Explosive Eighteen (Stephanie Plum 18)

“What the heck are you doing here? And I’m not your girlfriend. I’ve never been your friend. I will never want to be your friend.”

“Gee, that hurts.”

“How did you get in?”

“I climbed up the fire escape and jimmied your window.”

I raised the Glock. “I guess I should be thanking you. This makes everything easy for me.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m not going anywhere, especially not to jail.”

“I have an arrest agreement, and I have a gun aimed at you.”

“Honestly,” Joyce said, “put the gun down. You’re not going to shoot me. For one thing, I’d bleed all over your carpet. Not that it’s all that great. And I’m unarmed. Just think of the paperwork, not to mention you’d probably get charged with assault with a deadly weapon. That carries a decent amount of time in an orange jumpsuit.”

“I hate you.”

“Blah, blah, blah,” Joyce said. “Get over it. Besides, I’m an entirely new person.”

“You don’t lie?”

“Well, of course I lie. Everyone lies.”

“You don’t steal husbands?”

“Okay, once in a while I steal a husband. I don’t see what the big deal is. They all turn out to be losers anyway.”

“So how are you new?”

“For one thing, I have blond streaks in my hair. What do you think?”

Joyce dyed her hair flame red, so the blond streaks were icing on the cake. Some of the hair was real, and some of it was fake, and when you put it all together there was a lot of it. She wore it teased up, exploding out into big curls and waves, like Farrah Fawcett’s hair on steroids.

I looked more closely at the color. “I like it. It’s flattering to your skin tone.” Good grief, I thought, now I was complimenting her hair. This was absolutely wrong.

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to do some sprucing up,” Joyce said. “You don’t ever look wonderful, but you look worse than usual. You get into a fight with Morelli?”

“I slipped and fell in a parking garage.”

“Yeah, right. That’s how you got the busted-up face. What, do I look stupid today?”

“Why are you here?”

“I was going to come get my key, and then I realized this was the perfect place to hide out. No one would ever think to look for me here.”

“Hide out? Here?” I vigorously shook my head. “No. No, no, no. No way.”

“Deal with it,” Joyce said. “I’m not leaving.”

Keep your eye on the prize, I told myself. Go with a capture plan. Let her stay here, and when she falls asleep, sneak up on her, zap her with the monster stun gun, and cuff her. Then drag her ass back to jail and collect the money.

“Did you kill Frank Korda?” I asked her.

“No, but if he wasn’t already dead, I’d consider it. The asshole lied to me.”

“Despicable.”

“No shit.” Joyce was on the couch surfing television channels. “I can’t believe you’ve just got the basic package. You don’t get anything on this crappy television. It’s going to be a real hardship for me to live here.”