Cover Story: Excerpt from Princess Naughty and the Voodoo Cadillac

?Ray Justus
Peanut had been hard to find for almost a week so Ray was relieved when he called.

“Where you been, man?” he said.

“I found us a sucker,” Peanut said.

“Yeah?”

“I’m at the store. Come and pick me up. We need to talk.”

“Give me forty minutes,” Ray said.

“Ginger and me are shooting the breeze. Take your time.”

Ray took a little extra care to clean up and put on a sharp suit. This was because of Ginger. He knew that, but he figured it didn’t make any damn difference as long as he kept it between him and himself. That was as far as it was going to go.

Ginger was Peanut’s girlfriend, and she was beautiful. Peanut could be an irritating little piss ant at times, but he was Ray’s partner, and Ray couldn’t field much enthusiasm for watching his back with the people who were supposed to be covering his ass.

He put Ginger out of his mind as he walked to the parking lot. He was good at making his brain work on a practical level. Whenever something troubling or frightening jumped into his mind, he would think about the altogether different until his cool returned.

This morning he thought about his ride. It was a Voodoo Cadillac — a four-year-old Eldo he had gotten cheap because it was rumored to carry a curse of death.

Ray liked to tell people that the car was a lot like him. Its bullet holes had been repaired, people were afraid of it, and it was responsible for a number of unnecessary deaths.

The story on the Voodoo Cadillac was its previous owner had been cruising along Ralph McGill, minding his own business when a notorious member of the gangsta-American community placed six rounds from a nine-millimeter pistol through the driver’s door.

The victim died instantly, and the car veered across the road and came to a gentle stop against a phone pole. Unfortunately, it caused a church bus of religious pilgrims from Snellville bound for the Atlanta Passion Play to swerve and roll three times.

The gunman expressed no remorse.

“He shouldn’t have messed with my old lady,” he said when apprehended.

This sentiment caused a great deal of confusion when it was learned that the victim was an openly gay businessman. Later, when the gangsta-wife admitted that at the time of the shooting, she had been doing the hokey-pokey in the back seat of Eldorado number two at Lake Lanier, it became evident that the entire slaughter had sprung from a horrible mistake of identity.

Actually, Ray didn’t believe that truth in advertising applied to a career criminal like him. He told people he was like the Eldo, but it wasn’t true. He was always thoughtful about what he did, had never killed anyone that didn’t need it, and his bullet wounds hadn’t been repaired nearly as well as he would have liked. Some mornings they hurt.

But, what the hell, if you are going to spend your life being Ray Justus, you better have a sense of humor about it, and if your legend scares some pathetic street punks, so much the better.

font face=”arial, helvetica, sans-serif” size=”+1”>THE DEAL
This was the deal. Ray and Peanut would pretend to be dope dealers, and they would find wealthy people like dentists who were under the impression they would make good gangsters.

They would offer to sell them a franchise. “You can be The Man in Lowest Buckhead” — that sort of thing.

Of course, it took a lot of money to be The Man in Lowest Buckhead, and when the poor innocents arrived with piles of cash, Peanut and Ray would take it away from them and give them nothing in return.

Under ordinary circumstances, the underlying unfairness of this transaction would provoke bitter protest, but in this special case the citizens would happily give Ray their money and be grateful to be allowed to return to the comfort of their homes.

This was due to the special talent Peanut and Ray had for terrifying people by imitating men with marginal IQ’s, permanent facial twitches, and a fondness for senseless violence.

Ray thought this was socially useful work, because it returned promising professionals to the straight and narrow path.

In many ways, it was like counseling. True, it cost much more, but, unlike counseling, it always worked.

font face=”arial, helvetica, sans-serif” size=”+1”>THE STORE
Ray rolled to his store on Cheshire Bridge. It was three small rooms marked only with a hand-painted sign, “Collectors’ Books,” in the back of an old brick building that housed a redneck lesbian bar called the Cheshire Beach.

Most of the inventory was pornography that would have been considered lame fifty years ago. The titles included: Bad Conduct School Girls, Backseat Bongo, and The Island of Housewives.

From the pictures, Ray concluded that Housewife Island was a place where women tested industrial underwear under beach conditions.

And then there was Sweethearts of the Rodeo. Ray didn’t have a clue about the meaning of this one. Mostly it was black-and-white photos of young Japanese women fully dressed in cowgirl outfits walking steers around what appeared to be an auction ring.

Ray had placed technical nursing texts next to The Happy Nurses section, old Carrier air-conditioning service manuals by a series called Hot Dates, and generally had a fine old time with both the sublime and ridiculous.

He had told Ginger to only say two things to folks who asked about the bizarre collection of titles: “I guess there’s no accounting for taste,” or, “We get people looking for things like that all the time. We’re the only ones who carry it anymore.”

Aside from that, she was told to be rude to the customers and, whenever possible, drive them from the store. Screw all of them anyway. If they bought books, he’d just have to buy more. The whole point of the place was to wash some money through the cash register so Ray would have a visible means of support, not to give degenerates something to look at while they polished their Johnson.

He pulled across the gravel parking lot and tooted his horn. He’d decided not to go in because he didn’t want to get the Ginger thing started in his head again. She came out anyway.

“I love you,” she mouthed and blew him a kiss.

He wished she wouldn’t do that. She had no idea what it did to him.

“He’ll be out in a minute,” she said as Peanut stumbled from the door behind her.

“He’s wasted,” Ray thought.

font face=”arial, helvetica, sans-serif” size=”+1”>PEANUT SHOKE
Peanut opened the car door and slid in the front seat.

“I like this Voodoo shit,” Peanut was fingering a pair of chicken feet hanging from the rear view mirror as he surveyed the collection of impaled fetish dolls on the dashboard.

“It keeps away the car thieves,” Ray said. “Are you stoned?”

“Hell yes, but you’re the one who’s driving.”

“You’re shaping up to be a responsible citizen,” Ray said. “You may get high in the morning, but you got yourself a designated driver.”

“I do my best work when I’m stoned,” Peanut said.

“Can’t see your mistakes is more like it,” Ray said.

“Just watch me.”

Peanut tried to change the subject

“Head over to Lenox Square. I’m going to see if we can pick this guy up so you can get a look at him.”

“What have you got so far?”

“Not much. I got a call from a buddy back home. He said this guy has been blowing smoke about how he got himself into some operation and is moving the cash around. I figured he was just drunk and talking, till I checked it out.”

“That’s it?”

“So far, yes. I want you to see it yourself. You’re the man with the plan.”

One thing that made working with Peanut easy was he knew his limitations. He was good on the street, but he couldn’t put the big picture together worth a damn. Ray knew that he honestly looked up to him, and, while it made working with him easier, it made everything else complicated.

Peanut was a good ten years younger than Ray, Ginger was ten years younger than Peanut, and those numbers didn’t add up to good news.

They were driving under I-85 where Cheshire Bridge turns to Lenox, making good time.

“Turn left when we get to Peachtree. I’m going to show you a building south of Lenox Square, then we can pick a good place to watch it from.”

Peanut was quiet for awhile, which was unusual, and Ray wondered if was he was so messed up he had skipped a track. Finally, he spoke.

“I watched this movie last night,” Peanut said. “These people got cat heads and ran around killing people.”

“You mean they cut the heads off cats, and killed people with them?” Ray asked, “A cat head doesn’t seem like much of a weapon. I’d rather use a gun.”

“No, man. These people were like the gods of ancient Egypt. They had human bodies with cat heads.”

“I see.”

“At the end of the movie, their house was surrounded by a herd of cats who attacked and killed them.”

“You sure you feel like working?” Ray asked. “Maybe we should take you down to Fulton Detox.”

“I’m good,” Peanut said. “The movie just reminded me of the day they took my old man off to the crazy place. Did I ever tell you about that?”

“You told me he went mental. You never told me about the big day.”

“We was up at this diner, and they served us some cat-head biscuits. You know what they look like?”

“Big as a cat’s head ...”

“Right. My old man looked at them and started screaming, ‘Why are the cat’s looking at me? Why are the cat’s looking at me?’ Then he knocked over the table and started punching everybody out.”

“That’s sad,” Ray said.

“Yeah, my mother and all us kids were crying. The police came and took him to the crazy house.”

“Must have been tough.”

“Shoot yes. They took him to the mental place and he just sat in a chair like a rock and didn’t say nothing. You know what they call that?”

Ray knew he was being set up. With Peanut, you never knew if he was buck-dancing or crying or maybe both at the same time.

“They call it catatonic,” Ray said.

“That’s right. Only when I was a kid I thought it meant something about not eating the cat-head biscuits. As a result, I developed a taste for them, which I have to this day. A cat-head biscuit every day keeps the psycho doctors away.”

“The way you’ve been acting lately, you might should try a mental health program based on scientific principles instead of biscuit eating.”

Peanut leaned against his head against the door post and closed his eyes. He was more trashed than Ray had realized.

“A point I need to make,” Ray said. “You can’t get messed up on drugs like this or your mind won’t work right even when you’re clean.”

Peanut opened his eyes.

“No problem, man, I got you covered.”??