Homemade Sin (13 page)

Stinky slinked to the top of the dumpster, stretched languidly, and ran his paws over his whiskers. He looked down at the dog with a sparkle in his glowing, malevolent, yellow-green eyes.

“You what?” Hussey screamed at Cutter, as he stood, hang dog in the hotel room and tried to explain.

“I'm sorry!” Cutter said. “It just kind of happened. I was winning one minute and the next minute all the money was gone.”

“I gave you my money for safe keeping! How did you take the money out of the bank if I had the checkbook?”

“I still had the ATM card,” Cutter said, having the good grace to look sheepish.

“So,” Hussy shrieked. “You lied to me. You never went to check out an apartment, you snuck over to the casino boat and lost all of our money! What am I supposed to do now? I can't pay for my tuition!”

“It's only money,” said Cutter.

“Easy for you to say,” screeched Hussey. “It wasn't your money!”

“Well, I guess you can get more money from your parents.”

“I can't tell my parents you took all the money and blew it gambling. I'd never hear the end of it. They would make me come home, and besides, it was all the money in my college fund. My parents saved for years to put me through medical school. I'm going to have to get a job, see if I can make tuition payments, maybe get some student loans or something.”

“How can I make it up to you?”

“Get me my money back, you fuck-up.” Hussey tossed a shoe at Cutter's head and stormed out of the door. “In the meantime just stay away from me!”

Stinky was growing bored with the dog. He had become tedious, yapping and circling the dumpster. He raised a paw to the sky and meowed, “I offer up the soul of this beast to appease the dark and hungry gods, may they look down upon me with favor.” He looked down at the greyhound, and meowed further, “I send you to your eternal rest, die well and be haunted by reality no more.” Stinky paused, then as an afterthought he meowed “'And may flights of angels sing thee to thy sleep.'” He remembered giving Will Shakespeare that line for one of his little stage plays.

Stinky nosed a hunk of sautéed fugu out of the dumpster which landed at Moreover's feet.

The greyhound gobbled up the chunk of fish, with one bite, then looked up at Stinky for more. Within a few seconds he began howling and rolling around on the ground in pain. As the poison took hold of him he began to shake and foam at the mouth.

Stinky batted another piece of fish off the top of the dumpster with his paw. “Dessert?”

Stinky graced the dog with a malevolent meow.

Belief is energy. Belief in the unseen powers of the Universe, whether it's asking for answers using tarot cards, a Ouija board, I Ching, reading the spread of chicken bones, or praying to win the lottery, it gives the unseen forces of the Universe the power to answer simply by the act of asking. Sometimes the answer is no, but the exchange always changes things. Call it karma, kismet, hoodoo, voodoo or God, the exchange of power changes the course of destiny. Whatever cosmic powers were at work that morning, Hussey almost stumbled over the prone twitching and shaking greyhound as she stormed through the alley behind the Fugu Lounge, her thoughts shooting daggers into a mental image of Cutter. The dog at her feet emitted a choked groan and looked up at her with huge pleading eyes.

The proverbial sick puppy, Hussey thought, looking down. “What's wrong with you, boy? Where does it hurt?” She eyed the chunk of fetid-looking fish by the dog's head and then kicked the gelatinous glob toward the dumpster. She pulled back the dog's eyelids and examined his pupils. She put her hand on his chest to check his heartbeat. “Looks like you ate something poisonous,” she said to the empty alley, “probably the fish, it looks like some kind of neurotoxin. Let's take you inside and see if we can get you all fixed up.” She spoke in soothing tones to the dog, eyeing the back door to the restaurant and noticing it was slightly ajar. As Hussey scooped the dog up into her arms Stinky peeked out from inside the dumpster. He watched her kick open the back door and carry the dog inside.

“I wasn't finished with him yet,” Stinky mewed as Hussey and the dog disappeared through the door. Stinky leapt from the top of the dumpster and scurried through the ventilator shaft toward the bar.

The door led through the kitchen to another door which led her behind the bar where she brushed past a startled Roland, who was stacking clean bar glasses on the shelf. She stretched Moreover out on top of the bar. Tony had drained his beer and wandered off toward the beach muttering how things just weren't like they used to be. Dee Dee looked over from the sushi bar, as the woman stroked the dog's head and talked to him in a calm, soft voice.

Staring at the woman carrying the dog, Roland remembered the spark that passed between them at the front desk. “What's with the dog?” he said.

“He's sick,” Hussey said, meeting Roland's eyes. They exchanged a silent acknowledgement of the electric moment when their hands had touched the night before. When the moment passed she said, “I believe he ate some poisoned fish. I need to call him a vet.” Hussey looked around the room at the various voodoo paraphernalia. “What's with picture of Marie Laveau?”

“You actually know who she is?” said Roland. “That's a first. I changed the décor here recently; it went with the voodoo theme.”

“It figures,” Hussey said. She let out a brief high-pitched chuckle. It wasn't the kind of chuckle that says ‘something's funny', but the kind of chuckle that says ‘the universe just dumped a whole butt-load of ironic on me which means it's using me for its personal entertainment once again, and if I don't laugh, I'm going to go bat-shit crazy.'

Her face settled into a sardonic smile as she looked down at the dog. His eyes were rolling back in his head and his muscles were constricting. “Damn, no time for a vet,” she said. “Watch him for a minute.” Hussey sprinted across the room and collided with Cutter as he opened the door to the bar. Hussey lowered her shoulder and knocked him to the ground as she passed. Before Cutter could pick himself up off the floor Hussey was halfway to their room.

Crossing her hotel room in two steps Hussey snatched up her weathered leather medical valise which had once belonged to her grandfather and ran back to the bar.

Dee Dee sashayed across the bar for a better look at the dog, “What's wrong with the fucking dog?” she said.

“Looks like he's dying,” Roland said. “He may have been poisoned.”

“Try to dilute the poison,” Dee Dee said. “Use the bar gun.”

Hussey brushed past a shaky Cutter without a word and crossed back to the bar with her doctor's bag. Roland was trying to spray water into the dog's mouth with the bar-gun dispenser while Dee Dee held open his jaws.

“That's good,” Hussey said, nodding acknowledgement to the woman holding the dog's head as she approached. “Diluting the poison, but I have something even better. I'm Hussey.” She placed the doctor's bag on the bar and snapped it open.

Dee Dee, still holding the dog's jaws open, cut loose with a string of vulgarities that would have made a baboon blush blue.

Hussey gasped and gawked at her.

“She has occasional Tourette's,” Roland said, rolling his eyes.

Cutter stopped when he saw the group huddled over ministering to the dying dog. He looked past Hussey who was rooting through the valise and his eyes settled on Dee Dee. When Dee Dee looked up, their eyes met in recognition. They stared at each other for a minute.

“I remember you,” said Cutter. “You were in the poker game last night? You took all of my money. You kept yelling out weird shit and cussing a blue streak.”

Dee Dee remembered him too, and the whole time she'd been at the table the previous night, she'd kept thinking his money wasn't all she wanted.

“Grab your ass and squeeze it while you pound me!” Dee Dee said.

“I know you are supposed to have infrequent Tourette's syndrome,” said Roland, “but if you ask me you're faking it, just an excuse to say what you truly feel.”

“Cut your nuts off!”

“See?” Roland said.

“No,” Dee Dee said, “it wasn't the Tourette's. I'm really gonna cut off your nuts.”

“Oh,” Roland said.

Hussey pulled bottles from her grandfather's bag. A small brass plate on the outside of the bag read Dr. Lester Paine, her grandfather. She had found the bag in the attic in an old trunk and decided it was perfect for holding her voodoo supplies. Whenever she looked at the lined, cracked leather of the case she thought of her grandfather's lined, weathered face, tanned in the Florida sun from all those house calls in his old rattle-trap Ford convertible. She had long ago replaced his medical instruments – the tongue depressors, stethoscope and blood pressure cuff – with her very different tools – gris-gris bags, voodoo dolls and chicken bones. Morphine and penicillin had been replaced with dried mushrooms, mescaline and assorted potions and powders from ‘conjure ashes' to ‘Eros powder.' She removed two small glass vials filled with purple powder. One vial was labeled ‘Mambo' and the other labeled ‘Borko.' She held the Borko powder up to the light and dropped it back into the doctor bag. “Don't want to use that one,” she said. “It's the old stuff, may do permanent damage. She held up the Mambo powder and smiled. “This is my own recipe, it should work.” She told Roland to hold the dog's jaws open while she poured some of the powder down its throat.

“What are you doing?” Dee Dee said.

“Doin' voodoo,” Hussey said. “I'm making a doggie zombie.”

In the ventilator shaft above the bar, Stinky gasped.

“This is too weird,” Roland said. “I redecorate this bar with all this voodoo stuff and then you show up, practicing voodoo, turning a stray dog into a zombie right on top of my bar. What are the odds?”

“A wise old woman once said when you have certain powers it makes you stand out, like a lighthouse in a thunderstorm. You get a better look at the Universe from the top of the lighthouse but the Universe also sees you better. And when you stand out like that it also makes you a lightning rod for the Universe. Weird shit happens to me all the time. And as far as voodoo goes, I thought I left had all that behind back in Cassandra,” Hussey said, “I came here to go to college, study medicine. But here I am at voodoo central of St. Petersburg, turning a greyhound into a zombie.”

“I guess this is a zombie emergency,” said Cutter in a snide tone.

“And I thought you were through being an irresponsible fuck-up,” Hussey treated Cutter to a basilisk glance.

“God, look at that poor dog shake,” said Dee Dee.

“Hussey honey,” said Cutter, “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to lose all our money … I don't want to be a screw up. I wish I could make it up to you.”

In her best Bette Davis, Baby Jane voice, Hussey said over her shoulder, “'But you can't Blanche, you can't!' Furthermore,” Hussey turned to him, with a voice full of menace, “why don't you find another place to be for a while, maybe permanently. I'm sick to my stomach at the sight of you.”