Love Game (5 page)

IT WASN’T
a huge explosion. We found out later that it was muted because Marty’s oxygen tank was running near empty. Luckily for Marty, he was safely in the all-marble bathroom, halfway through the sports pages, when the explosion happened, taking the poker table with it and making mincemeat of the erotic tapestries. Uncle Harry’s other friend miraculously
made it out with only burns on his lighter hand, since he had ignited it far from his face.

From outside on the balcony, the explosion was scary enough, and we didn’t know the extent of the damage. But it was the fireball we witnessed hurtling from the hall toward the living room that made Spencer throw me to safety—which in his mind was over the balcony, away from the house.

He tossed me like I was a horseshoe at a company picnic, then ran in the direction of the fireball, bent on saving Lucy, Uncle Harry, and the rest, I assumed. Meanwhile, I flew over the railing toward the depths below and my certain death. My life flashed before my eyes. It took two seconds, which reminded me I was way too young to die.

I flailed my arms and legs in a fit of survival instinct and, with a bit of acrobatics worthy of any Cirque du Soleil performer, latched on to a piece of railing that ran along the underside of the balcony, and I hung there like a bat.

I was in shock, surprised that I wasn’t lying at the bottom of the canyon with every bone broken, and scared out of my mind that my grip on the rail would fail at any moment. I tried to scream, but I couldn’t get sound out.

After a few seconds, I heard footsteps on the balcony above me.

“Oh, my God! Oh, my God! You killed her. You squashed her like a bug,” Lucy wailed like her best friend had died. I supposed that was just what she believed.

“Gladie!” Spencer called. He rarely used my name, preferring the nickname he had given me in honor of
my pink underpants. He called me over and over before it dawned on me that I should answer.

“I’m here,” I squeaked. “I’m here, and I’m going to die,” I added, so they would fully grasp the situation and move quicker to my rescue.

“Darlin’!” Lucy cried. “Darlin’, I thought you were dead!” I looked up to see Lucy’s head hanging over the side of the balcony.

“I’m almost dead,” I said, stating what I thought was obvious. “I can’t hold on much longer.”

“Spencer is on his way down,” Lucy assured me.

“Did he get thrown off the balcony, too?”

Spencer tossed over a rope ladder and slithered down it. “I’ve got you,” he announced, wrapping his arm around my waist.

“No, leave me and save yourself,” I said.

“Are you kidding?”

“Yes, of course I’m kidding! Get me out of here!” I was losing patience. It had been a hell of a day. A catastrophic car accident was one thing, and I could even handle explosions and fireballs, but hanging one hiccup away from an untimely demise would have tried even the Dalai Lama.

Spencer tugged, but I held on tight to the rail. “Let go, Pinkie,” he ordered.

“I am! I am!”

“No you’re not.” He plucked at my fingers, trying to pry them loose, but they held on tight.

“They’ve got a life of their own,” I said, panicking. “They’re not letting me go.”

“You are certifiable.”

“Says the man who threw me to my death.”

“If only,” Spencer said. “Dead people don’t talk.”

“You’re a riot, Spencer. I always laugh at men who try to kill me.”

Spencer tugged again, but my fingers wouldn’t come loose. “I didn’t try to kill you.”

“You did. You’re John Wayne Gacy with a badge.”

“You wound me, Pinkie. Gacy was the ugliest of all the serial killers.”

“Well, you pissed me off.”

“Look,” he said. “Why would I want to kill you? I’m not married to you.”

My fingers sprang loose like magic, and Spencer caught me, slamming my body against his. My feet found the rungs of the ladder, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

I sank into Spencer, wrapping my arms around his neck for dear life, and allowed him to take my weight and climb up the ladder. He laid me on the balcony and knelt next to me. His new Armani suit had taken a beating. Served him right.

Lucy bent over and studied me.

“You all right, darlin’? I never saw anything like it. You hung on like a bobcat’s jaw clamped on Bambi’s leg.”

“I guess I’m fine. Spencer tried to kill me,” I said.

“I was trying to save her life,” he growled.

“He tried to save everybody,” Lucy told me. “Ran in to clear us all out of the house so we wouldn’t be burned alive. It would have been brave if there was a fire, but the fireball didn’t catch, just a lot of show. Then he remembered he threw you off the balcony.”

I struggled to my feet. I was a little shaky, and I was impatient to get home. Grandma would have a good
dinner waiting for me, with mashed potatoes, hopefully.

“Where’s my purse?” I asked. “Oh, no.”

I looked over the side. My new lip gloss was about halfway down, nestled in the pointy leaves of a yucca plant. The gloss was the perfect color. I had discovered it at the bottom of the clearance bin at the drugstore. It was the last one in stock.

I scanned the canyon, but my purse had vanished, along with my car keys, wallet, and a half-eaten Hershey bar. Luckily I had put Uncle Harry’s three hundred dollars in my pocket.

“We really should hurry, Gladie,” Lucy said. “We need to find Luanda.”

“I have splinters in my hands,” I said.

“I wonder if your Grandma knows where to find her,” she said.

“Who’s Luanda?” Spencer asked.

“I’ve got bush in my hair,” I said.

Lucy waved off Spencer. “We’re on a case, darlin’.”

“What case? Pinkie, what are you up to?”

“I lost my car keys,” I said. “And my spider clothes are in the trunk.”

Spencer crossed his arms in front of him. “Did someone die again?”

I looked at my hands. “Can you get tetanus from splinters?” I asked.

THE FIRE
department gave the all clear about an hour later. It turned out Uncle Harry’s security guard, Kirk, could start my car without keys. From now on I would have to start the engine with a screwdriver,
but at least I could drive it. He also opened my trunk for me, but it would have to be kept closed with a piece of rope.

I was looking less like Donald Trump by the minute.

Spencer gave me a law-enforcement lecture about driving without a license. “You threw me over a balcony,” I reminded him. “You tossed me to my death, along with my driver’s license.”

“So I guess a quickie is out of the question,” he said.

“I thought women are more trouble than they’re worth,” I replied, turning the ignition with the flat-head.

“Habit.” He shrugged and patted the car.

I shifted it into drive and, against Lucy’s wishes, took her to her house, with the promise that we would battle the mysterious Luanda the next morning. I was beat, and the only things I wanted were a hot shower and carbs.

I finally rolled into Grandma’s driveway as the sun started to set. Next door, Holden’s porch light turned on. It was set on a timer, but the interior of his house was dark, and his truck was nowhere to be seen. I hadn’t had word from him since he left town weeks ago. I was trying not to take his silence personally. After all, he was on a mission to clear his name and probably didn’t have time to call, but I still checked my phone every few minutes.

I slapped my forehead. My phone. It was at the bottom of the canyon, along with my purse. I’d had a lot of bad luck with my phone in the past few months.

“This has been a hell of day,” I said out loud.

“You’re telling me.” I jumped in my seat. Ruth Fletcher leaned against my car, her craggy face poking through my open window.

I clutched at my chest. “Ruth, what are you doing here?”

“Are you kidding me? My shop is condemned, as is my apartment above it. Since the whole nightmare is your fault, I figured I would shack up with you while it’s getting fixed.”

“With me? What does Grandma have to say about that?” Ruth didn’t have the greatest respect for Grandma, and I didn’t know how the two would get along living under the same roof.

“Haven’t said a word to her. Haven’t seen her yet. I’ve been waiting for you. If the old bat is so all-seeing, then I don’t need to say a word to her. She should just know.”

I rolled my eyes. “Fine,” I said.

“Why do you have bush in your hair?” Ruth asked.

The front door opened, and Grandma peeked her head out. “What are you two waiting for? Dinner is getting cold. Ruth, I made up the blue room for you.”

I TOOK a long, hot shower before dinner, spending a lot of time trying to remove the splinters from my hands and the tangles from my hair. Afterward, I dressed in sweats and thick socks that Spencer had left at the house weeks before. Luanda or no Luanda, tomorrow I would get my winter clothes cleaned. I was tired of looking like a high school gym teacher.

I opened my bedroom door and was greeted by a flood of light. At first I thought the sun had exploded,
and I worried that I would die hungry, but then I realized the light was coming from across the street. It wasn’t flashlight kind of light. It was Hiroshima kind of light.

“What the hell!” Ruth hollered from below. “Is this how you treat your dinner guest? Am I ever going to be allowed to eat?”

“I’m coming.” I skipped down the long staircase and hit the last step just as a horrible grinding noise started. I put my hands over my ears.

“It’s worse than Woodstock!” Ruth yelled over the racket. It was a stretch imagining Ruth Fletcher at Woodstock. She wasn’t really a love-in kind of gal.

Grandma
click-clack
ed into the entranceway, her hands over her ears, too. We stood there, looking like the hear-no-evil monkey, waiting for the noise to stop.

“It’s not stopping!” I said.

“It must be the dolphin across the street,” Grandma yelled.

My hands dropped away from my ears. “Huh?”

“The dolphin! The dolphin!” she repeated.

Ruth turned toward me. “This is a nuthouse.”

The grinding got louder. I felt my brain bouncing in my skull. “The dolphin that bought the house!” Grandma explained, her voice straining against the noise.

“Woman, you need a padded cell,” Ruth said.

“The dolphin that bought the house?” I asked Grandma.

“Yes, he’s renovating it, and then he’s going to sell it. I hope a young family moves in.” She clapped her hands and pointed at me. “Or a single man!”

“Single men don’t buy houses, Zelda,” Ruth sneered. “Neither do dolphins.”

Grandma and I exchanged looks. We were thinking the same thing. Holden was a single man and he had bought the house next door, but that didn’t end the way we had hoped.

“It’s not necessarily the end, dolly,” Grandma said.

My brain clicked into high gear. “Flipper!” I yelled in triumph. “You mean a flipper bought the house across the street!”

Grandma nodded. “That’s what I said. Dolphin. He says he’s going to turn it around quickly. I bet he’s got thirty men working on it.”

“Not at this time of day, he doesn’t,” Ruth said. She walked upstairs and came back down a couple of minutes later with a baseball bat in her hand and a look of determination on her face.

“Uh,” I said.

“I’ll get them to shut up,” Ruth announced, and stormed out of the house.

“I’ll put the fried chicken and mashed potatoes in the oven to keep warm.” Grandma walked back to the kitchen.

I sighed. I didn’t want to run after Ruth in order to protect her from a twenty-five-to-life sentence and to save the dolphin from being bludgeoned to death. I had had bad experiences with the house across the street. As far as I was concerned, it should be given a wide berth. Besides, it didn’t take a genius to realize I shouldn’t chase after a bat-wielding Ruth Fletcher. She could be cantankerous, was probably a home-run hitter, and five gets you ten she was juicing.

But it was obvious we weren’t going to eat until we were all sitting together at the table, and nothing could get me moving like the promise of mashed potatoes.

In order to save time, I didn’t bother putting on shoes. I ran out into the night toward Ruth and the earsplitting grinding noise, wearing only Spencer’s tube socks on my feet. They were cushy and warm, and I would kill Ruth if they got holes.

The house was bathed in floodlights and swarming with construction workers. They climbed on and over the house and passed in and out of the doors like ants in an ant farm. The grinding noise was actually several grinding noises. And the grinding noises were accompanied by knocking noises that I hadn’t noticed before.

Luckily, Ruth was slow. I caught up to her halfway across the street.

“Ruth,” I called. “Stop!”

She turned with her bat resting against her shoulder, doing her best Sammy Sosa impression.

“I’ll just be a minute,” she told me.

“Ruth, you have a bat.”

“This isn’t a bat. It’s a 1928 Louisville Slugger. Where it goes, I go.”

“So do I,” I said.

It was easy to find the man in charge. The flipper looked shockingly like Abraham Lincoln: tall, ugly, with ratty facial hair. He wore shorts, construction boots, and a puffy jacket, and he held an official-looking clipboard. Ruth spotted him at the same time.

“Shut the hell up! Shut the hell up!” she yelled at him without preamble, lifting the bat high.

He smiled like he was the lunch hostess at Denny’s. “May I help you, ma’am?” he asked her.

“Turn it off!”

“Turn what off?”

“The noise! The lights! You can’t march into this neighborhood like a panzer division.”

“I’ve got a license,” he said, holding up a paper, his smile never wavering. “I can do whatever I want until ten.”

“Ten?” Ruth shouted. I stood back out of range of the Louisville Slugger. Her eyeballs glowed red. She was ready to blow.

“Ten,” he repeated.

“I’ll show you ten, Herr Himmler,” she threatened. “I’ll show you ten through your fascist skull!”

Time slowed. Ruth let rip with her bat, but I watched it through the eyes of a hummingbird, my reflexes turned lightning-fast. I was the Bionic Woman. I was Wonder Woman.