by a tarantula or a poisonous viper.
I instantly opened my eyes to a stinging twinge. I was blind and as slippery as an eel as I felt my way along the wall of the shower for the curtain. Then whatever it was hit again, this time on the heel.
“Goddamn!” I yelled. I wanted to dash away from the danger, but I had to go step-by-step from the confines of the shower stall. I had one foot out and one foot in when I heard noises coming from under my feet. It sounded like giggling voices. The giggles turned to loud laughter.
I was pissed. I felt my way to the towel rack, wiped my eyes, and grabbed the .38 revolver I kept in my backpack. I stormed out the door. My vision was slowly returning as I crouched down to look into the crawl space under the bungalow. I moved cautiously toward the rear of the building with my gun pointed in the direction of the laughter. “All right, you little fuckers, come out from under there,” I growled.
The water was still running in the shower above me, and there was no drainpipe. The water just poured into a puddle in the sand. Then I heard a woman’s voice say, “Don’t shoot.” Two figures ducked, crawling toward me until they could stand up straight. They held their hands high above their heads. It was the two girls from the pool. Like a perfectly placed piece of film scoring, “I Shot the Sheriff” blared from the jukebox at the bar as I held my gun on the girls.
They had looked pretty amazing at a distance, but up close, they were even more gorgeous. To say that they also possessed attitude would be an understatement. One was nearly six feet tall, and the other was just an inch or two shorter. One had short, curly blond hair, and the other’s was straight and dropped almost to her waist. They wore matching cutoff sleeveless T-shirts, and with their hands stretched above their heads, I could see the tan lines between their abdomens and the white skin of their perfectly formed breasts. One shirt read FAKE, the other, REAL. At that distance I couldn’t tell, nor did I really care.
The taller girl had a thin gold chain around her waist that attached to a small pouch. In her hand, she held the smoking gun, or should I say the smoking wire: a stretched-out coat hanger that had been jammed up through the drain and into the bottom of my foot.
“We give,” the taller girl said.
“That wasn’t funny.”
“Yes, it was. I’m Dawn,” she said, and the two of them began laughing.
“Of course you are,” I replied sarcastically.
“And I’m Christmas. We’re cousins,” the other girl chimed in.
“I can’t tell the family resemblance.” I smirked. Christmas was a transmitting antenna with no channels set to receive. Dawn, it seemed, was the listener. Christmas broke the silence of the standoff. “My friends actually call me Noel-Christmas. It sounds like a long name, but it really isn’t. I think it has a ring to it. . . . Get it? It’s like saying Christmas without really saying it, you know?”
“It would be like being born on Easter and being named Bunny, but changing your name to Bonnet. Let’s get back to the point here,” I snapped, still fuming from the invasion of my privacy in the shower.
“Exactly!” Noel squealed. “You get it. See? Older guys are, like, so deep.”
“Yeah, but deep down where it counts, I am still very shallow,” I answered.
“We were just trying to have a little fun,” Dawn said seductively. I was staring into her eyes mainly to avoid staring directly at her breasts—but then I saw her gaze move down my body.
“I was trying to take a shower,” I said, suddenly nervous.
“Listen, Captain Testosterone, you better cool your jets,” she hissed in a newly threatening tone. “The rain is trying to spoil our party, and then you showed up, threatening us. I suggest you put that thing back wherever it came from, because all we have to do is scream ‘Rape’ and those construction workers on the other side of your bungalow will come running, and I don’t think they could help but figure out who’s bothering who here.”
“Nice tan,” Noel-Christmas chimed in. That was when I realized that I was standing on a resort beach, butt naked, pointing a revolver and a hard-on at two gorgeous women. This was not what I would call keeping