The Ten-Ounce Siesta

question, Jack chopped the heel of his left hand against her right wrist. Her hand opened reflexively and the machine gun toppled from her grip. The right hook Jack launched a split second later began at his waist, and by the time it connected with the woman’s jaw it was traveling at a felonious velocity. She was biting off the last letter of that last word when the punch hit her, and her jaw snapped closed and the word came out shorter and much less sarcastically than she had intended. Her sunglasses flew off just as her eyes rolled up in her head, and she went down like a femme fatale Halloween costume dropped off a hanger, and she did not move.

The machine gun lay on her left. The phone on her right.

The phone rang again.

Jack snatched it up, reaching for the machine gun almost as an afterthought.

Gunfire stitched the air above his head.

The voice that followed was somehow more intimidating.

“Drop the gun, you miserable cocksucker.”

Forty-five years worth of Marlboros, who the fuck cares how many packs, but certainly enough unfiltered cancer sticks to heap several ashtrays Mount Everest high. Cutty Sark on the side, shots consumed per night averaging in the low double digits. An upper denture plate that didn’t quite fit no matter how much Poligrip she globbed over it. Vocal chords that had suffered the strain of a lifetime’s worth of tantrums, cat fights, and other assorted trials and tribulations.

All those factors had combined to create the voice Jack Baddalach heard behind him, and that was why it was more intimidating than the sound of gunfire.

Jack dropped the machine gun and turned to face the voice’s owner. She had come around from the back side of the gas station while Jack faced off with the woman in black. And in the time it took Jack to dance his little dance with the weak-wristed machine gunner, this woman had entered the limo and swept Angel Gemignani’s Chihuahua into her hands.

Her hands were sheathed in black leather. So was the rest of her. In fact, she might have been a twin to her weak-wristed counterpart if not for three factors that Jack could not ignore.

First off, there was her voice.

Second, she was wearing a jacket over her bikini top. But the jacket was obviously mostly for show, because she wore it unzipped to her navel.

It was the view Jack spied through that unzippered opening which lead him to difference number three. And that was the simple fact that this woman was much older than the one Jack had punched out. While the younger woman’s bikini top was fashioned from nothing but leather, this woman’s top was equipped with subtle lengths of supportive wire. The top itself was without question a cantilevered wonder that worked an amazing magic with the woman’s breasts. The breasts themselves were deeply tanned globes marred only by a fine dusting of wrinkles- the price often paid by lifelong sunbathers. And while some might remark that the woman’s breasts looked like full round grapefruits kissed too long by the warm California sun, even the most jaded observer would be forced to admit that these twin wonders were forced up and out in a way that was in equal parts startling, amazing, and dramatic, and if the image of youth and vitality impressed upon the viewer was indeed an illusion-a mere result of engineering acumen-then, in Jack Baddalach’s opinion, the device which provided said illusion was certainly worth every penny the woman had paid.

Jack looked at her face. Tanned skin taut on a skull blessed with a sharply dramatic bone structure, crowned with a bubble of heavily sprayed white hair that from a certain distance might be mistaken for a motorcycle helmet.

Of course, the sight of a little old lady in black leather wouldn’t have slowed Jack down for an instant, no matter how amazing her breasts were. No. Not when he had a Chihuahua to protect. What slowed Jack down were the two women who bookended the woman with the cantilevered grapefruit breasts.

Both were redheads. Both held machine guns exactly like the one Jack had so recently possessed. And both were dressed in black leather as well. Together the three women comprised an outlaw gang that would warm the heart of any cattleman-a whole lot of bovine flesh had obviously been shed so they could look way past dangerous.

Three dangerous gringas, and one not-so-dangerous senorita in a horizontal position behind Jack. For a second he imagined the four of them not as a gang of criminals, but as a Phil Spector girl group driven to desperate measures.

Jack was about ready to toss up his hands and ask where the Candid Camera crew was hiding. In fact, he almost certainly would do just that, and do it soon. But first he had a bit of unfinished business to attend to.

Because the cellular phone in his hand was still ringing.

Ringing insistently.

Jack raised his free hand, smiling at the women as if he finally got the joke.

“Don’t do it, cocksucker,” the old woman said, and she didn’t sound at all like Alan Funt.

The two younger women pointed their weapons at him.

A chill traveled Jack’s spine, the kind of chill he couldn’t ignore. Still, his hand closed around the speaker panel. Flip it open and he’d know. He had to know.

“I’ve been waiting a long time for a phone call,” Jack explained. “Almost a year. I think this might be it. I’ve got to find out.”

The old woman barked laughter. “Answer that phone and you’ll never find out anything, ’cause you’ll be deader’n a paraplegic’s dick before you so much as say howdy-do.”

The phone rang again. Spike squirmed in the old woman’s grasp, barking sharply, worried puppy eyes trained on Jack.

Jack hesitated. It was weird. Like being in some old Lassie movie or something, like the moment when Lassie warns Timmy just before the idiot falls down a mine shaft-

But Jack had to know. He had to answer the call.

Spike stared at him. No. That wasn’t right. Not at him. Behind him.

Jack turned and came nose to nose with the woman in black, sans sunglasses.

Man, her eyes were something. A real surprise. Clear blue and-

“Don’t just stand there!” the old woman yelled. “Take care of him!”

The young woman’s irises flashed like chiseled ice as she smashed the butt of her machine gun against Jack’s forehead.

He didn’t hear the telephone anymore.

But he did hear bells. .

. . as if some crazy Quasimodo was ringing in the New Year up there in his head.

Jack knew it was an illusion. Just as he knew that he could get a grip on reality if he could only open his eyes.

Open his eyes and he’d see Freddy G laughing. Pack O’ Weenies, too. And the Phil Spector girl group gang singing, backup band chugging to a “He’s a Rebel” beat. Oh, we had you going, Jack, they’d sing. We had you going, and good! Yeah. That was how it would be.

Jack tried mightily. His brain listed starboard as he got his right eye open, then to port as he raised the lid of his left.

They stood above him like some imposing female forest. Blurry as watercolors running in the bright sunlight that washed them from behind, but Jack could see them just as surely as he could smell all that black leather. Black leather scented with jasmine perfume.

He heard their voices. The younger woman spoke first, the one he’d punched out. Her voice was as smooth as leather and jasmine-sweet.

“I don’t want him to suffer, Mama.”

“If you would have done your job right, he’d be dead by now.”

“But Mama-”

“Don’t Mama me, girl.”