Finger Lickin' Fifteen

Excerpt

In my mind, my kitchen is filled with crackers and cheese, roast chicken
leftovers, farm fresh eggs, and coffee beans ready to grind. The reality is that I keep my Smith & Wesson in the cookie jar, Oreos in the microwave, a jar of peanut butter and hamster food in the over-the-counter cupboard, and I have beer and olives in the refrigerator. I used to have a birthday cake in the freezer for emergencies, but I ate it.
 
Truth is, I would dearly love to be a domestic goddess, but the birthday
cake keeps getting eaten. I mean you buy it, and you eat it right? And then where are you? No birthday cake. Ditto cheese and crackers and eggs and the roast chicken leftovers (which were from my mother). The coffee beans are light years away. I don't own a grinder. I guess I could buy two birthday cakes, but I'm afraid I'd eat both.
 
My name is Stephanie Plum and in my defense I'd like to say that I have
bread and milk on my shopping list, and I don't have any communicable
diseases. I'm five feet seven inches. My hair is brown and shoulder length and naturally curly. My eyes are blue. My teeth are mostly straight. My manicure was pretty good three days ago, and my shape is okay.

I work as a bond enforcement agent for my cousin Vinnie, and today I was standing in Loretta Rizzi's kitchen, thinking not only was Loretta ahead of me in the kitchen-needs-a-makeover race, but she made me look like a piker in The Loose Cannon Club.
 
It was eight in the morning, and Loretta was wearing a long pink flannel
nightgown and holding a gun to her head.
 
"I'm gonna shoot myself," Loretta said. "Not that it would matter to you, because you get your money dead or alive, right?"
 
"Technically, that's true," I told her. "But dead is a pain in the tuchus. There's paperwork."
 
A lot of the people Vinnie bonds out are from my Chambersburg neighborhood in Trenton, New Jersey. Loretta Rizzi was one of those people. I went to school with Loretta. She's a year older than me, and she left high school early to have a baby. Now she was wanted for armed robbery, and she was about to blow her brains out.
 
Vinnie had posted Loretta's bond, and Loretta had failed to show for her
court appearance, so I was dispatched to drag her back to jail. And as luck would have it, I walked in at a bad moment and interrupted her suicide.
 
"I just wanted a drink," Loretta said.
 
"Yeah, but you held up a liquor store. Most people would have gone to a
bar."
 
"I didn't have any money, and it was hot, and I needed a Tom Collins." A
tear rolled down Loretta's cheek. "I've been on the edge lately," she said.
 
Loretta is a half a head shorter than me. She has curly black hair and a
body kept toned by hefting serving trays for catered affairs at the
firehouse. She hasn't changed much since high school. A few crinkle lines around her eyes. A little harder set to her mouth. She's Italian-American and related to half the Burg, including my off and on boyfriend Joe Morelli.
 
 
From: FINGER LICKIN' FIFTEEN, by Janet Evanovich, (c) 2009 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Press, LLC.