Homemade Sin (17 page)

“Theoretically,” Hussey said, “but it is not a very nice thing to do, and there are dangers. Remember, what you do will come back to haunt you.”

She was considering that Dee Dee might be a little sociopathic and decided she better watch her back when around her.

“How about a nightcap?” Roland said to Hussey as they pulled into the hotel parking lot.

“Sounds great,” Dee Dee said.

Damn, thought Roland as he led the two girls into the bar. He found Cutter behind an empty bar washing glasses.

“How did it go today?” Roland said as he joined Cutter behind the bar.

“I had a few people come in for lunch and ordered fugu so I took a shot at cutting those ugly fugu fish. I hope I didn't kill anybody.”

“What the customers do after they leave isn't our concern,” Dee Dee said. “That's my motto.”

“And those old people drove me nuts all day,” Cutter said, “If I didn't get out to the pool and take their orders every fifteen minutes some old geezer would come storming into the bar, all pruney and dripping water on the carpet, and bitch at me for not waiting on them properly. There was one old hairy guy in Speedos who scared the hell out of me. He actually growled at me and started throwing wedges of lime. I thought a rabid, mangy Grizzly was loose in the bar.”

“Moreover won the race. We won, like four hundred dollars,” she told Cutter.

“I know,” Cutter said. “I won too. I placed a bet with Tony.”

“You bet on Moreover?” Hussey said.

“After what you did to Mrs. Zoller's Aussie, I figured he couldn't lose,” Cutter said.

Dee Dee perked up her ears and was listening intently.

“Anyway, I'm taking off,” Cutter said. He untied his bar apron and laid it on top of the bar. “I'm going out to my stifling hot van and try to sleep. See you tomorrow.” He nodded in Hussey's direction and stalked toward the door.

“Would you mind taking out the garbage on your way out?” Roland said.

Cutter hefted a large trash bag over his shoulder and trudged through the kitchen door.

“And thanks for running the place while we were away,” Roland called after him.

Stinky looked down menacingly from atop the dumpster as Cutter approached. “Worship me lowly human. I am Stinky, Fierce Feline of Fatalism, the Caustic Cat of Cataclysm, I am the Kitty Courier of—”

The back of Cutter's hand connected with the side of Stinky's head knocking him from the dumpster into a pile of fetid fugu.

“Fucking stupid cat,” Cutter said as he lifted the lid and deposited the garbage in the dumpster.

Stinky stared up at Cutter with hate-filled eyes, marking him, burning Cutter's face into his memory. “You will pay for that!” he growled.

“Now, ladies?” Roland said, turning toward Hussey and Dee Dee, “What's your pleasure?”

“Make me something special,” Hussey said.

Roland smiled. Here is my chance to impress her, he thought as he plucked the bottle of absinthe from the shelf and poured two fingers of the dark green liquid into two heavily- walled bar tumblers. He retrieved a large, slotted silver spoon with a serrated edge that hung from a hook on a shelf behind the bar. “My runcible spoon,” he said as he suspended the spoon like a strainer above one of the glasses. He placed a sugar cube in the center of the runcible spoon's slotted bowl and sprinkled a few drops of absinthe on to the sugar cube. He made a big showing of flicking his lighter to life and setting the Absinthe soaked sugar cube ablaze while Hussey raised one eyebrow and smirked. Finally, Roland reached into the small bar cooler, retrieved a pitcher of water and a yellow, pear-like fruit. Roland used the cutting edge of the spoon to pare a slice of quince and dropped it into the glass of absinthe, where it was sucked down into the emerald depths of the glass.

“Now we add some quince, and water to rinse the sugar through a runcible spoon …” he lilted as he poured water from the pitcher over the sugar cube. The emerald absinthe turned verdigris as it fused with the water. Hussey was reminded of the color of Mama Wati's house, as she watched the water chase the absinthe around the sides of the glass, turning it as milky as a cataract.

“‘And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, they danced by the light of the moon, the moon, the moon,'” Hussey finished Roland's bastardized version of the rhyme while he repeated the sugar cube process on his own drink.

“You know Edward Lear?” Roland grinned at her, his eyes owlishly wide.

“I've read The Owl and the Pussycat,” replied Hussey flashing him a catlike grin. “But I never knew what a runcible spoon was. And I've always wondered how an owl and a pussycat could go about using any kind of spoon in the first place. No thumbs ….”

“Ah,” Roland said, still sporting an impressed smile. “Nobody really knows. I think Lear made up the word. I used to think it meant any spoon with a cutting edge but since I've read more of Lear's poetry I'm not so sure. Like; ‘What has come to your fiddledum head!' or ‘What a runcible goose you are!' Or; ‘He has many friends, laymen and clerical, Old Foss is the name of his cat; His body is perfectly spherical, He weareth a runcible hat.'”

“Maybe it's anything with a sharp edge,” Hussey said.

Roland swirled the glass in his hand until the liquids consummated their union and placed it on the bar in front of Hussey. “For my runcible friend,” he said and smiled.

Hussey raised the glass to the light and examined the milky green color, sniffed it and sipped the shot. “It's a lot stronger than Death in the Afternoon” she said.

“Here's to things that are stronger than death.” Roland raised his drink to her.

“I'll have one of the same,” Dee Dee said. “And what did Cutter mean about Mrs. Zoller's Aussie? Did it have anything to do with the voodoo stuff?”

Roland stared at Dee Dee and made a motion toward the door with his head hoping Dee Dee would take the hint.

“Mrs. Zoller was a lady who lived in the town where I come from; Cassandra, just east of Orlando. She had an Australian Shepherd that was scared by a ram. I gave him some of my Mambo powder and he got over his fear, entirely straightened him right out.”

“What's in the Mambo powder?” Dee Dee ignored Roland's hints and hoped to catch Hussey off guard.

“A secret recipe of eleven herbs and spices,” said Hussey with a sly wink. “I can't divulge trade secrets, part of the voodoo oath. Besides, in the wrong hands, that stuff could be dangerous.” Hussey finished her drink and addressed Roland; “It's late and it's been a long day. I'm off to bed.”

“Want me to walk you back to your room?” Roland said. There was more than a trace of hope in his voice.

“I don't think so,” Hussey said. “Let's take it slow, see what grows. You might turn out to be my knight in shining armor, or you might turn out to be just amour for a night. I want to know that you're interested in more than just a night.”

“I'm interested in a lot more than a night—”

“I'll see you in the morning,” Hussey said over her shoulder as she sashayed out of the bar.

Roland wiped up a frog-green, ring of absinthe left on the bar by Hussey's glass and began to chant the lines of a poem:

“‘The Owl looked up to the stars above,

And sang to a small guitar,

‘O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,

What a beautiful Pussy you are,

You are,

You are!

What a beautiful Pussy you are!'”

Ascending the steps to her room, Hussey could sense someone at the top of the stairs, lurking in the shadows. Cutter didn't know he was lurking, which was what made him scary.

As Hussey turned the corner toward her room Cutter stepped out of the shadows and approached her. “I've been waiting for you. Can we talk?”

“Have you gotten my money back?” Hussey said.

“Not all of it but I'm working on it. I'll get about five hundred on that dog today when Tony pays me.”

“Then we have nothing to talk about. When you have the other twenty-nine thousand and five hundred dollars, we can talk. Until then stay the hell away from me!” She turned on her heel and stormed toward her room.

After Dee Dee polished off her drink and left the bar, Roland locked the doors to the bar and went outside into the parking lot. He felt the moist breeze drifting across the beach from the Gulf as he walked around the hotel to the beachfront and stood, looking across the Gulf of Mexico. He watched as a surf of puffy clouds boogie-boarded past a floating, blue-white, man-o-war moon. He could make out the small whitecaps in the backwash of light as they curled backward on themselves and dove into the sand. He was reveling in his evening with Hussey, a mooning smile playing across his lips. He had been charming at dinner, flirting with Hussey, and she had flirted back. Maybe she really liked him, maybe this time he had found someone he could love and who would love him in return.

As Roland watched the whitecaps, lost in thought, he heard a commotion outside one of the upstairs hotel rooms. It sounded like a man and a woman engaged in a screaming contest and one of the contestants sounded like Hussey. From the sound of it she was winning. Roland turned back from the beach and took the steps up to Hussey's room two at a time. He found Cutter standing in the hallway in front of room 213 shouting through Hussy's closed door and he heard Hussy shouting back. He looked down the outdoor walkway and spotted Dee Dee perched in the doorway to her room watching the action with interest. Roland picked up the gist of the conversation from twenty feet away. They were disagreeing on Hussey's future, Cutter was advocating that he be in it, and Hussey held the opposite view. Just as Roland was about to approach Cutter to suggest he take a hint and leave, Hussey emerged from her room and confronted Cutter face to face. She was brandishing what looked like a large bird claw, maybe a turkey or something larger and the sight of it stopped Cutter cold.