“I think you mean golden parachute.”
“Say what?”
“A golden parachute lets you gently float down to earth.”
“Mary Poppins could do that with a umbrella,” Lula said. “What about Mary Poppins?”
The thing about Lula is that when she gets things wrong they frequently make sense.
I heard the door open behind me and saw Lula’s eyes go wide. I turned and bumped into Ranger.
“Babe,” he said, his hands at my waist to steady me.
Even if I’d had my eyes closed I would know I was smashed up against Ranger. He always smells great. He uses Bulgari Green shower gel, and the scent clings to him. I’ve used it and it’s gone by the time I’m done toweling off.
His hand moved to my wrist, and he tugged me outside. “I’m on my way to talk to Bogart,” Ranger said, “but I wanted to talk to you first. Did you pick up anything useful while you were at the plant?”
“I didn’t get to talk to a lot of people, but the general attitude is mostly mellow. No one seems to be overly concerned about the freezer meltdown, the tainted ice cream, or the Bogart Bar guy. I read through the five files you gave me, and nothing really jumped out. Three files were thick because of requests to transfer. You might ask Bogart about that. I didn’t see anything in the employment histories as to why the requests were consistently turned down. No reasons were given. It occurred to me that we might want to take a look at new hires. If Mo Morris sent someone into the plant to sabotage stuff it would have been just before all the bad things started to happen.”
“I’ll check on it,” Ranger said. “Anything else?”
“Did you just take a shower?”
“This morning.”
“You smell nice.”
A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. He leaned in and kissed me. Our tongues touched, and I curled my fingers into his shirt.
“Criminy,” I said.
He gave me a light parting kiss. “You have my number.”
Oh yeah.
I watched him drive away, and I went back into the office.
“Criminy,” Lula said.
I nodded agreement. “So true. Where’s Connie?”
“Courthouse, covering for Vinnie. I’m babysitting the office but nothing’s going on, so I’m working on my reality show. We’re gonna shoot it tonight. We did some preliminary test runs but this is the real thing. I’m just going over the script one more time.”
“I thought reality shows were unscripted.”
“They’re scripted unscripted. Not a lot of people know that. Just us on the inside,” Lula said. “You want to hear my script?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to have to think about you and Briggs naked.”
“Yeah, I could see where that would be a problem with Briggs. He’s not real attractive once you get his clothes off him. Not a lot to look at, if you know what I mean.”
“Did we get any new FTAs?”
“A shoplifter and a mime.”