Free Bare-Naked Lola (A Lola Cruz Mystery) by Melissa Bourbon Ramirez

parking lot. Saved by the grocery store. The Indian summer had finally given way to cool autumn temperatures, so I cracked the window and left Salsa in the car to hold down the fort. Sixty dollars later, I owned a lovely flower arrangement, and five minutes later we were heading back to Rochelle Nolan’s gated community.
    “Clever,” Reilly said, holding onto the flower vase.
    “It’s worth a shot.” We’d come all this way. To go back to Sacramento with nothing to show for our time wasn’t going to earn me any P.I. points at the office.

    “So,” Reilly said after a spell. “Nice try, but what’s the answer?”
    Damn. She was nothing if not dogged. “What was the question?”
    “That Jack Callaghan is into you, so what’s your problem? Have you, you know”—she lowered her voice, as if there were children in the car who she didn’t want to hear—“done the deed?”
    Any good Catholic girl would have blushed at that question. I was a very good Catholic girl. My mother would’ve been proud. “ Híjole , Reilly. What kind of question is that?”
    “Curious minds, and all that.” She grinned like she thought she knew the answer.
    Which she didn’t.
    “ Pues , truth?” I finally said.
    “ ¡Sí, sí, sí! ” She angled herself more toward me, as if I were going to give her all the down and dirty details of Jack and me.
    Only there were no down and dirty details.
    “No.”
    There. I’d said it. If only there were a few flies in the car she could catch with her open mouth.
    The flowers started lilting right. “Wait…what?”
    “Reilly!”
    I grabbed for the vase, but she managed to straighten it before the flowers fell out, never even blinking. The girl was single-minded. “But you were with Sergio, and—”
    I threw up my hand, stopping her short. I did not need a rundown of my past sexual exploits. “ ¡Cállate! With Jack, it’s different. Ever since high school, I knew—”

    “Lola. This isn’t high school.”
    Boy, did I know that. When I was a nubile sixteen-year-old, Jack was the sexiest teenager I’d ever laid eyes on. Pero now? At thirty-one, he was downright irresistible. How I steered clear of him on a continual basis was a mystery. “If it’s going to happen, I just don’t want there to be any baggage.”
    Reilly, the newly anointed relationship expert, scoffed. Scoffed! “There’s always baggage, right? Take Neil. All his contacts, like the DMV girl, and the courthouse girl, and the Caltrans girl? Not just friends. Uh-uh. They’re all exes . He’s got loads of baggage, but he’s still the right one for me.” She paused, the flowers listing again, a momentary frown crossing her lips. “Pretty sure he is, anyway.”
    “That’s my point,” I said, turning onto the gated drive of Rochelle’s development. “If it’s going to happen, I want to know for sure. I don’t want to wonder.”
    She shook her orange-haired head. “You never know for sure. You have to take a chance every now and then.”
    As I rolled down my window, I glanced at Reilly, wondering when she had become the voice of reason in my romantic life.
    …
    Reilly squealed as the security guard opened the gate and waved us through. “I can’t believe it worked!”
    “Yeah, easy.” Some security station. Either the guard was horrible at his job, or they had loose rules about delivery people coming in and out. Either way, it didn’t give me confidence that paying top dollar to live in a gated community was worth the extra money.

    We wound through the rolling hills of the neighborhood, searching for the address I’d found for Rochelle. The sprawling estates with their waterfalls, fountains, cobbled driveways, and turrets made me feel like I was on a movie set rather than in a suburb of Sacramento. So this was how the rich lived.
    Finally I turned onto a private cul-de-sac.
    “Holy macaroni!” Reilly blurted.
    She’d taken the words right out of my mouth.
    I tossed a rawhide bone to Salsa, cracked