Rescued By A Kiss (The New Orleans Go Cup Chronicles Book 1) (6 page)

Once the elevator started moving, the light went out. Julia, Isabella, and I sat in the dark riding down. Julia said, “I hope nothing crawls on us.” Then we heard what sounded like gunfire. I worried about Sam. I realized we were sitting ducks in this elevator and not from bullets. Bullets I wasn’t afraid of, OK, maybe a little afraid, but I was not nearly as afraid of them as I was of a roach. What Julia said put me in heart-racing, palm-sweating terror. I started breathing harder. Then, she had to add, “Well, if something does, you can’t do anything about it. You will be like one of those feral cats caught in a Have-A-Heart Trap thrashing around. This elevator reminds me of those and I bet it’s making you crazy.”

Julia only made me dwell on my biggest phobia sitting in the dark with nowhere to go. My hands felt wet and my knees were rubbery. I thought of my last roach encounter. It was in my mother’s kitchen two days ago, and I felt trapped there too.

I had put a glass in the kitchen sink when I saw him through the window moving up the back stairs straight for the open door. I had no way to stop him. I couldn’t get to the door in time to close and lock it. My sister was in the habit of leaving the door wide open. It wouldn’t have mattered, they had ways of getting in.

I moved back to the far side of the refrigerator hoping it would shield me from his view. I knew he could tell where I was hiding and could smell my fear. He began moving straight for me. I ran. I ran as fast as I could up the hall toward the living room. I couldn’t outrun him. He flew after me, up the hall, closing in. I stumbled into the living room and fell behind the Lazy Boy where my father sat. Dad looked up, startled.

“Don’t let him get me. Kill him. He’s coming right at me!” I screamed, but no one rushed to help me. I froze, powerless to help myself. He was aiming for my face, moving at me, fast, very fast. “Stop him!” I gulped down breaths of air between sobs for help. “Please,” I pleaded and grabbed my father.

“Really, Brandy? It’s only a roach,” my mother said. Her head didn’t move. Her eyes peered over her glasses while she continued to sew rhinestones and sequins onto my sister’s costume. She made no effort to move or come to my aid, and the costume needed to get finished for Sherry to wear on Mardi Gras.

“It’s flying! Kill it . . . before . . . before . . . before . . . it lands on me!” I couldn’t breathe and speak at the same time.

Rolling his Times Picayune newspaper into a make shift swatter my dad rose from his chair and gave my mother a disapproving look. He said, “This is all your fault. She wouldn’t be like this if you hadn’t terrorized her when she was a baby. You did this.”

My mother would threaten me as a child by saying she would put a roach on me if I didn’t take a nap, or be still, or keep quiet, or eat my food. She used it to make me do something I didn’t want to do and she was determined to make me do it. It had a lasting impression. That was when I was two, and now its almost twenty five years later.

Dad swatted it to the floor. The roach ran under the sofa and he scrambled after it pushing furniture away from the wall to find the critter. He moved the sofa, then a chair and an end table before he stomped it into the afterlife declaring, “It’s dead.”

“You’re wrecking my living room.” my mother said.

“Are you sure it’s dead? Did you stomp it? You need to stomp on it.”

“Yes, I am sure it’s dead.” Dad was standing there watching the dead roach to see if it was going to move.

“I need to see it dead. You know, sometimes they play dead, and after you put them in the garbage can, later when you lift the lid, they fly out at you because they’re pissed.” I required confirmation to move on with my life.

“Well, come see,” Dad said.

“Oh for God’s sake,” said my mother.

“This is all your fault,” he repeated to her while I surveyed the roach’s corpse. It looked enormous, at least a foot long, lying on its back with its big fuzzy legs folded stiff up in the air. “See what you’ve done?” he added.

“Next, she’ll want you to call Dante to come put crime scene tape around the body,” my mother said. My mother refused to take credit for the phobia she created. She feared nothing, except running out of sequins.

I pushed that memory out of my mind when we reached the basement and the dumbwaiter stopped. The very dim light bulb came back on and I looked around to make sure it was only Julia, Isabella and me in that cage. “I want out of here, please open the door.” I blurted out even though my heart rate was getting back to normal once the light came back on. “Can you try? Can you try faster? I’m holding the dog.”

Just then, the door slid open and there was Sam on the other side huffing and puffing. “I ran down the stairway when I saw this big fat guy trying to shoot at me through the iron gate.” Sam didn’t notice I almost knocked Julia off her feet pushing my way out the accordion door as he was opening it. He led us to the emergency exit, pulled out another key to turn off the alarm. He pushed the door open, pushed us out and said, “Be careful, and as soon as you can get to a phone, call the police.” Then, he closed the door, locking us out and himself in.

Getting shoved around all night by men, even nice and well-intentioned ones like Sam, started to get on my last nerve. I just wanted to shove someone back, starting with the guy standing next to my mother’s station wagon. We rounded the back corner of the building and came to an abrupt stop. We took a step backwards to hide from his view. He looked like a smaller version of the Lakefront Towers; a large, square block of a man. He faced the rear of the big, black, Cadillac with his slab of an arm slung over the open door, resting his fat stubby leg inside the frame of his car. He wore an ugly green warm-up suit that hung down to his knees in the crotch. It was almost the same color as my mother’s station wagon. I wondered,
am I the only one who doesn’t see the fashion sense in this color?

He looked back and forth at the front lobby doors and up to the top of the building. He had parked right next to me, his car faced the street and mine faced the building. His car was positioned for a fast getaway. Mine was not. He stood in the door on the driver’s side of his car, and I could not get into my car without asking him to move out of my way. I thought I heard police sirens in the distance. I’m sure some of the older, non-parade-going tenants called 911 when they heard the shots. Sam told me some of the old timers who lived in the building would call the police if anyone’s dog pooped on the lawn.

We needed a diversion to get out of there and I wanted to avoid my third police confrontation at a second crime scene in one night. The way my luck was going, Dante would be first to arrive. I thought we should hop the back fence, and leave that blasted station wagon right there. The lobby doors flew open, the alarm sounded and the thug from upstairs lumbered out. He headed for the Caddie. He wore the same ill fitting warm-up suit in red. He looked to be a scaled-down version of the driver wearing the green warm-up, but just as big, square, and dumb looking. The pair, dressed in matching red and green, looked like Santa’s henchmen. I wondered why they weren’t wearing the season’s colors of purple, green, or gold. Red suit ran out of the building so he must have been the one who fired the shots. They wedged themselves into the vehicle and hit the gas. Green Fat Boy made too sharp a turn and caught his rear bumper on the bumper of the station wagon causing it to jack-knife behind the Cadillac. His car could not move.

He jumped out and lifted the station wagon off the caddie. Impressive. I was really glad I did not run up and shove him.

Once he unhitched the two vehicles, he squeezed back into the Cadillac and went screaming out of the parking lot on two wheels.

Julia and I ran for the station wagon. We pulled out of the lot and turned in the opposite direction toward the New Orleans Yacht Club, and were half a block away dragging the front bumper when I saw at least five police cars in my rear view mirror turning into the Towers’ driveway. I drove slowly as the bumper was dragging the ground causing sparks to fly up from the front end.

I rounded the bend out of sight of the Towers and the fleet of arriving police cars. I stopped to see if I could fix or tie up the front bumper. I found nothing in the car to use. Julia wriggled out of her bra from underneath her shirt.

“Here, use this. After my augmentation next week, I will need to buy larger bras. I won’t be needing this size. Go big or go home, I always say.”

Another augmentation? She was going to turn into the Bionic Woman. Time, being of the essence, I hooked the bumper to the grill wrapping Julia’s bra around it twice and got us rolling again. Good thing she’s a big girl.

I ran into the yacht club and called Sam. He answered on the first ring. “The police are here,” he said. “I gave them the description of the two I saw leave the building. I’m not saying anything about you or your car in the report. I don’t want them to find out who you are, and where you live, so I am leaving you out of it. They’re sending over the crime lab to see if they can get ballistics from the shots fired and maybe an ID. Gotta run.” He hung up.

The coast seemed clear, and I wanted to go back to Charity. I wanted to see Jiff Heinkel. I also wanted to tell him that Isabella was safe with me, and I wanted to tell him about the two thugs that tried to break into his apartment and hurt his dog. A big part of me wanted to make sure he was going to be all right. If I got to kiss him again, well, I wanted to do that, too.

W
hen I got
back into the station wagon, Julia’s pager buzzed.

“Whose paging you?”

“Work. They’re paging me to come in.”

“What? I thought you had tonight off. Can’t you get Suzanne to go in for you?”

“I did have it off, and Suzanne’s already working tonight. I guess someone didn’t show up, or it’s really busy.” Then she added with a hint of amusement at my predicament, “You could drop me at the club and I can get a ride home, or we can go back to your house to get my car. Chances are you will run into Mom and Dad. Oh, and then you can leave this dog there, too. Shouldn’t you listen to your boyfriend, Dante, and go home?”

Julia could dance on my last nerve when she tried. If I took her to work, it gave me more time to figure out how to get back to Charity. I wasn’t ready to go home and explain the kiss and Isabella just yet.

“Isn’t this ironic after all the grief you give me when I do listen to Dante? Let’s talk about something else, like when you’re getting divorced. On second thought, no, let’s not.” Julia didn’t catch the edge in my voice and went off on another tirade.

I gave her a sideways look and headed back to the French Quarter across town. The parade would be over by now, but the crowds still partying would make it slow driving the Green Machine down Bourbon Street to Club Bare Minimum.

“If I had known he couldn’t get it up, I wouldn’t have married him,” Julia started in.

“You, Julia, of all people, married someone without a test drive?”

She ignored me. “Come to think of it. He did get it up once. So we decided to try the pump. The doctor said it is perfectly natural for a man his age to have issues. S.J. wants to get a penile implant. Do you know how much those cost? Ten thousand dollars!”

I thought,
as much as a boob job?
She knew when she met him he was on the verge of bankruptcy and now she was surprised to find out he’s sexually dysfunctional?

“So, we tried the pump. You know when a man is aroused, the blood goes into his penis and it starts to erect . . .” Julia started. I held up both hands to cut her off.

“Julia, stop. I know how a penis works in spite of what you think about my love life. Continue. Go on about the pump.”

She crossed her arms across her chest and stuck out her chin as if I had insulted her, then she picked up right where she left off. “Well, the penis goes in the acrylic cylinder at one end and I was supposed to pump it from the other end. You are supposed to see the penis getting bigger in the clear tube, and when it gets big enough you slip on a rubber band to hold the blood in to keep it erect. Well, I pumped it like the instructions said, and when it didn’t get any bigger I called the 800 number on the tube, and . . .”

“Wait. What? You called an 800 number on the tube—while you were in the middle of pumping his uh, uh?”

“Penis. Pumping his penis. You can say it. Yes, I had to ask them what I was doing wrong,” she said, as if this were the most normal course of action one would take during this process.

“So, what did they tell you, try two rubber bands and call me in the morning?”

“Oh, that’s funny,” she said throwing her head back and jutting out her chin, but most of all, she stopped talking.

“OK. I’m sorry, go ahead and finish the story.” I wanted this saga over and didn’t want to revisit it later.

“I wasn’t doing anything wrong, his equipment is just shot. Kaput. Finished.”

“His penis is out of warranty? Can you get a refund on the marriage license?” I asked with all the seriousness I could muster.

“I’m never telling you anything, ever again.” Julia crossed her arms over her chest as if she could not be coerced into further discussion. This faux insult lasted a nano second. “But, the answer is no, I can’t get a refund on the pump either. So, I am divorcing S.J. and he is going to pay for it since I’ve paid for everything else since we’ve been married.”