by D. M. Guay
“No need to get nasty.” She put her hands up. “Do you want the money, or do you want my hands up?”
“What?... shut up!” The robber was sweating bullets. (I probably should choose a better metaphor here, but I don't perform well under pressure.) His eyes darted nervously between us and the register.
At that point, I'd also wished I'd paid more attention in geometry class because I was having a lot of trouble calculating exactly what angle the bullet would travel if I grabbed the gun and tweaker pulled the trigger. Should I push the barrel up or down? Before I decided to make a move, I kinda needed to know which one of us might accidentally get shot. And then there was the whole was I even strong enough to overpower this dude? Maybe I should have listened to angel eight ball and taken some fitness classes.
And wouldn't you know it, the stupid ball chose that very moment to roll out onto the counter, triangle up.
“That's right, fatty. If you'd listened to me, you'd have this jerk pinned. You'd be DeeDee's knight in shining armor already.”
Always an opinion.
“Where did that come from?” The robber pointed his gun at the angel eight ball.
“Please. Do me a favor and shoot it.”
But no. He put the gun in my face instead, and I mean really in my face, into my nose so hard it pushed my nostrils flat. This is the part where I would have pooped my pants if all of my orifices hadn't been squinched up so tight with fear.
“Hey. It's okay. You don't need the gun.” DeeDee smiled at the robber. “Take the money. We don't care. You can have it.”
The robber looked at her. Then at me. Then at the fat stack of cash in the open register drawer. “No funny business,” he said. “Hand it over.”
“Okay. I've got to put my hands down so I can get the money, okay?”
He nodded, anxious, but still unsure if he should trust our plan.
“Life in prison for killing us isn't worth the cash,” she added, cazh as usual. She stacked up the bills. Twenties, then tens, then fives, then ones until the drawer was empty. She took one shiny gold coin out of a side compartment and sat it on top of the bills. It looked like actual, pure gold. And ancient, with some weird design on it. What was that?
She held the money out to him. He took the wad with his other, equally trembling hand. He stuffed it into the pocket of his giant-legged raver jeans. Then he grabbed the eight ball. “This is mine now, too.”
“Good luck with that,” I said. Man. When was I gonna learn to keep my lips zipped?
“What? Shut up!” He backed away. The gun was no longer touching me, but he was still pointing it at me. Then DeeDee. Then at me. His eyes were so wide, the whites above his irises were clearly visible. Great. He literally had crazy eyes.
“Don't call the cops,” he yelled as he rounded the end of the counter. The jerk still had his gun on us when he stopped to load his pockets full of cheap smokes from the display racks.
DeeDee leaned close to me and whispered. “You're wearing your name tag, right?”
I glanced down. “Yeah. What? Why?”
“Make sure it's straight. Then say 'Have a nice day' to the guy before he walks outside. Okay?”
“What? No!” I whisper screamed. “I hope he has a shitty day. He deserves the worst possible day.”
“Just do it. You have to do all the steps, or it won't work.”
“What won't work?”
“The robbery protocol!”
She straightened my name tag, then hers, and said: “Have a nice—”
That's when the intercom vibrated to life, with ear-splitting feedback, and “Hungry for Heaven” screeched out of the speakers. Gah. Why did I know that? Kevin and his Dio! Really? Now? And when I say screeched, I mean it felt like every note was a talon ripping my eardrum apart piece by piece and pulling it out through my nostril. I put my hands over my ears, but the music was so loud it rattled my insides.
“Sorry!” Kevin said. “I accidentally walked across the play button.”
The nervous robber apparently didn't like Dio either. He scowled and held his ears. “Turn it off!”
He pointed the gun at the speakers and pulled the trigger. I don't know where Kevin bought those speakers, but he got a good deal because they appeared to be bulletproof. The bullet sparked when it hit one, then bounced off. It was ricocheting all over the place. It bounced off the counter and hit me straight on the name tag. “Gah! I'm DEAD!” I screamed.
I did a quick assessment, running my hands over my chest, but nope. Phew. No bullet hole! No bullet? Huh. I heard a chink. The bullet had stopped cold, lodged in the front window.
“On the floor or I'll kill you!” Except, the robber didn't give us time to do anything before he pulled the trigger again.
Bastard! But that bullet bounced, too. What, was his ammo made of rubber? At that point, the holy-shit-I-just-got-shot-and-there's-another-bullet-coming nerve impulse kicked in, and I screamed like a terrified toddler. DeeDee ninja-kicked me to the floor and landed on top of me. Oh. Hell. No. She was not going to save me.
We tussled for a hot minute as I attempted to roll over on top of her, to shield her from the bullet like the gentleman my Mom raised me to be. But no. She pushed me off, reached up, and clicked Kevin's Zune off. The music stopped immediately. My ears were still ringing. DeeDee shook her head and sat on one knee for a hot minute, getting her bearings, before she bounded—in one move, no joke—over the counter, somersaulting over the cigarette displays. I followed her yelling “nooooooooooo!” terrified that one of us would be shot. Again.
She knocked the shaking addict to the floor. The gun slid across the linoleum. He went after it, but he wasn't exactly in peak physical condition. DeeDee got to the gun first, grabbed it and turned it on him. The robber looked like he might actually poop his pants. He started emptying his pockets and pleading for his life. “Keep the money,” DeeDee said, holding the gun like she was a trained assassin. “Just get out. Now.”
He scrambled to the door, but before he was all the way out, DeeDee called after him in the most high fructose corn syrup sticky-sweet voice I'd ever heard. “Have a nice day!”
The door shut behind him.
“I'm calling the cops!” I squealed.
“No. Don't.” She flipped the lock on the front door and held on to the push bar white-knuckled. “Robbery protocol. One. Secure your name tag. Two. Give the perp the cash. Three. Say have a nice day. Four. Stay still. Justice will be served immediately. Whatever you do, don't move.”
All three of us looked out the window. The robber was limp-running across the parking lot. He stopped at the base of the neon 24/7 Demon Mart sign. I could see his face in the red glow, looking around. There was a sound, a deep vibration.
Whoop. Whoop. Whoop.
It sounded like flapping, like the wings of a bird, but amplified and in slow motion.
“Remember, don't move,” DeeDee said, eerily calm. “It'll get him faster.”
“Who'll get what faster?” Nope. Don't answer that. La la la la, forget I said anything.
The building vibrated, rattling things off the shelves. The robber started running again. Scrambling, actually. He tripped over his Phat pants, falling face-first onto the asphalt. He started to crawl. He looked back at the pitch-black night and screamed, “No! No! No no no no no!”
“I hate this part.” DeeDee's voice was shaking. “Whatever you do stay still, Lloyd, or it'll come after us.”
“What will come after us?” Jesus. I needed to shut up because I really didn't want answers to these questions. I stared out the window, frozen in place with terror, eyes absolutely dry because I was too scared to blink.
At that moment, a black shadow descended on the robber, swallowing him in total darkness. No, not a shadow. The edges came into focus in the neon light. The robber was wrapped in a gigantic, pitch-black wing with feathers like a bird. A big bird, and not the nice yellow one. I couldn't even see the guy. The wing was wrapped up tight around him. My heart
was kicking my sternum so hard it was knocking me sideways.
Wow. Junkie or not, I wasn't sure anyone deserved whatever this was. Just then, a gold shimmering eye emerged from the black feathers. It looked into the store.
“Don't move,” DeeDee whispered.
Kevin was clinging to my shirt, trembling. The gold eye looked at us, then away. The creature's massive wings flapped, and it took flight. The addicted robber screamed. His legs kicked against air, as the creature carried him away into the night, gripping him in leathery clawed feet.
“That,” DeeDee said, “is why no one ever robs us twice.”
Chapter 15
“We need to talk about the music, Kevin. You turned it up on purpose, didn't you?” DeeDee asked.
We were all behind the counter, reloading cheap cigarette packs into the display carousels and generally tidying up after our attempted robbery/colossal demon bird-napping. “You nearly got us killed,” she said. “You know the protocol. What were you thinking?”
“If you must know, I was trying to summon the spirit of Ronnie James Dio. I started while dingus was robbing us because I thought it would be awesome to watch Dio swoop down and scare that tweaker away before he hung out with us.”
DeeDee gave him some serious side-eye.
“Don't give me that look. It was a sure thing. I consulted the book. I did my homework.” Kevin's leg pointed at the big creepy old monster manual behind the counter. It was open to the page with Bubby and a bunch of other unfathomable horrors in a circle around the hungry angler-fish guy. Right next to the page with illustrations of rocks and lists of their magic powers. “So I picked the wrong rocks. You know how this goes. It's art, not science.”
“Maybe next time don't test your spells during an armed robbery?” She huffed. “Still, your rocks did something. That bouncing bullet thing? It saved Lloyd's life. Of course, we probably wouldn't have been shot at if you hadn't blown that poor guy's eardrums out. You and your stupid Dio.”
“Watch your mouth,” Kevin snapped. “That man was a world treasure. No man is more metal than Ronnie James Dio.”
“Wait. What?” I was a few steps behind on the conversation, still reeling from watching a man-eating devil bird fly off with a drug addict. “The bullet. That was the rocks?”
“Pretty sure.” She pointed to the whitish one. “Kevin, why were you using clear quartz to summon a spirit? It's a power amplifier, not a conduit. Don't you need selenite to reach the other side?”
Kevin glared at me. “I asked for selenite and you gave me quartz? No wonder it didn't work, dumbass.”
“Dude. If it was the wrong rock, you should have said something!”
“I'm not a rock expert. I thought it was the right one,” Kevin snipped.
“Well, so did I!”
DeeDee examined the copper wire linking the stones, unfazed by our argument. “The pyrite. That's defensive, a shield. That's probably why the bullets bounced,” she said. “I'm not sure how you planned to help Dio cross over with pyrite, but the quartz must have amplified its defensive properties. That's why the bullet didn't kill Lloyd. It bounced instead. Nice setup, Kevin. Maybe we could use it if things ever get really bad around here.”
“Oh, my God. I seriously almost died?” I suspected it, but now that I knew for sure, it was way more intense.
“A drug addict shot a gun at you,” Kevin said. “Duh.”
“But...they're just stupid rocks! Rocks are rocks. They don't have superpowers.”
They both looked at me like I was stupid. Again.
“Do you even know how to read?” Kevin asked.
Yep, I'd been shamed. By a talking roach.
“Ack! I can't deal.” They weren't even the least little bit freaked out by my near-death experience, but I sure as hell was. What good was paid off debt if you weren't alive to enjoy it?
“Listen, Lloyd. We can talk about the details later. Right now, relax.” DeeDee hugged me then smoothed out the wrinkles in my “Who farted?” T-shirt. Please don't lecture me on my fashion choices. I'm not in the mood.
“It's fine. You're fine. Don't worry. That dude will never bother us again,” she said. “But Jesus, you might kill me with this shirt. Next day off? We're going shopping.”
I blushed. Shopping. It's a date! Wait a minute. She couldn't smooth all this over that easily. “Don't worry? That's easy for you to say,” I said. “You didn't get shot.”
“Uh, yes she did.” Kevin held up a smooshed spent bullet. “While you were screaming like a sorority sister.”
“Says the roach who was holding onto me for dear life. And what the hell was that thing in the parking lot, anyway? Why are none of you talking about that?”
“It's not our first robbery,” DeeDee said. “We don't need to know its name. Just always–always—give the thief a gold coin. It helps it find him faster. You do not want it flying in circles around the store any longer than it has to, because that is some seriously freaky shit.”
She slipped the last pack of Pyramids into the display rack. “See? All better. Back to normal.” She put her hands on her hips and surveyed our clean-up job. “You all right, Lloyd?”
I stared at her. Uh. No. Duh!
“Okay then. I'll take the gate, you relax for a while. Pull yourself together,” she said. “Bubby will be here soon. Why don't you watch some wrestling with him? Take it easy. Eat some popcorn. Have a laugh. You'll feel better.”
She smiled, sat her curvy bottom on the counter, then flipped her legs over. A second later, she was at the beer cave door scanning the passport of a man in a tan trench coat. He looked like a middle-aged detective. Except for his orange feathered ostrich legs. Woah boy. Didn't need to see that.
“You're good to go, honey, but only if you put on some pants,” DeeDee said to him. His shoulders slumped, disappointed. DeeDee handed him a pair of khakis out of the weapons cabinet, and he slipped them on, fumbling to get the cuffs over his bird feet.
Nope. No way. Hanging out with a giant jelly hell centipede was not going to make me feel better. None of this was making me feel better. Stupid debt. I was literally trapped in debt hell! I stomped off.
“Where are you going?” Kevin asked.
“I'm getting a slushy.” A big one. And probably another one after that. I was gonna slam icy sweet goodness like cheap tequila shots until I was on a happy sugar high. Don't judge me. Sometimes you have to eat your feelings.
“Wait a minute,” Kevin said.
“What!” I turned around.
Kevin pointed down. A big, muscle-clad red arm was emerging through Kevin's swirling green vortex. “Get one for my dickhead roommate, or we'll be tripping over his stupid claw hand for the rest of the night.”
“Fine,” I huffed. Talking roaches. Disembodied demon arms. Armed robbers carried off by giant birds? Literally being shot in the chest. Nope. Nope. More nope. How many more weeks until Thanksgiving? Because I am out!
So, I was at the slushy machine pouring out a Brimstone Blueberry for Kevin's dick roommate, calculating exactly how many more shifts I had to work to be debt free, when I heard an alarm go off behind me. It was an ear-splitting low-pitched, blurp blurp blurp. Like the red alert on a movie submarine.
Holy hell. What now? I had learned one thing since I started working here. When it rained at the 24/7 Demon Mart, it poured. The quiet nights were super quiet, and the bad nights were super bad. So, here we go. The robbery had opened the floodgates. Tonight was shaping up to be about as fun as being neck-deep in a dumpster filled with burning devil turds. I gave myself a quick pep talk. Only a couple more weeks and you'll be debt free. Maybe you can find another side hustle to speed that up. And, DeeDee's taking you shopping. That's step two on the twelve-step path to boyfriend. Eyes on the prize!
Okay then. Nerves steeled. I turned around to see what the alarm was all about. The hot succubus strippers sashayed toward me, licking their glossed lips—woah boy, so hot—hips swinging. “Hi, cutie pie.” The brunette bombsh
ell stroked my neck with the dark red nail on her perfectly manicured finger as she walked by. “You ever need a ride, sugar, you know where to find me.”
She winked, the other two tittered. Jesus, was it hot in here? I watched their curvalicious lady bits bounce as they strutted across the parking lot and into the side door of Sinbad's. No man was leaving that dump with a full wallet tonight.
It was Morty, the smarmy incubus, who must have set off the alarm. He was arguing with DeeDee at the beer cave door. He was dressed in full police uniform, but even in authentic gear, he still had the aura of a low-budget bachelorette party stripper.
“I'm sorry, but the scanner reads red. You can't come out. You know the rules.”
“But I have to, Sweets. I've got a three-way lined up with two horny housewives. They're in the adventurous stage of their mid-life crises. Totally desperate. Nearly rock bottom. Prime pickins. I've been working them for weeks. Opportunities like this don't come along every day. You know I need it, honey. Need it!”
“You know the rules, Morty. Go home and get it sorted out, then come back. It's early. You've got time.”
“But those two ladies are rearing to go. I can smell their ovaries from here! I'm only going next door. Look, if it'll make you feel better, I won't leave the bar. I'll do them in the storage room. It's right next to this wall here. That's as good as staying in the store. It's only two feet of concrete wall out of bounds.” He pointed to the wall where Bubby's TV hung, awaiting the wrestling stylings of Dwayne Johnson. “If I'm late, they might go home. Or worse, find some other man. A human man. Do you want them to waste their wild streak on a night of disappointing sex? Dash their hopes and dreams? Or do you want them to feel true ecstasy, one time in their short, miserable lives?”
“I'm sorry, Morty. I can't let you out. Those are the rules,” she said. “Take care of your documents. Talk to your...boss? Well, whatever you've got down there and then come see me.”