Wicked Appetite - By Janet Evanovich Page 0,25

wait,” Diesel said. “Let’s start upstairs.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

There were three bedrooms upstairs. I stepped into the master first, immediately turned to leave, and bumped into Diesel.

“Out of my way,” I said to him. “You can’t make me go in there.”

“Of course I can,” he said. “Look how big and strong I am. And I’m insensitive, too.”

The bed was a tangled mess of twisted sheets and lumpy pillows without pillowcases. Empty liquor and beer bottles were everywhere. Drawers were open with clothes spilling out, and dirty clothes were scattered across the floor, interspersed with crumpled fast-food wrappers, half-eaten bags of chips, two roaches the size of lab mice taking a feet-up permanent siesta, and another rubber chicken.

“I’m not touching any of this,” I said to Diesel. “And I’m especially not touching whatever is hanging on the doorknob.”

Diesel checked out the doorknob. “It’s underwear.”

“Ick!”

“He’s a single guy,” Diesel said. “This is the way we live.”

I looked at him, and I think my eyes went blank for a moment and my mouth dropped open.

“Not me,” Diesel said, smiling. “But some guys.”

I did serious mental eye-rolling. “Where do we begin?”

“Look for something that might contain a charm, and be careful not to explode yourself.”

I cautiously picked through the mess, testing out watches, shoes, beer bottles, belt buckles, and the rubber chicken. Nothing glowed or felt warm.

“This is stupid,” I said to Diesel. “It’s none of these things. We should be looking for a booby trap.”

“Problem is, most of the time you don’t recognize a good booby trap until it’s too late,” Diesel said.

“Have you ever been booby-trapped?”

“Yeah, and it’s usually not pleasant.”

It took a while to get through the master, but things went faster with bedrooms two and three. The furniture had been removed from these rooms, leaving only a few dents in the carpet as evidence of habitation.

“Looks to me like the Missus backed the truck up to this house before Lenny even knew she was leaving,” Diesel said. “He got picked clean.”

We went downstairs and searched the living room. Not hard to do, since the furniture consisted of a matching brown leather couch and chair that had seen better days. Probably picked up at a yard sale after his ex-wife took the good stuff. No furniture in the dining room. That left the kitchen, and I’d already handled everything that wasn’t nailed down in the kitchen.

“Let’s think about this for a minute,” Diesel said. “We’ve done the object-touching routine, and I’ve had my eyes open for anything remotely resembling a booby trap or secret hiding place. What have we missed?”

“Maybe it’s not in the house. Maybe it’s in his car or his office.”

“If we’re to believe him, he was drunk when he hid the inheritance, so it had to be something fairly easy to do. I think that leaves out his office, and probably his car. Most likely, he set the device when he was relatively sober and then walked around the house with a bottle of liquor in his hand, trying to decide on a hiding place.”

“We didn’t check appliances,” I said, peering into the microwave, flipping the door down on the dishwasher. I opened the oven and burst out laughing. There was a rubber chicken in the oven.

“What’s with these chickens?” I asked Diesel. “He’s got a rubber chicken fixation.”

I took the chicken out of the oven, held it by its long skinny neck, and a metal-and-glass cylinder fell out of its butt.

“Uh-oh,” Diesel said.

An instant later, he had his hand clamped onto my wrist, pulling and shoving me out the kitchen door, half carrying me in a sprint across the small backyard. We were maybe thirty feet from the house when there was an explosion, followed by a second mega-explosion. The second explosion blew the back of the house apart and sent us sprawling. I felt Diesel roll on top of me, and all around us, debris was falling out of the sky. Bits of paper and wood and flaming chunks of mystery material. Diesel got to his feet, dragged me up beside him, and we moved into the adjoining backyard.

“Looks like you found the booby trap,” Diesel said.

I had my fingers curled into his shirt in a death grip, and I was babbling. “What the? How? Who?”

Diesel pried my fingers open. “Honey, I love that you’ve got ahold of me, but I think you’ve got some chest hairs in there.”

Flames raced up the side of what was left of Lenny’s house and black smoke billowed into the sky. Sirens