Free When Pigs Fly by Bob Sanchez Page B

Unfriendly Skies. He looked into their duffel bags. Maybe it was the knife he found sitting on top of the clothes, or the roach clip with the beaded tassels. Either way, airport security whisked them out the door.
     
    “I should have you both arrested,” the Unfriendly guy said, “and I will if I see you again.”
     
    “But we need to—”
     
    “Shut up. Get out.”
     
    Ace and Frosty stood by the curb as taxis and vans picked up passengers and dropped them off, leaving exhaust fumes behind them. They were lucky to have their bags and licenses back, Ace supposed. A dozen buses pulled up and left before Frosty said, “Do you suppose any of these things go to Arizona?”
     
    Bingo! Sometimes Frosty came through in the clutch. The sign on the next bus said, “Downtown Boston.” Ace remembered seeing a bus station not too far from the Combat Zone.

Chapter 14
     
    Pincushion
    Juanita’s boyfriend Zippy had almost killed Mack Durgin—yeah, that was his real name—and the failure left Zippy with mixed feelings. Pain sucked, and since he understood that others might share that opinion, he was glad to have left the Durgin guy’s brains intact. On the other hand, when Juanita came back from her night with the guy, she looked like she was staggering off the mother of all roller coasters. Durgin was serious competition, and he couldn’t bear to lose Juanita.
     
    Zippy sniffed a little coke, then lay on his back and looked up at the sky, buck naked on a twin mattress that smelled of old weed and sweaty wrestling matches. It was Juanita’s room, and she had sprinkled the ceiling with stars that glowed in the dark, a hundred to a package from Wal-Mart or iParty, she must have bought out the store. She had arranged the stars into constellations like the Big Dip— named after you, baby —and the Little Dip, which he could pick out pretty easy. The other ones didn’t make any sense to him, like Leo and Orion for example. Anybody who could get a lion or a guy with a sword out of those stars was smoking better weed than Zippy was, and maybe they’d like to share.
     
    Juanita formed a silhouette against the night light shining out of the open bathroom door. Her shape alone was exciting, never mind the body that filled it. She climbed onto the bed and straddled Zippy, and his tongue stroked the lemon frosting off her nipples. Outside, a group of boys laughed and played hip-hop music on their boom box. These were the words:
     
    Gonna do the deed
     
    Gonna spill my seed
     
    You know what I mean
     
    I’m a sex machine
     
    —Which pretty much summed up Zippy’s feelings at the moment. They don’t make lemon frosting like they used to, Zippy thought. He wasn’t angry about this, not at all. In fact, the tattoo on his head was test—testicle—no, testament, that was it. Testament to how open-minded he was. The zipper opening up to the brain was an act of genius on his part, his special brainchild.
     
    “Baby?” He said, and she didn’t answer right away, because she was cruising at about thirty thousand feet. In fact, she didn’t answer until they both exploded in mid-flight and settled back to earth with satin parachutes.
     
    “What, baby?” He began noticing his surroundings again: the purple lava lamp, the confining apartment, the shades they had neglected to close all the way, so the boys must have gotten quite the peep show.
     
    “What was in that frosting?”
     
    “Lemon. Didn’t you like it?”
     
    “I know about the lemon. It was something else.”
     
    “I made it with NutraSweet. Refined sugar is bad for you, baby.” She kissed him with lips soft as butter, which was pointless now as he was ready to talk business.
     
    “The old guy you were with?”
     
    “Which one, baby?”
     
    “You know, my gun didn’t go off?”
     
    She stroked his hair. “Your gun went off just fine,” she said.
     
    “I’m talking about the old guy who hassled you here for money and I tried to blow his