Nazi Sharks! (11 page)

“What the hell are you talking
about?” Nikki asked.

“I mean, why aren’t you all
packing?” Steph rephrased herself.

“We’re languishing in
grief.”

Edwina threw herself on the
motel bed in which Wilt Chamberlain had once bedded over twenty
women. He’d had an hour to kill. She absently fondled one of Mila’s
Goonies
socks, the face of Chunk staring at
her accusingly. Just last night Mila had playfully stuffed one of
her breasts into the 90% cotton tube. Never again. Edwina had been
responsible—Mila followed her ideas everywhere and Edwina did
nothing to protect her. Would you have let Sloth get slowly eaten
by sharks, Chunk? What about that Asian Goonie? No, I didn’t think
so.

“It won’t do any good packing,”
she said at last with a sigh. “The FBI agent guy said he’d have to
ask us some questions. Tomorrow.”

“I’ve watched a lot of
X-Files
episodes,” Andrea stated, “and I wouldn’t be
surprised if he’s in cahoots with the sharks.”

“No, you’re just in shock,”
Edwina explained patiently. “Nobody says ‘cahoots’ anymore.”

Just when depression threatened
to drive the girls into an intensely erotic frenzy of lesbianic
kissing and caressing, an unexpected knock at the door saved the
day.

Edwina rose suddenly. Had they
found her? After all this time? She approached the door and gazed
through the peephole. Looking awkward and adorable in his all-red
three-piece suit, Reynolds waited with his hands behind his back.
He must have something behind there, something, perhaps, to cheer
her up. Hopefully it’s not a shark, she thought. Or the complete
series box set of
Moonlighting
.

Edwina opened the door,
struggling not to let her smile of relief show too much at such a
time of grief. The other Queens stared at him as though he were a
clown with a massive erection.

“Hi,” Edwina stated
cleverly.

“I—I came to say, first,” he
stammered, “that I’m sorry about your teammate. My dad—Kevin
Costner—wanted me to tell you, ‘She swam like a seal pup and died
like one.’”

Reynolds drew a lovely bouquet
of gas station flowers from behind his back and presented them to
Edwina, who passed them to Steph, who passed them to Andrea, who
passed them to Erika, who passed them to—who was that woman,
anyway? The girls, at any rate, approved and withdrew their
undeserved prejudice. For now.

“I also wanted to say, umm,” he
looked nervously to the other girls, but realized quickly his
apology would have to be public. “I’m sorry about the other night,
Edwina. She was lying and I should’ve—I guess it doesn’t matter
now, since she’s really, really dead. But I like you. I like you
more than I liked my childhood dog, Waffles. He and I would do
everything together. He saved me from a burning building. We built
a treehouse, just the two of us. Even without thumbs, Waffles
helped. One day a bus full of German tourists turned him to
liverwurst.”

“I know,” Edwina said from
behind her mask of intense blushing. “About the lying, I mean. Not
waffles. That was depressing.”

“I’d like to take you out, take
your mind off sad things, put them on happy things—like me.”

“I don’t know…”

Somehow it didn’t seem right.
One could even say it felt wrong. Mila had just been eaten. Waffles
was dead. She hadn’t really come out of shock. And the girls—they
depended on her like kittens on a particularly milky teat.

“You should go, Eddie,” Nikki
said. “It’d do you good.”

“You’d just be moping in here
with us otherwise,” Steph said.

“Waffles would want you to do
it, Eddie,” Andrea pointed out.

“Alright, you’re right,” Edwina
relented after some hesitation. “Let’s go, Ryan.”

Edwina winked at him and he
winked back a stiff, belabored wink, “Alright, Deezen. Let’s
go.”

Chapter 23

To a dwarf, the horizon would
be obscured by the enormous, weathered mountains that thrust into
the air over a curvaceous, smooth plain. No dwarf being present, we
can see they’re the tits of the two murdered Pussy Willows,
sticking up like wild cacti, only much more inviting to the
touch.

“Not a shark,” the medical
examiner explained to Warren and Walker. “That’s for sure.”

The examiner cringed after
saying ‘That’s for sure,’ awaiting the cantankerous discourse on
the necessity of sticking to the facts, the impossibility of
certainty, and some aggressively incomprehensible similes. But
nothing happened. Nothing at all. In fact, other human beings were
nodding. They…they agreed!

“I didn’t think it was a
shark,” Warren said. “I suspect it’s the serial killer. There are
signs of his MO, right?”

The examiner felt a warmth deep
in his torso, a glow that overtook him and yet he had no idea what
to do with it. They were suspecting things. Doing something to
signs—was that? Yes, it was. Interpreting! Yes! Yes, there are
signs of an MO! But—can he say that? What would happen?

“Oh yeah,” he said cautiously,
“I’d say there’re signs. Sure. Lots of ‘em.”

“Well?” Warren pressed.

“Yeah, signs.”

Warren looked at Walker, who
was staring at his own fist. He exchanged a helpless glance with
Warren, then got back to business.

“Did you find anything
interesting?” Warren urged, coaxed even. “Feel free. Please. The
Sheriff is coming out some shark’s ass right about now.”

“Yeah!” the examiner blurted, a
little ashamed of his enthusiasm. “Yeah! You’re right. I’m free!
Free! To perform deductions, inductive reasoning—” seized with the
moment, the examiner grabbed Warren by the shoulders “—syllogisms;
to follow intuition, assumptions, even—oh my god, even theories!
Free!”

The examiner fell back from
Walker, placing his hand on one of the cold, dead tits for support.
He caught his breath, composed himself before the stunned FBI
agents, and took control. “Well, then, okay, besides the
signs—y’know, The Signs—I did find this tag.”

The examiner held up a minute
fragment of non-descript cloth with a piece of tweezers. Warren
strained to make out anything of value on the tiny patch of fabric,
then shrugged, unable to even verify it was a ‘tag.’ Something had
once been written on it, sure.

“This, good sir,” the examiner
explained, “is the tag from a man’s underwear band. Fraying, old,
nasty underwear—underwear that’s been worn and washed for years,
despite being purchased from the bargain bin at a K-Mart.”

“K-Mart?” Walker inquired.

“Yes, no doubt. Now, the bimbo
put up a fight—I’d say she put a lot of work into that body and she
wasn’t gonna let it go easy. In the struggle, scritch! Off comes
part of the killer’s underwear. He probably sustained a wedgie,
very mild—I’m sure he had no trouble walking, even running away. In
fact, if this underwear was as nasty and frayed as I suspect, it
may also have been so loose and hole-ridden that it scarcely wedged
at all, for practical purposes. May have even been a vaguely
pleasurable wedging. At any rate, she got the tag off and he didn’t
notice. If he did, he’d think—much as you did—that it was a
meaningless fragment. It looks meaningless. But I took the liberty
of scrutinizing the fibres individually and performed a statistical
analysis on the likelihood of the letters of the alphabet matching
each pattern of inking. It so happens, it’s highly likely that the
tag once read, before all the wearing and relatively infrequent
washing over the years, ‘Kevin Costner.’”

“Costner?” Warren asked,
wondering what quackery he’d just permitted. “The film star?”

“Well, probably not,” the
examiner said, at last putting the dramatically tweezed fragment
back into an evidence bag—and not his turkey sandwich bag, as he’d
done yesterday. “There’s actually a Kevin Costner locally. A
Mexican chap. He was running the swim competition. As though he
invited swarms of busty, young women with taut bodies—eager to get
wet—to invade Shakatitt Beach. Nothing suspicious about that,
right?”

“Costner, eh?” Walker chimed
in. “His performance in
The Mothman Prophecies
brought me
immense joy.”

“That was Richard Gere,” Warren
argued. “Great film, though.”

“Really? Then what was Costner
in?”

“You’re thinking of
Dragonfly
.”

“Oh…” Walker realized,
reluctantly, his partner was quite correct. “I didn’t care for
Dragonfly
. So it was Gere in
Mr. Brooks
?”

“No, no, that was Costner.
Playing a serial killer, as it happens. Indeed, maybe we should pay
this Mexikevin Costner a little visit. If he offers coffee, Walker,
we accept. But this visit will not be a social visit. It’ll be an
investigative one.”

Chapter 24

“I’m glad I came,” Edwina told
Reynolds. “For a few moments, I forgot a shark ate my best friend
today.”

She truly had. Yet, the
conviction Mila’s death had brought her had never left her mind.
Not a legal conviction, but an ethical one. She had spent so much
of her life bouncing from one zany idea to another, never staying
with any one fad, phase, or doomsday cult for long. “Look how much
it did for Ben Franklin?” she once posed. Her next big idea had
been to sail around the world naked. How could they do that now?
No-one could use an astrolabe like Mila. Besides, wasn’t it
Edwina’s crazy idea that had gotten Mila killed? Maybe she should
stay put for a change. Sure, somewhere Ben Franklin was cackling.
Let him. He’s dead anyway.

“I’m glad you came, too,”
Reynolds said, gripping her hand a little more tightly as they
walked through the gently lapping surf on the moonlit beach. No-one
else was there except a crab that had made a Polish boy cry
earlier. The sea and the moon was all for them and it was
beautiful—it was romance. “I feel I have a lot to make up for.
Maybe you’ll let me keep making it up to you?”

“Sure,” Edwina said with a
blushing smile. “I’d like that. But, y’know, it doesn’t help that
we’re strolling along the exact same stretch of beach where—”

“You’re a very special girl,
Deezen,” Reynolds announced suddenly, turning to meet her gaze.
He’d never looked more Hispanic, nor less sane.

“How so?” Edwina asked,
expecting to be flattered, but sensing something was
wrong—ass-over-tea-kettle wrong.

“The way you make me feel,” he
explained, the soothing waves adding a poetic meter to his speech,
a pentameter or something, one of those. “I get to see plenty of
good-looking girls, what with my dad’s competition and all. They do
nothing for me, Edwina!”

“You’re gay?”

“No! Of course not,” he quickly
disagreed. A little too quickly. But then, at what speed does a
straight man deny being gay? “I find them all sexy, desirable. But
they never
arouse
me. Looking, touching—I
remain as limp as a dead monkey.”

“And I’m different?” she
inquired. She hadn’t been prepared for this sort of confession. She
had left her cassock at home. But somehow his opening up made her
feel more rooted, more real. She could stay here. She could not
flit away to the next notion. Unless this itself was another one of
her wacky ideas! Oh, Edwina, you’re a riddle to yourself. At least
you have a killer bod.

“You make me as rigid as a
dictator’s rule,” he admitted bashfully.

“If anyone else were saying
this,” she said, after some consideration, “I’d probably kick him
in the balls, spit in his pain-gaped mouth and leave before I’m
tempted to do worse. But somehow, I know you’re sincere.”

“I am,” he agreed, holding
Edwina’s hand to his chest so she could feel the authenticity in
his beating heart. A good, healthy heartbeat; he clearly kept his
sodium levels low. “And it’s true. Last night I erupted like a
marshmallow volcano thinking of your beautiful body intertwined
with mine. It’s been… years, maybe my whole life, since I felt like
that.”

“But why?”

He let her hand drop and turned
away, his Mexican fire building like an overheated jalapeno.

“This curse, Eddie! The Curse
of Burt Reynolds!” he held his hands out like claws, the fearsome
claws of a Mexican soap opera star. “I’ve always felt like a nancy
boy, no better than a crumb hanging obscenely from Burt Reynolds’s
mustache. But you—you make me feel like more of a man than any
Reynolds, even Debbie.”

Edwina walked away from the
shore toward drier land, leaving Reynolds in the mire of anxiety,
suspense, and the need for approval. He’d once lost a horse in that
mire and didn’t like it one bit. She kicked at an abandoned beach
fire, the blackened driftwood rolling resentfully away.

“Well,” she said at last,
“while we’re on the beach, we might as well break out the
marshmallows.”

“I didn’t bring any—oh!” he
gasped. “I see what you mean!”

The time for hesitation was
over and this Hispanic Hamlet seized his beloved not as a monkey,
not as a Reynolds, but as a man. He kissed her passionately, so
passionately she could taste the guacamole, and they fell to the
sand with entwined legs.

Edwina bent her arms beside her
head, permitting Reynolds free access to her chest. He took the
opportunity almost instantly, as though they were linked, mindless
members of a sex-crazed cyborg hive. His delicate fingers opened
her blouse efficiently and had her bra down in seconds, revealing
the most exquisite set of breasts he’d ever laid eyes or hands on.
Not oversized melons, as his father liked, but handfuls of flawless
density and perfect, full shape, like God’s template for all
boobage. He couldn’t contain himself; he had to take them in his
hands, squeeze them together, caress them, feeling the dainty
nipples tickle his palms—as the Good Lord intended. For a moment,
he thought he saw something marring those immaculate white mounds,
but he knew it couldn’t be. It made no sense. His father’s face!
One on each breast, mocking him. He shook his head violently, still
caressing the perfect tits. Edwina moaned beneath him as he rubbed
his hot face over them, darting his tongue out at surprising
intervals.