Page 4 of Race With The Devil

CHAPTER TWO

Unity

I was about to step over to Wolf, surrounded by rough and tumble bikers turned into mushy sweethearts at the sight of a fluffy puppy. It even occurred to me to ask this pilot if there were any more backyard pups from that litter, but I lived in a tiny apartment down on Bargain Boulevard. I could never own one. Which was sheer torture, working at Doggie Style Grooming, making all those adorable dogs beautiful. Well, most of them were adorable. Some were just absolute rats.

But the second Ford said, “selling fentanyl and killing people,” my heart thudded to a stop. I’d lived with thugs and maniacs my entire life, and I did not approve of Tutti Morgan for Lavinia. Neither did Knoxie’s old lady Bellamy, who’d been raised in a nut house community up in Merry-Go-Round Canyon where they shoved things inside your vag in the name of “therapy.” But Lavinia was pregnant, and the fuckwad reluctantly asked her to marry him, so we had to pretend to be behind her. Let God do the accounting when it was over, you know?

But good old Wolf pricked up his ears and brought the fluffer over. A wave of crusty outlaws, some of them wrinkled, pierced, and smelly, flowed with him. I put down Lavinia’s dog and sunk my fingers into the fluffer’s fur knuckle-deep, along with about six other guys. We sort of spilled out into the hallway. Sock Monkey, the Prospect who had probably been guarding the door during church, grabbed ahold of the leash of Lavinia’s dog, Diesel. Sock Monkey had a crush on me. Bellamy had told me.

I said, “He’s got quite a rep for manufacturing drugs, but I’ve never heard of him killing anyone.” I just wanted to draw them out, to hear more. It frankly didn’t surprise me if he’d killed anyone. Bellamy and I were hugely familiar with the bruises that came from being beaten or tossed around. Lavinia displayed them frequently. We used to say things to her but hadn’t brought it up since she’d gotten engaged to the wifebeater. “He can make dope out of the shit in your toilet.”

Wolf nodded eagerly. “He’s a top-flight chemist, which is why we work with him. Not anymore, though, since three people died in comas on his product last night.”

I hadn’t heard of that. Sideshows weren’t my style, but I know Lavinia attended them. “One wasn’t Lavinia, I presume?”

“Three guys,” said Knoxie, as he tried to take the doggo out of Wolf’s arms. A tug-of-war ensued, Knoxie and Duji on one side, and Wolf and Faux Pas on the other. Everyone wanted a piece of this darling pupper.

I wound up winning, because no man can hold out against a woman with an amazing pair of knockers expertly displayed in a push-up bra, though the November days were getting chilly. It just brought mens’ eyes lower, past my bold flaming anchor ink to my bullet-hard nipples, stiff against the cold. Ah, the sweetums’ fur was as soft as the footfalls of departed spirits against my bare chest. “I know what,” I said, not at all trying to avoid the pupper’s kisses. “I’ll call Tutti to come down here to get Diesel. Maybe we’ll find out something from him.”

Ford seemed surprised I could come up with a genius plan like that. “That’s a good idea. Here, let me take that pup so you can—“

“No, allow me,” said Roman, a former rock star turned biker.

“Give me the honors,” insisted Faux Pas.

Even the gruff mineralogist Sax Saxonberg got in on the act. “This baby’s way too cool for the likes of you, Wolf,” he said. “Got any more of them, Tanner?”

“I’m not a breeder or seller of dogs,” said the pilot. That’s when I noticed how built he was. Under the tight T-shirt that proclaimed he worked for Paws-n-Gauze, he was carved like a Thanksgiving turkey. Something deep in me pinged at this awareness, some ancient acknowledgement that he was hot, I was hot, and we should stand closer together.

But his arrogant, assholish speech sort of ruined all that.

“I just brought this guy here as a favor to a mutual friend. I’ll have to show you the ropes, Wolf. Exercises to put Beetle through.”

“Beetle!” cried Wolf. “I like it! It’s like he’s . . . Beetle.”

Tanner went on. “I don’t want him around no drugs. You don’t do drugs, do you, Wolf?”

Wolf looked askance, forming his mouth into a “no.” But no sound came out.

“No, he doesn’t,” said Lytton with finality. “He fires up a bowl of my excellent medicine once in awhile, but he absolutely does none of that manufactured trash.”

I smiled at Lytton. I knew his flagship product, Young Man Blue, well. I had posed for several print advertisements for him. I was becoming known, at least in Arizona, as “Unizilla,” the inked and pierced babelicious model who posed fiercely in in barely-there two-piece suits paddling canoes, hands over my bare boobs in grow rooms, made up as a skull for Day of the Dead, or sticking out my ample ass in a thong. Knoxie always said I could make a mint performing for his old boss at Triple Exposure Studios—“It’s What the World is Coming To”—but so far I’d refrained. Performing sex acts in public reminded me too much of my shitty childhood. I was making a name for myself as a ganjapreneur. I’d been hired to attend a few cannabiz expos, just posing outrageously, such as squeezing two ice cream cones down my front, to draw customers while getting stoned out of my gourd. Good thing I had a high tolerance for cannabis.

Tanner was on the verge of a story. In his gruff, gravelly voice, he continued. “In Tasmania there’s an enormous opium poppy field, strictly for medical purposes, you know. Get this. Users climb the fences, ignore the security cameras, and fill themselves on poppy straw and sap. They stagger around, ruining the crop, passing out, having to be carried out the next day. You can’t throw the book at these trespassers. These mooching thieves are wallabies.”

Now my mouth was an O. “No shit,” I whispered.

“Now that’s adorable,” said Duji, pointing at the floor. “Like Peter Rabbit busting into Mr. McGregor’s garden.”

“Pretty darned cute,” said Tanner, “though the repeat offenders are seriously addicted. You know what? You’ll notice that what’s irresistible in critters is loathsome in people. We laugh at the high wallabies, but we’d be mortified if they were Tasmanian children, you get me?”

“I get you,” Ford said heatedly. “I have two tykes, as do most of us.”

“Except me,” piped up Wolf. “That’s one reason I wanted a dog so bad.”

I could relate to Wolf. My buddy Bellamy was infertile, as was I. Both for very similar reasons. Bellamy made up for it by riding her Harley with an attached sidecar for her very noble and badass Husky.

“I’m a grandfather,” Duji said, eyes flashing. “I’d bury anyone who gave any of them the shit this Tutti Morgan sells. If that makes me a hypocrite, so be it. It’s a living.”