Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem Read online

  Just then Cy got up from where he’d been stretched out on the sofa watching the action and padded across the room to his water dish. He came over and stood next to me. His chin dripped water on my hand. I couldn’t see his expression in the gloom of the unlit room but I knew he was rolling his one good eye.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “It’ll be easy,” Amber said. “Easy as pie.”

  It was a moonless night when Amber backed the Mustang into the broken shell driveway of the house she’d been scoping out. Camellia branches scraped the roof like fingernails on a blackboard.

  “You see,” Amber said, turning toward me. “We’re completely hidden from the street and the neighbors.”

  “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” I whispered.

  She put her hand on my knee. “Everything’s cool, baby.”

  I set the stepstool we’d bought at the hardware under the windows of a Florida room that looked off over the bay and climbed up. Amber was right. When I pushed up the old wooden window frame, the latch gave way with a splintering sound. I scrambled up and over the sill. It was hot as Hell in a ski mask, black sweatshirt and navy blue work slacks.

  I carried two canvas sacks and a flashlight. We’d agreed I would take only small antique-looking objects. I made my first find in the sunporch: a bronze statuette of a naked nymph bolted to a crystal ashtray.

  In the kitchen I scanned the countertops with the flashlight. They were bare except for an ancient toaster. I opened several cupboards, discovering only stacks of plates and rows of mismatched glassware. Amid a drawerful of rusted knives, I found several silver or silver-plated spoons. Into the bag they went.

  My jitters had dissipated. I was into the rhythm of the thing now, moving silently from room to room in my black suede Vans. A Chinese-looking lamp base, a pair of Tiffany-style vases from the mantle, more silverware from the dining room sideboard, some old leather-bound books. Another bronze statuette in a western motif: an American Indian on horseback with drawn bow and arrow riding down a luckless buffalo.

  One sack was full. I leaned it in the doorway to the front hall and started up the stairs. The third step groaned like an old harmonium under my body weight. For some reason I stopped dead in my tracks. That’s when I heard a shuffling sound. Like a zombie moving in the pitch-blackness of the upstairs hall.

  Or a person!

  In the next instant, the overhead light above the stairway snapped on. I slammed my eyes shut.

  When I opened them seconds later, side-by-side shotgun barrels confronted me like twin black holes punched in the universe.

  Gradually additional details filled in as the camera pulled back and upward. A pair of eyes as cold as blue-veined marble, hollow cheeks peppered with stubble. The maw of a denture-less mouth dripping with spittle.

  The mouth closed.

  Then opened again:

  “Get out!”

  I ran like a motherfucker.

  After the burglary fiasco, I insisted Amber get into rehab. I couldn’t afford to fund her monkey any longer, monetarily or emotionally. I’d been that close to getting my head blown to smithereens.

  Nightmares of doing jail time haunted my sleep. Huge tattooed convicts, group showers, etc. You get the picture.

  I went back to driving myself to and from work. Amber didn’t get to use the Mustang any more during the day to cruise around looking for trouble. After she refused to sign up for a rehab program, I gave her a week to find someplace else to live. Cy got his pillow back.

  On our walks Cy and I discussed the vagaries of women. More particularly, I ranted and raved about what a scary slut Amber was, while Cy listened patiently. When I finally stopped talking, Cy gave me a quizzical look. Then wiggled his tail like a cheerleader’s pompom, as if to say: Jerk, I told you she was trouble from the get-go.

  The next afternoon Amber started working at a gentlemen’s club.

  On the fourth day following my ultimatum, I came home from the BANK to find the dinner table set with plates and glasses, a bottle of wine and a bouquet of daisies. Amber, standing in the kitchen, lit a scented mood candle the moment I walked in the door. She wore an old Eurythmics T-shirt that had shrunk in all the right places. Tex-Mex takeout steamed on the kitchen counter: seared meat with jalapenos and onions, beans and corn tortillas.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I thought we should give it one more try.”

  “No way, José.”

  “I got beef fajitas. Your favorite.”

  “You’ve got three days left to find a new place. Then I put your stuff on the curb.”

  “You’re such a Blue Meanie.”

  “I just want to work at my job at the BANK, hang out with Cy, lead a quiet law-abiding life.”

  Amber walked out from behind the kitchen counter. She was barefoot. In fact she was stark naked below her belly button where the bottom of the Eurythmics T-shirt ended.

  “Oh, no,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” she said.

  A while later, as I lay on the couch, my head cradled in Amber’s lap, she explained about the guy she’d met at the tits and ass club where she’d started working. A wholesale diamond dealer drunk as a skunk. He had an office on the sixth floor of the old Bradbury Building downtown. A shipment of stones was arriving tomorrow worth over a hundred thousand dollars. A once in a lifetime opportunity.

  “No, no, no,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, yes, yes,” said Amber. “All you have to do is wait downstairs with the engine running. I’ll take care of the rest.”

  At which point she put her face in my crotch and began performing CPR.

  It was the nadir of the afternoon of the next day. Three-thirty. Everyone was asleep at their desks or sales counters. Only rich lesbians on the make cruised the mall department stores at that hour seeking desperate housewives with whom to perform lewd sexual acts.

  I pulled my white ’03 Mustang with the chocolate Naugahyde interior to the curb in front of the Bradbury Building. It was a six-story Deco job with elaborate geometric tile work like the teeth of a hip-hop artist. The shoeshine guy inside the lobby slouched in the customer’s chair, sound asleep.

  The same Eurythmics T-shirt as the night before fondled Amber’s chest. Hip-hugger jeans hung below. The front of her jeans bulged with an evil-looking 9mm.

  “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. If you have to move, circle back around.”

  She leaned over and kissed me on the mouth.

  “Wish me luck, chico.”

  I watched her walk silently across the lobby, her hips barely swaying, and go into the elevator.

  I waited five minutes, the engine running. Then I slipped her into gear, moved my foot from the brake to the gas and pulled into the street. That time of day there were almost no other cars on the streets. In no time I was out of downtown and heading along Gulf Road. I pulled into the BANK and went inside.

  The head teller looked surprised. I’d called in sick that morning.

  “I couldn’t stay away,” I said.

  Next morning’s Caller-Times carried the story of a shootout during an attempted jewelry holdup. There was a picture of a woman’s bloodstained body. A cloth covered her face. Her T-shirt advertised a band called the Eurythmics.

  After that Cy and I just hung out and drank Corona. On the weekends we might go to the beach. The dog days of August were just too hot to do anything else.

  Looking for Goa

  1.

  The exact location of Goa is a question that has plagued scholars for centuries. Some believe it resides like a black freckle on the subcontinent’s right nipple. Others point to a small protuberance on the Buddha’s right testicle, noting also the similarity between Goa and gonad. Still others delimit a ragged sweep of Indian coastline abutting the Arabian Sea midway between the Gulf of Klambhat in the north and Cape Comorin at the southern tip. In any case, Portuguese adventurers stumbled upon it in the fifteenth century and refused to let go for the next 45
0 years.

  2.

  Over the summer I pulled off a series of bank heists among the lesser-known burgs of North Jersey, using a Dick Cheney Halloween mask and a Browning .45 I inherited from my father, a World War II vet. He gave it to me as he gasped his last emphysemic breath inside an oxygen tent at the Sioux Falls, South Dakota, VA hospital.

  He started smoking after he made his first landing on some god-forsaken rock in the Pacific. As his platoon slogged up the beach, they came upon a Jap trooper leaning against a shattered palm tree, his guts hanging out like an exploded party favor. He was moaning in Japanese, a goner for sure. But when the G.I.s walked past him, he pulled out a revolver and shot dad’s best buddy in the back of the head. Splat. Kind of a mini Pearl Harbor. Then the Jap keeled over dead.

  Dad took his pal’s dog tags and the pack of Luckies in his shirt pocket. From that day forward it was three packs a day until the afternoon he handed me the .45, made a gurgling sound and expired.

  I never took up smoking myself. A nasty, dirty, purposeless habit. Kind of like life. Who needs a double dose of that?

  Like I said, me and Marge, my partner in crime, had taken up bank robbing. We’d both been unemployed for over a year and were tired of eating beans out of a can.

  The first four or five jobs went down smooth as silk. We netted almost sixty grand apiece. No one was hurt. And the cops didn’t have a clue, since neither of us had any priors.

  Then came the last one, which ran right off the fuckin’ rails.

  It all started when I pistol-whipped a teller who wasn’t stuffing the cash fast enough into the canvas sack I’d thrown at her.

  The security guard took umbrage with my rough treatment of the gentler sex. Anger pulsed through his paltry brain faster than common sense. Deciding I was distracted by the money, he went for his 9mm where it lay on the floor in front of him. He’d tossed it there at Marge’s request moments after we made our grand entrance, shouting obscenities and waving our weapons aloft.

  “Drop the fuckin’ gun, asswipe!” But Marge forgot to scoop it up.

  Now Marge, standing on the bank manager’s desk surveying the scene through the slit eyes of her Martha Stewart mask, caught the guard’s movement. Without the slightest hesitation, she squeezed off a round. Your marksmanship doesn’t have to rival Natty Bumppo’s when you’re using Black Talon hollowpoints. Half the guard’s face ended up smeared like pepperoni pizza across the nearest plate glass window.

  The tellers found a whole new level of motivation to slam that cash into the canvas sacks I’d provided.

  I walked over and looked down at the dead guard.

  “Jesus, Marge,” I said. “Why’d you have to do that?”

  “It was him or us,” she said.

  3.

  After the hold-up fiasco, we hid out in a sixth-floor-walkup shotgun flat in Hoboken, New Jersey.

  It was too hot to leave town. And too hot to stay. The cops were everywhere. It was the dog days of summer and the apartment had no air conditioning.

  The bar where Yo La Tengo first played was just around the corner. When I went out, every guy in a nylon Just Do It wife beater and navy blue watch cap was an undercover cop. I was so paranoid, I could barely make it down to the corner deli. The gook running the produce store next to the deli had to be CIA. Or maybe NSA.

  Thank god I wasn’t some raghead with an expired student visa.

  Taking a murder rap was never part of my plan. All I’d wanted to do was stick up a few banks, pistol-whip the occasional teller, and stockpile enough loot so I could move to Costa Rica and open an ice cream parlor.

  Now all I wanted to do was disappear. Like acting out a movie script written in lemon juice.

  The apartment belonged to a writer friend of mine named Eric who’d gone to Greece with his girlfriend for the summer. Frisky fucking on the white sands of Mykonos, etc., etc. Knowing I was out of work and living in a cardboard box, he left me the key.

  I sat on his Salvation Army couch gnawing my knuckles.

  “Your nerves are eating you alive,” Marge said.

  “Thanks for the heads up.”

  “You need to chill before you get a cerebral hemorrhage.”

  “We’re dead. Finished. Don’t you see that, Marge? We’ll never get out of Jersey alive.”

  She jumped up, pulled out her .357 magnum and started waving it like a drunk with a whiskey bottle. Her eyes flared like Fourth of July sparklers.

  “We’ll go out in a blaze of gunfire. Dead coppers everywhere. We’ll make a video and send it to Oprah. You and me sitting here at this coffee table, eating vegetarian and talking about self-realization. Marge and Bill. The new age Bonnie and Clyde.”

  Luckily the doorbell rang. It was Looney Tunes, the meth addict from down the hall. I let him in.

  He was constantly on the move. A blur. Like the Roadrunner.

  He pushed past me: “Marge, baby.”

  They hugged. A tad too long and a tad too close for just friends. When they stepped apart, I could see Tunes had a hard-on. I’d heard that shit he injected made you a regular satyr until you crashed.

  “Hey, Tunes,” Marge said. “We got to get Bill unstressed ’fore he blows a gasket.”

  Tunes began to tap out an impromptu soft shoe. “Why don’t we do it in the road … ,” he sang.

  Pissed for every good reason and none at all, I walked into the bedroom and slammed the door. I sat on Eric’s bed. A stack of books sprawled across the night table. I extracted a coffee-table-sized volume and opened it. The title page read Palaces of Goa. Inside were dozens of pictures of gaudy, otherworldly palaces built by Portuguese adventurers and merchant princes from the spoils of the East. For a brief time I was transported far, far away from the hollow streets of Hoboken.

  4.

  When I came out of the bedroom several hours later, Marge informed me it was my turn to go down to the deli for supplies.

  “Get some egg salad,” Tunes said.

  “And some of that dark Russian rye bread,” Marge said.

  Taking a $50 from one of the bags of loot, I started down the narrow treacherous stairs. It seemed as though the building was deserted. In the dozen or so times I’d been up and down, I never saw anyone either on the stairway or down the asshole brown corridors that faded into shadows as murky as an abortion clinic in the Bible belt. I was wearing Vans, so I hardly made a sound. Just an occasional squeak when I pivoted too fast.

  At the second floor I pulled up short, confronted by the ratcheting sound of a door chain unhooking. Click-click went the deadbolt. The door across from the stairwell opened. A woman teetered forth.

  Plastered was my first take.

  Then I realized she was wearing some kind of metal braces on her legs. One hand held a metal cane. Her eyes met mine and she took my breath away. They were the deep purple of pokeweed berries ripening in the vacant lot across the street. Without the slightest hesitation, I dove into them.

  When she smiled, her face shimmered like an angel caught in a ray of heavenly light. Long perfect nose. Creamy brow. High cheekbones, angular and resolute. A moss green T-shirt hugged her twin guavas. Definitely kick ass.

  “Did I surprise you?” she asked.

  “No. No. I was on my way out to the deli. You’re the first person I’ve met since I moved in the other day. Up on six.”

  “I didn’t hear anyone moving in,” she said.

  “It’s a furnished sublet,” I said. “I guess you hear all the comings and goings?”

  “With these fucking things, I don’t get out much.” One of the metal braces creaked when she moved. She blushed. “Excuse my French.”

  “Hey, no problemo.” My eyes just kept eating her up, like some high school freshman with a crush on the homecoming queen.

  “Do you always stare at women you meet in hallways?”

  “Can I buy you a beer?” I asked, fixating on the ancient tile floor. “My name’s Bill, by the way.”

  She gave me one of those
is-that-the-best-you-can-do looks.

  “Alice,” she said. “And thanks for the offer. But I was just going down for the mail.”

  Suddenly I had this vision of the two of us living by the beach in one of the broken-down palaces of Goa. Meeting some swami who performed a miracle so she was no longer crippled.

  I shrugged it off and started to descend the final circuit of stairs. There was no point in involving Alice in my personal nightmare.

  “Do you play Monopoly?” she called after me. “I’m always looking for someone to play Monopoly.”

  5.

  The torrid dog days rolled on like a tepid sea upon a tropical shore. I was as stir-crazy as a cat on a hot tin roof.

  Marge kept slamming back the tequila and going off to the bedroom to boff with Tunes. I slept on the couch wearing earplugs and an eye mask.

  Somewhere in there I started going down to Alice’s to play Monopoly. She was cutthroat, and I usually ended up in bankruptcy. I always brought a six-pack of ice cold Heinekens from the deli. But the alcohol didn’t affect her concentration. After the game, we’d talk about life and stuff. And finish up the beers.

  I was in love. But I wasn’t sure about Alice. She was very cautious. Because she was a cripple, everyone always tried to take advantage of her.

  When we ran out of things to talk about, we watched gangster movies on her Direct TV hookup. They always ended badly.

  “How come you never talk about yourself?” asked Alice.

  “Boring,” I said.

  “I’d be interested.”

  I realized suddenly that she was falling for me. I couldn’t let that happen. It was too dangerous.

  “This is where I came in,” I said, climbing to my feet.

  Alice didn’t stand up.

  “Will you come and play Monopoly tomorrow?”

  “I think I’m tied up for the rest of the week. But I’ll call you.”

  “I don’t have a phone.”

  “Well…” I backed toward the door. Then turned, twisted open the dead bolt and ran out like a lunatic.