Connie was out of the office bonding out Shania again when I got there, and I was glad to know that she'd be home in time to pick up her child from school. However, Lula was there. When I joined her in the bonds office, she was in one of her two most common positions – playing Solitaire on the computer. Her other favorite position was sleeping on the sofa, but because she would have just woken from her mid-morning nap, she wouldn't have been tired. Of course, that hadn't stopped her in the past.

"Are you ready to go huntin'?" said. Lula

"Wabbits?" I said with a smile. "I could do with some rabbit stew."

Lula gasped and turned to me in shock. "You actually eat rabbit? Poor, fluffy, defenseless bunnies? Like the Easter Bunny? The Easter Bunny brings chocolate. Bunnies are good."

I laughed. "True. To tell you the truth, I've never cared for rabbit stew. I just said that to see what you'd say. It always seemed like murder to me to kill a bunny for food. More so than with a cow or a pig or a chicken or turkey. I don't know why that is, since bunnies are probably better to eat than something like a cow. More food per bone mass, less impact on the environment, and they procreate like crazy. However, there is something that seems inherently wrong with killing little fluffy bunnies."

"I know", said Lula. "When I see a little bunny, all I want to do is pick them up and cuddle them, and maybe squeeze them to see if chocolate pooped out."

"I don't think chocolate poops out."

"How does the Easter Bunny get all that chocolate get to all those houses then? Santa Claus carries a magical sack with him. The Easter Bunny don't carry no sack. How else would he get the chocolate to all the different houses? He has to poop it out."

Euww. I might never eat Easter chocolate again, and that was a shame since Easter was one of my favorite times of the year.

"I don't know how you can say that you value rabbits", I said. "You carry your lucky rabbit's foot on your keychain."

"Yeah, but that's not a real rabbit's foot. That's just a piece of fake fur that's been imbibed with magic."

"Uh-hunh. How does it get imbibed with magic?"

"An old witch says magic words over the fake foot when it's in the factory."

"Uh-hunh. If you say so."

"You can tell that it's fake because it's a bright pink in color. Have you ever seen a pink rabbit? No, you haven't. See? It's a fake foot." She took it out of her purse to show me the color.

"Sure. They didn't dye it at the plant?"

Lula looked at the foot. She inspected it for a moment, then cried out and threw the keychain across the room. The keys hit the wall and slid to the floor. "Get it away from me!" she said. She shuddered and ran to the bathroom and washed her hands. When she returned, she said, "that's gross. I've been carrying around a piece of real rabbit. There's a poor defenseless bunny out there with only three feet, and it's all because of me."

"I think the bunny is dead."

"Oh, God! That's even worse! I killed a bunny. I can't touch my keychain any longer."

"You need your keys to drive your car."

"You can drive me home."

"You need your keys to open your house."

"I can live in your apartment."

"Mary Lou is staying there."

"Hunh. I don't want to stay with that bitch. She might pepper spray me in my sleep."

"Why don't I take off the rabbit's foot and then you have your keys back."

Lula thought about that for a moment. "Okay, as long as you don't mind holding a piece of an animal. Hell, I won't even wear real fur. That's disgustin'."

I crossed the room and picked up the keychain, and removed the rabbit's foot. I handed the keys back to Lula and she gingerly took the keys from my hand. I threw the rabbit's foot in the garbage. "Better?" I said.

"Yeah, but now we don't have the luck associated with the rabbit's foot."

"Was it particularly lucky?"

"You haven't blown up a car lately, have you?"

"No, but it was hit by Bucky's bullets last week."

"Yeah, but that was just a little bullet. He didn't incapacitate the car. As far as your cars go, it didn't even register. I mean, it didn't even count in our pool." The bonds office, copying Rangeman and the police, had started a pool for when my car would be next incapacitated. In the last year, there had been five winners. Rangeman had started a similar pool for the length of time between my carjackings. There had been nine winners in that pool, and the only reason that there weren't more was because it only started six months ago.

I shook my head. "So, should we take the Explorer when we go out skip chasing today?"

"Yeah. We don't have my lucky rabbit's foot now, so we aren't going to have good karma today. I see a car getting jacked in our future."

"Okay", I said. I hoped that we didn't have a carjacking. Tank had said that morning that he had another day to go before he won the pool for carjackings, and he had asked me to take it easy today. I had promised I would. "We have the one old file of the guy that broke into the junkyard, got stuck on the fence on the way out, was freed from the fence and decided to do it all again, including the part where he got stuck on the fence. He doesn't sound too smart and should be easy for us to capture him."

"Okay, let's clean up the oldest ones first. Dumbest is even better. I need a cash infusion. My Amex bill needs to be paid, and I bought a new handbag when I was out on the weekend. It was a good deal. It was a real knock off Gucci bag. I needed it."

"Why did you need it?"

"I just did."

"Un-hunh. Well, I love old and dumb as well."

"I won't tell Ranger that you said that. After all, he's not too much older than you, is he?"

"No, he's the same age. Where I was born in October, though, he was born in the middle of May."

"Did you celebrate his birthday with him this year? If his birthday is in the middle of May, you would probably have been living with him at the time. You would still have been going out with Morelli, but you would have been living with Ranger."

"That's true."

"Please tell me he had a birthday cake, because that would be real disappointin' to find out that he didn't have a birthday cake."

"He had a birthday cake."

"Whew! Not having a birthday cake would be unnatural. After all, you only get birthday wishes once a year, and you have to make the most of them. How did you celebrate his birthday with him?"

I blushed as I remembered exactly how we spent his birthday night.

"Yeah, baby. That was one of those times where you were smiling the next day?" Lula believed that, if I had great sex the night before, I was smiley the next day but, if I didn't have sex, I was a cranky-pants. I hadn't been a cranky-pants since I had decided to get serious about Ranger. Of course, I wasn't much of a cranky-pants when I was going out with Morelli either.

"Since that was the day I shot Brodie, I wasn't exactly smiling. I did, however, wake up feeling pretty good about things."

"That was the day you broke up with Morelli. It must have been good with Ranger. Wait, don't tell me. I don't want to know if his wanger is an early wilter." She paused. "No, I lied. I do want to know."

I laughed and shook my head.

"So how did you justify to yourself that it was okay to have sex even if you were going out with Morelli? You were always so careful about not crossing the line. Your Catholic guilt gave you the morals of a saint. I don't personally have that problem myself."

"Apparently that guilt wasn't strong enough. But I didn't think my straying counted. It was birthday sex, and birthday sex never counts."

"That's true."

"After all, I didn't know that it was his birthday and I had to do something to help him celebrate."

"That's true. How did you find out that it was his birthday?"

"Ella sent up a cake for dessert."

"Was it the day old 'happy birthday Larry' cake?"

"Nope. Larry didn't have to go without a cake. Ella made Ranger a cake from scratch especially for him."

"Wow. I could use an Ella in my life. I'd like a homemade cake as well. Was it good?"

"I had two pieces."

"This is making me hungry. I wonder what the Tasty Pastry has in their day-old selection."

"I'm hungry for cake as well", I said.

"We do have to do surveillance."

"And we always like having a little something to eat for surveillance."

"I just had one foot-long sub for lunch today", said Lula.

"I had fruit salad."

"That's all you had?"

"Well, no, but what I had with it was potato chowder, and since it was made with vegetables it shouldn't count."

"Hunh. You need some happy food."

"I'm not unhappy."

"You will be if you don't have any cake to eat."

I paused. Lula had a point. I was now in the mood for cake. I could only hope that they had a chocolate one in the fridge. I could really go for chocolate cake.

I went to our supply cabinet and took out a couple of leftover plastic forks. It paid to be prepared. I turned to Lula. "Let's roll."