Tats Too (16 page)

“No,” she said, “just the kitchen. You can rule the yard. You mow, you rule.”

I mowed the yard that day really crooked just to make my point and the wavy lines bothered me all week. She pretended not to notice.

It took me a couple of days before I outlined a revenge plot and gathered all the necessary ingredients.

After a shower, Vivian walked into the bedroom and a couple of seconds went by before I heard, “Lee, sweetie? I’m requesting your presence in the bedroom.”

So, I walked in all sheepish and said, “What, honey?”

She looked at me then looked at the scarves I had laid strategically out on our bed. “Is there something you want to tell me?” she asked.

I toed my boot into the floor and answered, “I was just wondering if we could…you know?”

She dropped her towel and stood before me in all her naked glory. I sucked in my breath and held it.

“Does your fantasy include me?”

I didn’t answer with words. I shucked off my boots and stepped in to her. My hands had a mind of their own and it took no time at all to get her pretty bothered. I laid her back on the bed and tied her wrists to the bedposts with a couple of scarves. I stepped back to admire my handiwork and she said, “I hope you’re not stopping now.”

“Hold on a minute,” I said and ran to the kitchen. I opened the fridge and took out the Cool Whip carton. I ran back to the bedroom and sat the container on the nightstand.

“Oh,” she said, grinning. “You want to combine fantasies.”

I picked up the third scarf and tied it around her eyes and
made sure there weren’t any peepholes.

I popped open the top of the container and used two fingers to scoop out a good-size portion. I rubbed the white stuff on her nipples first.

I took my time licking it all off.

I held the container over her belly and used my fingers to scoop every last drop of it onto her stomach. I smeared it all over her body. Then I licked and cleaned my favorite parts.

She squirmed and moaned and tried to move against my face, but I held her hips down and right about the time she was about to explode…

…I stopped.

“Don’t stop, baby, don’t stop now,” she panted.

I gently untied the scarf from her face. She blinked a couple of times then giggled. “You have Cool Whip all over your face,” she said. “You look like a deranged Santa Claus.”

“Lick it off for me,” I teased and leaned in close to her.

Her tongue lapped at my lips, then suddenly she pulled back and looked at me hard. “Goddammit!” she screamed. “That’s fucking Miracle Whip!”

I jumped off the bed just in time that her kicks connected with nothing but air.

“Untie me!” she screamed. “Untie me so I can fucking kill you!”

After that, she didn’t talk to me for five days. She just shot icicles out of her eyes like she was Queen Frostine blocking the path to Candyland.

I knew the ice had melted when I saw the jar of Miracle Whip sitting in the fridge door between the ketchup and the mustard. I was back in the game.

My stormy thoughts are drowned out by a huge roll of thunder in the distance. I scan the sky but there’s nothing, not even a single cloud.

The thunder rumbles louder.

I look in my side mirror and blink at what I see. A storm cloud of motorcycles are cresting the sand dune behind us and coming on fast and this is no mirage.

I ease down to about seventy-five miles per hour and move to the far right so they can pass.

But they don’t. They ride up my ass instead. Or rather, make that Vivian’s ass.

I slow down to seventy.

So do they.

The lead bike’s front tire edges in close to my back tire. Way too close. Like maybe only a foot or so behind mine.

Vivian leans into me and wraps both arms around my middle.

I study the lead biker in my mirror. It’s a woman. She’s riding a souped-up, chopped-down flat black Harley with ape-hangers and long-ass leather fringe on the grips. The three-foot fringe flogs her arms and her bitch’s thighs like a dominatrix’s cat-o-nine tails. I’m pretty damn sure she’s somebody I don’t want fucking with me.

I slow down to sixty and wave her around.

She pulls up alongside me, but doesn’t pass. She rides right next to me for half a mile without even giving me so much as a glance.

My mirrors reveal that she’s got two other motorcycles behind her. Three bikes, each with a passenger. We’re outnumbered six to two. And there’s nobody around for the next hundred miles or more.

I check out the leader from the corner of my eye. She’s big with shoulders like a trucker and has two sleeves of black tribal tats zigzagging from her wrists clear up to her chin. Her dark hair is knotted in a long, thick braid hanging halfway down her back. Black leather chaps cover her faded jeans and she’s wearing a dirty wifebeater under her cut. Something about her looks familiar. Maybe I’ve seen her mug in the papers or on the news.

Her top-heavy bitch has on knee-high leather boots with ass-showing leather shorts that lace up the sides. Her peaches look like somebody’s been shaking her tree way too hard. She has bottled blond hair with dark roots showing down the center part like an inverse skunk, and she’s wearing so much bright makeup it glows like war paint.

I drop off the throttle just a tiny bit until I can see the back of the leader’s cut. It has a top rocker that reads
Hell’s Belles
in red embroidered cursive.

Well, fuck me.

I’ve heard of them. They’re the sister gang to their more notorious brothers. And if anything, they’re meaner. They’re into all kinds of illegal shit, mostly drugs and guns, and they pillage their way across the desert states. I don’t know exactly what pillage means (read it in the Bible when I tried to work on bucket list number two and it always goes hand in hand with rape), but I bet they’ve done it. They make dykes on bikes look like tykes on trikes.

The leader, the “P” in biker parlance, looks over at me, long and slow. Her eyes travel over my bike and lock and hold on Vivian.

Shit.

She throws her left hand in the air, giving some kind of signal, then speeds up and cuts in front of me, missing my front tire by only six inches.

Another bike pulls up alongside and the last bike pulls up close behind, boxing us in.

The leader slows, forcing me to slow right along with her. I stop because I have no other choice, but I leave my bike in gear and my clutch pulled in.

The other bikes form a tight circle around me and cut off their engines. The P’s bitch swings her leg over the sissy bar, giving a full show of leather crotch.

The P un-asses and slides her eyes to her next in line, probably her VP, who’s a scrawny mess of a gal with stringy dishwater hair and eyes that look like two pickled, hard-boiled eggs poking out of her skull. She’s all jittery and jumpy and has skin the color of bologna, which isn’t bad for a sandwich but doesn’t look so appetizing on a person.

The P nods and this must be the signal for everyone to get off their bikes because they both kick down in unison and crawl out of their saddles.

All six of them crowd round me and Vivian. The VP snakes one bony hand out and flips my kill switch. When she reaches down for my key, I grab her wrist and squeeze hard, but before I can so much as blink, she has a switchblade in her other hand and its blade is twitching right under my nose.

The P snaps her fingers and warns, “Toxic.”

Nice name.

Toxic flicks her knife away and it disappears back in her front pocket. I turn loose of her wrist.

The P saunters over and plants her big black boots right beside me. The name tag on the front of her cut says
Mikey
. She hooks her thumbs in her front pockets, cupping her crotch with her palms and stares long and hard at Vivian.

I look at Viv’s reflection in my side mirror. She’s looking right back at Mikey, her expression unreadable.

“Nice bike,” Mikey says, her eyes dropping to Vivian’s tits.

I don’t say anything. Not because I don’t have anything to say, more like I don’t have anything to say that won’t get me killed. I’m a mother now, I remind myself. For Georgia’s sake I don’t want to say something stupid.

Mikey reaches out slowly, picks up a strand of Vivian’s hair and rubs it between her thumb and finger. I know where her hands have been, and I really don’t like her touching Vivian. The hair raises on the back of my neck and my spine stiffens. Toxic moves her hand to her pocket and since I’m rather fond of my nose being on my face, I stay frozen.

“Get your fucking hand off me,” Vivian says in a whisper laced with arsenic.

Mikey grins and gently turns loose of Vivian’s hair, taking the time to arrange it back on her shoulder. She points her chin in my direction, but keeps her eyes stuck on Vivian as she asks me, “You always let your bitch talk that way?”

I grit my teeth and keep my mouth shut. There’s no way I’m going to give Toxic a reason to start slicing and dicing.

“No,” Vivian finally answers for me, “sometimes I let her on top. Just to spice things up.”

I throw Vivian a shut-the-hell-up look, but she squints one eye back at me. What am I thinking, Vivian’s never shut the hell up in her life.

Thank God Mikey laughs. A long beat later the rest of her gang joins in like canned laughter on a sitcom and as soon as she stops laughing, so do they.

Fuckin’ eerie is what it is.

I look up and down Mikey’s arms, openly admiring her sleeves. Now I know exactly why she looks so familiar. It’s not her, it’s the artist I recognize. I take a calculated risk and try to play nice, “I like your art.”

She scans my ink in return.

“Gina does good work,” I add. “I hand-made all her tat guns. Probably even the one she used on you.”

Her cold eyes bore right through me and I get the distinct feeling she’s not going to play nice back.

This time I try the prison bonding thing. “I was inside Mabel Bassett for twelve years.”

She snorts through her nose like a bull. “Mabel’s an old whore,” she says. “We’ve all been inside her once or twice.”

Okay, maybe she’s not into the shared experience. I keep pushing the nice because I don’t know what else to do. “I’m Lee,” I introduce. I hook my thumb toward Vivian, saying, “That’s Vivian.”

“Mikey,” she says, giving me her gang name. “They call me that ’cause Mikey will eat anything.”

Her bitch steps forward and wraps an arm around Mikey’s waist, saying, “I’m Anything.”

The laugh jumps out of my mouth a little too quick and a half second later, they all join in, even Mikey. That seems to have broken the tension because Mikey takes turns pointing out the rest of her crew. “That there’s Toxic. And her old lady, Shock.”

What is this, a Roller Derby crew or a bike gang?

I nod at Toxic like I just now saw her. She rubs the tip of her nose and sniffs. I don’t know if she’s flashing me a cutting-off warning or if she’s just got coke-nose. I catch sight of a bio-hazard symbol tatted on her bicep. I start to tell her she put the symbol in the wrong place, but thankfully this is the one time I don’t blurt everything I’m thinking.

I slide my eyes to Shock and nod. She has one of those Bettie Page-style haircuts and eyes that are too green to be real. She has so many face piercings that you can be pretty sure she’s pierced everywhere else, too. She’d be halfway pretty if her face didn’t look like a pincushion.

“Off,” I order Vivian, slapping her thigh.

Vivian gets off the bike, but I can tell by the way she hitches her purse up high on her shoulder and puts her fists on her hips that she’s not at all pleased with me giving her orders. I shoot her a reprimanding look anyway and turn to face Mikey.

I look up at her as she continues the introductions, “That’s Scratch and her bitch, Cat.”

I nod to them, too, trying not to stare at all of Scratch’s thin white scars running up and down her arms, neck and shoulders. Some are old, a few are fresh and still red. She has a shaved head and a tattoo of a black leopard on her pale skull. Cat is black with a big, tight afro and that real pretty color of skin that looks like slippery, freshly waxed mahogany. She has red fingernails a good three inches long and I’m pretty sure I know how Scratch got her scars.