by Mark Henry
Mrs. Swinton grimaced, but the tears had begun to fall. She embraced me and mumbled something that sounded like, “I knew you were good people” into the lapel of my Versace.
As gently as I could, I pushed her back and turned her toward one of the more genuinely adept huggers in the crowd before releasing her and rolling my eyes. “Jesus fucking Christ. How the hell does she think we’re going to find this guy? I don’t swim.”
Wendy ground her teeth, pissed. She shook a finger, far too rigid for my taste, in my general vicinity. “This is all your fault, Amanda. We have to be in San Francisco by the time that boat docks, or I’m screwed. And if I’m screwed, you’re screwed.”
“Jesus,” Gil said. “You bitches are getting a little Scarface up in here. I might just have to—”
“Do everything in your power to help us find a suitable patsy for this murder?” I finished for him, nodding as instructively as I could manage until he did as well. “Fuck, it’s not even a murder as far as I can tell. It was just a stupid feeding for Christ’s sake. We’ll just throw Mrs. Swinton some possibles and let her get her revenge out quick before anyone’s the wiser.”
“Us? I’m not getting mixed up in another one of your capers, Amanda. I’m done with that shit.”
“Oh come on. We’ll be out of here with time to spare. Promise.”
Wendy’s eyes narrowed to slits, but she followed me back to the car, huffing as she resumed her shotgun seat. The population of Las Felicitas seemed to be largely in a car wreck lookiloo state, bar a few stragglers who’d stepped away for a smoke, so the streets were pretty empty as we pulled away. I brought up a map to the bed and breakfast and set my phone in front of the speedometer.
“You know,” Wendy sighed. “I’m beginning to think you orchestrate all these dramas just to direct all the attention to you. You want me to fail.” Wendy scowled and bit a dainty hunk from the forearm of a vagrant she produced from her purse. It jutted from a rolled down paper bag like a bottle of Mad Dog. “You want me to be penniless and broke, oh no, excuse me, broker than you, and end up with nothing and no one, huddled up under cardboard blankets drinking backwash out of shit-smudged vodka bottles.”
“Jesus. Don’t hold back.”
“Admit it. It’s never been the other way around before and you hate it.”
“I don’t begrudge your success as a drug lord, Wendy. Why would I? I benefit from your triumphs. Gil does too. We can’t wait for you to rule your own private island nation, surrounded by pasty vampires zonked out on your primo cream.”
Wendy stopped mid chew. “Now you’re making fun of me.”
“You want me to give her a Columbian necktie, missus?” A glint caught my eye in the rearview, Abuelita flashing a butterfly knife.
“I thought you were Panamanian,” I said.
Wendy tossed the hunk of meat back into her purse. “Oh for Christ sake. She’s from Bakersfield. Her real name is Jan.”
Abuelita cursed under her breath.
After a few moments of awkward silence, I couldn’t keep it in any longer. “Jan from Bakersfield is now a chola with Sharpie brows?”
“Missus named me Abuelita because I looked like the grandmother on the Mexican hot cocoa box. But I like it. I’m a new woman. This Abuelita is a bad ass.”
Wendy nodded. “I rescued her from the ghettos of Bakersfield for her obvious skill as a jeweler, but when I learned of her affinity for crime, I was smitten. Abby’s a fabulous one-woman exterminator for my cloud cartel.”
“You’re a regular Harriet Tubman.” Gil snickered.
“You better fucking believe it. She was working at a Burger King for chrissakes! Not even an In-n-Out. But she’s a hell of a lot better with her Glock than a burger flipper. Show her, Abby!”
I could feel the woman’s breath on the side of my neck, the chill of steel against the base of my skull. “Wait.”
“So,” Wendy nodded, encouraging agreement. “We’re not going to actually look for the killer?”
“Of course not,” I said, laughing at her naivety.
“We will leave this place the minute your obligation is over?”
“We’re going to act just like the cops do and find someone that could be the killer and call it a day. Easy as pie. I can’t very well jeopardize a relationship with a bookseller. Word spreads and this word would absolutely kill sales.”
“Well at least you have the best intentions at heart.”
“You bet your ass, now let’s motor. I need to wash up and change into something much more provocative if I’m going to lure a potential killer into buying me lots of cocktails.”
Chapter 6
Gil pushed up between the seats as we pulled onto a road with a sign indicating we had reached “The Spit”—why anyone would name an area that is beyond me. Had to be a running joke amongst early mapmakers that got way out of hand—probably the syphilis talking. “Even if you give her patsies, you still need to figure out the motive.”
“Well, it was a wereshark so...the motive is food. Which I think we can all agree is pretty normal, so...”
“What if it’s not?” Abuelita coughed. “What if this shark is an enforcer? Like Abuelita?”
I had to hand it to the old bitch, that was a good question. “So what you’re saying is, the new Miss Sandflea had the actual title to gain? I guess it could have been her. It wouldn’t be the first time a petty title had been the motive for a crime.”
Wendy sneered, nodding her head. “Oh yeah. That pale bitch looked like she’d do just about anything to climb to the top.”
“Of the dune?” I asked, considering the girl I’d been rooting for. Moonglow didn’t seem the type but you never knew. No one looking at me would ever think I was a man-eater (oh, who am I kidding? You’d be a fool to underestimate my ravenous hunger for man meat).
Wait. That didn’t come out right.
“It’s a start. But you’re right about one thing.”
“Yes?” Gil said.
“I think better lubricated. We’ll check into the inn and grab a drink.”
“Umm.” Gil shrugged. “Does this place have wi-fi?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
“Then, I’ll probably turn in for a bit and then meet you later. I need to check on...something.”
Wendy scoffed. “He needs to see if anyone’s sending him dick pics.” She twisted in her seat, throwing her arm around the headrest. “The answer is: obviously. Even vampires are still just men. Cell phone cameras were invented for you to take pictures of your junk. At this point, they’ve all blurred together haven’t they? Just one long dick.”
Gil crossed his arms over his chest. “There are subtle nuances.”
“Bullshit,” I said, laughing. “Cut. Uncut. Long, short, fat, pencil-thin. Whatever. The problem is that they’re usually attached to an asshole.”
“How about you?” I nudged Wendy. “I know you’re up for a drink.”
She shook her head no.
“No?” I shuddered. Something was wrong with my alcoholic world. “What?”
Her eyes widened to pissed-off saucers. “I said, no.”
I glanced in the floorboard. Sure enough. She’d eaten another of the Twix bars...so quickly I hadn’t even noticed. I shook my head slowly. This was not going to end well.
The blacktop of Ocean Lane gave way to gravel and sand, I didn’t notice the sharp tings and knocks battering the undercarriage of the Volvo until a particularly large stone hit and the sound echoed around inside forcing a blood-curdling scream from Wendy, who slammed on the phantom brakes in the footwell of the passenger side, which caused me to reflexively do the same until the SUV had sunk half a foot into the sand.
The wheels spun and spun.
“Really?” I glanced outside into a nighttime that was much darker than Seattle ever was. No aura of artificial light. No street lamps. Moonless.
Gil scrunched up between the seats, scowling. “Why did you do that?”
“Wendy startled
me.”
“I thought someone was shooting at us, of course!”
“Out here?” Gil glanced around, a pale fog bunting the windows. “In the middle of Bumfuck, Washington?”
“Does that happen to you a lot?” I asked. “Gunfights?”
“Not as often as it should,” Gil snipped from the backseat.
Wendy huffed and I hit the gas again only to spin in the sandy divots of a rash decision.
“We’re stuck,” I said, grumbling. “Why don’t you send your maid out to shove a board under the tire?”
“I am not a maid!” Abuelita shouted, rolling up her telenovella magazine into a bat and lunging to whack me upside the head.
Deflecting the assault with a wave of my hand, I glared at Wendy. “You better call her off before I have a Panamanian dinner.”
Abuelita pursed her lips and wound her hands beneath her armpits, mumbling Spanish curses like a machine gun. I found it best to ignore her when she went off like that for absolutely no reason, trying to figure her out was as difficult as making sense of the character dressed as a bee on those shows she watched incessantly in Wendy’s living room—seriously and what’s up with the fake beauty marks? Those shows would lead anyone to believe that there’s a mole epidemic in Mexico.
A facial blemish apocalypse.
While they are, without question, a delicious people, their taste in TV is suspect.
“Stop it!” Wendy spat, glaring at me and then behind her. “Both of you! I don’t want my two best friends fighting. You’ll have to figure out a way to get along.”
“Wait,” Gil said, head cocking to one side. “Two? Amanda and I aren’t fighting.”
She soured. “I meant Abuelita and Amanda, you’ve been demoted, ever since…”
“Here we go,” I said, leaning into my palm.
Wendy gripped the dash and sighed, long and hard—too hard. Her breath turned to a milky fluid that hung in the air, tentacles reaching around her head, zeroing in on Abuelita. The woman, used to Wendy’s careless expulsion of zombie toxin, and already quite infected, bit off some more of the zombie-making breath in big chomping bites. She might not be a maid, but she was a made-in waiting. When she finally died, she’d unfortunately join us for eternity, or until she couldn’t afford to keep her body intact. Then she’d just fall apart and that’d be that. That she continued to inhale the stuff was just plain weird. There wasn’t a viral load that would make her a super-zombie or anything.
It was just wasteful.
I rolled down the window and waved the thinning mass of breath out of the car like a haze of pot smoke before it reached Gil’s undead lungs and embolized quicker than a stake through his heart.
“Just keep it to yourself,” I said, patting her thigh. “You do not want us to talk about that.”
Wendy sneered at him and I was certain she was about to explode and blurt out her suspicions of Gil’s involvement in her expulsion from the Undead Roller Derby League. Never mind the fact that she never once left the bench because, honestly, if she couldn’t manage to operate the four wheels on a car, how was she going to manage eight? Plus, I saw her audition and she only did it because she’d had her thighs worked on at the Reaper Clinic and wanted to show them off in satin short shorts.
I pushed open the door and sank my red-soled Louboutin Pigalle Platos into the loose surface of the lane. We were fucked for transport. The right rear tire was sunk so far into the sandy road the fender had dug in.
“We’re going to have to leave it here and go by foot.”
“And we hate that.” Wendy bristled.
“Yes. Let this be a reminder that if we ever want to get anywhere, it’s best to have you sitting where you can do the least damage.”
“At home?” Gil suggested.
“I didn’t have an actual brake, so…this is all you.”
I waved her off.
While neither taxing nor nearly as fraught with danger as their experience in the alley, the walk to the inn was nonetheless annoying, but that had more to do with the luggage cutting grooves in the sand behind them as though they were dragging their dead pets. Rolling bag my ass. The wheels were as useless as a dramatic plastic surgery reveal without a reality show to capitalize.
Ocean Lane dwindled to a beach path surrounded by the sharpest pampas grass known to man. Once we’d battled our way through it, the blades snagging on every piece of fabric and thankfully not my flesh, it opened back up to reveal our lodgings.
So to speak.
I’d expected a manor befitting the name Bed and Breakfast and not a fifties Ranch-style house that seemed to teeter atop the grassy dunes that lined the windbreak off the wide beach. But sure enough, a sign grew out of a dense patch of dying pampas grass.
The Dunes of Hazard Bed and Breakfast.
“Do you think that’s a reference to that show about the hicks with Boss Hogg?” I asked, tossing a thumb in the sign’s direction.
“Maybe?” was the consensus, though it didn’t seem likely. What kind of a person named their business after a crappy TV show?
Abuelita squeezed in between us, an even sourer arch to her Sharpie-d chola brow. “I seen this kind of place on the TV,” she said, pointing a crooked finger at the squatty B and B. “Gypsy family lives there, twenty or thirty, maybe more, sleeping on floors and using basement for combing out dirty stuffed animals they get from garage sales and dumpsters to put in those claw machines. Kids say ‘I want to play claw, Mommy! Stuffed animals are so cute!’” Abuelita paused to meet each of their eyes dramatically before proclaiming, “End up with scabies.”
“Can’t be,” Wendy said, scanning the yard. “I don’t see any goats.”
“Terrifying.” I yawned. “Skin conditions are no joke. Huh, Wendy?”
“Shut up.”
The first thing I noticed about The Dunes of Hazard’s owner, Mrs. Winterford, wasn’t her disability—the wheelchair seemed more accessory than necessity—it’s that she lounged in it tragically like a Victorian heroine, clutching her pearls, twirling them, as though caught mid-stretch from the couch, reaching for a bon bon. The kind of woman who’d say something like, “Could you just scoot those hard candies over a smidge? Cheers. Thanks.”
The chair was electric and she operated it with a glittery knob that she barely touched, poking it with the tip of her finger as if she were waking a hobo on a bench. The contraption lurched backward.
“Right this way,” she said, eying each of us curiously.
I shuffled in, careful not to get too close to the treachery of her wheels.
“I’m Mrs. Marissa Winterford, of course.” Her accent was southern and the face powdered white with three spots of red, two pats on the cheeks and a smear on the lips. Strange but oddly familiar as though I’d only recently been in her presence. She spread her arms wide as if a round of hugs were in order.
They most definitely were not, so I shot a hand out instead and she took it with a gracious suspicion. “Well, bless your heart,” she said, pulling me down to her traveling boudoir and wrapping me in a shriveled embrace. “You must be Amanda. I would have thought you’d arrive much earlier.”
She leaned in even closer to my ear to whisper, “You made me miss my pageant.”
That was it. I’d seen the woman in the crowd outside the Felicity, busily jotting notes. I’d assumed she was a cub reporter, or whatever the elderly equivalent was. Nag, perhaps. But here she was chiding me for my lack of timeliness. What reason would she have to lie? A better question was, why was she doing it from the comfort of an electric wheelchair when clearly she was ambulatory? Laziness?
I decided it would be best to keep quiet about her whereabouts since I didn’t have anywhere else to rest my rotting corpse than her—hopefully—fresh sheets. Plus, maybe it was just one of the old lady’s quirks, like how Gil sometimes spritzes his victim’s necks with Formula 409 before he bites them.
“Oh. I’m terribly sorry,” I lied. “Wendy back there had some intestinal i
ssues that forced us to stop every few miles and find a potty. I’m sure you understand.”
She hadn’t, of course. Not yet. But I’d heard gurgling.
Wendy’s hand went to her stomach suddenly, reminded of her liaison with the human candy making its way toward the racetrack of her intestines. Her face took on the seething glower of the recently convicted and, for once, I couldn’t take any pleasure in it. The Twix had been pure absentminded autopilot, the kind of thing I'd done hundreds of times. A cruelty we shared for laughs. Well mostly it was me that laughed, but you get the gist.
I was reminded of my mother then and her accusation that I’d be the worst possible friend. Was I? Was I still? It seemed the last few years as a zombie had been an education in how to get along. Sure there’d been backsliding. I don’t always enjoy the company of others, but how do you tell someone that? I found it best to mock them incessantly until they achieved a healthy distance.
It just never worked with Wendy or Gil. Again, too similar, I guess.
Mrs. Winterford threw up her hands in sympathy. “Dear God, do I ever? Poor child. I’m lactose intolerant as the day is long. And damn it if that stuff isn’t hidden away in everything that’s delicious. You’re telling me there’s milk in a damn scone? God bless it.” She rolled passed and wrapped Wendy up in her clutches. She brought her inside by the hand, Wendy sneering the whole way and stumbling to avoid track marks across her tiny feet.
The foyer door opened into a living room that hadn’t seen a decorator since disco was young. A tired and saggy sectional sat in a sunken conversation pit accessed by a short flight of stairs and surrounding a fire orange metal fireplace that fed smoke through the vaulted ceiling through a shiny pipe all lit by a spray of gigantic glass dandelions. The only thing the room was missing was a gaggle of porn actors and actresses, that hard-working dick and poon obscured by enough pubic hair to rid the world of childhood propecia.
“You like?” Mrs. Winterford grinned with pride.
Gil was first to respond. He lumbered in, gaze nostalgic and a smile creeping onto his lips that told me he was reliving a “moment.” “You’ve really captured a moment in time here, Mrs. Winterford.”