Fearless Fourteen (Stephanie Plum 14)

“I feel sort of stupid that I can't help her.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.”

My cell phone rang with a number I didn't recognize on the display.

“It's your new best friend, Dom,” he said. “I'm watching you, but you'll never find me, so don't bother to look around. Just act like everything is normal. I don't want to freak the kid.”

“Okay, what's up?”

“Just making sure you're not taking him back to Morelli's house. You take him back to Morelli's house, and I'm gonna have to kill you al

ong with Morelli.”

“Have you thought about getting help? Maybe seeing a doctor?”

“I don't need help. I know what I'm doing. You're the one who's gonna need help if you don't take good care of the kid.”

And he disconnected.

This was a family beyond dysfunction. Dom's mother was probably the sanest of them all, and she was being fed pureed peas.

I pulled away from the school and hooked a left. Zook turned in his seat and looked out the back window.

“Who's the guy following you?” he asked.

I looked in my rearview mirror. White car right on my bumper. Might be a Taurus. That probably meant it was a rental, since no one actually buys a white Taurus. My first thought was Dom. I stopped for a light and got a glimpse of the driver. White hair. Pasty complexion. Large, framed, black plastic Buddy Holly glasses. Definitely not Dom. It was the stalker.

Must have followed me from the hotel garage. Just what I needed, one more nut to add to my collection.

“Hang on,” I said to Zook. “I'm going to get rid of him.”

I have a routine that I do in the Burg when I want to lose a tail. It involves a lot of cornering and rocketing down alleys, and it always works. It was especially easy this time, because the stalker was clearly an amateur. I lost him halfway through my drill.

“Cool,” Zook said. “That was excellent. Do you know that guy?”

“He's a Brenda stalker. I don't know why he attached himself to me.”

I rolled through the Burg and parked in front of my parents' house.

“I have to work tonight, so I'm leaving you with my parents,” I told Zook.

“What about Morelli?”

“I thought we'd test-drive this arrangement. Variety can be good, right?”

My Grandma Mazur had the door open before we even got to the front porch.

Grandma was dressed in her favorite lavender slacks, white tennis shoes, and flowered shirt. Her gray hair was freshly set in rows of curls, her nails were painted to match her slacks. She'd been a beauty in her time, but a lot of her had shrunk and sagged. This went unnoticed by Grandma, who seemed to get younger in spirit as her body aged.

“Who do we have here?” she wanted to know.

“This is Mario Rizzi, Loretta's son. Everyone calls him Zook.”

“Zook,” Grandma said. “That's a pip of a name. I wish I had a name like that.”

She took a closer look at him. “You got a awful lot of holes in you. How do you sleep with all those rings attached to your head? Don't it bother you when you roll over?”

“You get used to it,” Zook said.