Top Secret Twenty-One: A Stephanie Plum Novel(71)

I understood their excitement. This was a high roller suite, and we weren’t high roller people. Unfortunately, I’d just gotten punched in the face and thought I was going to swan dive off a ledge, so I was having a hard time getting excited about the Snickers and the monkey pillows. The adrenaline rush had burned off, and I was exhausted.

“They even got two bathrooms here,” Grandma said. “There’s a powder room, and then there’s this bathroom here off the bedroom.”

“Do you want this Snickers?” Lula asked me. “Because if you don’t want it, I might want it for the ride home. And what about Granny? Does she want anything here?”

I looked around. I didn’t see Grandma. She was in the bedroom, and she’d mentioned the bathroom, and Oh my God!

“Babe!” Ranger shouted from the bathroom. “Come get your grandmother.”

Ranger was standing in the glass-enclosed shower with the door open, looking out at Grandma. He was dripping wet and seemed not especially concerned that he was naked.

“It’s like she’s paralyzed,” he said.

“Amazing,” Grandma said, eyes wide, staring in unblinking stupefaction.

I yanked Grandma out and closed the bathroom door.

“It was mesmerizing,” Grandma said. “It was like staring into the eye of a cobra. I don’t care if I do anything else on the bucket list. This was awesome. It was like a biblical experience.”

Lula stared at my shirt and my face. “What the heck happened to you?”

“There was a little skirmish,” I said. “It’s all okay.”

“You got a nasty bruise shaping up on your face. You didn’t get that from anybody I know, did you?”

“Nope. We took down a bad guy. Where are you going now? More slots?”

“We didn’t get to Caesars yet,” Grandma said. “That’s our next stop. And we’re going home after the dinner buffet. Call if you need a ride.”

I walked them to the door and locked up after them. Ranger was out of the shower when I went into the bedroom. His hair was damp, and he was wearing a hotel robe.

“Sorry about Grandma,” I said. “She got away from me.”

“She just stood there staring. It was eerie. I was afraid she’d had a stroke.”

A stroke of good fortune, I thought. Not everyone was lucky enough to see Ranger naked.

“I heard a text come in while you were in the shower,” I said.

Ranger looked at his phone. “It’s from Mac. This was a more sophisticated delivery system than the one they were going to use on Rangeman. The timer actually showed the start time, and they calculate that the ballroom emptied well before the gas reached it. Plus Mac immediately shut the ventilation system down, so much of the polonium was trapped in the duct.”

Rafael came to the door with a couple bags of clothes. “I did the best I could,” he said, “but everything downstairs has monkeys on it.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m sure they’re great.”





THIRTY


RANGER NEEDED TO stay in Atlantic City to debrief with the FBI, but I was free to leave with Grandma and Lula. I might have been more inclined to stay with Ranger but for the fact that I was wearing head-to-toe monkeys. The day had been traumatic enough, and the day before hadn’t been all that good either, and now I had monkey underpants on. The saying “Out of sight, out of mind” didn’t apply to monkey underpants. I wanted to go home and try to feel normal and convince myself that the threat was gone.

Rafael and Hal walked me from the room to the hotel drive court and made sure I was securely belted into Lula’s Firebird. Hard to tell if Ranger was still afraid for my safety, or if he was afraid I’d change my mind and come back to the room with Lula and Grandma.

Lula pulled away from the hotel and headed for the freeway.

“I must have ate a million shrimps at that buffet. And the cocktail sauce had just the right amount of horseradish.”

“Yep,” Grandma said. “This was a real good day. We should do this more often. I wouldn’t mind having another day just like this one.”

I was in the backseat with an ice pack on my bruised cheek, and I didn’t ever want to repeat my day.



It was close to nine o’clock when I walked into Morelli’s house. He was on the couch watching television with Bob, and they both looked happy to see me. Then Morelli took a closer look, and his expression changed from happy to heartburn. Good thing he hadn’t seen me before the shower and clean clothes.

I dumped my messenger bag and clothes bag on the floor and squeezed in next to Morelli. “It looks worse than it is,” I said. “The important thing is that it ended well. Vlatko is gone and will never come back. And I’m here with you and Bob.”

“You have a monkey on your shirt,” Morelli said.

“I have a monkey on my everything. What happened today? Did I miss anything good?”

“Miriam Pepper had a few too many Manhattans for breakfast, and her bathrobe caught fire while she was attempting to scramble some eggs. She managed to get herself out of the bathrobe, but in the process she set her kitchen on fire and half her house burned down.”

“Is she okay?”

“Yeah, but here’s the good part. When the fire marshal went into the basement, he found bricks of high-grade Mexican marijuana stacked up like cordwood, plus some rocket launchers and stuff to make firebombs. They started to question Pepper, and he lawyered up. When they questioned Miriam, she said the marijuana was for personal use and medicinal purposes.”