Plum Spooky (Stephanie Plum 14.50)

“You know, girls. Pussy. Wulf said he’d make sure they were all over me.”

“You need Wulf to get you girls?”

“No way. I can get all the girls I want. It’s just that I’m busy, you know? I don’t have time to do the whole bar scene. Anyway, I think the bar scene is old. I mean, who does that anymore anyway, right?”

“What, do they check your ID?”

“Yeah. It’s humiliating.”

I pushed myself up to a sitting position and swung my legs over the side of the bed.

“So how’s Wulf going to get you girls?” I asked him.

“He brings them in to me. Like you. You’re my first. We have the monkey lady, but she’s kind of old and Wulf is using her for other stuff. Anyway, Wulf said I could practice on you. You’re kind of a mess, but you’re nice and soft.”

“Soft?”

“Yeah. Your breasts are soft.”

“You touched my breasts?”

“I would have done more, but you’re all muddy. I figure we’ll put you in the shower now that you’re awake, and then I’ll have a go at you.”

“How about if I have a go at you,” I said. And I kicked him in his Munchkins.

He crashed to the floor and rolled around in a fetal position, gasping for breath. The door to the little bedroom opened, and Wulf looked in at us.

“I see it’s going well,” Wulf said.

I wanted to say something clever, do a kung fu move on him and run like the wind, but truth is, my brain was numb with fear. Wulf scared the crap out of me. There was something about him. The lack of facial expression. The black eyes. The perfect clothes over the body that exuded evil power. He was the dark side of Diesel.

“I need to move you,” Wulf said. “You can walk with me, or I can incapacitate you and drag you out.”

“I’ll walk.”

He stepped aside and motioned me out the door. We were in a small but comfortable ranch-?style house from the seventies. He led me out the door and across the yard to an outbuilding. It had stopped raining, but the air was raw and the ground was oversaturated. The outbuilding was nothing more than a shed. Maybe five by five. A door and no windows.

“I’ll be back,” he said. “And when I come back, you’re going to have to be nicer to Martin.”

He closed and locked the door with a padlock, and I was in total blackness. Not a hint of light. No furniture. No bathroom facilities. Just a metal shed. I felt my way around the shed, but there were no weak seams. I still had my cell phone clipped to my jeans, but there was no reception.

I was in a terrible position. My Jeep was in my parking lot, and Ranger had no idea I was in trouble.

Diesel was rambling around in the woods, oblivious to my predicament. When he finally returned to rendezvous with Flash, Flash wouldn’t be there. Bottom line, I was on my own, locked in a shed, waiting for a madman to return and give me over to a geek who wanted to get laid.

A half hour passed, and I heard a car drive away. A couple more minutes, and it sounded like someone was clunking the padlock against the shed exterior. There was silence and then more of the clunking and some scratching. The padlock clicked, the handle turned, and the door opened a crack. I cautiously peeked out. The sun had set below the trees, but the sky still held some light. No one was in the yard. I pushed the door fully open, and that was when I saw him. It was Carl!

I picked him up and hugged him to me.

“Eeep,” Carl said.

The padlock was on the ground, the key still stuck in the lock.

“Is anyone else here?” I asked him. “Gail Scanlon or Martin Munch?”

Carl shrugged his shoulders.

This wasn’t one of the properties Diesel had tagged for further investigation on his first sweep. The little ranch-?style house sat in the middle of a cleared patch of ground. No garage. No generator. Just the tool shed, which was big enough to hold a lawn mower and not much else.