"I'm on morning watch tomorrow, so if you have something to say, just say it," I warned her ghost late one night. She was sitting on the edge of my bed helping herself to my new lipstick as I slept. "And don't even think about writing something weird in the mirror.""Are you really this stupid?" she asked.
"I'm not the one who got myself killed and dismembered in two unrelated incidents," I said.
"Unrelated? Wake up, dumbass."
"If I wake up, you're gone. I mean it, Rita, I'm counting to five.""Mexico," she whispered urgently in my ear. "You and me with the top down."
Okay, so we'd spent some time together in Mexico -- shopping, tanning, smuggling diet pills. What was the big freaking deal already? "Look, I know you probably have rules of your own wherever you are," I said, "but you can't swoop in at all hours talking dead chick to me and expect me to get it."
She picked up my granny's locket -- a sparkly piece of costume jewelry from JC Penney -- and dangled it in front of me."The meaningful family heirloom that wasn't where I left it the night before?" I scoffed. "You're better than that." She started rifling through my dresser drawers -- which she often did all night as I slept. I could never tell if she was focusing on the lingerie or I just had a disproportionate amount of the crap, having inherited her entire stripper wardrobe after she died. I only wore any of it when I hadn't done laundry in way too long, since a tassled sequin bra paired with a crotchless rhinestone thong wasn't the most comfortable workplace ensemble. "I'm only trying to help you," she sighed. "You do know you're next?"
"I'm not in this," I told her, rolling over with the pillow over my head. "Never was."She laughed. "You're in it right now. Go check the laundry."
I sat up in bed, wide awake. She was gone, of course, having broken the rule about not saying anything creepy to me -- and really, how much creepier can you get than sending a girl alone to a deserted laundry room at three o'clock in the morning?Then again, the last thing I ever asked her was if she had anything for the wash, tiptoeing around her room to grab a few things. She may or may not have been alive at the time, depending on whether or not you believed the freak who freely admitted to dismembering her dead body -- but only after happening upon it that way. I was hoping he wasn't going to start haunting me, too, now that he'd hung himself -- especially after I couldn't get back to sleep.
I
finally gave in and got up to retrieve a load I'd been doing before falling asleep -- jumping into a pair of Juicy sweat
pants. Now living in a small complex on Fountain, I shuffled across a fenced courtyard shaded by palm trees and overrun by
generations of possums awake all night scaling the roofs. The familiar, all-night traffic sounds just outside the gates made me feel safe -- even when I found
the dryer running and poor dead Rita sitting on top of it wearing nothing but a
pair of rhinestone stilettos. "Let me guess," I said. "The real murder weapon?" 
"Don't
be so old school." I reached inside the dryer, pulling out a
sparkling rainbow of delicates that really should have been hung dry.
"Now look what you've done," she added. I held up the remains of a mangled
bikini top, pulling out its ropey matching bottoms. It was one of the many bejeweled suits we had treated ourselves to in Mexico -- wearing little else as we crossed back over the border blowing kisses at the distracted guards who waved us through. "Good times," I said to my old friend's naked ghost. "Night-night.""Ba-bup," she clucked. "Clean the lint trap." I pulled out the clogged screen, removing a tuft of lint encrusted with gemstones, shimmering in the moonlight. "Diamonds?" I asked.
"Well, duh," she said. "What kind of a candy-ass little smuggling operation did you think I was running?
