Explosive Eighteen (Stephanie Plum 18)

“Sit down here,” Brenda said to me. “I’ll get you fixed up. I don’t have any clients for the rest of the day.”

“Gee, thanks, but I don’t think so,” I said.

“On the house,” Brenda said.

“It’s not the money,” I told her. “I sort of like my hair the way it is.”

“Honey, your hair is no way,” Brenda said. She cut her eyes to Lula. “Am I right?”

“Yep,” Lula said. “You’re right.”

Brenda ran her fingers through my hair. “First thing, you need highlights. Big, chunky highlights.”

“About the photograph?”

“Put a cape on and sit down while I mix this up,” Brenda said. “We can talk when I come back.”

Heaven help me, I was going to have to let her give me highlights to get her to talk.

“I don’t trust her,” I said to Lula. “She’s crazy. What if she poisons my hair?”

“I’ll go watch her,” Lula said. “I know what I’m doing when it comes to hair and pharmaceuticals. You just sit in the chair and don’t worry about nothin’.”

They both came back after a couple minutes, and Brenda streaked gunk into my hair and wrapped it in foil.

“It’s no big deal about the photograph,” Brenda said. “I thought I needed it for a business transaction, but turns out it wasn’t necessary.”

“What about your brother? Am I off the hook with him, too?”

“You know about Chester?” She shrugged. “I don’t know what’s going on with him, except he’s an asshole. I’m not talking to him. He’s only my half brother anyway. We found out my mother was doing the butcher.”

She picked up a different bowl of glop and streaked and foiled new gunk alongside the previous gunk.

I bit my lip and said a Hail Mary.

“I can see this isn’t gonna be as interesting as I hoped,” Lula said. “Bitch slapping’s unlikely, so I’m gonna go sit and catch up on all your trashy magazines.”

“You still haven’t told me anything,” I said to Brenda. “Chester hired two guys to follow me around. Why? Who’s the man in the photo?”

“The man is no one. It’s a composite. You know, somebody’s nose and someone else’s eyes. It’s done on a computer.”

“Tom Cruise and Ashton Kutcher!”

“I don’t know. I never saw it,” Brenda said. “Anyway, it’s real clever. It looks like a photograph, but it’s a computer program. You scan it into a computer, and the computer breaks the picture up into little itty-bitty thingies and sees a code. And then you can use the code to do things. Like open a car.”

“I don’t get why that’s so special. You can open a car with a key. You can open a car with a remote.”

“Yes, but this opens cars that have fancy doohickeys like GPS and security systems. You don’t necessarily have to own the car to be able to unlock it, if you get my drift.”

“You could steal a car with this?”

“Exactly, and after you open the car, you can start the engine and do all kinds of things … like work the gas and brake and steering without being in the car.”

Lula looked up from her magazine. “So I could use that photo to start any car I picked out of the lot and ram it through your plate-glass window?”

“Maybe not any car, but I suppose,” Brenda said.

“Nice,” Lula said. And she went back to reading her magazine.