Sorority Girls With Guns (15 page)

With that, I turn around and walk off the balcony, leaving Richard standing in stunned silence behind me. I'm at the door to his suite when I hear him yelling, "Wait! What are you going to do?"

I open the door and walk out. Richard is still yelling panicky questions as the door closes behind me.

Chapter Eighteen

This time, I'm telling the editor of
Maxim
that I couldn't stand to be objectified in a bikini on the magazine's cover for any less than ten million dollars when Tiffany wakes me up screaming.

"Shade, wake up, we have to help Morgan! She's threatening that guy with a gun!"

I sit up, the harsh reality of my cash-starved existence coming back to me with a snap. I see the shaggy carpet that looks like it's been in the room since the seventies, the mysterious stain by the door, the lampshade that's starting to escape the metal ring that holds it to the lamp. And then I see Tiffany, dressed in Dior pajamas that she found at a thrift store before our trip. They're monogrammed with the letter R, but she only paid five bucks for the set.

I glance at the bedside clock. "Tiffany, if you're still pissed at me, four-forty in the morning really isn't the time to repair our relationship, okay?"

"This is not about me being pissed at you! This is about helping our friend!" Tiffany grabs me by the arm and pulls me toward the door. I stumble on legs that can run three miles on a treadmill but can't seem to work right when my brain is still in a semi-conscious state.

"Did you say something about a gun?" I ask, letting her pull me out the door. It's easier than trying to walk. Or think.

"You know that guy she had the one-night stand with, the one who tried to blackmail her with the sex tape?" Tiffany runs down the hallway and starts stabbing the elevator button repeatedly, as if that will make it arrive faster. She hits the button for the first floor so hard that she breaks a nail. "Shit!"

"Aren't you grateful to the universe that you broke a nail? Maybe it'll prevent you from poking someone's eye out later or something, right?"

"Would you shut up?" Tiffany screams at me.

"Fine, just tell me, as succinctly as possible, what's going on with Morgan and Biff and who has the gun again?"

Tiffany stares at me, her forehead knotting in confusion, and I realize she might not know the word "succinctly". "Sucks? Sucks what?"

"Who has the gun?" I ask as we pass over floor two. Hey, at least we don't have to stop at every floor to let people on at four-forty in the morning.

"Morgan." Tiffany looks at me like
I'm
the idiot. "It's her gun."

"And she's..." I lower my voice as the doors pop open and we walk out into the lobby. "Pointing it at Biff?"

"Sort of. You'll see." Tiffany dashes across the lobby and I follow, my legs finally waking up.

We round the corner of the building, into the overflow parking lot. The first thing I see is Biff's ridiculous truck with a black eye. Well, one of the headlights is out. It looks like-

“
You shot my fucking truck!” Biff yells.

The first thing I do is look around the parking lot for witnesses. Fortunately, the parking lot of the Motel One is deserted at four-forty in the morning. I spin around, looking at curtained windows for signs of movement. Nothing. The people who frequent this dump are either hard of hearing, super sound sleepers, super drunk sleepers or disinclined to get involved with the problems of others. Or maybe no one else wanted to sleep in this dump. Who knows, it appears we're getting lucky.

“
Morgan, what's going on here?” I ask, approaching slowly. “I thought we had the situation with this asshole under control.”

“
We did.” Morgan keeps the gun trained on Biff's truck. “But now this dickhead wants more.”

“
More what?”

“
I just told her if she doesn't turn over that blackmail tape she has on me, I'm going to tell everyone
her
secret,” Biff says, folding his arms and leaning against his truck. Then he frowns and bounces off the truck like it's radioactive. Yeah, he just realized leaning on a target is a bad idea.

“
You want her to release that embarrassing tape of you?” Tiffany asks.

Biff raises his eyebrows. “You mean that sex tape that you girls made without my permission after you rufied me?”

“
We did no such thing!” I yell, in case he's secretly recording this. He could have a camera phone
anywhere
, trust me.

“
I thought about it,” Morgan says. “But I was afraid you'd be one of those people who has a bad reaction and dies. Especially considering how much you drink. So I figured it'd be better just to let you get drunk on your own, the same way you do
every
night.”

“
Morgan, keep a lid on that, you never know who might overhear,” I say, stepping closer to her. I'm standing right behind her and just a bit off to the side, facing the angle between Biff and the gun so I can keep an eye on them both.

“
So you admit that you made a sex tape of me without my knowledge or permission?” Biff asks, increasing my concern that he's recording this conversation.

“
We did no such thing!” I yell, shooting Morgan a please-shut-up look. I look closely at her, and I can see that she's really upset. Her normally-perfect eye makeup is smeared, the shimmery baby blue of her sweater now swirled up into her eyebrows. Waterproof or not, her mascara is smudged down her face. And the hand holding the Barbie Gun is shaking and white-knuckled, like a guy about to get serious with Taylor Swift.

But as panicked as she is, Morgan is still able to have one rational thought – she sees that I'm right. “We don't know what you're talking about,” she says.

Biff is looking back and forth from her, to me, to Tiffany and back again. “Your friends don't know, do they?”

Tiffany's brow furrows, and I know she's going to make some lucky Botox doctor very rich one day. “What is he talking about, Morgan?”

“
I know,” I say, and Morgan whips her head around to look at me. Biff takes that opportunity to lunge for the gun, but I see him coming. He's not as drunk as he was the other night, but his reflexes are still no match for mine, and I haven't taken my eyes off either him or the gun this whole time. The second I see the barest flicker of movement from his direction, I grab the gun from Morgan, shooting her an I'm-on-your-side look.

Unfortunately, she
is
too upset to discern the meaning of that one, and she tries to pull the gun away from me. This gives Biff the opportunity to get close enough to throw his hand in the mix, and
now
Morgan sees why I was trying to go after the gun. She lets go, but her fingers get stuck in whatever you call that space between the trigger and the rest of the gun. (Sorry, I don't read
Hooker and Handgun
much.) Why she had two fingers on the trigger, I have no fucking clue. You'd think a Texas native would know more about guns.

“
Ow!” she yells, startling Biff so much that he momentarily lets go of my wrist. That's when her fingers finally slip free of the trigger...by triggering it. The gun seems to explode in my hand and I can't help but jump.

Chapter Nineteen

“
Oh my God!” Tiffany screams. I guess she can't think of a reason to be grateful to the universe at this particular point in time.

I don't get flustered much, but I've never found myself holding a smoking gun before. Okay, so it isn't smoking, but it
d
id just go off and I
am
holding it now and I have no fucking clue why.

“
Holy fucking Christ, you shot me!” Biff shrieks like a little girl. I look at him, trying to see where he got shot, and I see a tiny trickle of blood on his hand, across the back of his knuckles. Well, at least it doesn't look like the bullet hit a vital organ. On the other hand, this will still look awful in court, and the thought of going to some filthy jail cell and being questioned by the cops is enough to make me break out in hives. Holy fuck, how am I ever going to explain this-

“
No, she didn't,” Tiffany says behind me, and her arm is going around me, pointing at Biff's truck. “She shot the antlers.”

I follow her finger, and see that she's right – the bullet is lodged in one of the ugly antlers.

“
Then why am I bleeding?” Biff asks, cradling his right hand in his left like he's been mortally wounded.

“
That's my blood!” Morgan yells, looking at her own hand. Sure enough, getting her fingers lodged in the gun caused her to lose a chunk of skin when she finally let go of it.

Biff wipes at his hand with his shirtsleeve, which probably hasn't been washed in a week. “Oh...uh, yeah, I guess you're right. Still, you could have killed me!” His head pops up and I see that he's going to go for the gun again, so I jump back, put the safety on and shove the gun in my purse.

  “
I don't think you want to take another step closer to me,” I say.

“
Why not? You can't get that gun out of your purse that fast.” He runs at me then, and I show him
why
he really didn't want to do that: I slam my knee into his crotch just as soon as he's close enough to grab me.

“
You bitch!” he yells, grabbing for my purse as he doubles over. That's when Morgan grabs him by his hair and jerks his head back. Unable to keep his balance while clutching his balls, he topples backwards, taking her with him.

I kick him in the side, not hard enough to really hurt him (I hope), but hard enough to make him jerk in the other direction. Tiffany helps me shove him over onto his stomach and Morgan grabs him by the hair again. I place a cheap high heel in the center of his back. “Move the wrong way, and I'll snap your spine like a potato chip, bitch,” I say to him.

Tiffany's brow furrows in confusion again, and Morgan raises an eyebrow, but neither of them say anything. They're right, of course – I have no idea how to do that. But I heard it in a movie once and it sure sounded badass.

Morgan hangs onto his hair and twists his head around to look at her. “Let me make something clear,” she says, very quietly. “I am going to med school. I got an A+ in AP Anatomy, AP Biology and AP Chemistry. If I wanted to kill you, I wouldn't use a gun. I save that for non-sentient, inanimate objects like your truck. Or your brain. Whatever. The point is, if I wanted to kill you I could and would do it in such a way that no one could ever trace it to me. And you would suffer terribly. Do you understand?”

Biff groans something that might be “Mmm-hmmm”. Or it might be “motherfucker”. I'm not really sure at this point.

“
We never rufied you. Anything that happened to you when you were drunk is
not
our responsibility.
If
we happened to find a tape of you, in which two girls tried
unsuccessfully
to have intercourse with you, we
would
use that to embarrass you, should you cause
us
any embarrassment. Especially if the only face visible in the video was yours, and you had no way of proving that you were rufied or that the video was made without your knowledge or consent. Because I'm guessing that no girl who appeared in such a video with you would want to do you any favors. Am I making myself clear?”

Biff is mumbling either “Mm-hmmm” or “motherfucker” again when I hear footsteps approaching. I whirl around to see a security guard rounding the corner.

“
Oh, crap!” Tiffany hisses as Morgan lets go of Biff's hair.

“
Relax and follow my lead,” I say. “Everybody just stay where you are.”

A flashlight plays over us. “What's going on here?” the guard yells.

“
Help me,” Biff yells from the pavement. “These girls are trying to kill me!”

“
Officer,” I say, putting on my best innocent face. “This guy was threatening my friend here.” I point at Morgan. “She was just trying to take his keys so he couldn't drive drunk, and he got rough about trying to take them back. We were trying to help, because we were afraid he'd hurt her. He gets really aggressive when he drinks too much.” I pull my foot off his back and step back.

Morgan follows my lead, grabbing Biff's keys off the ground with the non-bleeding hand. The bleeding one is pulled up into her sleeve. “I'm sorry we had to go to such extremes, but he
is
obviously too drunk to drive.” She affects a panicked look, which probably doesn't require a whole hell of a lot of acting right now. “Please don't make a big deal out of this. He's a good guy, he just isn't used to drinking so much, and  if he gets in trouble he could lose his football scholarship.” That one usually works pretty well on the university cops at home. Plus, football players are notoriously good bribers, at least at our school.

The security guard, a short, squat guy with messy hair and food stains on his white uniform shirt, pulls Biff to his feet. “Is that what happened here, pal? Are you even old enough to be drinking? You smell like a brewery.”