Game On: Tempting Twenty-Eight (Stephanie Plum #28)(73)

“Are you alone?” I asked. “How did you do this?”

“You asked me to hack into food delivery services, and I found several recent deliveries to this building,” Melvin said. “I tried to access the building’s security cameras, but it turned out there weren’t any, so I did some investigating and found out the building was vacant and due to be renovated.”

“We went to tell Ranger,” Charlotte said, “but he wasn’t at Rangeman. He was at a break-in somewhere. We were in the control room, wondering what we should do, when a call came in from Diesel, saying that Oswald had Stephanie and was going to start torturing her unless we were turned over to him. Hal was in charge of the control room, and he asked us to return to our rooms.”

“You’ve got cuts on you from the window glass,” Lula said to Melvin. “I’ll go to the kitchen to see if there’s Band-Aids.”

“This was all our fault,” Melvin said to me. “We were the ones whose hacking started all the killing, so we decided we were the ones who should end it. We didn’t want anyone else getting hurt.”

“It was my fault,” Charlotte said. “When the Potatoes hacked into Oswald’s system, we knew we’d accomplished our goal, and everyone instantly signed out. Except me. In the very short time we were all in, I noticed something odd. So I stayed and prowled around and didn’t like what I found. I was the one who started the killing because I was the one who installed malware in Oswald’s system. I knew he had the ability to do something terrible and I took it upon myself to stop him. I didn’t think it would come to any of this.”

“You look like a hero to me,” Lula said from the kitchen. “How’d you get out of Rangeman is what I want to know.”

“We went back to our rooms and I hacked into the control room and put a ten-minute block on Ranger’s security system. It shut down the cameras and unlocked all the doors. We ran downstairs to the shooting range and got a gun, and then we left Rangeman and walked to this building. We weren’t sure what we would do if we found Oswald, or even if Oswald was in the building. We went into the garage and saw that there was a car parked by the stairs. When I looked inside, I spotted your messenger bag.”

Lula was opening and closing cupboard doors and slamming drawers shut in the kitchen. Every time she slammed a drawer, we would all jump, for fear of her setting off her explosives.

“We decided we would go through the building and look for Oswald,” Charlotte said. “I had the gun and we thought maybe we could get the drop on him. If I had him at gunpoint, we could call Rangeman, and they’d come take over. So, we went floor by floor and we were really quiet, and when we got the top floor one of the doors was locked. We listened at the door, and we thought we heard someone moving around.”

“The thing is, there weren’t any voices,” Melvin said. “We didn’t want to do something stupid and make things worse, so we went back downstairs to regroup. That’s when we thought about going next door. The building was boarded up with a condemned sign on it, but it looked like it was still sound, so we broke in and went up to the floor across from Oswald. There was a light on in one of the rooms and it looked like Oswald was working at his computer.”

“The other window was dark, and we were wondering what to do next when we saw you,” Charlotte said to me. “You were standing with your back to the window. We tried to get your attention, but you wouldn’t turn around. And then you disappeared. I think you must have sat down on the floor.”

Lula came back into the room. “I couldn’t find any first aid stuff, but I got a couple kitchen towels.”

“It’s just this one cut on my arm,” Melvin said, holding the towel against it.

“I almost wet myself when I saw you hanging outside the window,” Lula said. “You must have some rock-climbing experience.”

“I watch the Travel Channel sometimes,” Melvin said.

“We could see that the roof of your building was flat,” Charlotte said, “and it looked like air-conditioning units up there, and that’s when we got the idea to try to rescue you. We got a couple lengths of rope from the hardware store on the next block and tied them to one of the air conditioners. The plan was that Melvin would go down with the second harness. We thought we could do it because the distance between the roof and window looked manageable.

“We didn’t plan on the window being painted shut,” Melvin said.

“Well, it all worked out perfect in the end,” Lula said.

Not completely perfect, I thought. Lula was locked into a vest loaded with explosives and we had a dead Oswald on the floor.

“Does anyone have a cell phone?” I asked.

Charlotte gave me hers and I called Ranger.

“We’re okay,” I said when I connected to Ranger, “but Lula needs someone to defuse some explosives.”

“I’m on it,” Ranger said. “Diesel called me when Oswald got in touch with him. I saw the photos of you and Lula. Is Lula still wired?”

“Yes.”

“We’re about to enter the garage to the building you’re in. What’s the status of Oswald?”

“Very dead. How did you get here so fast?”

“When we got power back, the control room located your phone in a dumpster on State Street. We sent a drone up and it took several hours of searching but we finally got a visual of Charlotte and Melvin on the roof, tying ropes to the air units. Even before the drone gave us the address, we were all staged in the target area.”