Full-(er) summary: -- Set after book 13 specifically, but generally could be anywhere in the Plum timeline.-- Stephanie Plum is just doing what comes naturally: dodging bullets, her boss and tax-collectors; while kicking criminal butt on a regular basis, with her own partners in crime, Lula, Ranger and occasionally Morelli. Until a series of events and mistaken identities leads to Steph ending up on the wrong of the cold prison bars. So who's going to bail out to bail-hunter? And what happens when an unknown stranger makes her choose between Morelli and Ranger: forever? What car will she totally destroy this time? What building and/or person will she blow up? Will her eyebrows be another casualty in the messed-up world of Stephanie Plum? Babe and Cupcake until Steph makes her decision; if she ever can. Action, Adventure, Humour. Will be relations (ie fluff and smut) eventually, but this story does have a plot too. Sort of. Kinda. I'm just flying by the seat of my pants here.

Warning: These first few paragraphs contain death. If it worries you in any way, I don't know, skim read over it or something. Why you'd be reading a crime-style series of books in the first place if death made you nervous, I don't know. Rated for mature concepts: language, sexual tension yada-yada.

Oops, forgot: I don't own these characters. I'll think of a more witty disclaimer later.

FTA Maree Constanovich was a very attractive woman for her thirty-one years. Deep olive skin, tawny almond eyes of liquid-gold and eyelashes so dark and long she never had the need for mascara, much to the envy of her female neighbours. She kept her perennial tan bathing nude in her outdoor heated pool, much to the delight of her male neighbours. A single mother to her five-year-old son, she supported him from a business run in her own home. It was a very successful, ludicrous business, but then again, she was both a professional and a specialist, so success naturally followed. Her specialty included pole-dancing, exotic dancing – and even a few steps further for the right customer. Yes, Maree was a very attractive, very successful woman.

I might have felt threatened, but I had one thing Maree didn't. A pulse. In death, Maree's ability to attract the attention of every male within a fifty-foot radius was for a totally different story. Death was not a style that sat well on Maree Constanovich. It seemed Ms Maree had been bathing in her pool when it happened. Several weeks later she was found, still bathing in her pool. And by that stage her skin was well and truly past the wrinkled prune stage. After 23 days of continuous sunbathing in 37 degree heat, her tan was a lot deeper than olive.

I wrinkled my nose at the body slowly drifting and decomposing in the pool, morbidly surrounded by bright inflatable children's toys. A rookie police officer tentatively prodded a beach-ball with his polished shoe in detached shock, sending it bobbing cheerfully in Maree's rotting corpse. Softened by the soaking, her arm detached and slowly sunk to the bottom of the pool, shedding clumps of flesh as it lazily descended.

"Do that again and you'll be the one fishing her out," Joseph Morelli snapped, jerking the rookie out of his reverie with a jolt.
"Yes Sir. Sorry Sir." The horrified expression on his face told him that for the rest of the afternoon he'd be steering well clear of the pool-side. I hid a smile and instead greeted Joe with a recently-waxed, well-shaped raised eyebrow.
"What brings you here, cupcake?" Morelli asked as he shoved his way through the overall-ed forensics teams and the dark suited FBI. Wordlessly I handed him a small, blurry Polaroid, snatched from one of the many manila file folders sprawled around the backseat of my new VW Bug. Morelli glanced from the photo to the corpse lazing in the pool.
"FTA?"
"When they say I can bring them back dead or alive, how literal do you think they were being?"
"Jesus Steph. If you need money that badly, I'll happily sign over this week's pay."
"It's not that I need any cash that desperately," – if I wanted to actually keep my car and my apartment at the same time – "but a bonded Maree would be worth exactly as much as a wide screen TV." Morelli just sighed.

We both turned and watched as a forensics diver in a wetsuit wrestled with the Creepy-Crawly pool cleaner for what appeared to be either one hell of a clump of clogged hair, or a portion of Maree's skull-cap.
"Could I just borrow that for like - "
"- It's evidence." Morelli shot back. Damn. Probably Connie wouldn't take too kindly to me slapping down half of Maree's head on her desk and claiming the finder's fee anyway. It was worth a try though.
"Why didn't any of the neighbours notice Maree's prolonged frolicking in the pool?" Morelli shrugged and pointed above my head.
"Shade-cloth. Just had it installed, much to the neighbours disappointment." I raised my other eyebrow. "It seemed Maree made a habit of bathing nude, gardening nude and mowing the lawn nude. Wish I had neighbours like her." He looked at me suggestively. Joe is my on-again, off-again, sort-of boyfriend. The fact he was thinking about sex while looking at a decomposing corpse sort of hinted at the current status of our relationship. I chose to ignore his last comment and continued questioning.
"Now, I'm no expert on corpses," Morelli snorted in amusement, "But is that how one's supposed to look?"
Morelli screwed up his face. "Well, floaters are never a pretty sight, but CSI's recorded water temp as 37 degrees, so it looks like someone jacked up the thermostat after killing her."
"So it's a murder."
"Looks like it."

Gosh gee. Just in case my life was meandering down the path of boredom, with all these rotting corpses and all, they throw in a few murder plots to spice it up. But as a testimony to how screwed up my life was becoming, even these gory scenario's were becoming more and more common-place in Stephanie Plums little world of gang violence, drug dealers and criminal activity. I don't know if this meant I was doing a great job at becoming a hardened bounty-hunter, or doing a lousy job at being a normal member of society. In my mind I was trying to be all Zen and calm about everything that happened to me. This week I resolved to freak out a lot less and just go with the flow. A bit like Ranger. So I suppose I really was losing my touch with the rest of decent society. I had crossed over to the dark side.

Morelli snaked two hands around my waist and laid them flat on my stomach.
"So cupcake," he whispered into my neck, "Do I need to guard your body tonight?"
I stepped out of his grasp, "God Morelli. Only you could make a pass while staring at a decaying body." I didn't mention how tempted I was to take him up on the offer.