From the corner of my eye, I caught something streak across the floor.
“Did you see that?” I asked Diesel.
“What?”
“Something ran through the kitchen.”
There was a scratchy, scurrying sound, and a ferret popped up on the counter behind all the bottles of oil.
“Maybe he kept one as a pet,” I said. “Maybe he . . . yow!” A ferret was climbing up my pants leg and another ran over my shoe. “The cages in the bedroom were closed, weren’t they?” I asked.
“They were, but I’m guessing they aren’t now.”
We got to the bedroom just as Carl was releasing the last ferret.
“Bad monkey,” Diesel said, pointing his finger at Carl.
“Eee?”
Diesel scooped up a small black ferret. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but we’re going to have to get the ferrets back in their cages.”
They were running between our legs, and rolling around like balls. “They’re having a good time,” I said.
Diesel snagged another one and stuffed it into a cage. “Yeah, I wish the same was true for me. Help me out here. Mark isn’t going to be in a cooperative frame of mind if he comes home and finds out we did the Born Free thing with his ferrets.”
I caught one, but it squished out of my hands. Something crashed in the kitchen, and Diesel and I froze for a moment before I took off at a run. “I’m on it.”
The kitchen was alive with ferrets. They were chasing one another up cupboards and over countertops, knocking over bottles of olive oil. A large tin had tipped, and olive oil was spilling down the side of the counter and pooling on the floor. The ferrets were lapping it up and skating through it, tracking olive oil everywhere. The entire kitchen floor was slick with it.
There was a giant crash in the living room. I stepped out to investigate and went flat on my back in the oil. It took a couple beats to catch my breath, and then I crawled hands and knees through the dining room toward the living room. Bunny stuffing was scattered across the dining room, mixed with the oil. And I suspect a ferret or two might have relieved itself in the excitement, because the dining room wasn’t smelling great and there were a lot of raisins on the floor. One of the large display cases had been tipped over in the living room, and I was looking at a lot of dead gnomes.
Carl was flattened against a wall, his hands over his eyes.
I was still on all fours, and I saw Diesel’s boots come into my line of vision. His hand hooked into my jeans’ waistband, he hoisted me to my feet, and he looked me over. His first reaction was a grimace and then a smile.
“You’re a mess,” he said. “And you smell like a bad zoo.”
“Have you seen the kitchen?”
“No, and I don’t want to. The disaster in the dining room was enough for me. From the amount of oil you’ve got in your hair and soaked into your clothes, I’m guessing there was some spillage in the kitchen.”
“Do you remember when the tanker Exxon Valdez broke apart in Alaska? It was like that.”
“Here’s the new plan,” Diesel said. “There’s no way we’re going to round up the ferrets. We’re going to sneak out like thieves in the night and never tell a soul what happened here.”
“Works for me.”
Five minutes later, we were in the Porsche and on our way to Marblehead. Diesel had the window rolled down, and Carl was holding his nose in the backseat.
“As soon as we get you out of this car, I’m turning it back to Gwen,” Diesel said. “My advice to her will be to push it off a bridge.”
“I must have crawled in something going through the dining room. I think the ferrets were doing the nasty with some of the bunnies.”
“Honey, you smell bad way beyond the nasty.”
I closed my eyes and slumped back in my seat. “Can we review what’s happened here? In the interest of saving the world from a hellish future, we’ve got some poor woman talking nonsense, we’ve blown a man’s house to smithereens, and now we’ve totally trashed another man’s apartment. And if that’s not enough, we’ve acquired a cat with one eye, and a monkey.”
Diesel looked at me. “Your point?”