Stinky emerged from beneath the counter and stared up at Dee Dee in the dark. They exchanged conspiratorial glances.
She stared at the kitty and heard a voice inside her head say, “Stealing isn’t right.”
“Who said that?” Dee Dee scanned the room. “Where are you?”
“Down here,” said Stinky. He smiled up at her, his green eyes glowing in the moonlight.
“So you can talk?” Dee Dee whispered.
“Yes, and I can tell Roland his new chef is a thief.”
“Why didn’t you talk to me before?”
“Because I didn’t have anything to blackmail you with … before.”
Dee Dee could hear the tone of superiority in the voice. “I’m just borrowing it,” Dee Dee said. “When I win at the casino boat tonight I’ll put back what I borrowed and keep the winnings. I’m gonna win tonight, I can feel it. And, besides, I can tell him you’re stealing his voodoo stuff,” countered Dee Dee, nudging the glass vial with the toe of her shoe.
“I’m just borrowing it,” Stinky mocked.
Dee Dee and Stinky stared each other Mexican-standoffishly.
“OK, crazy fish cutter,” said Stinky. “I’ll keep your secret if you keep mine.”
There is some subconscious instinct, some unwritten rule that says you must squander ill-gotten gains as quickly as possible. Some strange force compels people, who have been successful in stealing, winning, or conning the universe out of a wad of money, to piss it away on a whim … like lottery winners who somehow manage to squander millions in a matter of months and end up worse off than before their winning number came up.
Or maybe it’s just stupidity.
Whatever the motivation, later that night Cutter Andrews still sat at the poker table, twelve hours after he had first plopped down a stack of chips, visions of winning a fortune dancing in his head. The casino had queried Hussey’s bank account from the joint account ATM card and advanced Cutter thirty thousand dollars against the account balance. Cutter had parlayed the money into close to fifty thousand dollars in his first two hours at the gaming table. In the following two hours he had managed to lose his winnings as well as ten thousand dollars of Hussey’s money. He knew he should quit before he lost any more of it. A nagging little voice in his head told him to get up, walk over to the cashier and cash out. He stared at the twenty thousand dollars’ worth of chips left stacked in front of him. Ignoring the little voice, he anteed up for the next hand.
“Why do we do it?” said Dee Dee to no one in particular as she stared at her cards. “Why do we keep fixing a beat-up old car time after time when we could have bought a new one for less? Or stay in the same rotten relationship long after we know we should have moved on? Why do we sit at the poker table when we keep losing and losing? Maybe we all are all dumber than dirt.” Dee Dee had been on a horrible losing streak all evening. She had lost all of the money she had stolen from the till and maxed out her credit card with a twenty thousand dollar advance.
Dee Dee, proudly displaying an IQ marginally above dirt, held on to her ace and dropped the other cards face down on the felt-covered table. Luckily she was breathtakingly beautiful and the universe looks out for drunks, idiots and beautiful women. And, lucky for Dee Dee, there was always someone even more stupid. Tonight the Buzzards of Destiny were shining on her. As fate would have it, that person happened to be sitting the same gaming table.
Cutter Andrews, a man who would have to be graded on a curve to get better marks than dirt, sat across from Dee Dee frowning at a handful of cards. As the game progressed, Dee Dee kept stealing glances at Cutter. She noticed his muscled arms in his polo shirt, his tousled sandy hair and his dazzling crooked smile.
Dee Dee fell in lust with this five-card stud.
“Ace hole! Gonna club you to death you stinking ace-hole,” Dee Dee snarled, staring at the lone card in her hand.
“I’ll take four cards,” Dee Dee said, now calm, as if she had never made the outburst, to the tall, Native American dealer dressed in an immaculate white shirt, bow tie and a headband with a feather dangling from the side.
The dealer dealt her a card from the deck with hands bejeweled with turquoise and silver.
“Dirty bitch, fucking nasty bitch! Club her, club you, club your ass you queen bee bitch.”
The other gamblers at the table stared.
“Sorry,” said Dee Dee. “I have intermittent Tourette’s syndrome. I start cussing for no reason, I can’t help it.”
Hesitantly, the dealer dealt her second card.
“Bearded fucker,” Dee Dee hooted, “club him too, king of the assholes!”
The man to Dee Dee’s right laid his hand face down on the table.
The dealer slipped another card off the top of the deck and pushed it toward Dee Dee, keeping it at arm’s length.
“Jack off, jack off, jack off! Club the fucking jack off!”
The other four people at the table continued to stare at her.
The dealer slid Dee Dee the last card.
“Ten little fucking Indian pigs in a smallpox blanket,” Dee Dee shouted at the dealer, “a fucking smallpox on all your houses, uh … tee pees. Club all ten of you heathen sons of bitches!” Dee Dee looked up from the dealer’s brass name tag that read, ‘Cody Counting Cards’ and found a face staring at her with murderous menace. Virtual smoke curled from his ears and his black eyes burned with indignation.
“Uhhh, sorry, Tonto,” Dee Dee said. “It’s the occasional Tourette’s, I can’t control it.”
Regaining his composure, the dealer turned to the man to Dee Dee’s right and raised an eyebrow. The man nodded to his fan of face-down cards lying on the table and shook his head.
Then next player, then the next, folded until the dealer turned to Cutter.
“You folding too?” said the dealer.
“I’m thinking, chief,” said Cutter, staring at his cards. “By the way, I want to be a dealer too. You got any jobs for dealers open on this boat?”
“Talk to me later,” said Cody. “Right now play your hand, everybody’s waiting.”
“Raise.” Cutter shoved approximately ten thousand dollars’ worth of multicolored chips into the center of the table.
The Seminole dealer raised both eyebrows, dropped his jaw at Cutter and shook his head. He turned to Dee Dee, lowered both eyebrows then re-raised one.
“See and raise, fucker!” said Dee Dee, as she pushed every chip she had into the center of the pot, about twenty thousand dollars’ worth.
“OK,” said Cutter. He shoved the rest of his chips, Hussey’s tuition money and his life savings, into the center of the table. “I’ll call. What you got?”
Everyone at the table, including the dealer answered him in unison, “A club royal flush you idiot!”
Dee Dee dropped her cards to the table face-up and grinned. Sure enough a royal flush in clubs stared back at the players.
“I guess Roland is right,” Dee Dee said to herself. “Some people are dumber than dirt.”
As the dealer gathered up the cards and started shuffling, Cutter broached the subject of employment once again. “So, Chief, what about that job?”
Cody leveled his eyes at Cutter. “Son, anyone with half as much sense as a day-old kitten could have figured out that woman’s cussing tell. You start with an a-hole, add a bitch, king of the a-holes, a jack off and ten little Indians, club them all and you get a royal flush in clubs.”
“I’ll do better next time.”
“Son, there won’t be a next time. Not only won’t I hire you, I’m going to ban you from this casino. I never thought I’d say this about anyone, but you’re too stupid to gamble. You’re almost retarded.”
Beneath a foreboding moon, Cutter, now penniless, slouched across the Santeria parking lot toward the certain Golgothic wrath of Hussey. As he passed the dumpster behind the kitchen he heard a sudden cacophony of cat howls and stopped in his tracks. Atop the dumpster perched Stinky, howling an invitation to al
l of the felines in his dominion to come to a feast. A clowder of cats gathered quickly in a semi-circle around the dumpster and howled back in anticipation. As the cats looked up at Stinky hungrily, tails swishing and mouths watering from the pungent scent of seafood, Stinky nosed bits of various fish, crab and octopus parts, leftovers from the chef Dee Dee’s table of toxic tidbits, she had prepared for the next day, toward the tabbies.
Stinky had laced their fishy feast with the zombie extract he had liberated from behind the bar.
“Eat up my new minions,” Stinky purred, “my army of zombie worshippers”. As Stinky watched with anticipation, the cats devoured the fishy bits and began to drop like flies, twitching and howling beneath his pious gaze. Gasping, choking and clawing the asphalt, the cats, each and every one, went home to kitty Jesus.
Stinky howled. “What’s happening? They aren’t supposed to die! They’re supposed to become zombies!” Stinky gazed over the carnage he had wrought, aghast. He had become the Jim Jones of fugu. So far all he had achieved was mass murder. Some sacrifices had to be made on the path to absolute power, Stinky rationalized. Kill a single cat, you are a murderer; kill a thousand cats, you are a conqueror; kill them all, you are God.
“I am the God of Cats!” Stinky howled at the moon. “But without followers I’m just another egotheistic kitty in a dogma eat dogma world. People don’t worship cats like they used to, sure, maybe a few crazy old ladies and the occasional serial killer, the kind of quiet guy who lives alone and has lots of cats, but not like they used to. The only worshipers I can find are other cats, and pussy cats make difficult worshipers. They don’t herd like human sheeple, they don’t chew Christ crackers playing swallow the leader. Until I can find out a working zombie recipe, a way to subjugate my feline followers, sacrifices must be made”.
“I didn’t just see a mass kitty cat suicide,” Cutter muttered as he slunk up the stairs to his room.
Chapter Seven
Bad Kitty
Roland opened the recently renamed and redecorated Fugu Lounge the next morning and went about setting up the bar for the opening day’s business, cutting limes and lemons and pouring buckets of ice into the ice bin behind the bar. He gathered up the trash bags, full to overflowing with remnants of the old Blue Flamingo, tucked the discarded stuffed swordfish under his arm, and headed for the dumpster through the kitchen.
What he found in the alley was so terrible it made his jaw drop and his stomach lurch. He dropped the stuffed fish on his foot. Dead cats lay scattered in the alley behind the restaurant. It wasn’t possible to swing a dead cat without hitting … a dead cat. Furry, feline corpses littered the area around the dumpster, their faces twisted in death masks of agony and their whiskers stained with a dusting of purple powder.
Roland dropped the trash bags, stumbled back against the kitchen door, wide-eyed and appalled at the horrific scene.
Stinky, his demented eyes shining with menace, sat regally, atop the dumpster surveying the wholesale death he had wrought.
“Jumping Jesus! What happened here?”
“It wasn’t Jesus,” Stinky’s voice rang icily in Roland’s head, “it was me.”
Roland stepped over the feline bodies, lying where they had succumbed around the dumpster. It looked as though a cat cult had been passing out catnip Kool-aid.
“Wh … why … Stinky?” Ronald stuttered. He came nose to nose with the smug pussy. “Wh … why?”
At this point it would be appropriate to shed some light on Stinky’s background. Stinky came into existence in the blink of an eye thousands of years ago in Carthage, in answer to the summoning of a small group of adolescent boys, drunk on excessive amounts of wine. It wasn’t clear if ‘cat’ is what they swore to worship, but Stinky had heard the call and thought ‘close enough.’ He’d held the title of ‘minor god’ until the Romans sacked Carthage, killing every man, woman and child and sewing salt into the ground so that nothing would ever grow there again.
After witnessing the carnage the Romans had wrought, Stinky realized three things; he liked being a god, he liked witnessing carnage, and he needed a new job.
He headed south, a familiar direction, to Egypt and took the name of Bast. As Bast, he became the dark and hungry cat god of the Egyptians, looking on with indifference as slaves were sealed in pyramids in tribute to his greatness. His armies swept through the ancient world massacring its enemies and leaving death and destruction in its wake. When the Egyptian Empire also fell to the Romans, he moved on, southward again, in search of work. In Central Africa, a throng of his faithful gathered nightly to make blood sacrifices to the great beast until the ground was spongy with offal and they danced naked, covered in sacrificial blood, beneath the glow of the antediluvian moon. In subsequent jobs, he sat on the steps of Aztec temples beside Montezuma and watched his warriors kick the heads of his enemies through goal posts.
Stinky missed his power, his worshipers and the carnage.
“Everything you think you know about me is true,” Stinky’s voice reverberated in Roland’s head, “I am an evil, twisted, demonic creature. I sacrifice kittens to my dark gods and then I dance around their stiff, decaying bodies. I call upon the unseen powers to smite them and all of their kind and raise me to the ultimate position of power I deserve from atop piles of their dead bodies. I hate baseball, apple pie, the flag and American Idol. And I hate humanity with an unholy blood lust you could not possibly understand with your weak human intellect. Yes, everything you fear about me is true. Oh, and I know where you sleep.”
Roland was almost speechless. “I agree with you about American Idol.” He still did not fully believe the carnage at his feet. “What kind of monster have I adopted?” he rasped as the cat carnage finally registered.
“Monster?” Stinky sniffed, affronted. “You may think that I’m as crazy as a soup sandwich, Charlie Manson, Jeffery Dahlmer, and John Wayne Gayce all rolled into one, equipped with claws and covered in fur, but there is a method to my madness. When my army of zombie cats takes over the world you will see.” He stuck his nose in the air with a certain Jehovian detachment. “I was once a powerful god, thousands of worshipers lay prostrate at my feet and then that one incident took all of that away.”
“Incident?” Roland asked.
“The bubonic plague.” Stinky shook his head. “I told them I was a cat, and cats do have fleas, and that it was an accident, but they didn’t buy it. They said I enjoyed the carnage far too much. Remember Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death? I dictated that to him.”
“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.
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