Explosive Eighteen (Stephanie Plum 18)

“I’m tired of fooling around with this,” I said to Lula. “This is bullshit. I’m going to Brenda, and I want answers.”

“Wham,” Lula said. “Kick ass.”

I motored out of Brenda’s neighborhood, took Route 1, and turned into The Hair Barn’s parking lot.

“I’m coming with you,” Lula said. “I don’t want to miss anything.”

“There won’t be much to miss. I just want to talk to her.”

“Yeah, but if she won’t talk, we’ll rough her up.”

“We will not rough her up.”

“Jeez L

ouise,” Lula said. “It’s no wonder you go around in the dark all the time. You got a lot of rules.”

Brenda was sitting in her styling chair when I walked into the salon.

“You came back,” she said. “You decided to get something done with your hair, right?”

“Wrong,” I said. “We need to talk.”

“I don’t need to talk anymore. I don’t care about the photograph. You can keep it.”

“I don’t have it.”

“Well if you did have it, you could keep it,” Brenda said. “It’s not important to me.”

“What about Ritchy?”

“Who?”

“Your dead fiancé.”

“Oh yeah, poor Ritchy.”

“Talk to me about poor Ritchy. What was he doing with the photograph?”

“He just had it, okay? And then he didn’t have it, because he gave it to you.”

“Why did he give it to me?”

“That’s a real good question. I think the answer is that he was an idiot.”

“There’s more of an answer.”

Brenda stood. “I can’t talk to you with that hair. It’s disturbing. Look at your friend. She has amazing hair.”

I glanced over at Lula. She looked like she was wearing a giant wad of tutti-fruiti–colored cotton candy.

“I take real good care of my hair, too,” Lula said.

“You don’t take care of your hair,” I told her. “Every four days, you dye your hair a different color. You have indestructible hair. If you set your hair on fire, nothing would happen to it.”

“I can’t believe you two hang out together,” Brenda said.

“It’s embarrassing sometimes,” Lula said. “She don’t know much about dressing, either.”