Flash. “I need horse food,” he said to Flash. He listened a minute and studied his shoe. “I don’t know what horses eat. Just go to a horse food store and let them figure it out. And bring some beer and pizza with the horse food.”

“What are you going to do with Doug?” I asked Snuggy. “He needs a barn or a stable or something.”

“I have him scheduled for surgery next week, and after that, I have a place for him to live in Hunterdon County. I just don’t have anything for him right now. And I guess I’m in a bind with the surgery. I lost the money I was going to use.”

I called my mother.

“Do you know anything about Lou Delvina?”

“You aren’t involved with him, are you? He’s a terrible person. If your cousin gave Delvina to you to find, you give him back. Let someone else look for him.”

“He’s not one of my cases. This is something else.”

“Well, I hear he’s sick. And something happened with him and his wife, because he’s not living at the Cranbury house anymore.”

“Do you know where he is living?”

“No, but I ran into Louise Kulach at church last week, and she said twice she saw Delvina getting cold cuts at the deli on Cherry Street. She said he looked terrible. She said you wouldn’t recognize him, except the butcher told her who it was. Where’s your grandmother?”

“She’s in the bathroom.”

“What should I do about supper? I have a pot of spaghetti sauce on the stove.”

“Grandma wants to eat at the mall.”

“I guess that’s okay, but don’t let her eat from that Chinese place. It always gives her the runs.”

I put my phone back into my pocket. “North Trenton,” I said to Diesel. “Delvina’s been seen at the deli on Cherry Street.”

“Never underestimate the value of gossip,” Diesel said. “Let’s roll before it gets dark.”

“What about the horse food?” Snuggy asked.

“We’ll stop at Cluck-?in-?a-?Bucket,” Diesel said.

“Doug doesn’t eat burgers,” Snuggy said. “Horses are vegetarians.”

“Whatever,” Diesel said. “We’ll stop at a supermarket and get him a head of lettuce. Just get him into the RV.”

Snuggy rolled the RV slowly down Cherry Street. Doug was in the aisle between the dinette table and the couch, looking out the big front window, eating an apple. It was his fourth apple, and half the apple fell out of his mouth while he chewed. Turns out it’s hard to eat an apple efficiently without opposable thumbs. We’d been driving a grid pattern through north Trenton, and this was our second pass down Cherry.

Diesel was perched on the seat next to Snuggy. “You’d better not be blowing smoke up my skirt with this horse “ Diesel said to Snuggy.

Doug reached forward and bit Diesel on the shoulder. Not hard enough to draw blood, but hard enough to leave a dent and apple slobber on Diesel’s shirt.

“This is the reason I don’t carry a gun,” Diesel said. “It’d be satisfying to shoot him, but I’d probably regret it... eventually.”

Snuggy turned off Cherry, drove a couple blocks, and stopped in the middle of the road. “Doug says the neighborhood didn’t look like this. He said the house was by itself.”

“Was it in the woods? In the middle of a field?” I asked.

“No. It was just by itself,” Snuggy said. “And it was noisy. He could hear cars all night long.”

“Route 1,” I said to Diesel. “The house was at the end of a street that backed up to Route 1.”

The sun was setting, and I could see a rosy glow in the sky in front of us.