Fearless Fourteen - Janet Evanovich [27]
“I thought her mother was in rehab.”
“She is. I didn’t look too hard at the signature. Here’s the problem. I can’t leave the office, and I need someone to spring Loretta and drive her home. Dom won’t go anywhere near the jail.”
EIGHT
“I JUST WANT to go home and take a shower and get into clean clothes,” Loretta said. “And for the rest of my life, I don’t want to ever see a Tom Collins.”
I turned down her street, and a block away we could see the disaster. There was a mound of furniture and assorted junk at the curb in front of her house.
“Shit,” Loretta said. “It’s that bastard slum lord who owns my house. He’s evicted me.”
I parked and looked at Loretta’s front door. It had a board nailed across it and an eviction notice tacked to the board.
“You had to know this was coming,” I said to Loretta.
“I was behind on my rent, but I was hoping he’d give me another month. We’re coming into wedding season, and the firehouse is booked solid with showers and receptions. I could have caught up this month.”
She wrenched the passenger-side door open and got out and stood staring at all her worldly possessions.
“Is this everything?” I asked her.
“Yeah,” she said. “Pathetic, isn’t it? Most of the big furniture pieces, like the beds and the couch, came with the rental.”
“You need to get this trucked out of here. There’s not that much. You could haul it in a pickup and store it in your mom’s garage.”
“I don’t have a phone,” she said. “My phone went dead in jail.”
I gave her my phone, and she called Dom.
Forty minutes later, Dom rolled in driving a rattletrap truck. He pulled to the curb, and I took off. I didn’t want another confrontation with crazy Dom, and I was due at the hotel at eleven. I was wearing black slacks and black boots, a stretchy white T-shirt, and a fitted black leather jacket. I was ready to represent Rangeman.
TANK WAS ON guard in front of Brenda’s suite when I stepped out of the elevator. I tried to imagine him in a pink tuxedo, but the picture wouldn’t come together.
“How’s it going?” I asked him.
“Good,” he said.
“No trouble with Brenda?”
“No.”
So much for conversation.
At precisely eleven o’clock, Ranger arrived, walked straight to Brenda’s door, and knocked.
Nancy opened the door a crack and looked out at Ranger.
“The car is here,” Ranger said.
Nancy grimaced. “She can’t get her eyelashes on.”
“And?”
“She can’t do television without eyelashes.”
Ranger looked over at me. “You want to step in here and translate?”
“False eyelashes,” I told him. “Doesn’t the station have someone doing makeup?” I asked Nancy.
“No. Budget cuts. We have hair and makeup coming in from New York for the concert, but there was a scheduling screwup and they won’t arrive in time for this television show.”
“Good grief,” I said. “This isn’t rocket science.” I pushed past Nancy and found Brenda in the bathroom, fiddling with her hair. She was wearing a white stretch wraparound shirt that tied in the front and showed a lot of cleavage and a lot of skin between the bottom of the shirt and the top of her jeans. She had her hair in two ponytails. She looked like Daisy Duke.
I looked at the mess of makeup spread out on the bathroom counter. She had individual lashes, which would take an hour to get on, and she had strip lashes, which any idiot could glue to her lids in ten seconds.
“I can do this,” I told her. “We’ll go with the strip lashes. You don’t have time for the individuals.”
“Are you a professional?” she asked.
“Even better. I’m from the Burg. I was putting lashes on my Barbie doll when I was seven. Close your eyes.”
I glued the lashes to her eyes and swiped on liquid eyeliner. I looked at my watch. Ten minutes late. Could be worse.
We maneuvered Brenda through the lobby to a side exit, where three black Rangeman SUVs idled. Ranger, Nancy, Brenda, and I got into the middle car, and we all cruised off into traffic.
I was in the backseat, and I was thinking I should be sort of excited to be part of Brenda’s entourage. After all, she