Death, Taxes, and Cheap Sunglasses (A Tara Holloway Novel Book 8) (30 page)

I bid my parents good-bye and headed out. Making a quick detour at Target, I grabbed the first white sheet I saw and proceeded to the checkout.

I met up with Josh and Kira a couple of blocks from the frat house. They climbed out of Josh’s car as I drove up. Kira, who was as painfully thin and long-limbed as a Tim Burton character, wore a shiny black satin sheet that perfectly complemented her white-blond hair, hanging in dreadlocklike chunks around her face. On her feet were a pair of black gladiator-style sandals that laced halfway up her calves. Her shoes were far more authentic than my sneakers. But I was more concerned with having enough traction to wrangle with our target than with looking like an authentic Roman.

Josh was wrapped in a pink sheet printed with images of the Disney princesses.
What the heck?
Were the sheets his way of sleeping with several women every night, engaging in a cartoon orgy? Did he dream of slipping his glass slipper to Cinderella? Did he want to get his hands on Snow White’s apples? I forced the thoughts from my head. Better not to think too much about it.

I stepped out of my car, grabbed my new sheet from the bag, and tore off the plastic wrap. “Oh, crap,” I said as I noted the gathered, elastic edge. “I bought a fitted sheet.”

It was too late to go back to the store to exchange it. I’d just have to make the best of it.

With Kira’s help, I did my best to wrap the sheet around myself toga style. When we finished, she stepped back and looked me up and down.

“How does it look?” I asked.

Her lip quirked. “Honestly? You look like you’re wearing a diaper.”

Great.
“With any luck everyone at the party will be too drunk to notice.”

The three of us made our way to the frat house. It was easy to find tonight. All we had to do was follow the smell of beer, the thrum of techno bass, and the sounds of indecipherable shouts and raucous laughter.

We arrived to find two freshman pledges standing on the front porch, apparently performing door duty. Both of them wore metal whistles hanging from chains around their necks.

I gave them what I hoped was a flirtatious smile. I was more inclined to pat them on the head and hand them a cookie and a glass of warm milk. “Hi. What are you two doing out here?”

“Watching for cops,” said one.

The second one looked us over, his eyes narrowing suspiciously.

Uh-oh.

He stiffened and made a face, the kind a mean kid makes when he doesn’t want you to sit at the lunch table with him. “You look like you’re wearing a diaper.”

I tossed my hair and giggled. “I know, right? I accidentally bought a fitted sheet.”

His face told me that even though this party was supposed to be open, we might be denied entry if we couldn’t convince him we were worthy. Anger boiled up inside me. This had never happened back when I was at the University of Texas. Of course I’d been younger then, and I would’ve put more effort into my costume.

“We’re friends of Devon Peabody,” I said. “He invited us.”

“Oh.” Mr. Suspicious relaxed and nodded. “Okay, then.”

Mentioning one of the frat members by name seemed to act like a secret code word.

The boy turned to Josh. “If you hear this blow,” he said, holding up his whistle, “drop your drink and run. If the cops don’t catch you with a cup in your hand they can’t arrest you.”

I knew the laws regarding underage drinking weren’t quite as simple as that, but I wasn’t about to correct the kid and have him find out I was a cop. Well, a cop of sorts. Besides, he only seemed to be addressing Josh, not me and Kira. I supposed it was clear that Kira and I were over twenty-one. Josh, on the other hand, could pass for fourteen. Maybe even twelve if he were holding an ice cream cone or wearing a beanie cap.

The boys opened the door and let us inside, quickly closing it behind us.

Inside, the place was lit only by colored lights mounted in the corners of the ceiling. Techno dance music blared from enormous stacked speakers at a deafening level, the vibrations shaking the floor and reverberating off our bodies. Hundreds of people milled about, each of them holding at least one red Solo cup, some of them double-fisting their drinks. They weaved around or stumbled into each other like drunken ants in an ant farm, laughing and hooting and hollering. In less than five seconds, I’d been jostled or bumped or groped by a dozen or more people. The crowd and noise created an environment that was near claustrophobic but, despite the sensory overload, we had to venture on.

As we wound our way through the crowd, I spotted Devon Peabody next to a large plastic trash can filled with red liquid. Whooping, he held up a bottle of vodka in each hand and poured them into the open garbage bin, dancing all the while. One of the girls stuck her tongue into the stream, drinking the vodka straight, giggling like a hyena when it ran down her chin and dripped into the can. Partygoers dipped their plastic cups into the liquid, scooping up cupfuls of the punch. One of the girls got some punch on her fingers and stuck them in her mouth to suck it off. A boy submerged both his cup and his hand, shaking the punch from his hand once he’d pulled it out of the can.

Ick.

Where was a health inspector when you needed one?

My stomach roiled and I turned to Josh and Kira. “That’s so unsanitary.”

“What?” they yelled in unison over the music.

“It’s un-san-it-ary!” I hollered back, doing my best to enunciate clearly.

“Sincerity?”
Kira shouted, raising her palms in a
WTH?
gesture.

“Yeah!” Josh cried, smiling, performing some wiggly dance moves and raising his hands in the air. “I like this music, too!”

Josh seemed to be reliving a college moment he’d probably never actually had. Poor guy. He’d only recently learned how to play nice with others.

The next thing I knew, he and Kira had cups of punch in their hands. Okay, I guess. We needed to blend in, after all. But if they actually drank that punch I’d insist they go see Ajay for a tetanus shot and antibiotics once the party was over.

The vodka bottles now empty, Devon stepped away from the trash can to toss the bottles into a cardboard box in the corner. As I turned around to scan the crowd, I was swept up in a stream of bodies migrating to the keg out back. “Hey!” Unable to backtrack against the solid flow, I did the only thing I could. Go with it.

A moment later I found myself in the backyard of the frat house. A huge oak tree stood in the middle of the yard, a silver keg of beer underneath it. A couple leaned against the tree, making out with such vigor they appeared to be zombies attempting to eat each other’s faces. A half-dozen guys stood around the keg, laughing, drinking, and filling their cups from the spigot. Five of them had brown hair.

Was one of them the thief?

Time to find out.

I eased up to the keg. “How’s it going?”

One of the boys snorted. “Are you wearing a diaper?”

Ugh.
“It’s a fitted sheet.”

“Are you sure?”

The whole group of them laughed as if he’d said the wittiest thing possible. I’d been here all of ten minutes and already this wild party was getting on my nerves. I supposed I’d outgrown this type of entertainment once I’d graduated, earned some money, and learned the calm, quiet pleasure of a nice meal and a movie. I wasn’t sure how much more of this I could stand.

“So,” I said, gesturing to the cups of beer in their hands. “You guys upperclassmen?”

“Freshman pledges,” replied one of them, polishing off his cup and leaning in toward the keg to refill it.

Freshman, huh?
That meant they were only eighteen or nineteen years old, under the legal drinking age in Texas. Not exactly model citizens, but who was I to condemn them? I’d done my fair share of minor lawbreaking, too. Underage drinking. Toilet-papering houses. Wrapping duct tape around a friend’s ex-boyfriend’s car after he dumped her. Took the guy half an hour to get his door open.
Good times.

“Are any of you good with computers?” I asked, attempting to segue into a discussion that might lead me to the thief. “I’ve been having a problem with my e-mail.”

The boys ignored me, instead entering into a shoving match when two girls with low-draping togas wandered by.
Jeez.
How bad did I look? I mean, I knew I had bags under my eyes and worry wrinkles and inflamed gums, but I used to be able to hold my own at parties like this. These boys were making me feel old and unattractive. Then again, this diaper did nothing for my figure. Not that I had much figure to begin with.

I grabbed a cup from a bag on a picnic table nearby and served myself a beer. I wasn’t a huge beer fan, but at least the keg wasn’t full of germs like the trash can inside. I wandered around, trying unsuccessfully to insinuate myself into conversations with brown-haired boys but having no luck. As I wandered away from one group, I heard a girl say, “Since when do the housemothers come to parties?”

Housemother?

Ugh.

chapter thirty

P
arty Crashers

I tossed back the beer, though it did little to ease the sting of the girl’s nasty comment. Pretending to be checking a text, I pulled up the camera app on my phone and reversed it so I could see myself.
Yikes!
The image told me why none of the young men at this party had given me a second glance. I looked like crap. Exhausted. Strung out, even, like an addict overdue for a fix. Definitely time to schedule another glycolic treatment. Maybe a double dose. Perhaps Jessica could string me up by my feet and dip me in a vat.

My mind worked, trying to come up with a fresh tactic to elicit information from these boys. In my experience, if a girl had a sizable chest, she could get a guy’s attention even if she had the face of a donkey. I wandered over to the beer keg, grabbed a second cup, then skittered around the tree and slid the two cups into the top of my toga. The fitted sheet came in handy now, the elastic edge helping to hold the cups in place on my chest. I scrunched the fabric up around the plastic so the ends of my new twelve-ounce breasts wouldn’t look so flat.

Properly equipped now, I went back inside and headed down the hall, hoping that some of these boys would be willing to give me some information on their fraternity brothers. I’d taken only seven steps when a boy stepped in front of me. His toga was a dingy yellowish gray.
Ew
Hadn’t the guy heard of Clorox?

“Hey, there!” he yelled over the music as he stared down at what he thought was my chest. “Let’s go dance!”

He grabbed at my hand to lead me to the dance floor, but I stood my ground. “Actually, I’m looking for someone!” I yelled back, the loud bass notes causing my plastic boobs to quiver. “He’s a computer science major, I think! Brown hair! You know him?”

I didn’t get an answer. Apparently my fake breasts were too distracting.

A jiggle inside the pocket of my shorts told me a text had come in on my cell phone. I pulled it out to find a message from Josh.

3rd floor 4th room! Now!

“Sorry! Gotta go!” I shoved the cell phone into my purse, pushed past my new admirer, and turned sideways to better slip through the crushing crowd. The group thinned as I ascended the stairs to the second floor, thinning even more as I reached the third. I counted the doors, sprinting down the row, my hand feeling for my holster through my toga.

What will I find when I get to the fourth room?

Has Josh found our target?

Or is Josh in trouble?

If I ran all the way up here only to discover that Josh needed help extricating an atomic wedgie from between his butt cheeks I’d be sorely disappointed. I was ready to bust this thief and get the heck out of this loud, smelly house
now.

The door to the fourth room stood slightly ajar, open an inch or two, just enough to give me a glimpse inside. I could see a floor covered with dirty laundry, beer cans, and fast food wrappers, and heard the sounds of a video game. A
clang
as metal weapons met. A
whoosh
as another weapon missed its target.
Oofs
and
grunts
as the characters engaged in combat.

I knocked on the door.

“It’s open!” called a male voice from inside.

I pushed the door open, having to shove fairly hard to move it past a pair of jeans balled up on the floor behind it. Josh lounged in a bright red beanbag chair patched with swaths of silver duct tape. He wore a headset and had a laptop in his lap, leaning first one way then the other as he worked the keys. Another boy, an average-sized, average-looking one with brown hair, reclined in one of those specialized, curved gaming chairs on the floor. On his bicep was a tattoo of a horned, redheaded woman with golden eyes and big boobs. She wore a dark red and gold bikini complemented by thigh-high boots and a cape. Talk about
what not to wear
. Like Josh, the boy had a keyboard in his lap, as well as a mouse pad and mouse situated on top of a stack of greasy pizza boxes next to him. Next to the mouse pad sat a cup full of punch. Judging from the boy’s blurry-looking eyes and slack jaw, it wasn’t his first.

The boy glanced up at me. “Is that a diaper?”

“Yes.” There was no more fight left in me, at least as far as my half-assed toga was concerned. “It’s a diaper. A big ol’ adult-sized diaper.”

Kira lay facedown on the disheveled bed, her top half supported on her forearms, her legs kicked up girlishly behind her. She watched the video game action, displayed on a huge wide-screen flat-panel monitor sitting on a computer desk. Next to the computer sat a high-quality laser printer. This guy had some nice, top-of-the-line equipment.

Josh and the boy talked trash into their headsets.

“Don’t invite the noob!” the boy cried into his mic. “He doesn’t even have purples!”

Purples?
What the heck was he talking about?

“Heal me!” Josh demanded, appearing to be yelling at the screen.