Revenge of the Cootie Girls

PRAISE FOR THE ROBIN HUDSON MYSTERIES

What's a Girl Gotta Do?

“Put down the paper right now and go out to buy
What's a Girl Gotta Do
.… This is a mystery where you wait on the edge of your seat not for the next murder, but for the next thing that Robin is going to say.… It's the kind of book you'll laugh at out loud, or take to work to read around the coffee machine.” —
The Washington Post Book World

“The most uproariously funny murder mystery ever written.” —Katherine Neville, author of
The Eight

Nice Girls Finish Last

“Witty, irreverent, sometimes bawdy … A rollicking blend of deftly aimed satire and neatly plotted murder mystery.” —
The Philadelphia Inquirer

“A hilarious, keenly written romp across the gender divide, downtown Manhattan's alternative scenes, and the frenetic world of TV news.” —
Entertainment Weekly

Revenge of the Cootie Girls

“Sexy, irreverent and wacky. Robin Hudson should be Stephanie Plum's goilfriend.” —Janet Evanovich, #1
New York Times
–bestselling author of
Top Secret Twenty-One

The Last Manly Man

“Offbeat and outrageously funny.” —
The San Diego Union-Tribune

“Fast-paced plotting, witty dialogue, fleshed out characters and enough red herrings to distract from the real villains and maintain suspense.” —
Newsday

The Chelsea Girl Murders

“Quirky characters, tough guy talk, romantic longing and unexpected twists … Hayter [is] writing at the top of her game.” —
The Milwaukee Journal

“What a phenomenally entertaining writer Hayter is.” —
The Times
(London)

Revenge of the Cootie Girls

A Robin Hudson Mystery

Sparkle Hayter

To CJW

and

The Goils

Sandi Bill

Diana Greene

Marianne Hallett

“Weird Deirdre” Kirk

“Right Lisa” Mann

“Left Lisa” Napoli

Tamayo Otsuki

Andrea Peyser

Kathrine Piper

Alesia Powell

Annalee Simpson

Siv Svendsen

Eva Valenta

Lynn “E.” Willis

and

my mom, Grace Jacqueline Audrey Bacon Hayter;

my sister, Sandra Dawn MacIntosh;

and my niece Jennifer Ann Hayter

Female friends are the greatest hazard in a working woman's life, for they cannot be casual.

—D
AWN
P
OWELL
, 1944

Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.

—O
SCAR
W
ILDE,
“A Few Maxims

for the Instruction of the Overeducated”

Readers of
NANCY DREW
need no assurance that the adventures of resourceful Louise Dana and her irrepressible sister Jean are packed with thrills, excitement, and mystery. Every girl will love these fascinating stories which tell how the
DANA GIRLS,
like Nancy Drew herself, meet and match the challenge of each strange new mystery.

—From the inside flap of
By the Light of the Study Lamp
,

a Dana Girls mystery by Carolyn Keene,

Copyright 1938, Grosset & Dunlap, Inc.

PROLOGUE

B
OY, IT'S HARD
to believe now, but not long before the Girls' Night Out Fiasco, I was complaining about being bored.

All in all, my job was okay, my cautiously nonmonogamous love life was okay, nobody I knew had been murdered recently, my cat was making decent money as an advertising spokesfeline which I, as her accountant, embezzled freely, and my urge to walk the streets randomly slapping people silly had subsided.

That's when the attacks started.

Most people have panic attacks. Panic was a fairly normal state for me. I had boredom attacks. A voice would sound,
You have to do SOMETHING
, echoing like Poe's tell-tale heart. I suppose I was lucky it didn't say, “If you build it they will come,” or, “Only you can save the dauphin from the English.” Still, this was a voice that disturbed me, and since it didn't specify exactly what I should do, it sent me all over the place in search of boredom relief.

Over the course of the next few months, I tried shopping, massages, trendy scenes, drag balls, poetry slams, and sleeping with twenty-five-year-olds. Well, one twenty-five-year-old. But it was all too been-there-done-that. I tried working out my ennui in the employee gym, but, damn, exercise is boring. So repetitive. Everyone had suggestions about how to put the bounce back in my pounce, from bungee jumping to Prozac to magic herbs and candles to Kendo, the art of Japanese swordfighting. Nothing worked for very long.

Until, that is, I started meddling in the rich and interesting lives of my insane girlfriends. That's what got me mixed up with my neighbor Sally in the spring, prompted me to take on an intern in the Special Reports unit that fall, and led to the revival of Girls' Night Out, a semiregular frenzy of female bonding with whichever of my goilfriends was around. One thing leads to another, and another, and another.…

Girls' Night Out by definition wasn't about networking or consciousness raising or art appreciation or sensitive female bonding. It was about laughs, plain and simple. The whole idea was to go all night, being goofy and having fun, to “get silly,” as Phil, my super, had advised me during my ennui. After a hard week doing budgets, managing people, being managed, raising kids, or investing zillions of dollars for clients, it's fucking Miller time, man.

In theory, at least. Maybe I was getting old. When I was younger, I'd go all night, from juke joint to juke joint, raising hell all over town. But every year it gets a little harder to do that.

My name is Robin Jean Hudson and I am the executive producer of the Special Reports unit at the prestigious All News Network, which sounds a lot more high-falutin' than it actually is. Though we try to do a few classy pieces every year, our bread and butter in Special Reports is UFO abductees, weird cults, crop circles, Satan, and abnormal sexual practices, sometimes all of the above at once.

Ever since my former boss, Jerry Spurdle, went to Berlin to be the bureau chief and avenge two world wars, I've been boss in the unit. As it turns out, I am good at bossing. Who knew? I am divorced, childless, and I live on New York's Lower East Side—excuse me,
East Village
—with my cat, Louise Bryant, of Aloof and Fussy Cat Food fame. She is part of their hero-cats ad campaign because she once saved my life, even though she didn't mean to. She was just pissed because she hadn't been fed.

Lately, I've been thinking about all the accidents, happy and otherwise, that send one's life spinning in a completely different direction. If my mother hadn't disobeyed her father back in 1957 and gone out with my dad in his dad's Packard to look for Sputnik in the night sky, I wouldn't even be here. I am very grateful to my mom and dad, and his dad, and the entire Soviet postwar space program, most of the time.

On top of all the accidents, there are the dozens, maybe hundreds, of decisions we make every day that have an impact on the future in ways big, small, minuscule.

For example, a simple thing like taking French in high school could have radically changed my life. I almost took French in high school, but at the last minute I changed my mind when I saw Doug Gribetz was signing up for Swedish. Since I had been in puppy love with Doug Gribetz since kindergarten, from the first time I looked up over my Lincoln Logs and saw him looking back, I decided to try Swedish as well, though I was too scared to speak to him in any language. After a week, he transferred out of Swedish. French was filled by then, so I stuck Swedish out for the semester, just barely passing. Nothing against our fine Scandinavian brothers and sisters, but Swedish is a language I can't speak without feeling goofy and cracking up, so I didn't learn very much. And I didn't go back to French until I was thirty and planning a vacation to Paris.

A little decision like that, and it made such a difference. But it wasn't just French, or boredom, or my bad-tempered cat, that facilitated the events of the last Girls' Night Out. There were a lot of twists and turns along the way that contributed. If my boyfriend Chuck hadn't forbidden me to go to the beach for spring break in 1979, things would have been different. If I hadn't been so docile with Chuck, I would have gone to the damned beach anyway.

And maybe I would have had more self-esteem and I wouldn't have been so docile, so grateful for Chuck's attention, if it wasn't for Mary MacCosham and the cooties.

Damn. That's a heavy thought. Because of cooties, lives were saved, and lives were lost.

1

N
ORMALLY,
I feel a little thrill when I return to New York, which starts as the plane begins its descent into the airport and the little houses and gardens of Long Island and Queens come into view. It picks up steadily on the drive into the city and fully inflates when the skyline of Manhattan suddenly looms over the Calvary Cemetery in Queens. There's something about that juxtaposition of the gleaming skyline and the vast cemetery that almost always gets me where I live. I don't know why.

But that Halloween, the LaGuardia control tower kept my plane circling for over an hour, and after I'd seen the little houses for the twenty-seventh time the thrill was completely gone. The traffic on the ground was even worse, backed up all the way from the goddamned airport. The city/cemetery panorama was frozen in front of me for an hour, and lost its luster in about half that time.

It took one long, horn-slamming hour just to get to the midtown tunnel, and another forty-five minutes to get through it. By the time we got to the Manhattan side my cab driver, who had painfully observed the Taxi and Limousine Commission's new politeness guidelines when I got into the car, was banging his fist on the steering wheel and swearing like a longshoreman's parrot. I don't mean to throw stones, because I've employed the odd cussword or two when the occasion demanded it. In New York, cussing serves a healthy purpose, often venting and/or replacing anger. Better a sturdy Anglo-Saxon expletive that has stood the test of time than a punch in the nose, I always say.

But cussing wasn't helping this guy one bit.

“It's okay,” I said, trying to calm him down.

“No, it's not okay,” he said. “I have a curse on me!”

Why this curse was put upon him I never learned—he kept breaking off into his native language—but I did gather that an enemy had cursed him. And what a curse. Because of it, his face was changing into someone else's, his penis was receding into his body, and he couldn't seem to escape bad traffic.

Right, gotta go now, the microchip in my buttocks is beeping, I thought, but didn't say, though I generally believe one good insane comment deserves another.

Instead I said, “Everything will work out,” because I was trying to be more mature and nurturing and all that, now that I was a semirespectable executive.

That's when he flipped.

“It will work out? I have a curse on me! How can it work out? I'VE HAD IT! This is the last straw!” he screamed. He threw his door open and took off running.

I sat there in the back seat, thinking he'd come back, you know. The guy picked a jim-dandy time to have a nervous breakdown. This crazy cabbie was even worse than the one who believed Korean greengrocers were involved in a conspiracy to spread rumors that he was homosexual.