Wicked Appetite - By Janet Evanovich Page 0,36

run. “I’m on it.”

The kitchen was alive with ferrets. They were chasing one another up cupboards and over countertops, knocking over bottles of olive oil. A large tin had tipped, and olive oil was spilling down the side of the counter and pooling on the floor. The ferrets were lapping it up and skating through it, tracking olive oil everywhere. The entire kitchen floor was slick with it.

There was a giant crash in the living room. I stepped out to investigate and went flat on my back in the oil. It took a couple beats to catch my breath, and then I crawled hands and knees through the dining room toward the living room. Bunny stuffing was scattered across the dining room, mixed with the oil. And I suspect a ferret or two might have relieved itself in the excitement, because the dining room wasn’t smelling great and there were a lot of raisins on the floor. One of the large display cases had been tipped over in the living room, and I was looking at a lot of dead gnomes.

Carl was flattened against a wall, his hands over his eyes.

I was still on all fours, and I saw Diesel’s boots come into my line of vision. His hand hooked into my jeans’ waistband, he hoisted me to my feet, and he looked me over. His first reaction was a grimace and then a smile.

“You’re a mess,” he said. “And you smell like a bad zoo.”

“Have you seen the kitchen?”

“No, and I don’t want to. The disaster in the dining room was enough for me. From the amount of oil you’ve got in your hair and soaked into your clothes, I’m guessing there was some spillage in the kitchen.”

“Do you remember when the tanker Exxon Valdez broke apart in Alaska? It was like that.”

“Here’s the new plan,” Diesel said. “There’s no way we’re going to round up the ferrets. We’re going to sneak out like thieves in the night and never tell a soul what happened here.”

“Works for me.”

Five minutes later, we were in the Porsche and on our way to Marblehead. Diesel had the window rolled down, and Carl was holding his nose in the backseat.

“As soon as we get you out of this car, I’m turning it back to Gwen,” Diesel said. “My advice to her will be to push it off a bridge.”

“I must have crawled in something going through the dining room. I think the ferrets were doing the nasty with some of the bunnies.”

“Honey, you smell bad way beyond the nasty.”

I closed my eyes and slumped back in my seat. “Can we review what’s happened here? In the interest of saving the world from a hellish future, we’ve got some poor woman talking nonsense, we’ve blown a man’s house to smithereens, and now we’ve totally trashed another man’s apartment. And if that’s not enough, we’ve acquired a cat with one eye, and a monkey.”

Diesel looked at me. “Your point?”

I blew out a sigh. “I don’t have a point. My life is out of control. Everything was looking so good a couple days ago, with my own house and a terrific job. And now everything’s facaca.”

“Your life isn’t out of control,” Diesel said. “It’s expanded.”

I rolled the concept of an expanded life around in my head for a couple miles, and by the time we parked in front of my house, I was almost buying it. The Spook Patrol was back on the sidewalk, cameras and Spook-detection gadgets at the ready. I stepped out of the car, everyone rushed up to me, and everyone gasped and fell back.

“Smells like ecto-slime,” one of the Patrollers said, holding his ghost gizmo at arm’s reach, pointing it at me.

“It had to be a really nasty spirit,” another guy said. “Like a level five.”

Spookmaster Mel spotted Carl getting out of the SUV. “What’s with the monkey?”

“We’re babysitting,” I told him.

The gizmo guy wanded Carl with his ghost-o-meter. “No demonic possession registering.”

“Maybe you need new batteries in that thing,” Diesel said, opening my front door, shoving Carl into the house.

“So what does he do?” I asked Diesel. “Does he use a kitty litter? Do we need monkey diapers?”

Carl looked at me and gave me the finger.

“He uses the bathroom,” Diesel said.

I didn’t know if that was good or bad. I wasn’t excited about sharing my bathroom with a monkey.

Cat 7143 strolled into the living room and went into killer cat mode when he spotted Carl. Arched back, bushy tail, hair on