Beautiful, Naked & Dead (Moses McGuire) Read online

  “You planning to slit your throat?” she said.

  “Seems like it would save a lot of people the trouble of killing me.”

  “Yeah, but a knife to the neck? Real messy. Then I got to clean it, and to speak the truth, I am bone tired, so why don’t you let me fix you up?”

  “Go to it little girl,” I said, handing her the buck knife. She cocked an eyebrow and took a pair of tweezers out of her bag. She reached up on her tiptoes to get to my neck.

  “Ok, we have established you’re a real tall guy, now sit down so I can fix your goddamn neck and get some sleep,” she said. I sat on the tub and she started to dig the tweezers into my wounds. My jaw locked as the pain burned up to my head. Hiding the pain I looked stone faced up at her eyes. She showed no more emotion than if she was carving a steak. She noticed the fresh tattoo image of her sister on my shoulder, tracing a finger over the healing skin without comment. Her eyes followed the scars running up into my scalp and down to the ragged bullet scar in my chest. “This ain’t your first time at the rodeo,” she said with a little admiration, and went back to digging. To keep my mind away from the pain I let my eyes roam, down her neck, down to the lace and satin, and creamy soft skin spilling over it. What is it about cleavage that makes me lose my mind? Makes me want to get lost in those soft curves and never return to my life. One, two, three, she popped the chunks of glass out of my flesh. Noticing where I had been looking, she didn’t chastise me or feign modesty, she just gave me a slight smile. She dabbed a washcloth in vodka from a flask in her purse and cleaned the wounds. Man she knew how to travel, never leave home without a flask, an automatic, and a medical-grade pair of tweezers. She was my kind of girl.

  “You’ll need to get some bandages, but I don’t think you’ll die, not from this at least,” she said, taking a short snort off the flask. I left her with the shotgun and instructions not to open the door. After a quick stop at a small drug store for bandages and extra strength aspirin, I went searching for a junkyard. Bullet holes tend to attract attention from the law dogs. At Trading Post Bob’s Junkyard, I found an old Crown Vic, it was rusted and dented, the engine was gone, but the glass was in useable condition. It also had a pitted but serviceable side-view mirror. Taking my toolbox out of the trunk I worked to remove the windshield and side window. With sun came heat. I took off my shirt, enjoying the sweat as it ran down my back. It was simple work, no moral judgments to make, no instant life changing decisions. Removing the chrome trim, I used a screwdriver to pop the rubber gasket surrounding the glass. Sixty-seven dollars and several hours later I was back on the road. At Pep Boys I bought a small tin of bondo and some black spray paint. I filled the bullet holes in the parking lot, and painted them over. Scanning the Crown Vic, it looked as if nothing had happened. Our trouble in the mountains was a whisper of a memory. Just one more nightmare waiting to wake me up.

  I pawned the Rolex for half its value, with no questions asked and no I.D. shown. Driving back the flashing lights cut though the sunshine. “Off Track Betting!” “Best Odds In Town!” “Be A Winner!” I had a fat roll in my pocket and no reason I could think of not to double it. Looking down I saw my knuckles white on the wheel. Things are fine when you want them, it’s when you need them you better look out. Marilyn pouted from the face of the cookie jar on the floor. I knew there would be no happy gambling today.

  I let myself quietly into the motel room. Cass was asleep, the covers pulled back exposing her long muscular leg. Brown curly ringlets haloed her face. Asleep she looked even more like Kelly. Sitting in a comfortable chair I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. Her heart shaped face with those full lips, lips built for kissing. Cass’ eyes fluttered then opened, she looked for a moment at me, then spoke. “What the hell are you staring at?” she asked without a smile.

  “You…I was staring at you. Just wondering how the fuck I got in this mess,” I said hardening. “You wanna tell me who those punks I buried were?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Not good enough.”

  “It’s the truth.” Climbing off the bed she moved to me, her face forming a sultry smile. “I do know you saved my life, if there is any way I can repay you, let me know.” Her hand went up, resting on my shoulder. Every cell in my body screamed for me to take her to bed, forget my troubles and get lost in her flesh. Standing up I looked straight into her deep brown eyes.

  “Listen little girl, I’m not a John. The pouting coquette bullshit doesn’t do squat for me, got it?” I lied. “My dick don’t even get hard when I’m on the run. Now, I just killed some men, I don’t give a fuck about them. What I do care about is who sent them. If I’m going to be looking over my shoulder I need to know who I’m looking for.” Her smile faded, and she sat back down on the bed.

  “I need some coffee.”

  “And I need some answers.”

  “Then go get me some coffee, cream no sugar.”

  “And let you slip out the back door? I don’t think so.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. You’re good at running, why don’t we see how you are at sticking.” After a long pause she finally got I wasn’t budging an inch. She sank back into the bed.

  “A few years ago Kelly and I moved to San Francisco…” she said, speaking to the ceiling. “We had nothing but the clothes on our backs and a few dollars we’d stolen from the old bastard when we split Indiana. Kelly always dreamed of San Francisco, she called it the Emerald City by the Bay. But if the all-powerful Oz lived there, we never found him. We got jobs dancing at the Barbary Coast. I didn’t want to at first, but my wild sister said it would be fun. What the hell else could we do that would bring in instant cash? She was a natural, from the minute she hit that stage she seemed to know all the moves. They’d pay extra if we danced together, something about naked twins made the dollars come flying. It wasn’t so bad. We’d smoke a little boo, cover each other in whipped cream and have a pajama party, and they would throw money at us. We had plenty of offers to sleep with the customers, seems most men fantasize about doing twins. We could have gotten rich if I had been willing to cross that line.” Confusion rained down on me. The Kelly I had known was too shy to ever strip, but I didn’t say anything, afraid if I did Cass might clam up again. “Kelly told me it was just like what we’d already had done to us, but this time we’d get paid. But I couldn’t do it. Kind of funny considering where I wound up. Anyway, Kelly started dating some old guy she met at the club. She said she wasn’t fucking him but I could tell she was lying. That innocent hick act of hers didn’t play with me. He would shower her with expensive jewelry, which we hocked for cash. It was a sweet deal, and if she didn’t want to call it prostitution, who was I to judge her. One night, she came home late from a date with the guy. She was in a panic, she had blood on her shirt. She said she had seen a bad thing, the less I knew the better. She said we had to leave town, fast. That we should split up, twins would be too easy to track. We had to change our names. From that day forward we were Cass and Kelly. She said when I got settled to send a letter to the LA post office general delivery under the name Lotta Love. The last time I saw her was in the SF airport. She hugged me and promised we’d be back together soon, then I headed out to Vegas. When I heard two mob boys were looking for me at the Cock’s Roost I took off…” Rolling onto her side she looked at me, “That’s the truth Moses, every sad part of it.” I nodded my head slowly, then stood up and walked out. I had to get away from her story. If it was true, then everything I’d known about Kelly was false.

  I walked down to a corner liquor store. On the street cars cruised happily by, the sun was shining and all was right in their world. My world on the other hand was crumbling. Kelly had played me for a chump, here I thought she was the one pure thing in my life and I was just another squid to be played. Had any of it been true? Were we even friends? I bought a fifth of Seagram’s and a bottle of ginger ale. I sat in the Crown Vic and poured myself a stiff one. I picked up Maril
yn hoping to find some answers in the ashes. So what if Kelly had been less than honest, maybe she wasn’t the angel I had made her out to be. I had loved her, that was true. Maybe loving someone meant you accepted who they were. She had accepted me with all my dark crap, or was she using me as a shield, a dark knight to protect her? If so, she’d chosen the wrong man. Maybe I should have put the key in and driven away, left Cass behind me and never looked back. But I had given my word. With Marilyn and whiskey in hand I went back to the motel.

  Confronted with the ashes of her dead sister, Cass lost it. Tears rolled freely down her cheeks. Now it was concrete, Kelly wasn’t going to pop out of the bathroom and say it was all a big joke. I wanted to comfort her, give her a shoulder to cry on. Instead I sat in the chair and poured a fresh drink. I placed the bottle on the nightstand. If she wanted a drink she could get one. She curled up, holding Marilyn to her chest murmuring quietly to it. Grief was a solo act, we all did it in our own private way. I was sullenly working on my third drink when she got up and took a shower. She left the door open a crack so I could catch glimpses of her through the pebbled glass. I turned my back on her. Someone had done a real job on these girls, someone convinced them that sex was the most they had to offer men. It was hard-wired into their systems, a default setting that had to have been placed there at a young age. It played on like a ghost in the machine, overriding grief, fear and even love. Maybe the bastard I should be hunting was farther back in their past. The dead end street Kelly was traveling on started way before I met her. But the punk who pulled the trigger was going down, he ended any chance for her to ever recover.

  “They have to die,” Cass said, drying her hair. It was as if she’d been reading my mind. Her tears were gone now, replaced by a set jaw and cold hard eyes.

  “Yes they do, but we have to find them first, what’s his name?”

  “Whose?”

  “The rich cat Kelly was fucking.” I said with more edge than I intended.

  “Gino T, Ter-something. He was old school Italian, diamond pinky ring, gold chains, hairy chest and the manners of a pig. He looked at us girls like he was judging a piece of beef. Torelli! Yeah, that was his name, Gino Torelli.”

  “Then he’s where we start.” Images of a fat Guinea sweating on top of Kelly flooded my brain. The whiskey and lack of sleep washed over me like a warm rain. It all suddenly felt too big to handle. I wanted to climb into bed and pull the covers over my head. I wanted to be back at the dog park watching Angel play. I wanted to be anywhere but here. Crunching down six whites I gulped the rest of my drink. Locking the bathroom door I took a long cold shower. It felt like needles on my skin but I could feel my blood rushing to warm me. The speed and cold water evaporated my sluggishness. Putting on a clean pair of jeans and fresh tee-shirt I was ready for action.

  “Let’s roll,” I told Cass.

  “To where?” she asked.

  “San Francisco, I want to get clear of Nevada in case they find those graves.”

  Driving out of Reno I winked goodbye to the glittering gambling dens, free from their draw for the moment. I could hear them laughing, they knew I’d be back sooner or later. Cass told me she thought the blood on Kelly was sugar daddy Gino’s, and that he was probably dead. It wasn’t much to go on, a name and a city, but it was all we had.

  In Walmart she bought some hair bleach and a pair of scissors. At a truck stop she went into the ladies room, twenty minutes later she came out as a different girl. Her curls were now cut to shoulder length and honey blonde. I was stunned by the transformation, she looked like Marilyn’s twin sister.

  “What, you don’t like?” she said pouting her lips.

  “No, you did fine, nobody will recognize you,” I said turning for the car. She caught my shoulder turning me to look at her.

  “Do you like it?” she said, a twinkle in her eye.

  “I said you did fine, now let’s roll.” After that we drove for a while in silence. She was still putting on the pout. We purred down Highway 80, through the Sierras. We crossed the state line without any problems, no we didn’t have any fruit or vegetables, did I forget to mention we left some corpses in Nevada? Well they didn’t ask, so I didn’t tell.

  “Were you one of her lovers?” Cass asked, breaking the silence as we pasted Truckee.

  “No, I thought I was her friend.” I kept my eyes on the road. But she saw through me anyway.

  “You were in love with her. You still are, I’ve seen the way you look at me. But trust me, I’m not her. She always had the way with men, it was like she could sense who they wanted her to be and that’s who she’d become. In high school she could have had any boy she wanted, but she wound up screwing the gym teacher. He was a burly bear. Yeah, you were her type,” she said with a wry smile. “Big, strong, a bit too old and a lot too dangerous. I’m just surprised you weren’t lovers. Maybe she saw you needed a friend more than sex.” I flinched, forcing my face into neutral. “That’s it, isn’t it?” I didn’t answer. I couldn’t believe Kelly had played me like that. Was I that transparent? As I thought about it I realized I was kin to these sisters. We were all children of the battle zone. Growing up in violence you learned to duck and weave, you learned how to read the signs and become whoever you needed to be to keep from getting whacked. At Donner Pass I pulled into a rest area to make a fresh drink; Cass arched an eyebrow, but I didn’t care. I needed the whiskey to take the edge off the speed I was popping like Altoids, and I needed the speed because it had been too many days without sleep. Crunching a few whites I sipped the drink.

  “Boy you have more bad habits than a convent.” She said with a grin.

  Pulling out onto the highway I noticed a stone pillar commemorating the Donner Party. They were a true testament to the American spirit, push forward at all costs and eat the dead when necessary. Wasn’t that the American dream in a nutshell.

  CHAPTER 9

  At midnight we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, Cass was asleep and I was in a drug driven haze. Somewhere around the Sacramento delta the lines between real and surreal had blurred. Fog swirled dancing in the beams of the headlights. Orange cables and girders dripped and bent at impossible angles, like a giant braided steel spider web it waited to catch low flying dreams. The bridge under our tires beat out a steady tip tapping rhythm counter punching to Iggy’s Afro Idiot CD. Where would I be without music? It had been my one true friend. From my first Stones LP, music always filled the empty void I swam in.

  Through the fog and steel, jewels sparkled calling our names. The city lights drawing us in like so many sailors before us. Calling us to crash on their rocks, this city of sirens. San Francisco, with its historic promise of magic and wonder. Built to fleece the gold miners coming and going to the fields up north, back then it had more brothels than churches and more saloons than schools. Destroyed by earthquake and fire it rose from the ashes, bigger and grander than before. In the sixties it called the youth of America to crash on its rocks, what started in peace, love, and LSD ended with heroin and STD’s. In the sixties the kids took to the streets and said fuck you to the government. In the seventies the government took the belt to them, and we’ve been paying the price ever since. War on drugs, war on music content, war on all that was strange and different. The tragic truth is, start a war with your kids and you wind up with drive-bys and Columbine. Just like two plus two equals four, it’s simple old school math.

  The Detroit beast cut through the fog, rising up over the near vertical streets, then swooping down past neat rows of meticulously painted Victorians. San Francisco was the closest thing to a European style city we had in the states, but its underbelly wasn’t elegant or quaint, it was pocked with strip clubs and junkies, pimps and sailors, drug dealers and dot com fast money artists. God I loved this city. The new media money may have caused the property values to skyrocket and driven out the artists, but it fed the world I swam in. The more money they got, the more sex, drugs and rock-n-roll they bought. And when the bubble burst my peop
le bought their shit at five cents on the dollar, cash these soulless geeks needed just to keep the party going one more day.

  Floating across Market Street I saw a skinny hooker stumbling up the sidewalk. Her blonde wig had slipped sideways showing the stubble of her shaved head, her arm was possessively wrapped around a drunk business guy sporting a goatee and a badly rumpled suit. Watching them, I knew I was home. Like Tom Joad said, “Wherever there’s a young girl selling herself to a fat old man, wherever there’s a bad drug deal going down twisted look for me and I’ll be there.”

  I found us a room at a flophouse on O’Farrell, across the street from the Barbary Coast and several other strip clubs. If you were in town on shore leave and wanted to see some tits, O’Farrell was your street. Unlike in LA where strip clubs dot the map and piss off the neighborhood improvement folks, up here they concentrate them all on one strip and turn it into a tourist destination. The night manager was a pimply kid with the bone thin body of a long time friend of Sister Morphine. He barely glanced up when I carried the sleeping Cass into the elevator. I tried to wake her in the car but she was out cold, in the small room I put her into the bed. I knew I should sleep but my heart was still hammering away from the speed. Objects in the room seemed to glow with their own interior light source. Through the cheap woven curtains the neon called to me with its candy land colors and its promise of a good time. Oh yeah, this was a town that would love you long time G.I.