“I’m going to get dressed and then check on Grandma,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the cafe.”
I was back to wearing my sweatshirt and V-neck sweater, and I was in front of Grandma’s door. Grandma was usually an early riser, but just in case, I’d taken the keycard from Briggs. I knocked once. No answer. I knocked again and was about to insert the keycard in the lock when the door opened. A guy reached out, grabbed me, and yanked me into the room.
I recognized the guy. Wheelman for Lou Delvina. I didn’t know the guy’s name, but he and Lou looked a lot alike. Early sixties and built like a fireplug. Lots of black hair and caterpillar eyebrows. He had the front of my sweatshirt in one hand and a gun in the other.
“This is good. Real convenient. Now we don’t have to call you.”
When something like this happens, adrenaline pours into your system. It’s the whole fight-or-flight thing. It worked good back in caveman days because the smart choice was always flight, and you don’t have to think a lot to run like hell. My reaction to the adrenaline is complete and utter panic. I break out in a sweat. My heart goes nuts. My mind freezes. Fortunately, it only lasts for a minute or two, and when the panic leaves, I go into survival mode.
“I can see you’re real surprised,” he said. “Probably you don’t remember me. I’m Mickey. I work for Mr. Delvina. We had a run-in with you not so long ago.”
“I remember.”
“Then you must remember Mr. Delvina,” Mickey said.
A gray blob of a creature hobbled in from the bedroom. “Well, well, Stephanie Plum,” the creature said. The voice was deep and croaky. The face was puffed up, the bloated body oozed into the head so that no neck was visible. The eyes bulged.
“Lou Delvina?” I asked, not entirely successful at hiding the shock. Last I saw him he was an ordinary middle-aged Italian man. And now he was... a giant toad.
“Funny how things work out. I get money stolen from me, and it brings me you. Drops you right in my lap. How lucky is that? Bad luck brings good luck.”
“Are you sure you’re Lou Delvina?”
“Mr. Delvina hadda take steroids for a rash. He got some water retention,” Mickey said.
“Where’s Grandma?”
“She’s in the other room. We were just getting ready to take her for a ride. We stopped in to see if she wanted to give us our money, but she said she didn’t have it.”
“It’s in the hotel safe.”
“That’s just what she said. And she said she couldn’t get it out of the safe.”
“I hear you talking about me, you nitwit,” Grandma yelled from the other room. “What part of I can’t get it out of the safe don’t you understand?”
“It’s true,” I said. “She can’t get it out because she didn’t put it in. I put it in.”
“That’s a big fib,” Mickey said. “I called down to the desk. Some guy named Randy Briggs put it in.”
“He was a real A-hole when he called,” Grandma said from the bedroom. “He told them I was senile and couldn’t remember. He’s gonna go straight to heck.”
“In case you’re wondering, we got her restrained in the bedroom,” Mickey said. “She’s a nasty one. She kicked me in the knee. We weren’t even doing nothing to her.”
“I was aiming for your privates,” Grandma said, “but I couldn’t get my leg up high enough.”
“You see what I mean?” Mickey said. “How’s that for an old lady to talk?”
Lou Delvina motioned for Mickey to bring Grandma out of the bedroom. “Bring her out,” he said. “I got things to do. I gotta get back to Trenton. I’m due for my allergy shot.”
Mickey trotted into the bedroom and wheeled Grandma out. They had her tied to a wheelchair and covered with a blanket.
“Pretty good, hunh?” Mickey said. “No one will know we’re kidnapping her. Lots of old ladies getting rolled around this place.”
Delvina shook his finger at Grandma. “You better be good when we get you out of this room. You make a fuss, and Mickey’s gonna give you a blast with the stun gun, make you piss your pants.”
“That don’t scare me,” Grandma said. “You get to be my age, and you do that all the time.”
“Why are you kidnapping her?” I asked Delvina.
“I want my money.”
“You already have a horse. How many hostages do you need?”
“As many as it takes.”
“Take me instead of Grandma. I’ll be more cooperative.”
“You tricked me and Mickey last time we saw you,” Delvina said. “I didn’t like that. You and that train engine guy... Diesel.” Some color came into Delvina’s swollen, blotchy face. “I hate him. And you’ll see, my time’s gonna come. You don’t mess with Lou Delvina. I got where I am today because I’m tough. I hold a grudge, and I get even. Everyone knows that. And now I got a plan. Ain’t that right, Mickey?”
“Yeah, boss, you got a plan.”
“What kind of plan?” I asked him.
“A big plan.”
Oh boy. Besides looking like a toad, Lou Delvina had gone a little nutso.
“The first part of the plan is that I want my money,” Delvina croaked. “Get the money to me, and you get your granny back.”
“Why don’t you wait here, and I’ll get the money. I just have to find Briggs.”
“What, do I look stupid?” Delvina said. “You’ll come back with the cops. And besides, I gotta get my shot. And Mickey’s gotta feed the horse.”
Mickey was still holding his gun on me. He handed the gun to Delvina and took cuffs from his back pocket. “Gimme your wrist,” Mickey said.
“No.”
“Give it to me, or Lou’s gonna shoot.”
“I don’t think he’ll shoot me.”
“You got that right,” Delvina said. “I’ll shoot the old lady. I’d love to shoot the old lady.”
I blew out a sigh and held my hand out for Mickey to cuff. He snapped a cuff on, walked me into the bathroom, and attached the other bracelet to the towel bar.
Mickey left the bathroom, closing the door after him. Seconds later, I heard the faint sound of the door to the suite opening and closing.
On the surface, Lou Delvina and Mickey were clichéd, mid-level, bumbling bad guys right out of central casting for every Mob movie ever made. At least, they used to be before Delvina’s cortisone issue. Problem was, Delvina was right about his reputation. Delvina had ruthlessly scratched and clawed his way up the crime ladder in Newark and finally had been rewarded with his own piece of real estate. That real estate was Trenton. In the old days, it would have been a prize, but the old days were gone and the Mob no longer exclusively ran Trenton. The Mob had to share the Trenton pie with Russian thugs, kid gangs, Asian triads, black and Hispanic gangstas. So Delvina was still scratching and clawing, and sometimes people who got in his way disappeared.
I sat on the edge of the tub and waited. Eventually, someone would show up. A maid. Diesel. Briggs. A half hour ground by and I heard my phone ringing in my purse in the other room. I prayed it wasn’t my mother. My mother was going to freak. She sent me out to retrieve Grandma Mazur and now Grandma was kidnapped.
The phone stopped ringing and I waited some more. Ten minutes later, I heard someone enter the suite.
“Help,” I yelled. “I’m locked in the bathroom.”
Diesel opened the door and looked in at me. “I’m not usually into bondage, but I’m getting turned on.”
“Delvina and his pal Mickey were here. They kidnapped Grandma.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“Yes!”
Diesel pulled his keyring from his pocket, sorted through his keys, plugged one into the cuff, and the cuff opened.
“I thought you’d magically make the cuff fall off my wrist,” I said to him.
“I could, but that would be showing off.”
“Delvina is taking Grandma back to Trenton and holding her hostage for the money... along with the horse.”
“Delvina’s beginning to annoy me,” Diesel said.
“Last time he annoyed you, you threatened to turn him into a toad. And now his voice is croaky and he’s fat and blobby and has no neck.”
“Imagine that.”
“You didn’t turn Delvina into a toad, did you?”
Diesel smiled. “He isn’t really a toad. He’s just toadlike.”
“Sometimes you can be downright scary.”
“Yeah, but I’m sexy and cuddly, so it’s okay.”
I hauled my cell phone out of my bag, and I called Briggs. It rang a bunch of times and went to his answering service.
“We need the money out of the vault,” I said to Diesel. “I’m worried about Grandma Mazur. Delvina isn’t a nice guy-”
“Briggs is probably asleep,” Diesel said. “We’ll go to the RV and get him up.”
I went through the suite and packed up Grandma’s things so I could check her out when I got downstairs. I wanted to make sure she had no reason to come back.
Snuggy was at the built-in banquette when we entered the RV. He was eating cereal, and he was looking rumpled.
“This sucks,” Snuggy said. “I haven’t got any clean clothes. I haven’t even got a toothbrush. And there’s no milk for the cereal.”
“Where’s Briggs? Is he still asleep?” I asked.
“No. His phone rang right after you left, and he got up and went out. I think he’s got a thing going with some girl.”
“Did he say anything? Do you know anything about the girl?”
“Nope. Didn’t say anything.”
The door banged open, and Lula stormed in.
“I’m gonna kill him,” Lula said. “I’m gonna find him and kill him. And then I’m gonna kick the crap out of him. I been sitting outside this hotel room, wondering when this photo shoot was gonna start, and along comes a maid and goes into the room. So I go in with her and what do you think I see? They’re gone. There’s no one in the friggin’ room. So I go down to the desk and ask where they are, and turns out they took off in the middle of the night.”
Snuggy tapped the cereal box with his spoon. “Want some cereal?”
“Yeah,” Lula said. “I didn’t have breakfast. I could eat a horse. Nothing personal.”
“I bet it was a scam,” Snuggy said. “You pay the photographer money to make a portfolio, and then he doesn’t even have film in the camera. Happens all the time.”
“How do you know?”
“It was on Everybody Loves Raymond. Ray’s brother got scammed like that.”
Lula dumped a load of cereal into a bowl and started shoveling it into her mouth. “Wait a minute,” Lula said. “There’s no milk in this cereal.”
“We haven’t got any milk,” I told her.
“I’m so mad, I don’t know what I’m eating. I’m beside myself. I gotta take a breath. I gotta calm down. I’m probably giving myself a stroke.” She scarfed down some more cereal. “So what’s happening around here? I miss anything while I was getting scammed?”
“Lou Delvina kidnapped Grandma.”
“Get out! Why’d he want to do that?”
“He figured we didn’t want the horse back bad enough, so he took another hostage.”
“He took the wrong one,” Lula said. “No offense. I like your grandma and all, but she’s gonna make their life a living hell.”
That was my fear. If Grandma got too cantankerous, Delvina might think she wasn’t worth the effort and get rid of her... permanently.
Diesel was slouched on the couch. “How did Delvina find Grandma?” he asked Snuggy.
“It wasn’t me,” Snuggy said. “I swear.”
Diesel kept looking at him. Not saving anything. Just looking.
Snuggy squirmed in his seat. “He must have followed me here.”
Now we were all looking at Snuggy.
“Okay!” Snuggy said. “He did follow me. I saw him. I didn’t have a choice. He was gonna kill Doug, and he had me by the short hairs. And I figured it didn’t matter that he was here. I figured he was just watching me. And then he started pressuring me, calling me, so I told him I couldn’t get my hands on the money because it was in the vault. I didn’t know he’d kidnap Grandma. He had Doug. Who’d think he’d kidnap an old woman?”
“I don’t want to be an alarmist or anything,” I said to Diesel, “but we need to get Grandma back now.”
“We can bring the police in, but that would get messy for Snuggy and Doug. And Delvina might panic and make Grandma disappear.”
I bit into my lower lip to keep from sniveling, and told myself to get a grip. I didn’t want Grandma to disappear.
“Looks like we’ll have to get the money without Briggs,” Diesel said.
“Oh boy,” Lula said. “Are we gonna rob the vault?”
“No,” Diesel said. “We’re going to help them return our deposit.”
We took the elevator and followed Daffy’s footprints through the casino gaming floor to hotel reception.
“I want to know the safety deposit box routine,” Diesel said. “Someone needs to go to the desk and ask to get walked through the process.”
“I’ll do it,” Lula said. “Us supermodels are always carrying a shitload of jewelry. I’ll tell them I need to know everything’s okay before I hand over my valuables for safekeeping. And if they disrespect me, I’ll scream discrimination. It’s illegal to discriminate against a supermodel. We got rights like everyone else.”
Lula strutted up to the desk, and we all watched while she talked to one of the clerks. The clerk turned Lula over to a manager, and the manager led Lula into a back room. Ten minutes later, Lula emerged, thanked the manager and clerk, and crossed the lobby to where we were waiting.
“You gotta get behind the desk and through the door,” Lula said. “Once you’re through the door, you walk down the hall and take a special service elevator two flights down. It opens into another hallway with a guard at a desk. You gotta show the guard your ID and do one of them fingerprint scans like at Disney World. If I was by myself, I wouldn’t have got anywhere, but I was with the manager, so he took me halfway down the hall to a door marked guests.
That’s the door that leads to the guest security boxes. There’s other doors down there that lead to the money-counting room and all, but they’re locked up tight. Once you get into the room with the security boxes, you can only open them with a key and a code. You get the code wrong, and the Marines come and cut your balls off. Oh yeah, and another thing, you’re always on television,” she said to Diesel, “so maybe you want to comb your hair.”
“How do I know which box is mine?” Diesel asked.
“The guy at the desk with the fingerprint machine has a book with everyone’s name and box number. Plus, did I tell you he’s got a gun? A big one.”
“The armed guard is a problem,” Diesel said. “I can scramble television transmissions, and I can open locks. I can’t make myself invisible.”
“I got a stun gun,” Lula said. “How about you jump out of the elevator and real quick you give him some jolts? You just gotta move fast before he shoots you. How fast can you move?”
“I can’t move as fast as a bullet.”
“I can get past the guard,” Snuggy said. “I can be real sneaky when it comes to people. I have this thing. Take your eyes off me, and I disappear.”
“I hear leprechauns can do that,” Lula said.
“Exactly!” Snuggy said to her.
Diesel looked down at Snuggy. “You don’t disappear. You have a knack for knowing when people are distracted.”
“I’m almost positive I disappear,” Snuggy said.
“If you’re wrong, the Marines are gonna cut your balls off,” Lula told him.
“I’d hate that,” Snuggy said. “I’m attached to my balls.”
Diesel scanned the lobby and looked beyond it into the gaming area. “I wish Briggs would show up.”
I dialed Briggs, and we all waited while his phone rang. Fin
ally, his service kicked in.
“Call me!” I said. “Now.”
“Let’s assume you can actually get past the guard,” Diesel said to Snuggy. “Can you open the locked door to the safety deposit box room and get into the box?”
“Piece of cake. Problem is, I’ll get caught by the security cameras. For some reason, television picks up my image.”
“I can scramble the television,” Diesel said, “but you can’t waste time once you’re out of the elevator. You’ll only have a couple minutes before they send someone to investigate.”