Free Stay At Home Dead by Jeffrey Allen Page B

laughing.
    “The thing?”
    “I got it outside,” he said. “Come on out. I’ll show ya.” He turned back toward the front of the restaurant, like he was checking to see if something was out there, then looked back at me.
    And that was when I figured out the hair.
    When he turned, the hair sort of wobbled on his head, didn’t really move in sync with the rest of his body, like there was a brief delay.
    The great big pompadour was a great big toupee.
    And now I was having difficulty taking my eyes off it.
    He pulled a comb from the back pocket of his jeans and ran it front to back through the side of his hair. I found it to be a gutsy move, because unless the rug was rubber cemented to his head, there was a fifty-fifty chance it was coming off with a single pull of the comb.
    “I got it out in my truck,” he said, now pulling the comb through the other side.
    Why would you risk combing a toupee? Wasn’t that what all the grease or mousse or whatever it was in his hair was for? Don’t you style it before you leave the house and then put up a force field around it? Or, better yet, don’t you order it that way from wherever you get them? Toupees-Mart?
    My father’s elbow found my ribs, and I managed to look away from the hair. “Uh, sure. I guess. Remind me, though. What exactly are you showing me?”
    He shoved the comb back in his pocket and tugged on the lapels of the leather jacket. “You’ll see, Ace. Follow me.”
    He turned on his boot heel and strutted to the front door.
    I looked at the other three men at the table. “He doesn’t bite, does he?”
    My father shook his head and glanced over his shoulder. “Odell, no. But that hair very well might have teeth in there somewhere.”
    Teeth. Maybe that was how it stayed on.

21
    Odell’s truck was a station wagon, a hideous-looking brown and tan thing, complete with faux wood paneling on the sides, circa The Brady Bunch era.
    He took me around to the back and busted out the comb again, running it carefully through the hair. “So. How’d ya hear about this?”
    “Odell, I have to be honest with you,” I said. “I’m still not sure what we’re talking about here.”
    He placed the comb in his back pocket and checked his reflection in the dirty back window of the station wagon. “Killer Kids, man.” He nodded approvingly at his reflection, then turned to me. “Gonna be huge, Ace.”
    Killer Kids. Of course.
    Odell pulled the latch on the back door of the station wagon and rooted around in the interior. Piles of clothes, empty boxes, paper bags, and soda cups flew around as he searched for whatever was beneath.
    Finally, he extracted a long yellow tube several inches in diameter and slammed the tailgate shut. He walked around to the front of the wagon, and I followed.
    He removed the leather jacket, tossed it high on the hood, exposing rounded shoulders and forearms that were nearly as white as the T-shirt.
    “It’s gonna be beautiful, man,” he said, chuckling as he popped the top on the tube and a roll of papers slid out. “I’m telling you.”
    “I’ll bet.”
    “Me and Benny, we worked our tails off on this,” he said, unrolling the paper across the hood of the wagon. “Shame he’s gonna miss it all.”
    I expected blueprints but got what looked like something Carly might be capable of concocting. Crudely drawn buildings in colored pencil were strewn across a long piece of butcher paper. Little cartoonish-looking people were drawn as if walking into the biggest square building on the drawing. A big flag above that building proclaimed KILLER KIDS !
    My first thought: would the exclamation point actually be part of the name?
    “This here’s the main building,” Odell said, pointing to the big building with the flag. “It’s gonna have a couple of gyms, a swimming pool, some party rooms, and some other stuff I’m not sure of yet. Maybe some martial arts type of room, where the little suckers can karate chop wood or bust cement with