Between the Plums

by Janet Evanovich

The doorbell rang again, and Lula and Connie rushed in with the cake. It was a huge wedding cake. Three tiers with a bride and groom on top.

  “We got it,” Lula said. “Mary Beth Krienski got cold feet and called off her wedding over the weekend, and we got this kick-ass bargain cake. Tasty Pastry was getting ready to heave it into the Dumpster. We got there just in time.”

  “It’s yellow cake with lemon between the layers,” Connie said.

  “Put the cake on the dining room table,” Grandma said. “Do I look okay for the pictures? Is my hair okay?”

  Pictures! Val would want wedding pictures. “I didn’t think to bring a camera,” I said.

  “That’s okay,” Valerie said. “I brought my camera.”

  “Yeah, and Connie and me stopped at the store and got one of them happy-snappy things,” Lula said.

  “You gotta have pictures of the bride,” Grandma said.

  All eyes turned to me. I’d gotten rushed out of the house this morning. I was still wearing the clothes I grabbed off the floor, and I had a ball cap on my head. And two big red hives on my face.

  “That’s okay, pumpkin,” Diesel said to me. “I think you look . . . cute.”

  I introduced Annie and the justice of the peace, and Albert Kloughn broke out in a sweat.

  “I thought I recognized you,” he said to Annie. “We met just once, and it was a while ago.”

  Annie smiled at him. “It’s so nice to see you again, Albert.”

  Albert was wearing a suit and tie, and he tugged at his shirt collar. “Can’t breathe,” he said.

  “I’m in a hurry to get married,” I yelled.

  “We need to get some papers signed,” Annie said. “Albert, you sign here as a witness. And Valerie. And here for Stephanie.”

  I watched Diesel sign. “Just Diesel?” I said to him. “No last name?”

  “That’s all I’ve got,” Diesel said. “My name’s Diesel.”

  “I need a bathroom,” Albert said.

  “No!” I told him. “You’re gonna have to hold it. Everyone get in their places. Valerie, you stand next to me. And Albert, you stand next to Diesel.”

  The justice of the peace jumped into action and whipped out his little book with the ceremony in it.

  Lula snapped a picture and my mother started crying.

  Albert stood rooted to the spot, his face white but his cheeks stained red. Diesel grabbed Albert by the back of his suit jacket and dragged him to his side, so we were all four in a row.

  “Are we ready to begin?” the justice asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “but we need to change places. This is actually going to be Valerie’s and Albert’s wedding.”

  Albert went down to his knees, and Diesel yanked him up to his feet, still holding tight to Albert’s jacket.

  The justice started reading from his script. “Dearly beloved—”

  “Skip ahead to the I do part,” I said to the justice.

  The justice thumbed over a couple pages in his book.

  “I’m going to be sick,” Albert said.

  “Dude,” Diesel said. “Suck it up.”

  Albert went down to his knees again. “I got this thing about weddings.”

  “You were okay when you thought it was mine,” Diesel said. “Just pretend it’s mine.”

  “I can’t pretend,” Albert said. “I’m no good at pretending.”

  “We could have a double wedding,” Valerie said. “Simultaneous. Then Albert could concentrate on being the best man.”

  I felt another hive break out on my chin. “I need my salve,” I said. “Somebody get me some salve.”

  “It’s not a bad idea,” Annie said. “The universe would rest easier if Diesel was married.”

  “I’m not marrying Diesel!” I told Annie.

  “Hey,” Diesel said, “a lot of women would give anything to snag me.”

  “I’m not a lot of women.”

  “No shit,” Diesel said. He shifted Albert from one hand to the other. “Can we get on with it? This guy’s getting heavy.”

  “Would you really marry me?” I asked Diesel.

  “Not forever, but a night might be fun.”

  Good grief.

  “I’m confused,” my father said. “Who’s getting married?”

  “Albert and Valerie are getting married,” I said. I turned to Albert. “Here’s the choice. You can go through this with your eyes open, or I can go get my stun gun, and you can get married with your eyes closed and your body twitching on the floor. My sister is pregnant again, and I’m going to make sure she’s married.”

  Albert’s mouth was open and his eyes were glazed.

  “I’m going to take this as a choice to keep eyes open,” I said to the justice of the peace. “Start reading. And hurry up.”

  “Do you—” the justice said to Albert.

  “He does,” we all said in unison.

  “Me, too,” Valerie said.

  And Valerie and Albert were married.

  “Let’s cut the cake,” Lula said.

  My grandmother trotted in with a cake knife, and we clustered around the cake. It was a great cake, except Bob had eaten all the icing off one side.

  “It’s better this way,” Grandma said. “You got a choice like white meat or dark meat, only this time it’s icing or no icing.”

  I ran upstairs to the bathroom to look for more salve.

  Diesel came up a minute later with a piece of cake for me. “That was a nice thing you did for your sister,” Diesel said.

  “How’s Albert?”

  “Deliriously happy.”

  “I think they’ve found true love.”

  Diesel nodded and fed me a piece of cake. “I have to go. I’m being reassigned.”

  “So soon?”

  “Yeah, but I’ll be back. You owe me a night.”

  “I do not owe you a night.”

  “I was willing to go the distance,” Diesel said. “That has to be worth something.”

  “How about beer and pizza?”

  “It’s a start,” Diesel said. “And don’t worry about Delvina. I changed him into a toad.”

  The doorbell rang, and I heard Grandma hustle to get the door.

  “Stephanie,” she yelled up the stairs. “There’s a flower delivery guy here, and he’s got a bunch of flowers for you. The flower guy said two of these were supposed to go to your apartment, but I said you’d take them all here.”

  I went downstairs with Diesel following, and I took three boxes from Grandma.

  The first box held a single perfect long-stemmed red rose. No card.

  The second box held a dozen yellow roses. The message on the card was . . . LOVE, JOE.

  The third box held a bouquet of daisies. The hand-scrawled note said . . . VALENTINE’S DAY SUCKS, USUALLY.

  Valentine’s Day didn’t suck this year, I thought.

  I felt someone brush a kiss across the nape of my neck, and I turned to Diesel, but the only thing behind me was the cake plate sitting on the bottom step.

  PLUM LUCKY

  I’d like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of

  Alex Evanovich, Peter Evanovich, and my

  St. Martin’s Press editor and friend,

  SuperJen Enderlin.

  1

  My mother and grandmother raised me to be a good girl, and I have no problem with the girl part. I like men, malls, and carbs. Not necessarily in that order. The good part has been spotty. I don’t steal cars or sniff glue, but I’ve had a lot of impure thoughts. And I’ve acted on a bunch of them. Not limited to, but including, snooping through a guy’s closet in search of his underwear. On the surface, this doesn’t sound like a majorly hot experience, but this was no ordinary guy, and I couldn’t find any underwear.

  My mother and my Grandma Mazur are really good. They pray every day and go to church regularly. I have good intentions, but religion, for me, is like tennis. I play an excellent mental game, and in my mind’s eye I look terrific in the little
white skirt, but the reality is I never actually get onto the court.

  It’s usually when I’m in the shower that I think of things spiritual and mystical and wonder about the unknown. Like, is there life after death? And just what, exactly, is collagen? And suppose Wonder Woman actually exists. If she was discreet, you might not know, right?

  Today is St. Patrick’s Day, and when I was in the shower this morning, my thoughts were about luck. How does it work? Why are some people flat-out lucky and others not so lucky? Virgil said fortune favors the bold. Okay, so I read that on the stall door in the ladies’ room of the multiplex last week, and I don’t personally know Virgil, but I like his thinking. Still, there has to be something else going on besides being bold. Things we can’t comprehend.

  My name is Stephanie Plum, and I try to leave the incomprehensible in the shower. Life is tough enough without walking around all day wondering why God invented cellulite. I’m a skip tracer for my cousin Vinnie’s bail bonds agency in Trenton, New Jersey, and I spend my day hunting felons who are hiding in attics. It was a little after nine A.M. and I was on the sidewalk in front of the bonds office with my sidekick, Lula.

  “You’re a holiday shirker,” Lula said. “Every time a holiday comes up, you don’t do your part. Here it is St. Patrick’s Day and you don’t have no green on you. You’re lucky there’s no holiday police because they’d haul your boney behind off to the shirker’s dungeon.”

  “I don’t own anything green.” Okay, an olive drab T-shirt, but it was dirty.

  “I own lots of green. I look good in it,” Lula said. “But then I look good in all colors. Maybe not brown on account of it blends with my skin tone. Brown’s too much of a good thing on me.”

  Lula’s borderline too much of a good thing in lots of ways. It isn’t exactly that Lula is fat; it’s more that she’s too short for her weight and her clothes are too small for the volume of flesh she carries. Her attitude is Jersey times ten, and today her hair was candy-apple red. She was packed into shamrock-green animal-print stretch pants, a matching green sequin-encrusted stretchy top, and spike-heeled dark green suede ankle boots. Lula was a hooker before she took the job at the bonds office, and I was guessing this outfit was left over from the St. Patrick’s Day fantasy collection.

  Truth is, I sometimes feel a little boring and incredibly pale when I’m with Lula. I’m of Hungarian and Italian descent, and my complexion is more Eastern European than Mediterranean. I have shoulder-length, unexceptional, curly brown hair, blue eyes, and a nice nose that I inherited from the Mazur side of the family. I was in my usual jeans and sneakers and long-sleeved T-shirt that carried the Rangers hockey team logo. The temperature was in the fifties, and Lula and I were bundled into hooded sweatshirts. Lula’s sweatshirt said KISS ME I’M PRETENDING I’M IRISH, and mine was gray with a small chocolate ice cream stain on the cuff.

  Lula and I were on our way to get a Lucky Clucky Shake at Cluck-in-a-Bucket, and Lula was rooting through her purse, trying to find her car keys.

  “I know I got those keys in here somewhere,” Lula said, pulling stuff out of her purse, piling everything onto the hood of her car. Gum, lip balm, stun gun, cell phone, a forty-caliber nickel-plated Glock, Tic Tacs, a can of Mace, a personal-mood candle, a flashlight, handcuffs, a screwdriver, nail polish, the pearl-handled Derringer she got as a Valentine’s Day present from her honey, Tank, a musical bottle opener, a roll of toilet paper, Rolaids . . .

  “A screwdriver?” I asked her.

  “You never know when you’ll need one. You’d be surprised what you could do with a screwdriver. I got extra-strength cherry-scented condoms in here, too. ’Cause you never know when Tank might be needing some emergency quality time.”

  Lula found her key, we piled into her red Firebird, and she motored away from the curb. She turned off Hamilton Avenue onto Columbus Avenue, and we both gaped at the gray-haired, wiry little old lady half a block away. The woman was dressed in white tennis shoes, bright green stretch pants, and a gray wool jacket. She had a white bakery bag in one hand and the strap to a large canvas duffel bag in the other. And she was struggling to drag the duffel bag down the sidewalk.

  Lula squinted through the windshield. “That’s either Kermit the Frog or your granny.”

  Grandma Mazur’s lived with my parents ever since my Grandpa Harry went to the big trans-fat farm in the sky. Grandma was a closet free spirit for the first seventy years of her life. She kicked the door open when my grandpa died, and now nobody can get her back in. Personally, I think she’s great . . . but then I don’t have to live with her.

  A car wheeled around the corner and rocked to a stop alongside Grandma.

  “Don’t look like there’s anybody driving that car,” Lula said. “I don’t see no head.”

  The driver’s side door opened, and a little man jumped out. He was slim, with curly, short-cropped gray hair, and he was wearing green slacks.

  “Look at that,” Lula said. “Granny’s wearing green and the little tiny man’s wearing green. Everybody’s wearing green except you. Don’t you feel like a party pooper?”

  The little man was talking to Grandma, and Grandma wasn’t looking happy with him. Grandma started inching away, and the little man snatched the strap of the duffel bag and yanked it out of Grandma’s hand. Grandma roundhoused the man on the side of his head with her big black purse, and he dropped to his knees.

  “She handles herself real good, considering she’s so old and rickety,” Lula said.

  Grandma hit the little man again. He grabbed her, and the two of them went down to the ground, locked together, rolling around kicking and slapping.

  I wrenched the door open, swung out of the Firebird, and waded into the mix. I pulled the little man off Grandma and held him at arm’s length.

  He squirmed and grunted and flailed his arms. “Let me go!” he yelled, his voice pinched from the exertion. “Do you have any idea who I am?”

  “Are you okay?” I asked Grandma.

  “Of course I’m okay,” Grandma said. “I was winning, too. Didn’t it look like I was winning?”

  Lula clattered over in her high-heeled boots, got Grandma under the armpits, and hoisted her to her feet.

  “When I grow up, I wanna be just like you,” Lula said to Grandma.

  I swung my attention back to the little man, but he was gone. His car door slammed shut, the engine caught, and the car sped down the street.

  “Sneaky little bugger,” Lula said. “One minute you had a hold of him, and then next thing he’s driving away.”

  “He wanted my bag,” Grandma said. “Can you imagine? He said it was his, so I asked him to prove it. And that’s when he tried to run off with it.”

  I looked down at the bag. “What’s in it?”

  “None of your beeswax.”

  “What’s in the bakery bag?”

  “Jelly doughnuts.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a jelly doughnut,” Lula said. “A jelly doughnut would go real good with the Lucky Clucky Shake.”

  “I love them shakes,” Grandma said. “I’ll share my doughnuts if you take me for a shake, but you gotta leave my duffel bag alone. No one’s allowed to snoop in my duffel bag.”

  “You don’t got a body in there, do you?” Lula wanted to know. “I don’t like carrying dead guys around in my Firebird. Messes with the feng shui.”

  “I couldn’t fit a body in here,” Grandma said. “It’s too little for a body.”

  “It could be a leprechaun body,” Lula said. “It’s St. Patrick’s Day. If you bagged a leprechaun, you could make him take you to his pot of gold.”

  “I don’t know. I hear you gotta be careful of them leprechauns. I hear they’re tricky,” Grandma said. “Anyways, I haven’t got a leprechaun.”

  The day after St. Patrick’s Day, I woke up next to Joe Morelli, my almost always boyfriend. Morelli’s a Trenton cop, and he makes me look like an amateur when it comes to the impure thoughts. Not that he’s kinky or weird. More that h
e’s frighteningly healthy. He has wavy black hair, expressive brown eyes, a perpetual five o’clock shadow, an eagle tattoo from his navy days, and a tightly muscled, entirely edible body. He’s recently become moderately domesticated, having inherited a small house from his Aunt Rose.

  Commitment issues and a strong sense of self-preservation keep us from permanently cohabitating. Genuine affection and the impure thoughts bring Morelli to my bed when our schedules allow intersection. I knew from the amount of sunlight streaming into my bedroom that Morelli had overslept. I turned to look at the clock, and Morelli came awake.

  “I’m late,” he said.

  “Gee, that’s too bad,” I told him. “I had big plans for this morning.”

  “Such as?”

  “I was going to do things to you that don’t even have names. Really hot things.”

  Morelli smiled at me. “I might be able to find a few minutes. . . .”

  “You would need more than a few minutes for what I have in mind. It could go on for hours.”

  Morelli blew out a sigh and rolled out of bed. “I don’t have hours. And I’ve been with you long enough to know when you’re yanking my chain.”

  “You doubt my intentions?”

  “Cupcake, my best shot at morning sex is to tackle you while you’re still sleeping. Once you’re awake, all you can think about is coffee.”

  “Not true.” Sometimes I thought about pancakes and doughnuts.

  Morelli’s big, orange, shaggy-haired dog climbed onto the bed and settled into the spot Morelli had vacated.

  “I was supposed to be at a briefing ten minutes ago,” Morelli said. “If you take Bob out to do his thing, I can jump in the shower, meet you in the parking lot, and only miss the first half of the meeting.”

  Five minutes later, I handed Bob over to Morelli and watched his SUV chug away. I returned to the building, took the elevator back to my second-floor apartment, let myself in, and scuffed into the kitchen. I started coffee brewing, and my phone rang.

  “Your grandmother is missing,” my mother said. “She was gone when I got up this morning. She left a note that said she was hitting the open road. I don’t know what that means.”