Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem Read online

  6.

  The cops were closing in. I could feel it. They knew we’d lain up in a lair somewhere close to the robbery scene. Because we’d left our stolen getaway car in the bank parking lot.

  Actually, Hoboken was the next town over. We caught a bus moments after we left the bank.

  But the cops were getting closer for sure. Sniffing the pavement for the scent of our paranoia.

  Back on the sixth floor without Alice, I was always in a pissed-off mood.

  Eric didn’t have cable, so I couldn’t watch old movies on TCM. I tried reading, but I could never get past the first sentence. “The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers…” I’d close the book and stare at the ceiling. There was an old water stain that looked something like a hog’s scrotum.

  “You need to get out more,” Marge opined.

  “Leave me the fuck alone!”

  “Tsk, tsk. No one likes a grouch.”

  One day Tunes left for parts unknown and Marge flipped out too. Pacing back and forth for hours in stony silence. Stripping down her .357, oiling it and putting it back together again five times a day.

  I figured pretty soon we’d be at each other with knives or razor blades.

  Then came September first. My birthday. I stayed in bed with the covers over my head until noon. By then I was sweating like a Greek in a gay bathhouse.

  Someone knocked on the apartment door.

  “It’s the cops,” yelled Marge. She skimmed her gun off the coffee table and dove behind the sofa.

  Wrapped in a dirty sheet, I walked to the door and peered through the peephole. It was Alice. I opened the door.

  “You never called,” Alice said.

  “You don’t have a phone.”

  Alice shrugged. “What do you want from me?” She thrust a small package at me. “Here. For your birthday.”

  I sensed Marge behind me, gaping over my shoulder.

  “Let’s go down to your place,” I said, stepping into the hall and pulling the door closed behind me.

  “Shouldn’t you get dressed first?” asked Alice.

  I looked down at the sheet draped around my loins. Oops. I went back inside. But I didn’t invite Alice in.

  “Who’s that?” Marge asked, raising an eyebrow for effect.

  “Shush.”

  “Don’t shush me. I’m your partner. I have a right to know about your peccadilloes. Your dirty little secrets.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about trust.”

  I jerked on a pair of Levis; scrambled for a clean T-shirt. Scooting into the bathroom, I took a leak and brushed my choppers.

  Marge hung in the doorway.

  “Your urine looks awfully yellow,” she said. “Are you sure you’re drinking enough water?”

  “Let’s worry about that later. I’ve got to go.” I brushed past her. “Just hold down the fort, Marge. I’ll be back.”

  7.

  When we got down to Alice’s apartment, she had this whole birthday setup going. A chocolate-cherry cake she’d baked herself. Fruit punch that was mostly vodka. And my present. Which turned out to be one of those medical bracelets engraved with my name and blood type.

  We drank two glasses of the fruit punch. The next thing we were naked. Alice turned out the lights. With the shades drawn against the afternoon sun, the room was dusky and pervaded with lust like a pornographic French novel.

  Then I heard the hobnail boots of the SWAT team rushing up the stairs, their gear creaking and rattling.

  Alice put a finger to my lips.

  An amplified voice echoed from above: “WE KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE! COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS ON TOP OF YOUR HEAD!”

  Then Marge’s shouted reply: “You’ll never take me alive, coppers.”

  A wasp’s nest of gunfire erupted, interrupted by several explosions. Boom! BOOM!

  Alice pulled me closer.

  A ray of sunlight burst through a rip in the old paper pull-down blinds and streaked across the room illuminating Alice’s torso. Next to the areola of her right breast, a tiny black freckle hovered like a fruit fly. As I placed my lips over it, I knew I had found Goa.

  Then What Happened?

  Sitting on the couch with Inez, I’m using a big ass needle to dig an itty-bitty splinter out of the fleshy part of my thumb, where it’s been festering all week. Inez lolls next to me. Her pale puppies cuddled up in a magenta push-up bra rise and fall like albino pomegranates bobbing on the incoming tide.

  I’m clad exclusively in the South Park boxers Inez gave me last week for my birthday. It’s hot as Hades in mid-July in Beaufort, South Carolina. Live oaks dripping Spanish moss, lavish sailing sloops, bygone Southern charm and rednecks up the wazoo.

  Inez’s husband, Dave, is away on a business trip, so Inez gives me a call. I don’t have anything else going, so I show up with a twelve pack of Budweiser, on sale.

  The time is late afternoon on Thursday. The TV’s tuned to some 1940s black-and-white melodrama with Barbara Stanwyck as an ice-cold bitch, soon to be a murderer. She keeps flouncing back and forth across the screen talking nonsense.

  Without warning the needle flies out of my hand.

  I swear it isn’t my fault. It’s as though someone switched on a superpowerful magnet in the vacant lot next door. The needle bows outward, before taking a flying leap. The point rips through the zombie-white flesh surrounding the splinter.

  “Shit!” I jam my thumb in my mouth. The throbbing subsides.

  Inez looks annoyed at all this turmoil disrupting her concentration on the movie.

  Gazing hither and thither across the wall-to-wall carpet, I can’t see the needle anywhere. Then again, being nearsighted I couldn’t spot a wildebeest until it’s six inches from my nose, just before it gores me in the small intestine. When I can’t spot the needle, I ease off the sofa and down onto the floor for a closer look. Next thing I’m on all fours, squinting and snorting at the orange and green shag like a trained hog looking for truffles.

  Try finding a needle in a shag rug, especially an orange and green one. After five minutes I’m cross-eyed and on the verge of a tizzy.

  A scream sounds. Then the loud pop of a pistol.

  It’s from the movie.

  Nevertheless my hand grasps Inez’s blue-veined foot in sudden panic.

  I stare at her foot, count the hairs curling from the middle joint of her big toe. Lucky seven. My nose six inches from Inez’s left foot, I’ve got a parrot’s eye view of five slick toenails lacquered in dark cherry, verily the color of blood pulsing from a bullet wound. From the mantelpiece Dave’s old brass naval clock chimes four times as I wonder whether Inez would be up for a ménage a trois. Probably not. Two fingers tiptoe up one shapely ankle to a lovely calf and beyond.

  “Please, Bill,” Inez says. “I’m watching this movie.”

  I scrunch to a seated position. In front of me are Inez’s perfect knees. Her nougat white thighs ooze backward, connecting to fullish hips beneath the languid folds of a black rayon miniskirt. My nose suctions like a Dirt Devil hand vac up those thighs. Inez grows restive.

  Rearing like Godzilla from the depths of Tokyo Bay, I fall forward, burying my face in her crotch. She squirms under my assault. But her legs open. The smell of Nehi Grape Soda and something else wafts up my nostrils.

  Something primordial washed up by the tide.

  In the next instant we’re rummaging around like crazy, jettisoning all remaining items of clothing. Inez gets the giggles. My skivvies go missing.

  We’re hard at it, Inez puffing air like a leaky dirigible, when Inez’s marmalade striped cat, Celia, decides I’m murdering its meal ticket. Without hesitation it leaps kamikaze style from the back of the sofa onto the small of my back.

  Its claws flay my flesh like a penitent beneath the archbishop’s lash. With a bellow of pain and rage, I leap backward. My dick flops loose, sags.

 
As my hands grasp for the beast, it leaps away in a glimmer of self-preservation. Saliva glistens on its fangs. Its claws drip blood. The high-pitched whine of a metal cutting tool escapes its jaws.

  “Bastard cat!” I scream.

  A glass ashtray scooped from the coffee table curves in a perfect collision course with the fleeing beast. At the last possible instant, Celia veers sideways. The ashtray explodes in a myriad of fake diamonds.

  I feel Inez moving beneath me. I look down. A veneer of sweat covers her body like the glaze on a Christmas ham. When she opens her eyes, her baby blues exude that shell-shocked, why-the-fuck-did-you-stop-now look.

  “What’s happening,” she moans.

  But I’m totally bent on wrecking havoc upon the cat, nailing its worthless pelt to the garage door with a titanium sashimi knife.

  “Yaaaaahhh,” escapes my lips as I leap after the witch’s familiar.

  Celia shoots under the dining room table, its paws spinning on the slick surface of Saltillo tiles, and disappears into the kitchen. Charging full-bore, I vault a dining chair hooking one corner of the chair back. The chair spins wildly away as I collide with the kitchen doorframe. Fooomph.

  When I yank out the knife drawer, it comes completely out, falls, scattering razor sharp blades in all directions.

  “Don’t you dare hurt Celia,” screams Inez behind me.

  I grab a knife. A long pointed one with a serrated edge.

  “Fucking cat tore up my ass,” I yell. “Signed its own death warrant.”

  “If you touch a single hair, I’ll kill you, Bill.”

  She doesn’t really mean that, I think. Though Inez is hard to read. She picked me up two weeks ago in the vegetable department at Piggly Wiggly where I’m checking out the baby eggplants and radicchio for the grill. Right after we fuck that first time in the bed of my pickup, she tells me she’s going to shoot her husband. She has a long list of grievances.

  I’ve always been attracted to volatile women. I like the edgy feeling of never knowing where you stand.

  “Don’t get all bent out of shape,” I yell back. “It’s only a fuckin’ pet.”

  Slowly I creep toward Celia, where it’s backed into a corner by the trash compactor and the back door, its eyes rotating like spinning marbles. Maybe that’s what I’ll do: jam the thing into the trash compactor. Slowly squeeze it to death.

  One hand wrapped in a dishtowel for protection from a swipe by Celia’s claws, knife in the other, I’m ready to pounce.

  In the stillness of that moment, the ratcheting sound of an automatic weapon being armed is unmistakable, coming from the living room.

  Inez has flipped out.

  Celia, judging that things are at an impasse and that it’s now or never, charges directly toward me. Shoots between my legs and is gone, baby, gone.

  Cautiously I approach the door leading back to the dining alcove. If Inez is armed and dangerous, I don’t want to give her an excuse to open fire. The knife is still in my hand. But my hand rests non-threateningly against the side of my leg. I realize I’m buck-naked.

  Inez is standing by the couch, as nude as Eve in the garden. A stainless steel pearl-handled Taurus 9mm pistol with gold accents rests nonchalantly in her grip. She looks at me. I look at her. She laughs. Then laughs some more, until tears wash down her cheeks.

  “Hey, baby,” she finally says. “Looks like you’re putting on some weight.”

  I look down to where my stomach, like some old stud hog’s gluttonous belly, overhangs my dick. I’m not particularly amused. But I give Inez a wan smile anyway.

  “F-ing cat ripped my buttocks to shreds.”

  “Maybe you deserved it. You crazy cock.”

  Beyond Inez, Celia sits licking itself in the arched hallway leading to the bedrooms. When it looks at me, I swear the bitchin’ cat has a grin on its face. Or maybe I’ve just been smoking too much hydro. I still want to eviscerate the critter, carve it up into cat jerky.

  But everything is cool now with Inez, so I don’t do anything except give the cat a death threat look when Inez glances away.

  The loud click of the front door lock opening splinters the stillness of our DMZ. The door swings wide. Deep shadows haunt the entryway. A figure wrapped in chiaroscuro blunders forward.

  An intruder!

  Inez whirls, raises the pistol. I have a broadside view of her splendid ass. Then the 9mm barks. The noise is deafening.

  The home invader crumbles forward onto the slate floor of the entry. One arm falls forward out of the shadows; a thick male hand curls inward like the legs of a dying spider. Becomes still.

  “Jesus, Inez!” hisses from my lips in a susurrating whisper.

  Inez approaches the body. Before I take a single step, I know it’s Dave lying there, dead as a donut.

  “It’s Dave,” she says. “He must of gotten back early.”

  She squats down, pokes at the body with the barrel of the pistol as though he were a jellyfish washed up on the beach.

  “Dead,” she says. “At least it was quick.”

  Suddenly my body’s shaking with palsy, my legs are twin strands of overcooked spaghetti, my mouth is as dry as a sand trap at Pebble Beach. I can’t believe this is happening!

  If it’s murder, am I an accessory? Is there a crime called not-quite-accidental homicide?

  I imagine myself sitting at a poolside bar years from now recounting these insane moments to a bucktoothed blonde falling out of her bikini on the adjacent stool. It’s like one of those loopy stories you stumble across in the crime docket section of the paper I’m telling her. She nods knowingly even though she never reads the newspaper.

  Then I tumble back into the present.

  Dave and Inez haven’t moved an inch.

  It was an accident I reassure myself as I retrieve my skivvies and scramble into them.

  “We need to call the police,” I say.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Stepping around the body, Inez closes the front door. Then she saunters back across the room and begins to dress.

  “No, really,” I say earnestly. “If we call the cops now, maybe they’ll believe it was an accident. If we wait, who knows what they’ll think.”

  “Forget it. Once the cops are involved, it can go anywhere. Only the lawyers make money on that.”

  “But Inez…”

  “No, Bill. Listen up.” She eases the magenta bra over her tumultuous breasts and reaches behind to secure those little hooks that are so hard to open. “Whether the cops call it murder or manslaughter or something else, irregardless, we’re in the shitter.”

  I want to say: YOU’RE in the shitter. But I don’t.

  “Irregardless isn’t a word,” I say.

  “Fuck you and the dictionary you rode in on.” Her forehead creases like a Vermont dirt road in a poem by Robert Frost.

  “I need a drink,” Inez says.

  I can’t argue with that.

  She strides into the kitchen where a half-empty bottle of Stoli stands like a Kremlin guard on the tile countertop.

  Inez and I suck down a few pops waiting for the sun to disappear behind the pecan and magnolia trees in the old hedgerow behind her house. We sit face to face at the Formica table in Inez’s retro kitchen, avoiding eye contact, fiddling with the ice in our respective glasses.

  “I’ve always wanted to check out Mexico,” Inez says, as she sips her second vodka tonic. The perfect summer drink.

  “Mexico? But they speak Spanish there.”

  “I took Spanish in high school,” Inez says. “And it’s cheap to live.”

  “How would we get there?”

  “Drive.” Inez lights a cigarette. She always does after her second drink. I loathe cigarettes. A good reason to clear out, I think. As if Dave’s corpse in the other room isn’t reason enough.

  “What about all this…” I say, sweeping my hand in an arc that includes white metal cabinets, the never-used wine cooler, the dishwasher and the trash compactor.

/>   “Dave and I were in way over our heads,” Inez says. “We got our first foreclosure notice two weeks ago. Same day I met you.”

  I think: Who’s not surprised?

  “Here’s the plan,” Inez says.

  I can hardly wait.

  “We clean out the bank accounts and Dave’s wallet. Pack some clothes and a few good books in the Bronco. And off we go to olde Mexico.” She stubs out her cigarette, refreshes her drink and strides into the unlit living room.

  Suddenly it feels very lonely in the kitchen. I pick up my glass and follow her.

  In the cave-like darkness Inez stands like a buxom cigar store Indian in the vague light coming through the big plate glass window. Out by the curb my truck has become a black silhouette against the streetlight a block away. The nearest house is three blocks away. The developer of Inez’s cul-de-sac ran out of money or went to prison or swallowed a bottle full of sleeping pills and stepped off the deep end, so there’s a lot of vacant land in the subdivision. All is still, like the night before Christmas.

  “What about Dave?” I ask.

  Inez’s property includes an old shed from some bygone agrarian era when the land was actually used to grow stuff. The shed has a dirt floor. Dave ends up in a shallow grave inside the shed.

  Afterwards Inez wants to fuck.

  Personally I’ve had as much excitement as I can stand for one evening. I convey this to Inez.

  Inez calls me a clandestine poof and flips me the bird. She was a communications major in junior college.

  We sleep in separate bedrooms.

  I don’t get much sleep. Keep imagining the prison group showers.

  At 7:00 a.m. Inez wakes me from a doze by beating on a cooking pot with a wooden spoon just outside the guest bedroom.

  “Whatthefuck,” I say.

  “Coffee’s ready. So move your ass, soldier!”

  Inez’s first husband was career Army before his fatal fall from the rim of the Grand Canyon while they were on their camping honeymoon.

  In addition to coffee, there’s toast slathered in butter and fried pork chops with grilled onions. Inez, nursing a cup of sugarless black coffee, sits across from me while I eat.