Wicked Business (Lizzy and Diesel 2)

“My purse!” the woman shrieked. “The hairy kid took my purse.”

Everyone turned to the woman and then to Carl. Carl held the purse over his head and chattered. “Chee, chee, chee!”

“That’s not a kid. It’s a monkey!” someone said. “Grab him.”

The docent was on his phone, asking for security, and everyone in the room ran after Carl. Mothers, fathers, kids, and an old lady in a motorized scooter chased Carl.

Carl climbed Excogitation, got to the top, and dumped the contents of the purse. Metal balls were running on their tracks, ringing bells, swirling in baskets . . . and tissues, lipsticks, spare change, and assorted female junk rained down.

I’d been the one to set Carl loose, but I was as transfixed as everyone else, watching him swing from the thirty-foot sculpture like a monkey in the wild.

I looked over at Monroe’s Motion Machine and saw that it was gone, along with Diesel. The glass display case appeared perfectly intact but empty, and I thought it might take a while for anyone to notice the sculpture was missing. I speed-walked to the elevator and whistled for Carl. He leaped from Excogi

tation to the spiral staircase, scurried around two guards, dodged Hatchet, and catapulted himself into the elevator just as the doors began closing. Hatchet was close behind him, face red and snarly.

“It’s gone,” Hatchet said. “The case is empty. I discovered it first, and you stole it, and I want it.”

He reached out to grab me, instinct took over, and I kicked him in his medieval nuts, knocking him back a couple feet. He let out a woof of air, doubled over, and the elevator doors closed shut.

“Eek,” Carl said.

“He’s a bad man,” I explained to Carl.

We departed the elevator at garage level and hustled to the SUV. Diesel was waiting with the motor running. We got in, and Diesel drove out of the garage.

“That was easy,” Diesel said.

Easy for him, maybe. Not so easy for me. My heart rate was still at stroke level, and I had so much adrenaline in my system I was vibrating.

“Did you see Carl?” I said. “He was amazing. It was like Cirque de Soleil at the Science Museum. We could get him a job as a Romanian acrobat.”

Carl found a cupcake crumb in his chest fur, picked it out, and ate it.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Diesel parked and we all trooped into my house and went to the kitchen. Cat 7143 and Carl sat back on their haunches on the kitchen counter, and I stood near while Diesel took the Motion Machine out of his backpack and set it on my work island.

“I had to partially disassemble it to get it into my backpack,” Diesel said, “but it was simple. Monroe designed this to be taken apart and put back together.”

It was a simple contraption composed of four wooden dowels stuck into a rectangular mahogany base. There was a crosspiece between two dowels at one end, and another crosspiece between the two dowels at the other end. A dowel ran lengthwise between the two cross dowels, and a silver ball and four silver bells hung from piano wire attached to the long dowel. The idea was to set the ball in motion so that it rang the first bell, the first bell rang the second bell, the second bell rang the third bell, and the third bell rang the last bell.

We examined every piece of the machine while Diesel reassembled it, but we couldn’t find a message.

“It’s all together,” Diesel said, securing the last dowel. “Let’s see how it works.”

He set the silver ball in motion, it hit the first bell with a pretty ding, the first bell hit the second bell with a lower-register dong, the second bell hit the third bell with a muffled kunk, and the third bell hit the fourth bell, producing another pretty chime.

“The third bell doesn’t ring,” I said.

Diesel got a soda from the refrigerator. “You try it.”

I set the ball in motion and got the same result. The third bell didn’t ring, and no magic message appeared. I touched each of the bells and got heat and vibration from only the third bell.

“The third bell is definitely charged with a different energy,” I said. “We just have to figure out how to set it free.”

“Maybe we need Glo,” Diesel said.

I called Glo, asked her to come over, and I made grilled cheese sandwiches while we waited. We stood in the kitchen eating our sandwiches, taking turns with Monroe’s Motion Machine.