Game On: Tempting Twenty-Eight (Stephanie Plum #28)(55)

“?‘They aren’t here,’ he said to me. ‘Where are they?’

“?‘Who?’ I asked him. ‘What are you talking about?’

“And he ran out and got into his car and drove away.”

“Did you see the car?”

“Yes. It was a blue sedan. I don’t know what kind. I’m thinking I should keep this between you and me,” Grandma said. “Your mother isn’t good at dealing with these dramatic episodes.”

Diesel rolled in at six o’clock with bags of food.

“I smell Pino’s,” Lula yelled from the couch.

Diesel looked in at Lula and then at me. “Can it get any worse than this?” he asked.

“It can almost always get worse. They kicked her out of the hospital. She’s only here for one night and then I can take her home.”

“We’ve got meatball sandwiches, pizza with the works, vodka rigatoni, and chicken parm. Plus, a bunch of sides. What do you want?” I asked Lula.

“Just fill a plate,” she said. “I’m starving. They wouldn’t feed me in the hospital.”

I piled food onto a plate, grabbed a bottle of water, and took it all to Lula. Diesel and I ate standing in the kitchen.

“How’s your internet?” Diesel asked me.

“I just checked a little while ago. It’s nonexistent.”

He helped himself to a second slice of pizza. “Mine’s wiped out, too. He crashed my computer. At least I didn’t get pages and pages of retribution.”

“Did he cut you off without sending you any kind of message?”

“His message was HAHAHAHAHA!”

“He might be a genius hacker, but he has no imagination when it comes to anything else. He visited my parents’ house a half hour ago. Grandma just called to tell me. She was alone in the house. She said Oswald ran through the whole house, asked her where ‘they’ were hiding and left. She said he drove away in a blue sedan. Grandma said she would have hit him with the iron fry pan, but she was making gravy in it.”

Lula made her way into the kitchen. “That was real good,” she said, setting the plate on the counter. “I appreciate that you’re helping me out in my time of need. I’m sure I’ll be better tomorrow, but right now I’m wiped out. Where do I sleep? I don’t mind sharing a bed or I can sleep on the couch.”

“Not the couch,” Diesel said. “There’s a game tonight. I need the television.”

“Okay,” Lula said. “I’ll take the bed.”

I watched her limp off to the bedroom and heard the door click closed.

“You just gave my bed away!” I said to Diesel.

“She said she didn’t mind sharing.”

“I’m not sharing a bed with her. She snores. Loud! You share the bed with her, and I’ll take the couch.”

“Not gonna happen,” Diesel said.

I put the leftovers in the fridge and got a half-eaten tub of ice cream from the freezer. I took it into the dining room and positioned myself in front of my laptop before remembering I had no internet.

“Crap,” I said.

Diesel sat across from me. “I like it. I can’t communicate with anyone. I can’t research anything. I have the perfect excuse to go old school and do my job without interference.”

“You still have a phone.”

“Only if I answer it.”

“Do we have a game plan for the Oswald capture?”

“Right now, I’m sitting, waiting for information. There are a lot of people in the field. Some are mine and some are Morelli’s.”

“Is Morelli communicating with you?”

“Not directly,” Diesel said.

I gave him my raised eyebrows look. “You’ve tapped into his phone?”

“Would you have a problem with that?”

“Maybe.”

“Then the answer is no,” Diesel said. “We didn’t tap into his phone.”

“Good to know,” I said.

I finished the ice cream and stood. “I’m going out. I want to look in on my parents and make sure everything is secure there. And I’m going to check in with Ranger.”

“Make sure you’re home by ten o’clock,” Diesel said.

“Curfew?”

“That’s when the match starts. You don’t want to miss it.”

I gave him a thumbs-up. I had no idea who was playing or what they were playing. Rugby, soccer, tennis, polo, checkers. I suspected this was going to be a long night that required a lot of wine. Maybe I should get some vodka. This might be a martini marathon.

I went to my living room window and looked down into the parking lot. I didn’t see anyone lurking in the shadows. No sporty black Porsche in the vicinity of my Ford Focus. No blue sedan. Good deal.



* * *




Grandma and my dad were watching television when I walked in. Dinner had been cleared from the dining room table, and it looked sadly empty without Melvin and Charlotte. My mom was in the kitchen, knitting.

“How long is it now?” I asked.

“Seventeen feet,” my mom said.

“You sound excited about it.”

“It’s an accomplishment. It’s satisfying. It’s something I can see and touch, and I know that I made it. It takes me an hour to make a pie and it gets eaten in ten minutes. When I scrub a pot, no one notices that it’s clean. People only notice when pots are dirty. My thing doesn’t disappear in ten minutes like a pie. My thing grows!” She held part of the thing up. “Look at it! I made it. I made something that’s seventeen feet long! I did it all by myself. The yarn is soft when I touch it, and I have all different colors of yarn. It’s like a painting or a sculpture.”