Plum Spooky

  Diesel gave a bark of laughter and retrieved my shoe. We were both ankle-​deep in mud, the difference being he was wearing his beat-​up boots, and I was wearing sneakers. He swept me off my feet and carried me to the ATV. He set me on the seat, knocked most of the mud off my sneaker, and laced it back on my foot.

  “Follow me,” he said. “We’re going to the Subaru.”

  It was slow going in the mud and rain. If it had been warm, it might have been fun sliding around on the slick, rutted road, but it wasn’t warm, and I wasn’t having fun. We reached the car, and I dragged myself off my ATV.

  “I lied about neither sleet nor snow, blah, blah, blah,” I said to Diesel.

  “You gave up your shoe for the cause,” he said. “You can’t ask for much more than that.” He released the hitch on the ATV trailer and handed the car keys to me. “You’re going home, and I’m staying here. Call Flash when you get cell-​phone reception and tell him to meet you somewhere and swap out the Subaru. And then send him back here to wait for me.”

  “I feel like a wimp.”

  “Yeah, but you’re a cute wimp. And I’m an awesome superdude. Just don’t forget to send Flash.”

  He took my phone and programmed Flash’s number in. Then he reached into the SUV and took a granola bar and the gummi bears.

  “See you to night,” he said.

  “What about Wulf? Don’t you need me to disguise your bread crumbs?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  So I’m a wimp. Better a warm, dry wimp than a dead, hypothermic idiot. And when I got the chance, I’d do something nice for Diesel.

  I WAS ON the Atlantic City Expressway, en route to the Turnpike, and Martin Munch blew past me. He was doing ninety in the rain, driving a mud-​splattered Audi. I would never have noticed, but he cut out around me, and I caught a flash of red hair and a vision of him hunched up on the wheel. I put my foot to the floor, and the Subaru lurched forward.

  After a mile, Munch pulled right, took the exit, and I followed. It was Saturday afternoon, we were in the middle of a monsoon, and Martin Munch felt compelled to drive two exits down the Expressway to a junk shop masquerading as a crafts and antiques fair. The parking lot was vast and empty. The building was a renovated, industrial-​size chicken coop. The walls were cement block, and the roof was tin. Inside the chicken coop, the rain on the roof was deafening.

  I’d stealthily squished across the lot and entered the building several steps behind Munch. I was wet and disgusting and not feeling at my best, but getting passed by Munch on the highway was an act of God I couldn’t ignore. He cruised the corncob dolls and miniature wooden hand-​painted cranberry buckets that said PINE BARRENS, USA and, on the bottom in small letters, MADE IN CHINA. He meandered into an aisle of dented lunch boxes from the 1950s and Howdy Doody puppets. He paused to heft an antique Etch A Sketch, and I thought, Come to mama.

  “Martin Munch?” I asked him.

  He turned and looked at me. “Yes.”

  Clink. I clapped the cuffs on him.

  “Do I know you?” he asked.

  “I work for your bail bondsman. You missed your court appearance. And I chased you through the woods yesterday.”

  “Jeez. You scared the heck out of me. I thought you were one of those crazy Pine People. There’s an old guy who thinks he’s the Easter Bunny. And the worst of all is the Jersey Dev il. You can hear him flying around at night, and his eyes glow in the dark. I saw something big and black with glittery eyes in the bush, and I started running.”

  “What were you doing in the woods?”

  “I was going to check on a house, and I didn’t want to take the ATV through the bog in the dark.”

  “Gail Scanlon’s house?” I asked.

  I never heard his answer because there was pain. It went through me like lightning. I went to my hands and knees and saw a pair of expensive black boots and black slacks with a razor-​sharp crease step into my field of vision. I looked up and saw Wulf staring down at me. He was even more impressive and frightening in daylight. He was big and ghostly pale. His eyes were black, shaded by thick black lashes. He reached out to me, and when he touched me, there was more pain, and then nothing.

  Stephanie Plum 14.5 - Plum Spooky

  SIXTEEN

  MY MIND CAME awake before my body. I was thinking, and then I was hearing. I opened my eyes, and I could see, but I couldn’t move. I was stretched out on a bed, and Munch was poking me like I was a yeast roll and he was testing my freshness.

  “Stop it,” I said. “What the heck are you doing?”

  “I wanted to see if you were awake.”

  “What hit me?”

  “Wulf. He’s awesome. It’s like he’s not even human or something. It’s like he’s some sort of dark titan.”

  I could feel tingling in my fingers and toes. The tingling moved along my arms and legs, and there was a rush of heat throughout my body.

  “He’s not a titan,” I said. “He’s just a big, scary, creepy guy in expensive clothes. What are you doing with him?”

  “We’re partners. We’re going to take over the world.”

  “Get real.”

  “Actually, I don’t really care about that,” Munch said. “I just want to be able to do my experiments. And I want to get chicks.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “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.

  I crept to the house and looked in a window. Lights were off. No activity. I tried the front door. Locked. I worked my way around the house, looking in all the windows. No one was in the house. There was a yellow pad on the kitchen counter. Dishes in the sink. Some clothes on the floor in the second bedroom. Looked like jeans and boxer shorts.

  A window was broken in the kitchen, the glass cleared out with a stick that was left on the counter. I looked down at Carl.

  “I imagine that’s how you got the key to the padlock.”

  Carl scratched the top of his head.

  I reached through the window, got the stick, and used it to break a window in the back door. I opened the door, and we stepped inside. My search was fast. I didn’t want to be there when Wulf returned. No phone that I could find. There was a power cord for a computer in the kitchen but no computer. Milk and a couple cans of soda in the fridge. A jar of peanut butter, half a loaf of white bread, and an opened box of cereal had been left on the kitchen counter. Minimum clothes in the dresser. A couple T-​shirts and a pair of Power Ranger’s briefs. A down jacket in the closet.

  Munch was living in the house, but it looked more like a stopover than a residence. And he was working someplace else.

  I dropped my wet sweatshirt onto the kitchen floor and zipped myself into Munch’s down jacket. The yellow pad on the counter caught my eye. It looked like Munch had a grocery list going. The first item was HTPB. The second was APCP. He also listed a transmitter, barium, and Blue-​Bec rockets. I ripped the page off the pad and stuffed it into my jacket pocket.

  I left through the back door with Carl tagging after me, clutching the cereal box. I guess life in the woods lacked amenities like cookies and cereal. We crossed the yard and followed the road. After a half hour, I heard a car approaching and saw headlights shining through the trees. Carl and I ducked into the woods, crouching low, hiding in the shadows. The headlights swept around a curve and the Audi passed us on its way to the house.

  As soon as the lights disappeared around the next curve, I took off running. In a matter of minutes, Wulf would be hunting me down. It was dark, and the road was slippery and pocked with potholes. I went down twice, scrambled to my feet, and stumbled forward. The dirt road widened slightly, and a short driveway to my right led to a double-​wide. There was a pickup parked in the drive. I ran to the pickup and looked in the window. Keys in the ignition. Pineys are trusting people.

  I jumped into the pickup, Carl scampered over me and sat in the passenger seat, and I turned the key. I backed it out to the dirt road, and the door to the double-​wide opened and a big guy, more Wookiee than human being, filled the doorway. He had to be over seven feet, wearing a T-​shirt and shorts, and he had hair everywhere.

  He roared, there was a shotgun blast, and the windshield was peppered with birdshot that didn’t completely penetrate.

  “Eep,” Carl said, eyes big and bugged out.

  I whipped the truck around and took off down the dirt road in Sasquatch’s broken-​down heap that reeked of giant prehistoric wet dog. In seconds, I was able to turn onto pavement. I had no idea where I was. I didn’t recognize anything. I was in a stolen truck with half a tank of gas, no identification, no credit cards, no money, and a monkey. I stuck to the paved road, and after ten miles, I came to an intersection with signs. The signs meant nothing to me, but just ahead I could see the glow of overhead lights to a parking lot. The lot was empty except for one car. The Subaru. Somehow I’d found the junk store.

  I had the SUV keys in my jeans pocket. I swapped out the truck for the Subaru and laid down rubber, wasting no time getting the heck onto the Expressway. I called Diesel while I drove. No answer. Diesel was probably waiting for Flash and had no reception. I needed to go back and get Diesel. Crap. I really didn’t want to do that. I was afraid I’d run into Wulf.

  “What do you think I should do?” I asked Carl.

  Carl didn’t answer. Carl had discovered Super Mario stashed in the console and was beyond happy, eating his cereal and making Mario jump around.

  I made a U-​turn at the next interchange and headed back for Diesel. If I got to the pickup point and he wasn’t standing there with the two ATVs, I’d turn around and not stop driving until I pulled into my apartment building parking lot.

  My heart started skipping beats a quarter mile away. I wanted Diesel to be waiting for me, unharmed. I wanted to get him in the car and make a safe retreat. And as far as I was concerned, Munch could stay in the wind forever. Vinnie would just have to deal with it. My rent was due, but better to be evicted than be dead … or even worse, be a Munch toy.

  I was the only car on the road. I switched to my high beams and slowed to almost a crawl, looking for the dirt road, afraid I wouldn’t recognize it. Fortunately, it wasn’t an issue, because Diesel was at the edge of the road. He was standing hands on hips, mud splattered and wet through to his skin. I stopped, he opened the passenger-​side door, and Carl gave him a thumbs-​up.

  “I get the feeling I missed something,” Diesel said, shooing Carl into the backseat and sliding in next to me.

  I gave him the short version of my eve ning adventures.

  “Take me to the house,” Diesel said.

  “What, are you nuts? There’s one road in and one road out. And there are homicidal maniacs there.”

  “I can only hope,” Diesel said. “I need to catch Wulf by surprise, preferably with his back to a wall. I’m sure they’ll abandon the house, but we might be able to get them in the pro cess.”

  The only way I knew to find the house was to go back to the junk shop and retrace my route.

  “This all looks the same to me,” I said to Diesel. “If you hadn’t been standing out in the open, I probably would never have found you.”

  Headlights swung onto the road in front of me, and a police cruiser passed me going in the opposite direction. I took the road the cruiser had just left, and hooray, there was the double-​wide. No doubt the police had been responding to the stolen-​truck report.

  I felt kind of bad about taking Sasquatch’s truck, but it wasn’t far away, and I’d left it in good shape.

  I swapped seats with Diesel, and he cut the lights and drove the muddy road in the dark. He parked the Subaru just short of the clearing, and we got out. Carl stayed in the Subaru with his game.

  There were no cars in the yard. This meant I was relieved, and Diesel was unhappy. We crossed to the house and looked inside. It seemed empty.

  “Are you going in?” I asked.

  “Maybe.” Diesel prowled the yard and found a large rock. “Get back,” he said. “Stand by those trees.”

  He hefted the rock and pitched it through a front window. Seconds after the window shattered, th
e house was literally blown apart by an explosion.

  “No need to go in,” Diesel said.

  “What the heck was that?”

  “Motion bomb. Remember the Sky Social Club? Classic Wulf. He loves that crap.” He took my hand and pulled me to the car. “We need to get out of here before the police and fire trucks clog the road.”

  “But the house is on fire!”

  “It’ll burn itself out. There’s no wind, and the woods are wet from the rain. There’s a large enough patch of cleared ground around the house, so the fire won’t spread. I’m sure there’s no one inside, and if there is, it’s too late to help them.”

  We ran to the Subaru. Diesel opened the door and groaned. The SUV was full of monkeys. Six of them in all, plus Carl. They were all sitting in a row in the backseat. All but Carl were wearing hats.