Plum Spooky (Stephanie Plum 14.50)

“I gotta go with you,” Tank said. “Ranger will kill me if anything happens to you.”

“Me, too,” Lula said. “I’m sticking to you like glue.”

“I’m going across the street to a radio station. Nothing’s going to happen to me.”

“I’ll be real discreet,” Tank said.

As discreet as a six-?foot-?six, no-?neck guy weighing three hundred and fifty pounds, all dressed in black SWAT clothes, with a Glock holstered at his side could be.

“Me, too,” Lula said. “I’ll discreet your ass off.”

Tank and I looked at her. She was wearing a traffic-?stopping, orange, fake fur jacket, a poison green spandex skirt that stopped just short of her ass, green ankle boots that matched the skirt, and her hair was sunflower yellow.

I allowed myself a small sigh of defeat, and I crossed the street with Tank and Lula on my heels. I pushed through the front door into a small, dark lobby with a tattered rug and sad, worn-?out furniture. No money in radio, I thought. A woman behind a receptionist desk focused on us.

“Can I help you?” she said.

“I’m from the Trenton Times,” I said. “We’re doing a feature story on WINK, and I’m doing some preliminary work, scouting out a front-?page photo op.”

“I didn’t hear anything about it,” she said. “You’re not on my schedule.”

“Well, how about us?” Lula said. “Are we on your schedule?”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Lula. Who the heck do you think? And this here’s Tank.”

The woman scanned her list of names.

“Jelly bean counting contest,” I told the receptionist. “They’re part of the photo shoot.”

Lula sneezed and farted. “Excuse me,” she said to the receptionist. “It’s not my fault. I’m allergic to the cat lady here.”

“That’s mean,” Tank said. “Men can have cats, too. Cats guarded royal houses back in Egypt.”

“If they guarded my house, I’d be dead,” Lula said. “I’d sneeze myself into the grave. And a lot you care. You picked a cat over me.”

“It was one of those fate things,” Tank said. “It’s just these cats came along. It wasn’t like I was looking for them.”

“I should have known. Right from the beginning, Miss Gloria said our moons were incompatible.”

The receptionist perked up at that. “I know Miss Gloria. Miss Gloria does my charts.”

“Get out,” Lula said. “Don’t you love her? You couldn’t live without her, right?”

“I don’t make

a move without Miss Gloria’s say-?so. One time, I was driving to work, and I was on the phone with her, and she told me I was gonna be in an accident, and next thing you know, I rear-?ended a guy.”

“That’s scary amazin’,” Lula said.

“I thought we might want a shot of the behind-?the-?scenes workings of a radio station,” I said to the receptionist. “Where’s your transmitter?”

“They’re down that hallway all the way, and to the right, and out the door, but there are people working on the main. We’re on backup right now.”

“I never saw a radio-?station transmitter before,” Lula said. And she took off down the hall, opening doors, looking inside the rooms.

“You can’t do that!” the receptionist yelled after Lula.