Homemade Sin (12 page)

“They?” Roland said.

“The GD SOBs,” snarled Stinky.

“It's obvious you don't like them whoever they are,” said Roland.

“Gods, Deities and Supreme Omnipotent Beings. They're an oversight council. They decided I would be better off in a less responsible position. So I was forced to change careers, from minor god to muse. I think it was blatant Catism,” Stinky said. “I mean look at Jehovah. After Sodom and Gomorra all he got was probation. Did you ever notice how much nicer he was in the New Testament? Probation! And he still conjures up an occasional catastrophe, flood, hurricane, tornado. Hell, he invented Ebola, Aids, reality television and sub-prime mortgages and the GD SOBs look the other way. Me, I get demoted just for a little pestilence.”

Roland stared at Stinky. “Are you insane? Why did you kill all these cats?”

“I was trying to make cat zombies to be my worshipers but it didn't work,” said Stinky introspectively. “I must have done something wrong, used the wrong powder. I should have known everything you get from Jeffie is crap. I guess I just lost my white chip in ‘Gods Anonymous'. But insane? You're the one standing in an alley talking to a pussy. I suggest you start cleaning up this mess, you don't want the health inspector seeing this, do you?”

Reeling, Roland stepped inside the kitchen and retrieved a fresh garbage bag and began disposing of the deceased kitties. When he had finished depositing the cat corpses into the dumpster Roland wordlessly slipped back into the lounge, walked straight behind the bar and poured himself a double shot of tequila. It was too early in the day to be drinking, but coming face to face with the carnage behind the restaurant had rattled his nerves. With a shaking hand he raised the glass to his lips. Just as he had downed the shot, he heard someone banging on the bar door and yelling in a thick Brooklyn accent.

“Hey, ya open yet? I want a drink.”

Roland came from around the bar and hurried to the door.

“Hey, anybody in there? I'm dryer than a pothead's mouth in El Paso.” Tony had a New York accent as thick as the funk in the Hudson River. “Wherz da ratfuckbastard dat runs dis place?”

Roland unlocked to door to find a short, fat man in his early seventies standing there tapping his foot, his bald, olive-toned pate reflecting the dim sunlight that filtered through the newly cleaned windows of the lounge.

“Well, dat took yous long enough.” Tony looked around the room. “I haven't been here in months. It looks different.”

“Name your poison,” said Roland as the man hoisted his bulk up on a barstool.

“Beer!” Tony grunted as he hefted his bulk barside.

Roland held a frosty mug under the tap and slid it across the bar to the man who downed half of it with one gulp.

As Roland filled a frosty glass from the tap, Dee Dee came through the door. She had dark glasses covering the even darker circles under her eyes and her hair looked like rats had nested in it. Without a greeting Dee Dee went into the kitchen and returned a few moments later, carrying a large stainless steel tray piled with raw fish. She crossed over to the newly installed sushi station and donned a white headband with a bright, red dot representing the rising sun and began slicing fish.

“How'd you sleep Dee Dee?” Roland called, sarcastically, to her across the room.

“Shithead! Big hairy balls!” Dee Dee was explicit as she sculpted sushi from the strips of fish.

“Who's da piece of tail over there cuttin' fish?” Tony said.

“I found her in Key West,” said Roland. “She was looking for a job and I needed a new chef.”

“Fucker!” Dee Dee shouted as she slipped past the bar back into the kitchen.

“Her sporadic Tourette's flaring up again?” Roland called after her.

“Nice ass, but she's got a mouth on her,” said Tony as Dee Dee banged back through the kitchen door wielding a large knife.

“Needed my fucking castrating knife,” Dee Dee said as she stalked back over to the sushi bar.

“She's got Tourette's syndrome,” Roland said to Tony, placing a second full, frosted mug before him. “She says it's uncontrollable, comes and goes, but sometimes I wonder.”

“From the looks of her I bet she bangs like an outhouse door in a hurricane.” Tony grinned, definitely smitten.

“Don't even think about it.” Roland said, “I've been warned that she's a short-handled shovel of a girl. A lot of work for little results and she'll break your back sooner or later.”

“What happened to this place?” Tony picked up a handwritten dinner menu off the counter and scanned it. “I noticed something was different when I came in but I didn't notice all this stuff. Didn't this place yusta to be da Blue Flamingo? I mean, its da same place and all, but everything's different. Whaddya do to da Blue Flamingo?”

“Well,” Roland said, “The Blue Flamingo wasn't exactly a five-star resort. I figured the place needed a make-over. The seventies' seedy look of the place didn't attract customers much anymore, at least not the kind of customers I wanted, customers who have money and don't dispose of bodies in the pool.”

Tony tugged at his collar nervously. “Who's the broad in the picture?” he said. “She looks spooky.”

Roland came around the bar and stood in front of the large oil painting of a light- skinned black woman wearing a blue turban on her head. She was also wearing a pale blue shawl and large hoop earrings. Her eyes seemed to follow you around the room wherever you went. “That's Marie Laveau herself, the original ‘Voodoo Queen of New Orleans'. She is kind of spooky now that I take a closer look.”

Roland crossed back to the bar as Tony examined the menu. ‘Extreme Dining' was written on the cover below was written; ‘Fugu Lounge.' Below that, a small skull and crossbones smiled at him from the menu. “I was gonna get a burger or something but all you got on this menu is weird shit. I mean, ya got stuff on here like nikogori … usuzukuri? What is that?”

Dee Dee looked up and smiled as she sliced shashimi made from Red Sea blowfish. She deftly sliced fish and piled up the slices of filleted candied California newt and eastern salamander, both rich in poisonous tetrodotoxin, on to her sushi rolling platter. A small sign behind Dee Dee's sushi bar read:

‘To throw away life, eat blowfish. – Japanese Maxim'

“Blowfish,” Dee Dee said from her sushi station. “Nikogori is blowfish jelly and usuzukuri is thinly sliced, raw blowfish.”

“Ain't blowfish poisonous? I think I heard about it on some food show once. It can kill ya if ya don't cut it exactly right.”

“That's the stuff,” Dee Dee said. “But I'm getting good at cutting it; I haven't lost a customer yet. Everybody who has eaten it has walked out under their own power.”

“Doesn't it take a while for the poison to kill them?” said Tony. “Coupla hours at least?”

“What they do after they leave here is their own business,” Dee Dee slammed the business edge of her knife down separating the head from the body of a large, ugly fish.

“Dee Dee's read up on how to slice fugu fish,” Roland told Tony. “She knows how to cut it. Did you know voodoo folks used blowfish to make zombies? It's got something to do with some kind of toxin in the fish. I don't believe in all that zombie crap, but since Dee Dee was a sushi chef, I thought we'd add fugu sushi to the menu, go with the whole voodoo theme. I found all this voodoo stuff in Key West and Dee Dee figured it might attract customers.”

Roland and Tony watched Dee Dee walk up to the bar, pick up the remote control, and give life to the television mounted behind the bar. She ran the channels until she found a NASCAR race. “Could I get a Margarita?” she said.

Roland scooped ice into the blender and added Margarita mix and tequila while Tony leered at her lasciviously from his seat at the bar. Both men watched her curvaceous backside sway back and forth as she crossed to the sushi station. She alternately sliced fish and lizard flesh into paper-thin slivers and sipped her Margarita while she watched NASCAR highlights on the television above the bar.

“It looks like old Rebel Buford might finally win one!” Dee Dee said, pointing to the cars circling the racetrack on the television.

On the screen, a good quarter lap ahead of the other racers, car number 13 unexpectedly steered into the infield, hit the brakes and slid to a stop. The driver jumped out, tore off his helmet and curled into a fetal position on the grass.

“Damn! There he goes again, and I had fifty dollars riding on the son of a bitch! Damned stupid NASCAR asshole,” Dee Dee hollered.

“Anyway,” said Roland, “we're hoping the sushi thing will catch on, a lot of tourists like sushi, and Dee Dee thinks customers will like the idea of eating something that could kill you. I guess it adds an element of danger to their lives, like bungee jumping or mountain climbing.”

“I don't see why folks would want to do things could kill ‘em,” said Tony polishing off his beer and lighting a cigarette. “How about pouring me another beer? I'm dryer than a hundred-year-old nun's twat.”

“You couldn't outrun those other dogs in a race car.” His master's voice still rang in his head. Moreover didn't know what those words meant, he just knew his master had been angry, he'd heard it in his tone. That, and the fact that moments after his master had said those words, he had been kicked out of the car.

Hungry and depressed, the now homeless brindle greyhound was sniffing the sidewalks along the beach for street treats. So far he had only managed to come up with a lone French fry and it had been kinda gritty. He moped up and down the street looking for food, occasionally wandering over to the beach to splash in the clear green Gulf water to cool off. He had decided the man who took care of him wasn't coming back for him. He was on his own; a street dog. The thought made him more depressed than ever. He was bordering on suicidal and contemplating throwing himself under the wheels of a passing limo (why not at least go out in style?) until he had spotted the cat.

An orange and black tabby streaked across the big greyhound's path. Moreover, catching a whiff of the feline as it passed, snapped out of his funk, his misery forgotten temporarily, as he tore down the beach after the tabby in hot pursuit.

Today he was a greyhound, a lean tiger-striped blur with a kitty in his cross-hairs. The problem was, he wasn't a greyhound all the time, and to win races you needed to be a greyhound every day, for every race. That was why the man who had always taken care of him had dropped him on the street and left him there, because you can't beat a pack of greyhounds in a race if you aren't a greyhound. And the racing dog had come in dead last in the last ten consecutive races. Genetically, he was a greyhound. He looked like a greyhound and he ran like a greyhound when he felt like a greyhound.

Unfortunately, he didn't always feel like a greyhound. Sometimes, as he stood in the chute, ready to spring out of the gate and run like the wind, he would feel like a dachshund. He would try to keep up with the other dogs when the race started, but as a dachshund he had to stay low to the ground and take tiny little steps. Once, in the middle of a race, he began to feel like an Australian Shepherd. He imagined a little tattoo of a demon ram's head on his shoulder, underneath it was the slogan ‘Born to Herd.' He had tried to herd the rest of the pack as they raced after the mechanized rabbit. They sure didn't like being herded. And they didn't like it when he was a police dog either, sniffing their cages for evidence of steroids.

But boy, did they like it when he was Yvette, the slutty poodle … they liked him far too much then, it was tough being a female, it was a bitch.

Sometimes he was known as Prince, the ‘metro alpha' and he imagined himself wearing a Gucci collar and going to an expensive grooming salon. He couldn't very well race when he was the ‘metro alpha': The dirty track would mess up his manicure. He raced better when he was formerly known as Prince. And then there was the Jack Russell incident. He really, really didn't want to think about that. The more races he lost the more depressed he became and the more he wanted to be a different breed. It was a ‘catch your tail 22' kind of thing.

But right now, the only thing going on in his doggie brain was ‘get the cat' and the chase was the thing.

As he gained on the cat, the fleeing feline took a sudden hard left off the beach around a hotel pool and into the alley behind the Santeria Hotel. He pursued at full greyhound speed but the tabby jumped to the top of a dumpster and disappeared inside.

Moreover tried to stop, but his momentum carried him past the alley entrance, his paws skidding on the pavement. He spun around and as he entered the alley he saw the cat's tail poking out from the partially open dumpster lid twitching back and forth.

Got him!

Barking a celebration, he sped toward the dumpster. Moreover launched himself up on his hind legs, front paws on the edge of the open lid, and peered into the darkness. Two pairs of green eyes glowed back at him. He sensed another feline presence. Sure, he sensed the scaredy cat he had been chasing, cowering in the dumpster, but this new kitty wasn't scared, this new kitty smelled evil.