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“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.”
