Hardcore Twenty-Four (Stephanie Plum 24)

“This is amazing,” Lula said. “I need to get one of these. You could see everything. It’s like I can fly.”

“I’m cruising at a slow speed right now,” Stump said, “but she can do forty miles an hour if I need to make a fast delivery.”

“What do you deliver?” I asked him.

He looked at me like I had corn growing out of my ears. “Money. Drugs,” he finally said. “And we use this in various locations to assess the movement of people.”

“Stump’s in the illegal immigration business,” Lula said. “He’s real good at it too. Nobody’s ever died in any of his trucks.”

“Everybody gets water, a blanket, and a granola bar,” Stump said. “I run a first-class operation.”

“I’m not seeing no zombie so far,” Lula said. “Maybe Slick’s already moved out of the area.”

“I’ll jump two blocks and make another sweep,” Stump said. “Do you know what direction he’s moving in?”

I shook my head. I didn’t know.

“He’s a zombie,” Lula said. “He might want to get underground. He might be heading for a cemetery or a storm sewer.”

“If he’s one of them drug zombies he could be going to Morley Street,” Stump said. “There’s a guy distributes on Morley.”

Whoa! “‘Drug zombie’?”

“Yeah, there’s some new street drug that turns people into zombies. Just popped up last week. At least that’s when I heard about it. Goes by the name Zombuzz. Nasty stuff. I tried to get a piece of it, but it’s a closed franchise.”

“Do you know the distributor?” I asked.

“No. He’s from out of town. I hear he’s weird. They say he comes and goes like smoke. I don’t even know what that means. Nobody knows much. Word is, he gives the stuff away. How do you compete with that?”

Stump’s cellphone buzzed, and he read the text message.

“Sorry, ladies, gotta go,” Stump said. “Business.”

He tapped instructions to the drone and, in less than a minute, we could hear the high-pitched whine and see the quadcopter coming at us like a giant mosquito.

“I got it. I got it,” Lula said, rushing toward the drone, arms outstretched.

The drone ticked off her fingertips and hit her on the forehead. BONK! Lula went still for a beat and then sat down hard on the ground.

“Ow,” she said.

I went to one knee beside her. “Are you okay?”

“Butterfly. Don’t let them eat all the Fudgsicles.”

Stump was packing his equipment. “You want me to put her in the back of the truck and drive her to the ER?”

Lula blinked at me and put her hand to her forehead. “What happened?”

“You tried to catch the drone, and it hit you in the head.”

“Fucking drone.”

“She’s okay,” I said to Stump. “I’ll get her a bucket of chicken, and she’ll be fine.”

Stump drove away, and I helped Lula get into Big Blue.

“Did you know about the zombie drug?” I asked her.