Homemade Sin (21 page)

“Did you think about calling the sheriff's office when you found the dead cats?”

“Yeah, right,” Roland said. “What do you think the sheriff would say if I called him up and reported there's a cat in my alley Jim Jonesing neighborhood kitties? Would you have believed it? Would you have believed the cat orgy if you hadn't seen it?”

“I guess not,” said Jones. He was wondering what the sheriff was going to say when he filed his report.

“I'm here to relieve you,” Hussey said to Dee Dee, as she stepped behind the front desk of the motel. Dee Dee was standing at the window behind the desk, looking out at the snowbirds. They were just standing motionless in the pool.

When Hussey came through the door Dee Dee didn't look relieved.

“You're supposed to show me how to check people in and out,” Hussey said.

Dee Dee pointed toward the pool. “See that herd of half-drunk, silver-back fossils standing chest deep in the pool, their flabby arms resting on floating noodles?”

Hussey looked at the dozen senior citizens standing stock-still in the pool. “Yeah, I see them.”

“They're like water buffalo: staring, vacant, waiting for death, shuffleboard or the next round of mango daiquiris, whichever comes first. Those geezers in the pool are the bane of my existence … watch.”

As Hussey watched, one old guy raised his finger in the air and curled it toward Dee Dee.

“OK, here we go,” Dee Dee said to Hussey. “Come with me.”

Hussey followed Dee Dee out to the pool where Dee Dee bent low to over the side of the pool while a man who looked like Wilford Brimley commanded her, “We need six mango daiquiris, four Mojitos, and one Zombie,” the man shouted to Hussey. “And we'd like a little nosh too.”

“Gnosh on this you shriveled old shit,” Dee Dee said.

“What did you say?” asked the man.

“Nothing, nothing, it's the Tourette's.”

“I can't eat,” whined a painfully thin woman to his right. “I gotta take my pills before I eat and I forgot my pills. Be a good girl and run up to room 21 and get my pills.”

“You are a fucking pill.”

“The ones in the blue bottle,” said the woman, missing Dee Dee's comment.

“How about cyanide?” Dee Dee said.

“I think I'm getting a little motion sickness,” said a bald man with huge caterpillar eyebrows and so much hair in his ears that they looked like tiny porcupines backing out of them. “When you get Doris's pills, pick up my Dramamine in room 18.”

“Cyanide for two then, you furry-eared prick.”

“And I need a sweater,” said a rotund woman floating without a noodle. “This night air is chilling my old bones.” The flesh on the back part of her arms hung like cow udders and floated on the surface of the pool. “My room is 17, get the green sweater. Don't get the brown sweater, or the blue sweater.”

“It's ten o'clock in the morning and you can't wear a fucking sweater in the pool you flabby old bag.” Dee Dee sighed.

“Get the striped one instead,” the woman said. “The one I got for Christmas from my granddaughter.”

“What kind of food is the girl bringing?” the skinny woman asked the Wilford Brimley look-alike.

“None of that weird stuff at the restaurant,” said a man who looked like he was wearing a silver fur coat from his neck to his waist and down his back. His head however, was bald as an egg.

“How about a banana, you silver-backed ape?” Dee Dee said under her breath.

“How about some sandwiches?” Dee Dee said more loudly and more helpfully, “Ham, turkey, roast beef? There's a deli around the corner.”

“I can't chew meat,” whined the first woman. “Got anything soft? I got these dentures that slip.”

“And no seeds,” said a rotund woman, “I have diverticulitis.”

Dee Dee stopped muttering and rolled her eyes.

“And I'm lactose intolerant plus I gotta watch my salt intake,” said a very wrinkled man with a long red nose. He was skinny as a rail except for a pot belly that made him look like a pregnant scarecrow. “Make sure there's no salt.”

“Anybody seen my asthma inhaler?” the silver-haired Sasquatch said. “When you're at the drug store get me another inhaler, the prescription is in my room. I can't remember what number; it's one of the ones upstairs.”

“Does this go on all day?” Hussey whispered to Dee Dee.

“Also find out what time the early bird special starts at the restaurant across the street,” demanded the Wilford Brumley look-alike.

Dee Dee nodded and started toward the front desk with Hussey trailing behind. “Yeah,” she answered Hussey, “like clockwork. Usually once an hour, sometimes a couple of times an hour. Sometimes they want a newspaper, or they ask me to go up and check on their pets in their rooms, or get a prescription filled, but there is always a drink order.”

“Are they always so demanding?” said Hussey. “And so annoying?”

“See what I have to put up with?” Dee Dee said, shaking her head. “I'll get the drinks and some egg salad sandwiches from the deli, and you get the stuff from their rooms and call the place across the street about the early bird.”

“What about checking people in and out?”

“If anybody checks out in the pool, call 911,” Dee Dee said. “Otherwise just go out to the pool and take the drink orders when they waggle their shriveled old fingers at you.”

As Dee Dee crossed from the hotel desk toward the bar she spotted Cutter, shirtless, in shorts and sandals, bent over the fender of the van, his taut, defined stomach muscles rippling as he scraped bugs off the windshield. Perfect timing, she thought and made a beeline for the front desk. Ducking behind the registration desk she slipped a keycard from the pegboard into her pocket and headed for the parking lot.

“Have you ever seen these things?” Cutter said as Dee Dee approached. He was scraping two bugs, joined at their rear ends, off the windshield. “Fucking bugs, they're all over my windshield.”

“They're called love bugs,” Dee Dee said, “and yes, they are fucking bugs; that's why they fly connected like that.”

“Oh, I thought they were all Siamese twins.”

God what a moron, Dee Dee thought, but he
is
cute. Dee Dee was imagining herself and Cutter making a similar love connection. She envisioned them copulating in mid-air, gliding over the palm trees, spinning over the peridot green Gulf, riding the waves, tumbling through space in the moment of ecstasy.

“Oh, God, yes. Harder, faster, grab my ass; pump me faster with every hard, hammering thrust!” Dee Dee squealed.

“Uh, what did you say?” Cutter said, looking up from scraping bugs off the windshield.

“It's the Tourette's talking,” Dee Dee said. “But if you like it, I could keep talking.” She flashed him a lewd and lascivious grin. “Or we could act it out. Who needs a lot of talking, right?”

Cutter could feel his face flush and his ears burn with embarrassment.

Dee Dee figured she had planted the seed of imagination in Cutter's mind and once he thought about it a bit he would want to reciprocate by planting something in her. But enough of that for now, she had a plan. She slipped the master cardkey into Cutter's hand. “Hussey is busy with those old geezers in the pool. You got at least twenty minutes to get into her room and get the zombie powder.”

“I'm not sure,” Cutter said, “I mean, if she catches me sneaking into her room she'll never speak to me again.”

“Just go get the powder,” Dee Dee said. “I'll worry about Hussey.”

Cutter crept along the upstairs hallway until he came to Hussey's room. He slipped the keycard into the lock, stepped inside and gazed around the room, his eyes stopping on Hussey's unmade bed. Something didn't look right. Then it came to him; two people slept in that bed last night, there were indentations on both pillows. That bitch was sleeping around already. It made him feel a little less guilty about stealing the zombie powder.

Cutter found Hussey's medicine bag in the closet, reached inside and found a vial of purple powder. He couldn't make out what the label said in the dark but it looked like the right stuff.

Beneath the bag he found the Conjures book and flipped through the pages until he found the chapter on making zombies. He scanned the page, committing as much as possible to memory. After he placed the book back in the closet, his lips still moving as he tried to commit the zombie-making process to memory, he opened the door a crack and peeked out to make sure it was all clear. He slipped out of Hussey's room, locking the door behind him.

When Cutter returned to the parking lot, Dee Dee was nowhere in sight, probably keeping Hussy busy he thought. He patted the vial of powder in his pocket and returned to scraping bugs off his van.

“Well, sugar,” Dee Dee said, as she stepped out of the hotel office moments later, holding a tray of drinks and egg sandwiches stacked in a pyramid, “did you get the stuff?” Her voice dripped honey, estrogen and lust.

“Yeah, I got it.” Cutter fished into his pocket and retrieved the small vial of purple powder. “And I found Hussey's voodoo book. It tells you how to make people into zombies.”

“So where's the book?

“I didn't take it. I figure she'd miss that, so I tried to memorize the steps on the page.”

“So what did it say?” Dee Dee said.

“Uh … I forgot.”

“You are a real re re,” Dee Dee muttered as she forced the vial of zombie powder into the back pocket of the tight cutoffs. As she stared across the parking lot, she saw a fire-red convertible pull in. A man wearing hand-tooled boots and cowboy hat stepped out of the vehicle quickly, as if he was exiting a burning race car. Dee Dee shielded her eyes from the sun to get a better look. A slow smile sneaked across her face as she stared at him. “I'll be damned,” she said to Cutter. “Providence just goosed me, in a good way. That's Rebel Buford, the race car driver. Our cash cow may have just delivered itself to the butcher.” She watched the tall lean man swagger across the parking lot and through the door to the Fugu Lounge.

“What?” Cutter said, returning to scraping the bugs off the windshield of his van.

“I gotta get back to work now.” Dee Dee gave Cutter her sexiest smile. “Try not to think too much about me.”

She spun on her heel and did a little exaggerated bump and grind across the parking lot and into the bar of the Santeria Hotel.

Deputy Ignatius Jones shifted the thin folder under his arm as he stepped into the sheriff's office and took a seat. “I found the cat killer,” he said as he opened the folder and passed the first sheet across the desk to the sheriff.

The sheriff picked up Jones's report between his thumb and forefinger and dangled it in front of his face like something he found on the floor of a bus station bathroom. He lowered his bifocals and gave the paper a cursory glance “What the hell is this?” he said to Jones, dropping the paper on to his desk. “A cat cult leader is killing the pussies and orchestrating cat orgies behind the Santeria Hotel. What am I supposed to do with this? Call all these old ladies and say ‘we found the culprit, a kitty Koresh'? If I gave the Mayor this crock of shit I'd be hunched in a sand dune every night on sea turtle watch and you'd be back in New Orleans patrolling what's left of the Ninth district. This is nuts.”

Jones peeled the second page from his folder and passed it to the sheriff. It was a print-out of the picture he'd snapped with his cell phone in the alley of the Santeria. “I have a witness to this pussy cat committing felinicide – this cat poisoning the other cats with fugu fish. I caught him red-pawed handing out some kind of kitty mega-Viagra.”

“This is a picture of a black cat sitting on a dumpster and a bunch of other cats fucking. So what?” the sheriff said.

Jones ran his right hand across his face. In his left hand he was holding the last page in the folder, a forensics report on the toxin found in the dead cats' brains. “I just got this from the vet's office,” he told the sheriff. “It confirms that the pussy cats were poisoned with tetratoxin, same stuff found in the fugu fish they serve at the Fugu Lounge in the Santeria Hotel. The cat culprit lives in the dumpster out behind the hotel and he is feeding the stuff to other cats. I know how it sounds, Curtis, but it's true. I wouldn't have believed it either if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. The little monster killed a dozen pussies with the stuff. I actually witnessed him give the cats some weird powder that turbocharged their libidos. I would have arrested him but I didn't have any evidence of the poisonings and, besides, I don't have any handcuffs that fit pussy cat paws.”

The chief tossed the stack of papers in his trash can and Jones' eyes followed them down. “Call all the ladies who lost their pussies and tell them the cats got into some poison, and don't include the kitty cult crap.”