It was a flat, two-story motel, with faded concrete stairs leading to the balcony and a long steel railing encased by six simultaneously chipping layers of paint. One of the second-floor rooms had its curtains pulled tight. Outside the door were four muscular men with shoulder-length, shampoo-resistant hair. They stood in a line at the railing, like bodyguards on lookout, which they were. Inside the room, a pert young brunette from Macon hopped next to the dresser, wiggling panties off her ankles and flinging them over a lamp with her foot. Across the bed: an already naked man, strapping strong like the others outside, but in a different way. Trim at the waist, then broadening toward the chest and shoulders from the kind of workout regimen that only takes place in lockdown. He couldn’t have been a day over twenty-five, with short, dyed-blond hair, a reddish tan, and a giant dagger tattoo running navel to sternum. The knife’s handle was … well, it was kind of hard to tell. The man had told the tattoo artist to surprise him with something scary, but the artist was ripped on crank and kept messing up. A spitting cobra became a flying lizard, then a gargoyle, then a tarantula-“Wait, I can fix it!”-vampire bat, horned toad, mud dauber wasp, Gila monster-the customer’s face growing increasingly crimson with silent rage-coyote, T. rex, briefly a badger, space robot, Chinese symbol, daisy chain of swastikas, and the head of Mamie Eisenhower, until it was finally one big, irreversible blob. The customer was about to explode … “Hold on, I got an idea!” The tattoo parlor doubled as a screen printing shop, and the artist quickly retrieved a squeeze bottle. He fired up the needle again and incorporated the bottle’s contents into the design. Finally, he was finished and looked up with a smile. “There! How do you like it?”
The young man stared down. “What the fuck is it?”
“A jellyfish. Pretty scary, eh?”
“What’s scary about a jellyfish?”
“Wait…” The artist ran to a wall and turned off the lights. “What the hell did you do to me?”
“I added some of the luminous fluid we use to make glow-in-the-dark T-shirts.”
“Now it’s just a blob that glows.”
“Glowing is scary.”
The artist was paid for his work with a free burial at sea.
That was two years ago, when the “Jellyfish” nickname started. Of course no one ever said it to his face. At least not twice. Instead, he demanded being called the “Eel,” because that’s what he insisted the tattoo looked like. Terrified subordinates studied the unrecognizable, glowing splotch and swore they saw an eel. “It’s fantastic, Eel!” Until his back was turned, then it was the forbidden sobriquet again …
And now the Eel stood in a second-floor budget motel room near the Florida line with a young nymph from Macon. He grabbed a drawstring leather pouch from his suitcase, loosened the neck and dumped the contents on the bed.
The woman gasped. Sheets sparkled with what looked like tiny shards of ice. “Are those real diamonds?”
The man made a silent motion.
The woman climbed into bed. “You don’t talk much, do you?” She leaned back slowly on top of the gems. Some of the larger stones stung slightly. And she liked it.
He turned off the lights.
“Holy shit! What’s that thing on your chest?”
The man pounced. More attack than liaison, headboard pounding so violently that asbestos dust fell from drop-ceiling tiles. The woman shrieked with ankles pinned to her ears. Eyes closed, chin thrust up. “What a turn on! Fuck me on the diamonds! Fuck me on the diamonds! Oh God, I’m going to come so hard! Fuck me on the diamonds! How much do you think they’re worth?”
The answer was stillness. She opened her eyes. All over before the fifty-second mark. At two minutes, the man zipped his jeans.
The woman sat up extra carefully so as not to scatter the gems sticking to her back. “You don’t waste time either.” She reached a hand behind her shoulder blades and slowly brushed them off, making sure they stayed in the middle of the sheet. Then she knelt next to the bed and scooped them into a pile. “We still have a deal, right? I get to keep ‘em?”
The man slipped into a faded Biketoberfest T-shirt.
She shook her head. “Whatever …”-resuming the gathering process-“… feel free to jump into the conversation anytime …”
The man walked to his suitcase.
She grabbed the drawstring pouch off the nightstand and began filling it.
He removed something from his luggage.
She finished and pulled the bag’s string, then reached for her clothes. “Been fun, but I gotta run.”
The man turned to face her.
She dropped the pouch. “What’s that for?”
He stepped forward.
She stepped back. “Stop fooling around. This isn’t funny.”
JACKSONVILLE
“A two-tone Javelin sat in front of a long line of traffic on the John T. Alsop Jr. Bridge-named after the city’s Depression-era mayor-but natives all call it the Main Street Bridge.”
“You’re doing it again,” said Coleman.
Serge looked up from his clipboard. “What?”
“Talking to yourself.”
“No I wasn’t.”
