Crazy 4U
Page 33
“No!” Velazquez gurgled.
Angelica tried to turn her head to see what was happening, but she couldn’t.
“Baaad doctoooorrrr,” a rough female voice said. “Baaaaad…”
“No! Get back in the gallery! Go back on your plinths!”
“Doctoooor neeeed to payyyyyy…,” another voice said.
“Payyyy!” others echoed.
Velazquez shrieked, the sound high and girly. He dashed through the corner of Angelica’s vision, pursued a moment later by a mob of naked women, chasing him with the same fervor they had once spent on chasing carbs.
Suddenly Tom was beside her, looking down into her eyes. She felt tears of joy and disbelief sliding down her temples.
“My love,” he said softly, and then held up a syringe. “This will pinch.”
“I…” Angelica croaked.
“Yes?”
“Looooove you.”
His bright blue eyes crinkled in joy, growing shiny with emotion. Then he nodded, and a moment later she felt pinch of the needle in the bend of her arm. She closed her eyes and let it happen.
Tom pulled out the needle and dropped they syringe to the floor. He unstrapped her from the operating table and pulled her up into his arms, squeezing her so hard she thought her ribs would crack. “Urrrg,” she said, with no breath to say more.
“Sorry! Did I hurt you?”
“No. Give me ‘nother!”
He hugged her hard, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and dug her hand into the shaggy hair she’d never thought to touch again. She realized she was moving more easily, and her mouth was working.
“Let’s get out of here,” Tom said, releasing her. He spotted her clothes in a heap, and fetched them, then helped her pull on PJ bottoms and sweatshirt.
They heard shrieks and something being knocked over.
“What are they doing to him?” Angelica asked.
“Do you really want to know?”
She shook her head.
Tom lifted her in his arms and carried her out of the lab, through a door into the bare hallway they had first used to enter the house. They pushed out into the night air, the feel of it gloriously cool and refreshing in Angelica’s lungs.
“Geeeeet hiiim!” a woman shrieked. “Doooon’t let hiiim get awayyyy!”
Velazquez let loose another girly scream.
As they came around the corner of the building they saw naked women pouring from the open terrace doors, running toward where they’d left Mr. Toad. A car door creaked and slammed, and then another.
“Oh no he’s not!” Tom said, doubling his pace, Angelica bouncing in his arms. “He is not stealing Mr. Toad!”
Rrr rrr rrr! Rrr rrr rrr!
“Goddamn it!” Velazquez shrieked. “Start, you piece of crap! Goddamn pile of junk!”
Rrr rrr rrr! Rrr rrr rrr!
“F—ing pile of s—!”
Tom’s footsteps slowed then stopped. He set Angelica on her feet. “Oooh. Mr. Toad’s not going to like that type of language.”
They could see the truck now, naked women trying to get into it and swarming over its cab. Velazquez was just visible, a shadow screaming behind the glass, waving his arms as he ranted at the little truck. Tom winced at the blue language floating to them on the soft breeze. Angelica pulled in her chin at a particularly spicy, multi-lingual string of curses.
“No,” Tom added. “The toad is not going to take kindly to that at all.”
As if to prove him wrong, the truck suddenly roared to life and roared away across the lawn. Velazquez shrieked in triumph as women fell off. One tried to get out of the way, but he howled and aimed for her. She was running as fast as she could on the grass, but the doctor trailed her, keeping the nose of the vehicle right behind her pumping thighs, although each time he gunned the engine to flatten her, Mr. Toad jerked right or left, as if deliberately missing the woman. The other women ran after the truck, screaming at Velazquez to stop. His maniacal laughter echoed back to where Angelica and Tom stood.
“Do something!” Angelica pleaded. “Stop him!”
But even as she said it, the running woman was coming to the end of the lawn. She made a last frantic dart to the side.
As the toad’s headlights hit the fence, Velazquez realized he was heading for the cliff and slammed on the brakes. The toad jerked and bucked in revolt, and then the engine suddenly roared and the wheels spun, steering straight for the fence in clear defiance of its driver. With a final buck, Mr. Toad leapt, crashing through the fence and flying free into the starry night. As the little green truck disappeared over the edge of the bluff, they heard the toad’s final, descending call of victory and farewell: BEEP BEeeeeeeep…!
The pursuing women slowed and stopped, gathering together at the hole in the fence. Tom and Angelica joined them. Below, all that was to be seen was the white foam of surf in the moonlight.
“God rest you, Mr. Toad,” Tom said solemnly. “It was your last wild ride, but through it you avenged your dart frog cousins and achieved greatness. We shall remember you always.”
Angelica sought his hand, and squeezed it. “Amen.”
Epilogue
“Karen says that teuscher is sending her to Switzerland to learn about chocolate production, as part of her training for her new job with them,” Angelica told Tom, reading the email on her laptop. She was sitting on the wooden veranda of their wall-less house on the island of Yap in Micronesia. “She thinks she’s found her calling.”
“Good on her!”
“Who’d have thought that temporarily becoming a carb-zombie would have led here to her life’s work?”
“I guess we all have something to thank Velazquez for,” Tom said, kissing her on the top of her head. “You wouldn’t have given me another chance if I hadn’t rescued you from his evil clutches.”
Angelica grunted in reluctant agreement. Velazquez’s work had also started a backlash against breast augmentation, and small, natural breasts were becoming the ‘it’ thing. Breast reduction surgeries and implant removals were on the rise in L.A..
Even better, researchers were investigating whether Phi-Tox could be used as a treatment for Parkinson’s. Velazquez had given a lot of people something to be thankful for.
Angelica set aside her laptop and picked up her sketchpad as Tom bounded off the veranda and into the lush tropical foliage that surrounded the house.
“You want me to pose like this?” Tom asked, leaning forward and flexing his arms. He made a face like an angry monkey.
Angelica laughed. “No!” Tom was supposed to be posing for her as Adam in the Garden of Eden.
“Like this?” He turned to the side and took an Egyptian stance. His butt was bright white in contrast to his tan everywhere else, and glowed even in the shadows of the tropical foliage.
“No! Be serious!”
He turned full frontal to her. “I am serious, about certain things.”
“Like what?” she asked, smiling.
“Do you really need to ask?” He waggled his eyebrows. Amidst the white of his upper thighs, one very important part of his physiognomy began to rise and swell. “It rises from the dead!” he declared in a Vincent Price voice. “And it wants only one thing: human flesh!”
Angelica feigned a sigh. “I’m never going to get any work done with that thing chasing me all day.”
“Is that a complaint, my beautiful wife?”
Angelica grinned and tossed aside her sketchpad. A moment later her sarong was a puddle on the wood planks, and she bounded off through the foliage, past Tom and down the sandy path to the beach. He caught her just before she could burst free into the sunlight, swinging her around and lifting her in his arms up to where she could wrap her legs around his waist.
“No complaints, husband o’ mine,” Angelica breathed as he lowered her down onto himself. “You know I love every part of you.” She threw her head back, feeling his rod part her flesh and fill her to delicious fullness. “Every single part.�
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