22 Tricky Twenty-Two by Janet Evanovich

hurt to take a look around the Zeta house.”
    •••
    Lula parked in a handicap space behind the student center and placed a handicap permit on her dashboard.
    “This’ll disguise my car so it doesn’t get filled with geese,” Lula said. “You’d have to be a real horrible person to put geese in a handicap car.”
    I examined the parking permit. “Where did you get this?”
    “Macy’s,” Lula said. “Jimmy the Cheat was having a trunk sale in the parking lot.”
    “You bought a handicap parking permit from a man called Jimmy the Cheat? Weren’t you afraid of getting cheated?”
    “Hell no. I’ve known Jimmy forever. Anyways I looked it over real careful, and it looked like the real deal.”
    “You’re not handicapped,” Connie said.
    “There’s all kinds of handicaps,” Lula said. “I had a disadvantaged childhood and I’m afraid of snakes. I even think I might have some dyslexia and gluten issues. I was putting this dress on, and I was thinking I might have some bloat.”
    I didn’t want to hear bloat details, so I led everyone across the dark campus to the Zeta house. We stood in deep shadow for a while and watched people coming and going. Lights were on in the house, and music was blaring.
    “Do you still think he’s in the cellar?” I asked Lula.
    “I don’t know anymore,” she said. “I was pretty sure at first, but there’s this fog sort of blurring out my video.”
    “For crying out loud,” Connie said. “Let’s get this over with and look in the cellar.”
    “They keep the door locked,” I told her.
    “So we walk in, find someone of authority, and tell him to unlock the door.”
    “It might not be that simple,” I said. “Last time we were here Lula shot up the balcony.”
    “Yeah, but I didn’t hit anybody,” Lula said. “And look at these people. They drink all day long and they’re all potheads. They probably can’t remember anything.”
    “Okay, we’ll go in, but no shooting,” I said to Lula. “None. Zero. Zip. Do not even
think
about taking your gun out of your purse.”
    “Sure. I got that,” Lula said. “We’ll go in nice and quiet and look around without nobody noticing us. We’ll just blend in and sneak around to the cellar door. It might even be unlocked.”
    I thought our chances of going unnoticed were slim. I was with a two-hundred-pound black woman wearing a size two knock-your-eyes-out tube of red spandex that barely covered her ass. Her hair was blond. Her cleavage was comparable to the Grand Canyon. Her nipples were practically punching holes in the spandex fabric.
    “Good plan,” I said. “Let’s go in and keep a low profile.”
    We made it through the entrance hall and living room and I stopped to look around.
    A guy came up to us with plastic cups of beer. “Are you ladies students here?”
    “Hell, yeah,” Lula said, taking a cup. “We’re studying all kinds of shit.”
    “Anyone want to go upstairs?”
    “Mostly we want to go downstairs,” Lula said.
    “We’d like to see the cellar,” Connie told him.
    “The cellar’s locked,” he said. “Nothing going on down there anyway.”
    “Then why is it locked?” I asked.
    “We keep the beer down there,” he said.
    “I want to see the beer,” Lula said. “I get turned on by beer. Most people want to drink it, but I like looking at it. You can’t imagine what I could do to you if I had enough beer to look at. You’d never be the same. You’d be ruined when I was done with you.”
    “Damn,” he said. “I haven’t got a key. Professor Pooka has a key. So what’s it going to be? One or all of you want to make me happy?”
    “You’re gonna have to get happy all by yourself,” Lula said. “We don’t make people happy until we know them better. We got standards.”
    “How much do your standards cost?” he asked Lula. “What can I get for ten bucks?”
    “You can’t get nothin’ for ten bucks,” Lula said. “If I was in that business, which I’m not, I