Tats Too (35 page)

Light? Does that mean I’m dead?

And what pig? Their guard pig, Wiggly?

I continue swimming, but my arms are leaden and my feet have stopped moving. I’m out of air and my lungs force my mouth open. Water floods into my mouth and lungs and I’m drowning.

The last thing I see is a great big, pink pig swimming down toward me. He grabs one of my floating dreads in his mouth, turns and paddles all three of his legs toward the ocean’s surface.

“Ow!”

My eyes snap open. I’m being dragged along the sidewalk by one dread. I twist around to find Jesus pulling on me like he’s a sled dog. He pulls me out of the pile of toilet paper and float rubble and I grab his feet.

“Thank you, Jesus,” I grovel, kissing the top of one foot. “You saved me.”

“No problem,” he says, wiping his foot on the back of his other leg.

Vivian looms over me. Her hair looks like the Leaning Tower of Pisa and I giggle, “I found Jesus.”

“Are you okay?” she asks.

I sit up, shake my head, and take stock. I’m fine but the parade has turned into a fuckin’ melee.

Mikey and her gang are taking this shit seriously. They have the Feebies surrounded. Mikey has Dillon in a chokehold and Toxic is slashing her knife at Festus.

Even the drag queens are getting in on the action. A couple of them have their high heels off and are using them like machetes to beat back all the looky-loos that’re squeezing in to get a better look.

I blink around at the crowd, but I don’t even see a glimpse of George, the Winkles or a pig.

“This is one crazy-ass hullabaloo,” I say, rubbing my sore scalp.

“Fuck your hullabaloo word,” Vivian says, grabbing my hand and pulling me to my feet. “We need to get the hell outta here.”

She pulls me into the middle of the street, holds her dress up high around her thighs and chases down a Shriner guy in a little car. He sees her coming right at him and veers into a crazy figure-eight pattern. Vivian drags me in circles and I stumble bumble after her. She finally catches hold of the guy’s fez, yanks it off and throws it at him, beaning him on the back of his head.

He slams on his tiny brakes. “What the hell?” he screams.

She grabs his rainbow-colored suspenders and pulls him out of the car. He lands upsy-downsy on the sidewalk and Vivian hops into the car. She looks at me and shouts, “Get the fuck in!”

Okay. I guess.

There’s not enough room for both of us in the clown car, so I plop my polyester-covered ass down on the trunk part and hold my feet in the air. Vivian mashes down on the gas pedal and squeals off down the street, going against the current of the parade.

She’s a pretty good wheel man because she has to weave around drag queens and all those gay rodeo cowboys and cowgirls and their horses and piles of horse poop. After a couple of blocks, she makes a hard right, then after another couple of blocks a hard left, and then I see where we’re headed.

A white and silver sign shaped like a paisley hangs on the side of a big, brick cracker-box building. The sign reads in cursive
Cushman Coffins
. Vivian swerves up next to the building which is surrounded by a tall chainlink fence with a locked gate.

What the hell? Do they think somebody’s going to break in and try to steal a coffin?

Well, I guess we kind of are, but still…

Vivian halts the tiny car right in front of the gate. I roll off the trunk into the gravel, then straggle to my feet. She unwinds herself from the car and marches up to the gate.

She loops her fingers through the fence wire and shakes it just to test the lock. “Looks like we’re going over.”

“How’re you going to make it over the fence in that dress?”

“When I said we, I meant you,” she explains.

I blow a hot stream of air through my lips just so she’ll know I don’t like this crap.

I hook one pointy blue suede shoe in the chain link, wrap my fingers through more of it and have my ass about five feet off the ground when I hear, “Hold it right there!”

I stick my nose through the fence and see a guard all dressed in a gray uniform with his belly jutting out in front of him a good two feet. He’s got funny buck teeth and a red nose like W.C. Fields. But the weirdest part is that he’s only got one arm. His long gray sleeve is rolled and pinned up where his arm would be if he had one and his one hand is carrying one of those big mag flashlights like what cops carry.

Who the hell ever heard of a one-armed security guard at at coffin factory?

“Hi,” I mumble through the fence.

He walks right up under me and tilts his head back. “What the hell’re you doing?” he asks.

I drop back down to the ground just in time to hear Vivian answer, “This is Cushman Coffins, right?”

“Yeah…” he says, looking her up and down then licking his lips at the sight of her tits.

“And you’re Darrel?” she asks.

“Yeah…”

How the hell did she know his name? Oh. It’s on his name tag, pinned to his shirt.

“Singing telegram,” she says.

“Singing telegram?” he echoes.

“We have a singing telegram for Darrel at Cushman Coffins,” she says. “The boys already paid for it.”

“The boys sent it?” he asks, looking from me to her and back again.

“That’s what I said.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” he asks, scratching the side of his head with the mag light.

Vivian laughs. “Yeah, you caught us all right. Elvis and I are trying to break in and steal your fucking coffins and haul them off in our tiny car and we thought we’d sing to you first,” she says like he’s a dumbass. “You going to let us in or not? We have a bunch of telegrams to deliver today.”

“You can sing it from there,” he says like he doesn’t believe her.

“Honey,” Vivian replies, pushing her tits into the fence, “this is the type of telegram you can’t sing on the street. If you catch my drift.”

The guard and I both look at her tits. They’re pressed into the fence and look like creamy flesh waffles. We both lick our lips.

“Okay, okay,” he says, with a big grin, reaching across to his armless side and pulling a ring of keys off his belt.

He does pretty good for a one-armed man because he has the lock off in about three seconds and the gate pushed open just far enough for me and Vivian to squeeze through.

Vivian takes off walking fast toward the building and I have to hop-skip to catch up with her. Darrel is a good ten feet behind us when I whisper, “We’re not going to do the live sex show thing again, are we?”

She looks at me out of the corner of her eye and whispers, “You wish.”

“What exactly are we going to do?”

Vivian grabs the doorknob and pulls it open, motioning for me to go first. I step inside and follow the dim light into an office while Vivian herds Darrel in right behind me. I turn around to face them just as Vivian grabs the flashlight out of his hand and konks him upside his head.

His eyes bug out for a moment, then he crumples to a heap by her feet.

“Oh,” I say. “That was a lot quicker than a sex show.”

It has not escaped my attention that everywhere we go, we seem to leave a string of male bodies laid out cold behind us. However, I stopped feeling sorry for any of them a long time ago. So, we leave Darrel on the floor as is, step over his big belly and head back out to the hallway. We walk deeper into the innards of the building until we reach a set of double doors. Vivian pushes on the right one, I push the left and we swing them open at the same time.

Holy mother of God.

It’s my worst nightmare.

There are hundreds and hundreds of caskets. Stacked one on top of the other, floor to ceiling. And every single one of them is white.

I do some really quick math in my head. There’s six coffins stacked vertically and…forty vertical rows. That means there’s two hundred and forty coffins to unstack, open and check inside.

“We’re going to need a little help,” I utter.

Vivian whips her cell phone out of her tittage and punches speed dial. After a moment, she speaks into the phone, “Lu, this’s Vivian. We’re at the the coffin factory. When you get this message, round up all the girls and get here ASAP.”

“Hands in the air! Don’t move!”

Vivian and I spin toward the voice and—

Okay, I was wrong.
This
is my worst nightmare. There’s three new Goodfellas, all with greasy paper napkins tucked into their collars, all holding guns, and all are pointing the guns at us.

These Mafia types must procreate like amoebas. You kill two and three pop up in their place.

“Well, well, well,” says the brightest of the three, “looks like we got Perelli’s wife right here in our little coffin factory.”

I have really good peripheral vision from all my defensive motorcycle riding, so I look straight at the Goodfellas, but use my peripheral vision to look around the place.

Stacks of money. There’s stacks of cellophane-wrapped, rubber-banded money on the floor. And some of the coffins are open and filled with more bills. The Mafia must be using this place to launder money. Or maybe even counterfeit money. That explains the fence and the security guard.

“Let me pop ’em, Boss,” says the shortest Goodfella who looks a lot like a troll doll in a silk suit.

“No,” says the Goodfella with the twisted mustache who looks like the villian in that
Perils of Pauline
silent movie. “Perelli said he wanted the redhead alive. We kill her after we get the diamond back.”

“So let me pop the Elvis,” Troll says excitedly.

Well, that’s all I need to hear. I do a forward dive, complete with somersault, into the nearest aisle of coffins. I’m getting pretty damn good at this cheerleading stuff if I do say so myself.

I hear Vivian scream.

I roll to my feet just in time to hear two quick gunshots and get splattered with white coffin splinters.

Vivian screams again.

I run.

I head down another aisle, backtrack, down another aisle, up another aisle, I don’t know where the hell I’m going, I’m just going and dodging gunshots and white splinters and running down aisles, bouncing off coffins like a pinball and listening to Vivian’s screams, until I see a little opening—

—I squeeze in between two caskets with a third on top, and hold my breath.

Running footsteps slap on concrete all around me.

I don’t dare breathe.

Vivian’s not screaming anymore. God, I hope they didn’t shoot her.

That’s when I see it. Right in front of me. Vivian’s layaway coffin. It has a big scratch on the side.

I stick my nose out of my coffin cave and look both ways. The coast is clear.

I jump out of my hidey-hole, lift the scratched coffin lid and throw myself inside, easing the lid back down.

It’s dark in here.

And it’s hard to breathe.

Oh, damn, I didn’t even think about that. There’s a limited air supply. I can’t stay in here forever. I’ll suffocate.

I need to quit thinking about dying. But that’s kind of hard to do when you’re laying on your back inside a coffin. It’s comfortable, though. Soft and pillowy.

I could go to sleep if I weren’t worried about dying and about Vivian dying and—

—I need to quit thinking negative thoughts. Think positive thoughts instead.

Tits.

I close my eyes and conjure up a mental image of Vivian’s tits. Once I have that picture, I bury my nose right between them and do the whole mmm mmm thang.

Oh my God, Vivian’s right. I do make yummy noises. I even heard myself that time.

I close my eyes again and stick my nose back into her imaginary cleavage. Okay. That’s better. I can feel my whole body relaxing. I’m back in control now.