Homemade Sin (11 page)

Cutter Andrews, a man who would have to be graded on a curve to get better marks than dirt, sat across from Dee Dee frowning at a handful of cards. As the game progressed, Dee Dee kept stealing glances at Cutter. She noticed his muscled arms in his polo shirt, his tousled sandy hair and his dazzling crooked smile.

Dee Dee fell in lust with this five-card stud.

“Ace hole! Gonna club you to death you stinking ace-hole,” Dee Dee snarled, staring at the lone card in her hand.

“I'll take four cards,” Dee Dee said, now calm, as if she had never made the outburst, to the tall, Native American dealer dressed in an immaculate white shirt, bow tie and a headband with a feather dangling from the side.

The dealer dealt her a card from the deck with hands bejeweled with turquoise and silver.

“Dirty bitch, fucking nasty bitch! Club her, club you, club your ass you queen bee bitch.”

The other gamblers at the table stared.

“Sorry,” said Dee Dee. “I have intermittent Tourette's syndrome. I start cussing for no reason, I can't help it.”

Hesitantly, the dealer dealt her second card.

“Bearded fucker,” Dee Dee hooted, “club him too, king of the assholes!”

The man to Dee Dee's right laid his hand face down on the table.

The dealer slipped another card off the top of the deck and pushed it toward Dee Dee, keeping it at arm's length.

“Jack off, jack off, jack off! Club the fucking jack off!”

The other four people at the table continued to stare at her.

The dealer slid Dee Dee the last card.

“Ten little fucking Indian pigs in a smallpox blanket,” Dee Dee shouted at the dealer, “a fucking smallpox on all your houses, uh … tee pees. Club all ten of you heathen sons of bitches!” Dee Dee looked up from the dealer's brass name tag that read, ‘Cody Counting Cards' and found a face staring at her with murderous menace. Virtual smoke curled from his ears and his black eyes burned with indignation.

“Uhhh, sorry, Tonto,” Dee Dee said. “It's the occasional Tourette's, I can't control it.”

Regaining his composure, the dealer turned to the man to Dee Dee's right and raised an eyebrow. The man nodded to his fan of face-down cards lying on the table and shook his head.

Then next player, then the next, folded until the dealer turned to Cutter.

“You folding too?” said the dealer.

“I'm thinking, chief,” said Cutter, staring at his cards. “By the way, I want to be a dealer too. You got any jobs for dealers open on this boat?”

“Talk to me later,” said Cody. “Right now play your hand, everybody's waiting.”

“Raise.” Cutter shoved approximately ten thousand dollars' worth of multicolored chips into the center of the table.

The Seminole dealer raised both eyebrows, dropped his jaw at Cutter and shook his head. He turned to Dee Dee, lowered both eyebrows then re-raised one.

“See and raise, fucker!” said Dee Dee, as she pushed every chip she had into the center of the pot, about twenty thousand dollars' worth.

“OK,” said Cutter. He shoved the rest of his chips, Hussey's tuition money and his life savings, into the center of the table. “I'll call. What you got?”

Everyone at the table, including the dealer answered him in unison, “A club royal flush you idiot!”

Dee Dee dropped her cards to the table face-up and grinned. Sure enough a royal flush in clubs stared back at the players.

“I guess Roland is right,” Dee Dee said to herself. “Some people are dumber than dirt.”

As the dealer gathered up the cards and started shuffling, Cutter broached the subject of employment once again. “So, Chief, what about that job?”

Cody leveled his eyes at Cutter. “Son, anyone with half as much sense as a day-old kitten could have figured out that woman's cussing tell. You start with an a-hole, add a bitch, king of the a-holes, a jack off and ten little Indians, club them all and you get a royal flush in clubs.”

“I'll do better next time.”

“Son, there won't be a next time. Not only won't I hire you, I'm going to ban you from this casino. I never thought I'd say this about anyone, but you're too stupid to gamble. You're almost retarded.”

Beneath a foreboding moon, Cutter, now penniless, slouched across the Santeria parking lot toward the certain Golgothic wrath of Hussey. As he passed the dumpster behind the kitchen he heard a sudden cacophony of cat howls and stopped in his tracks. Atop the dumpster perched Stinky, howling an invitation to all of the felines in his dominion to come to a feast. A clowder of cats gathered quickly in a semi-circle around the dumpster and howled back in anticipation. As the cats looked up at Stinky hungrily, tails swishing and mouths watering from the pungent scent of seafood, Stinky nosed bits of various fish, crab and octopus parts, leftovers from the chef Dee Dee's table of toxic tidbits, she had prepared for the next day, toward the tabbies.

Stinky had laced their fishy feast with the zombie extract he had liberated from behind the bar.

“Eat up my new minions,” Stinky purred, “my army of zombie worshippers”. As Stinky watched with anticipation, the cats devoured the fishy bits and began to drop like flies, twitching and howling beneath his pious gaze. Gasping, choking and clawing the asphalt, the cats, each and every one, went home to kitty Jesus.

Stinky howled. “What's happening? They aren't supposed to die! They're supposed to become zombies!” Stinky gazed over the carnage he had wrought, aghast. He had become the Jim Jones of fugu. So far all he had achieved was mass murder. Some sacrifices had to be made on the path to absolute power, Stinky rationalized. Kill a single cat, you are a murderer; kill a thousand cats, you are a conqueror; kill them all, you are God.

“I am the God of Cats!” Stinky howled at the moon. “But without followers I'm just another egotheistic kitty in a dogma eat dogma world. People don't worship cats like they used to, sure, maybe a few crazy old ladies and the occasional serial killer, the kind of quiet guy who lives alone and has lots of cats, but not like they used to. The only worshipers I can find are other cats, and pussy cats make difficult worshipers. They don't herd like human sheeple, they don't chew Christ crackers playing swallow the leader. Until I can find out a working zombie recipe, a way to subjugate my feline followers, sacrifices must be made”.

“I didn't just see a mass kitty cat suicide,” Cutter muttered as he slunk up the stairs to his room.

Roland opened the recently renamed and redecorated Fugu Lounge the next morning and went about setting up the bar for the opening day's business, cutting limes and lemons and pouring buckets of ice into the ice bin behind the bar. He gathered up the trash bags, full to overflowing with remnants of the old Blue Flamingo, tucked the discarded stuffed swordfish under his arm, and headed for the dumpster through the kitchen.

What he found in the alley was so terrible it made his jaw drop and his stomach lurch. He dropped the stuffed fish on his foot. Dead cats lay scattered in the alley behind the restaurant. It wasn't possible to swing a dead cat without hitting … a dead cat. Furry, feline corpses littered the area around the dumpster, their faces twisted in death masks of agony and their whiskers stained with a dusting of purple powder.

Roland dropped the trash bags, stumbled back against the kitchen door, wide-eyed and appalled at the horrific scene.

Stinky, his demented eyes shining with menace, sat regally, atop the dumpster surveying the wholesale death he had wrought.

“Jumping Jesus! What happened here?”

“It wasn't Jesus,” Stinky's voice rang icily in Roland's head, “it was me.”

Roland stepped over the feline bodies, lying where they had succumbed around the dumpster. It looked as though a cat cult had been passing out catnip Kool-aid.

“Wh … why … Stinky?” Ronald stuttered. He came nose to nose with the smug pussy. “Wh … why?”

At this point it would be appropriate to shed some light on Stinky's background. Stinky came into existence in the blink of an eye thousands of years ago in Carthage, in answer to the summoning of a small group of adolescent boys, drunk on excessive amounts of wine. It wasn't clear if ‘cat' is what they swore to worship, but Stinky had heard the call and thought ‘close enough.' He'd held the title of ‘minor god' until the Romans sacked Carthage, killing every man, woman and child and sewing salt into the ground so that nothing would ever grow there again.

After witnessing the carnage the Romans had wrought, Stinky realized three things; he liked being a god, he liked witnessing carnage, and he needed a new job.

He headed south, a familiar direction, to Egypt and took the name of Bast. As Bast, he became the dark and hungry cat god of the Egyptians, looking on with indifference as slaves were sealed in pyramids in tribute to his greatness. His armies swept through the ancient world massacring its enemies and leaving death and destruction in its wake. When the Egyptian Empire also fell to the Romans, he moved on, southward again, in search of work. In Central Africa, a throng of his faithful gathered nightly to make blood sacrifices to the great beast until the ground was spongy with offal and they danced naked, covered in sacrificial blood, beneath the glow of the antediluvian moon. In subsequent jobs, he sat on the steps of Aztec temples beside Montezuma and watched his warriors kick the heads of his enemies through goal posts.

Stinky missed his power, his worshipers and the carnage.

“Everything you think you know about me is true,” Stinky's voice reverberated in Roland's head, “I am an evil, twisted, demonic creature. I sacrifice kittens to my dark gods and then I dance around their stiff, decaying bodies. I call upon the unseen powers to smite them and all of their kind and raise me to the ultimate position of power I deserve from atop piles of their dead bodies. I hate baseball, apple pie, the flag and American Idol. And I hate humanity with an unholy blood lust you could not possibly understand with your weak human intellect. Yes, everything you fear about me is true. Oh, and I know where you sleep.”

Roland was almost speechless. “I agree with you about American Idol.” He still did not fully believe the carnage at his feet. “What kind of monster have I adopted?” he rasped as the cat carnage finally registered.

“Monster?” Stinky sniffed, affronted. “You may think that I'm as crazy as a soup sandwich, Charlie Manson, Jeffery Dahlmer, and John Wayne Gayce all rolled into one, equipped with claws and covered in fur, but there is a method to my madness. When my army of zombie cats takes over the world you will see.” He stuck his nose in the air with a certain Jehovian detachment. “I was once a powerful god, thousands of worshipers lay prostrate at my feet and then that one incident took all of that away.”

“Incident?” Roland asked.

“The bubonic plague.” Stinky shook his head. “I told them I was a cat, and cats do have fleas, and that it was an accident, but they didn't buy it. They said I enjoyed the carnage far too much. Remember Poe's
The Masque of the Red Death
? I dictated that to him.”