Doggone Disaster Page 6

  “Hey Winky,” Milly said as the door opened. “And there’s my Charmine!” She stepped up and eagerly grabbed for her precious fur baby, but due to the frizz, she couldn’t decide on the proper angle of approach. “What happened?” she asked.

  “We gave her a bath,” I said from my safe distance.

  “A bath?” Milly asked. “Why?”

  “Yes’m. It’s all part of our complete pet-carin’ service,” Winky said proudly as he handed over Charmine. I grimaced as the tongue that had been carrying around dead fish heads all day now licked at Milly’s open, smiling lips.

  “Awww,” Milly cooed and patted Charmine’s head. “That’s so sweet of you! Val, it makes me wish I could keep you on as her sitter.”

  “Yeah, too bad,” I said. “But you found someone else. Right?” For Pete’s sake! You better have!

  “Yes. She starts tomorrow. It’s a Friday. I figured it’s better that way. The new sitter will just have Charmine the one day to start. To kind of get Charmine used to her, you know?”

  I nodded. Milly nuzzled her precious pooch. “Then we’ll have the whole weekend together, won’t we, doodle-bug?” Charmine French-kissed Milly. I stifled a gag as Milly looked up at me. “That way, it’s not too traumatic for her, you know?”

  “Right,” I said. “We wouldn’t want poor, delicate little Charmine to be traumatized.”

  Milly tilted her head and smiled. “Thanks for understanding, Val. Here you go.” She took a step toward me with the cash, Charmine in her arms.

  “Stop!” I held up my hands. “Uh...you can give the money to Winky,” I blurted.

  Milly gave me a curious stare-down.

  “Well, uh...you see...Val there’s comin’ down with a cold,” Winky said. “Didn’t want to give it to little Charmine, here.”

  Milly’s face melted into a sweet smile. “Val. Sometimes you surprise me. I had no idea you loved animals so much.”

  I smiled and shrugged. “Who doesn’t love dogs?”

  Winky looked at me. “I thought you said –”

  “Winky, take the cash!” I said.

  “Here it is. Eighty-five dollars,” Milly said. “Well, we’re off to our castle!” Milly said, her attention fixated again on Charmine.

  “And you’re off to your prince charming,” I added, doing my best not to sound sarcastic. But I wasn’t happy about this whole Charmine business. Not one bit. That little ingrate in a fur suit was quickly turning all my buddies into a syrupy-sweet saps.

  “Toodles!” Milly said brightly, as if to prove my point. She gave Winky and me a silly finger wave, then took one of Charmine’s paws and waved it at us. “Say bye-bye, Charmine!” She put her darling pooch in the stroller and pushed it out the door three seconds before I lost it. I closed the door behind me and leaned against it.

  “Thank God that’s over,” I muttered. “I owe you for that ‘cold’ excuse, Winky. Thanks.”

  Winky smiled and shrugged one shoulder. “Weren’t nothin’.”

  “Can I give you a ride up to Davie’s Donuts? The first one’s on me.”

  Winky grinned like a rotten Halloween pumpkin. “Sure thang. Hey! Did I tell you? Winnie’s been ‘sperimentin’ on new donut flavors. She called this mornin’. Said she’s got one called the ‘peanut-butter and bacon bomb.’ I been chompin’ at the bit all day to try it.”

  “That sounds amazing,” I lied. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter Ten

  “This is hands-down the best thing I’ve ever eaten,” I said to Winnie as she watched me anxiously through her red-framed eyeglasses. I scarfed another bite of the gooey, sweet-and-salty donut. “Who knew peanut butter and bacon went so well with vanilla custard?” I mumbled through another mouthful.

  “Tol’ ya.” Winky said, elbowing me from the adjacent stool at the dining counter inside Davie’s Donuts. He nodded proudly at his girlfriend Winnie, who ran the small, ‘50’s-style donut shop when Davie was away. “She’s my lil’ donut darlin’, ain’t you?” Winky garbled through his own mouthful of Winnie’s amazing donut concoction.

  Winnie blushed. Her chubby face gleamed with an ear-to-ear grin that was in serious danger of splitting her head in two. “That does it!” she said. “That’s the one I’m entering it in the magazine contest.”

  “What contest?” I managed, just before circumstances beyond my self-control caused me to cram the remaining chunk of peanut-butter bomb into my eager mouth.

  “The Desserts for Dollars competition in Betty Cracker magazine,” Winnie said. She bent down and fished a magazine out from under the chrome-rimmed counter and opened it to a page she’d earmarked. Pictured on the contest page were enough cakes, pies and cookies to send all of Pinellas County straight into sugar comas.

  “Wow,” I said, and washed down the remnants of my donut with a slurp of coffee. That looks like some pretty tough competition.”

  Winnie frowned with uncertainty. “You don’t think my donuts are good enough?”

  “Oh, no!” I rebutted. “I didn’t say that. That was the best thing I’ve eaten in like...forever! But to be honest, I’ve never heard of Betty Cracker.”

  “It’s new. Kind of like Southern Living meets Guns and Ammo,” Winnie explained.

  “Yeah. If she wins, she’ll get fifty grand and a lifetime supply of shotgun shells,” Winky said.

  “Well, I gotta tell you, Winnie, you’ve got my vote,” I said. “Just one question.”

  Winnie leaned her plump torso over the counter. “What?”

  “Can I have another one...to go?”

  If Winnie were a balloon, she would have burst with pride. “Darn tootin’!” she said. “I’ll bag one up for you now! Sure you just want one?”

  “No. But if I eat more than that, I’ll have to buy new jeans.”

  Winnie laughed. “I hear that.”

  I turned to Winky. “Thanks again for helping me out today.”

  “T’weren’t nothin’, Val. It’s what friends do.”

  I smiled at my funny little friend. “Hey, I was gonna ask you. What’s going on with your fishing tackle jewelry business?”

  “Playin’ Hooky, you mean? It’s got kind a ‘sporatical lately,” Winky explained. “Seems like we done satisfied the need for fishin’-related ornamentation in Pinellas County.”

  “It isn’t helping that Old Joe died, either,” Winnie said sadly.

  “He did?” I asked. “Was he a big customer?”

  “Well...not directly, but yes,” Winnie explained. “He owned the Bait and Tackle Shack next to Caddy’s. He let us sell our stuff there.”

  “Oh yeah. I remember him,” I said.

  “Well, he up and died a couple of weeks ago, and the place has been boarded up ever since.”

  “We don’t know what in tarnation is going on over there,” Winky said. “Old Joe was our main distributor, you know. Until we find somebody to take on the line, we’re kind ‘a dead in the water.” Winky cocked his head and smiled. “Hey, that was kind a ironical, wat’n it, Val?”

  My lips twisted to the left. “You could say that.”

  “Here’s your donut, Val,” Winnie said, sliding a white paper bag across the counter toward me.

  I picked it up. “This feels a bit heavy,” I said to her.

  She shrugged and grinned. “You know, I never did learn how to count to one.”

  I laughed. “All right. But if I split my jeans, it won’t be the last you’ve seen of me.”

  Winky busted out laughing. “Good one, Val!”

  I felt my face heat up. “Okay, maybe that was a poor choice of words,” I said. “On that note, I’ll take my leave.”

  As I walked toward the exit, a streak of giddiness shot through me. But it was no sugar rush. It was the childlike joy of anticipation. I had a bag of donuts, and the rest of the evening to myself! One thing was for sure; neither Tom nor my diet would be making an appearance tonight. I absently pushed opened the shop door. In my secret fantasy I was already in bed alone, in my swe
atpants, snarfing down on those bacon and peanut-butter bombs, watching reruns of Sex in the City.

  Oh, yeah. I opened the bag and took another peek at Winnie’s miraculous new reason to be alive....

  Whump!

  Something thumped me hard on the back, knocking me off balance. Suddenly, the sidewalk was hurtling toward my face. I tumbled forward, landed on top of my purse, and gasped as the impact nearly knocked the wind out of me. My head hit the bag stuffed with peanut-butter bombs. The flimsy paper bag shielded my face from the sidewalk like an airbag, then burst open, sending custard and peanut butter exploding all over my face like a cream pie on a circus clown.

  I scrambled to my knees and sucked in a bit of air. All of a sudden, something hot and rough swiped over my lips. What the...?!!

  I squinted through the clotted custard covering my eyes. The sloppy jowls of a humongous dog came into focus. I screamed like a little girl.

  “Aaaaghhh!”

  “Gee, lady. You’d think you was bein’ murderized or somethin’,” said a man’s voice from behind me. His accent screamed New Jersey jackass. “It’s just a hound dog.”

  A hound dog! Ack! My worst nightmare come true!

  “Could you please control your dog?” I screeched on the verge of hysteria. The mutt continued unabated to clean my face with its disgusting tongue. I tried to stand up, but my legs were too wobbly.

  “All right, all right,” the guy said. “Harvey, stop.”

  The dog ceased licking my face and sat back on its haunches. It licked its own chops for a change, while I wiped my eyes with remnants of the paper bag. My attacker was a rusty-red hound dog with droopy eyes and a six-inch snout that dripped with stringy saliva. Gross! I shivered in disgust at the thought that its grotesque tongue had been all over my face.

  I craned my neck to the left to glare at the dog’s insipid owner. But instead of giving him a piece of my mind, my mouth fell open and stayed there.

  The guy was entirely covered in curly black hair – except for where he shaved it off, and, of course, the top of his head. He must have been proud of his abundant body hair, because his attire – shorts and sleeveless t-shirt – enabled him to display it to the max. The guy’s face was almost round and as pasty-white as half-dried glue. His nose was sunburned red, and his neck and his face below his nose were being swallowed alive by a seven o’clock shadow. I figured in another hour or so, his upper lip would disappear behind a swath of greasy, black fur.

  Somewhere near New Jersey, a village was missing its werewolf.

  “I’m Jake Johnson. I’m new in town,” he said as I scrambled to my feet. I searched the ground for my missing left sandal. The dog had knocked me clean out of it. I discovered it teetering on the concrete curb. I walked over and inched my foot into it.

  “Said my name is Jake,” the hairy man repeated. “And you are?”

  “Mad as hell!” I bellowed, and continued marching to my car without looking back.

  I SCREECHED OUT OF the parking lot of Davie’s Donuts with Maggie’s dual glass-packs blaring. I glanced at my face in the rear-view mirror. Gawd! I looked like I’d just popped a zit as big as my face. Thank goodness I was only a few blocks from home. With any luck, no one would see me.

  But, of course, I didn’t have any luck. In fact, I managed to make an old woman who lived down the street stumble backward in horror and drop her glass of iced tea. “Sorry!” I yelled, but as I pulled onto Bimini Circle, I wanted to scream myself. Tom’s car was in the driveway.

  Dad blast it! He wasn’t supposed to come over tonight!

  “Crapola!” I yelled to whoever was within earshot. I pulled over to the side of the road and scrounged around for a napkin, paper towel, grocery receipt, candy-bar wrapper – anything to wipe the donut goop off my face. Nothing. Tom had cleaned out my car over the weekend. Just another example of my rotten luck.

  I opened the glove compartment and scrounged around in it. My choices were my car registration slip, pages out of Maggie’s owner’s manual, or the business card of Ferrol Finkerman, a two-bit, ambulance-chasing attorney. He’d tried to sue me twice already – once over a missing ring finger, and once over a botched toupee inspection.

  Finally, for once that jerk will be of some use to humanity. I grabbed Finkerman’s card and used it like a straight razor to shave away the biggest globs of custard clinging to my face and fling them to the curb. When my face was fairly recognizable as human again, I licked my palms and rubbed them over my cheeks. I checked the results in the rear-view mirror.

  Awesome. I look like a melted ice cream cake.

  Why did crap like this always happen to me? If Tom wasn’t here, it wouldn’t matter. But he was, dang it! “Arrgh!” I was about to burst into tears of frustration when a thought hit me like a baseball bat to the noggin.

  Wait a second! I could use this mess to my advantage. Tom thinks he can just drop by any old time he pleases, does he? Well then, he should expect the unexpected. He wants to move in with me? Well, I’ll just give him a little taste of what he’s in for!

  I grinned like a demented clown and mashed the gas pedal. Maggie’s twin glass-packs growled demonically. “Bring it on!” I yelled, and lurched into the driveway.

  I cut the ignition, flung open the car door and marched up to the front door. My front door. To my house! This was my castle, dang it! I shouldn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to in my own castle, right? And at this exact moment, I was in absolutely no mood to share the throne!

  I jammed the key in the lock. Before I could turn the knob, the door opened wide and there stood Tom, grinning at me. My mouth flew open in preparation of wiping the dimples off his boyish face, but when I looked down my train of thought derailed. I stumbled backward off the front porch, tripped over my own feet and landed flat on my butt on the walkway.

  “Val?” Tom said. “Are you okay?”

  I kicked a foot at him. “What are you doing with that?”

  Tom looked down, then back up. He grinned sheepishly. “Oh. Uh...surprise!”

  Nestled in Tom’s arms was my canine nemesis, Charmine.

  I wanted to scream, “Get that psycho witch out of here!” But I couldn’t. Tom thought I loved dogs. Crap! I took a breath to calm myself, then asked, “Why did Milly bring her back?”

  Tom cocked his head at me for a moment. “Oh! This isn’t Charmine. But now that you mention it, he does look a lot like her.”

  I scrambled to my feet again for the second time in ten minutes. I brushed myself off and glared at Tom hard enough to bore holes through his thick skull. I spoke slowly through clenched teeth like a professional ventriloquist. “Tom. What. Is. That. Dog. Doing. Here?”

  Tom’s eyes shone as he spoke. “Isn’t he a cutie? I found him wandering the street on my lunch hour today.”

  If Tom was waiting for me to say something cute, he had a long wait ahead of him. But it wasn’t the dried-up custard on my face that had sealed my lips shut. It was lockjaw caused by blinding rage. I stared at the dog, then back at Tom. This could not be happening!

  Tom nuzzled the little dog, then shot me another one of his boyish grins. “Val. You know, I was thinking about how much you said you enjoyed taking care of Charmine. Then I spotted this little fellow bumbling down the street. I thought, well, if nobody claimed him, we could keep him. You can work at home as a writer, and he can keep you company. He could be your muse! Come on, Val. What do you say?”

  For the sake of all of humanity, I kept my mouth shut. If I’d said what I wanted to say, there was a very good probability it would’ve caused a rift in the time-space continuum – and we’d all have gone hurtling to our deaths inside a giant black hole.

  Chapter Eleven

  After carefully considering the peril I could have been placing on the entire universe, I settled on a one-syllable answer to Tom’s question about keeping the dog. Though it was a small answer, I said it with big emphasis.

  “No!” I screeched. The single syllable cracked
like a dam holding back a raging river of unspoken obscenities.

  “No what?” Tom asked. He was still standing in the doorway, blocking my access to my castle, completely unaware of the psychological power held over me by the four-legged beast in his arms.

  I was dumbfounded by Tom’s obtuseness. “No, you can’t keep that dog here! We have no...no...no dog food.”

  Tom grinned and tousled the fur shrouding the dog’s face. “No problem. I picked up a bag of dog chow on my way over.”

  “But...but...but.” I said, sounding like a stuttering chicken. “Why don’t you just keep it at your place?” I inched my way cautiously to within three feet of the dog. It didn’t lunge at me. Tom wasn’t kidding. The dog really wasn’t Charmine.

  “You know I can’t have a pet at my apartment, Val. Besides, the way you raved on and on about Charmine...I thought you’d love having a dog around the place.”

  “When did I rave?”

  “You said Charmine was adorable.”

  “I wouldn’t call that raving. Not technically.”

  “What are you saying? You don’t like the dog?”

  “Well, sure I do,” I lied yet again. I clamped my eyes shut and scooted by them like a scared crab. Once inside the house, I opened my eyes and breathed a sigh of relief at not being bitten. “A dog is such a responsibility, Tom. Who’s going to walk it? Feed it? Clean up the poop?”

  Tom laughed and shut the door behind him. “We’re not twelve years old, you know. We’ll figure it out. Besides, it’s only until we find the owner. I’m figuring a dog this nice has to be microchipped, right? Look at him. Isn’t he the cutest thing you’ve ever seen?” Tom held the hair back from the dog’s irritatingly cute face.

  “Uh huh,” I grumbled. “But...we both have to go to work in the morning. We can’t leave it inside all day unattended. You saw what Charmine did to my...uh...I mean...how Milly didn’t want to leave Charmine all alone by herself.”