Tats Too (5 page)

I went back inside and turned in two slow circles around the living room and before I even knew what I was doing, I strutted back out onto the front porch. I broke into a run across the front yard and straight up to the van. I grabbed the sliding door handle and pulled, but it was locked. I pounded on the side of the van with both my fists, yelling, “Open up! Whoever the hell you are, open this fucker up before I break through the window!”

The door slid open and two pair of huge hands grabbed me under the arms and by my dreads and pulled me inside.

The door slammed shut behind me, and I was tossed to my hands and knees in the back of the van. It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the dark and a lot longer than that for my brain to adjust to what I saw.

One whole side of the van was all these computer screens and wires and hi-tech gadgets and blinking lights. The monitors showed split-screen views like in those old Doris Day/Rock Hudson movies. Each view was a different part of my house.

One screen showed Vivian asleep in our bed with Georgia in her arms.

And there was our kitchen, our living room, the hallway, Georgia’s room. Everywhere in our house there was a smoke alarm except the bathroom and the laundry room. My first thought was thank God they weren’t watching me while I was on the toilet. My second thought I said out loud to the two dark shapes hovering over me. “Who the hell are you people?”

“I have a better question,” said a deep voice with a Yankee accent. “Who the fuck are you and what’re you doing with Mrs. Perelli?”

“That’s actually two questions,” I replied, buying time because my mind was spinning out of control. “Let’s try again. Who are you guys?”

The answer to my question came in the form of a backhanded slap. It was hard enough to snap my head around and throw me onto my side. I tasted the sharp, tinny tang of blood, but I didn’t give them the satisfaction of showing it hurt.

“We ask the questions,” said the other man.

They both sounded like they were from the east coast somewhere. Yankee accents. They looked like Italian mobsters. Like they could have been extras in that movie
Goodfellas
.

“Then ask,” I said, sucking back a mouthful of blood.

“Where’s the diamond?” the first guy asked. His breath stank like he’d been chewing on CornNuts.

I shook my head. “I don’t know anything about a diamond.”

He drew back his arm to hit me again, but the other guy stopped him with a raised hand. “She’s telling the truth,” he said. He stared me down. “You ever heard of Cheech Perelli?”

I shook my head again.

“That’s his wife you’ve been sleeping with.”

I decided to play tough gal. Okay, it wasn’t exactly a decision, it was more like I blurted. “I’ve slept with lotsa wives. What’s so special about this one?”

That time I got another slap on the other side of my face. That one was harder to get back up from. “What was that for? I’ve never fucked your wife.”

At least I don’t think I have
. I quickly shut my eyes, sincerely hoping I didn’t get hit again. A couple of seconds went by with no fresh pain, so I opened them again.

“You can have the bitch,” he said. “Cheech don’t give a shit about her. It’s the diamond he wants.”

“I’ve never seen any diamond. How do I know you’re not making this shit up?”

“Vivian was his runner,” the Goodfella explained. “Running dirty money from Rome into London and delivering it back all clean. One day she takes off with the money and an uncut diamond that she was supposed to take to Townsend to fence.”

“Charles Townsend?” I asked. It was all beginning to make sense now. That must’ve been how Vivian hooked up with the man she called Prince Charles who chased us all over hell and half of Oklahoma. The same guy who met his untimely death when he kidnapped me and Viv. The same Prince Charles who put a .45 slug through my left lung.

“Yeah,” he answered. “But Mrs. Perelli never showed in London. She hopped a plane and showed up in this hellhole.”

“I’ve still never seen any diamond.”

He leaned down until our noses were almost touching. “Find it,” he said, blowing hot CornNuts breath in my face. He had a jagged scar down his right cheek, cutting right through his oily mustache. I didn’t want to think about how he got that scar. He continued, “Find the diamond, deliver it back to us and maybe you and your kid will stay alive. You got two days.”

Before I could respond, they picked me up by my arms and the elastic waistband of my boxers and tossed me out of the van and onto the sidewalk butt-first.

***

At seven a.m. on the dot, I went inside the bathroom and turned on the shower full blast. I sat down on the edge of the tub and twiddled my thumbs.

I didn’t have to twiddle long. It’s like a thing with Vivian. Every time I get in the shower, she comes in to pee and flushes away all my cold water. We’ve argued about it several times, but she can’t understand why I’d care. So, I knew if I wanted to talk to her all I had to do was turn on the shower.

Right on cue, she walked in, shut the door and saw me sitting on the edge of the tub.

“Morning,” she said, pulling down her panties and plopping down on the toilet.

“Where’s the diamond?” I said, cutting to the chase.

She peed for a while, scrutinizing the towels hanging in front of her. When she pulled at the toilet paper, I asked again, more forcefully, “Where’s the diamond, Vivian?”

She still didn’t look at me. “What movie did you watch last night?” she asked, grinning.

I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees and stared at her hard until she looked me in the eye. “It was a mobster movie,” I said. “All about this godfather Mafia guy named Cheech Perelli. His wife steals a diamond from him and runs away. She hooks up with a nice, unassuming woman and has a baby with her. But the movie gets really interesting, see, when Cheech sends his guys after the diamond. They bug the house with cameras and microphones. Park their van right outside the house and threaten to kill her and the baby unless the diamond finds its way back home. They give her two days to live.”

Vivian pooched out her bottom lip, deep in thought. She took her time wiping and then pulling her panties back up. “How’d the movie end?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I didn’t see the end.”

“I hope it was a happy ending,” she said, picking her panties out of her crack. “I hate those movies where everyone dies.”

She opened the door and said, “I’ll get Georgia ready. Let’s go out for breakfast. I’m craving pancakes.”

***

Vivian was decked out in full arsenal with her tits aimed right at me. High heels, short skirt, intoxicating perfume, the works. She must’ve thought she was going to blindside my anger with a tit ambush.

Her feminine wiles didn’t work.

We scooted into a booth at IHOP and ordered without looking at menus. I got Georgia all settled into a high chair. She’d been sitting up on her own since she was four months old. I popped a binky in her mouth and gave her a teething ring for entertainment, which she promptly started banging on her table.

Viv and I hadn’t spoken a word since the bathroom. I finally sliced through the silence. “So, Mrs. Perelli, got anything else you’ve been hiding from me?”

She leaned forward and placed her tits out on display. I put my imaginary blinders on and didn’t give her the satisfaction of even a glance. However, Georgia did see them. Which meant she stuck out her fat little fingers and wiggled them in a gimme gesture, straining to reach them, squealing something that sounded a lot like “Tee-tee, tee-tee!”

“I swear to God, I don’t know who’s worse, you or her,” Vivian said as she picked her tits back up and crossed her arms over her chest.

With her tits properly stowed both Georgia and I went back to thinking straight. “I’m waiting,” I said, drumming my spoon on the table in time with Georgia’s banging.

“So, you even wanna hear my side of it or are you going to believe a couple of thugs?” Vivian asked flatly.

“These Goodfella guys said that you’re married to Perelli. That you were laundering money and fencing uncut diamonds through Prince Charles. That one day you took off with the money and some diamond. Perelli doesn’t care about you, but he wants his diamond back. You telling me that’s all wrong?”

Vivian uncrossed her arms, shifted in her seat, and crossed her legs. She watched Georgia for a long moment before answering, “That’s all true.”

“How come I have to find out about it this way?”

“Cheech was in prison.
Is
in prison. For tax evasion. He might be out, I dunno.”

I didn’t answer. I put the knife down and stared out the window. The beige van was parked about five cars down from us. I nodded toward the van and Vivian’s eyes followed my own.

She inhaled sharply and continued, “I thought I had time to figure all this out.”

“I have it all figured out,” I said. “Give back the diamond. You have a day and a half to give it back before they kill us and
Georgia.”

She shook her head. “We give it back, they kill us for sure. As long as we have it and they want it, we’re safe.”

The waitress brought our food and set the plates in front of us like she was dealing from a deck of cards. Neither of us touched our plates. Georgia screamed when she saw the pancakes so I broke off a piece and put it in her little hand. She sucked on it and asked for more, so I put my whole plate in front of her. She tore into it with her chubby little fingers and double-fisted pancake into her mouth.

Vivian started in again, “He won’t have us killed as long as I’m the only one who knows where the diamond is. He’s not going to piss away ten million dollars like that.”

I gulped. “Ten million?” I reached for my water and swallowed hard.

“At least. It’s one of the largest uncut diamonds ever found. Please don’t let her eat pancakes.”

“A little pancake won’t hurt her any,” I said. And maybe just to prove who was boss, I poured half a bottle of syrup over Georgia’s plate.

Vivian sighed and finally said, “I did it for us, Lee. I did it for our family. I mean, at first I did it for me. But after I met you…I thought when Prince Charles was gone that would be the end of it. I thought Cheech would think it was Prince Charles who had the Devil’s Diamond and he’d leave me alone. I didn’t know he’d come after us. I thought we were safe.”

“Stupid question,” I began. “Why’s it called the Devil’s Diamond?”

“Oh,” she said, waving her hand in front of her face like she smelled something bad. “There’s a legend or something about curses and selling your soul to the devil and dying a horrible cruel death.”

“Oh, is that all?” I responded.

She leaned forward a little and asked, “You don’t actually believe that kind of crap, do you?”

“Before today I didn’t believe in a lot of things. Like how my wife could steal a ten-million-dollar diamond and have the Mafia after us and have our house bugged, so selling my soul to the devil is just going at the bottom of that list.”

“Well, I don’t believe in devils and curses,” she said matter-of-factly like that made it so. “And your daughter is getting syrup all in her hair.”

Every time. Every time Georgia screams or makes a mess she’s my daughter.

A thought struck me. “How the hell’d you smuggle a ten- million-dollar diamond over here on a plane anyway? Where’d you hide it?”

Vivian raised one eyebrow meaningfully. “Do you really have to ask?”

Damn. Only Vivian would fly five thousand miles with a diamond nestled up her girlie parts and act like it was something she did every day.

“How big is it?” I asked. Because a ten-million-dollar diamond sounded a little uncomfortable to me.

She shrugged one shoulder. “Size of a large egg.”

My first thought was ouch. “Didn’t that kinda hurt?”

“Honey, for ten million, I’d stick a basketball up there and smile while I was doing it.”

“Ouch.” My second thought was…sure, you can stick it up in there, but how the hell would you get it out? I’d heard of women that can shoot Ping Pong balls out of there, but I’d never actually seen it.