Read Online Beach Blanket Bloodbath (Amanda Feral Book 4) by Mark Henry - Free Book Online Page A

the Hulk had
gone tranny.
    “Tommy Doyle!” a voice cried from behind
me, reinforcing my decision. “You bring this nice lady's bag right back or I'll
put another hole in your ass with this here pea shooter.”
    Tommy stopped still and stomped his foot.
“Oh, come on! Mrs. Swinton!”
    I followed his glower to find a tiny
woman in a tweed skirt and jacket, her messy hair in a bun, glasses askew.
There was nothing off-kilter about the pistol in her hand though. She was
locked and loaded.
    “I'm not fucking around, you little
idiot.” She warned, cocking the gun she brandished, the click echoed across the
intersection. The woman leaned close in to me and whispered, “I knew I should
have sold his parents some of those recalled magnet toys when he was a kid. Let
Darwin have him.”
    The boy shuffled over, pouting and held
my bag out in front of me. I snatched it, twisting it in a circle to inspect
for damage—and to determine the degree of torture Tommy Doyle would be in
for—and, finding none, tossed it over my shoulder. He let a cocky snicker
escape and I couldn’t resist clutching his arm and jerking him close to me.   “You’re lucky there’s a witness,” I
hissed.
    He yanked his arm away and scowled.
“Whatever, lady. You’re the one who’s lucky.”
    “Always,” I agreed.
    He glanced back at the woman who’d
intervened and winced when she stabbed the gun in his direction. “Go clean out
your boxers, Tommy. Don’t let me catch you harassing my authors again.”
    The boy stumbled into a run and
disappeared around the corner of the theater.
    “Thank you. I owe you one,” I said
jogging toward the theater and then stopped, remembering her comment. “Mrs. Swinton?
The bookseller?”
    “Yes. I’ll be seeing you tomorrow!” She caught
up to me and rubbed my arm with the kind of familiarity I don’t usually care
for. “But tonight is Miss Sandflea!”
    Mrs. Swinton hurried past and into the
theater.

 
 
 
Chapter 5

 
    I
wedged my foot in the slowly closing door and trod inside the theater,
searching, inexplicably, for the kind of rude-ass friends that don’t wait. I
caught sight of Gil backing out of the main floor door and shook my head. He
merely shrugged in response, and slipping his hand into mine, pulled me up the
side stairs after he and Wendy.
    “Ground floor is packed,” he said. “Hurry,
they're doing a musical number about toxic debris from Japan!”
    “No?” How was that even possible? It
seemed to fly in the face of the human necessity to be offended by everything.
    “Oh yeah. This shit is crazy ass
backwards.”
    We squeezed into the last few seats up in
the nosebleeds and took in the pageant with growing horror...also delight. In
my world, the two are so tightly woven, you'd be hard pressed to tell the
difference, especially if you’ve been drinking—which reminded me. I
produced a flask of bourbon, screwed off the top and gulped.
    “That one,” I said, pointing to one of
the contestants. “Really should have rethought the proportions on that trawler
costume, she looks massive.”
    “Sh,” a rodent-esque redhead chided from
their left, her lips clinched tight. “She's only sixteen.”
    I leaned over the aisle and hissed. “Then
she should know better.”
    Abandoned rusty ships collided with
pagodas, remnants of the Japanese tsunami having made their toxic way to the
shores of Las Felicitas—“Aren't pagodas Chinese?” Gil muttered. The
shimmying “sea” of cardboard waves propped up by girls dressed as deformed
jellyfish, sharks and even a manta ray that looked more like a spatula.
    “This is magical,” I had to admit, but
should have waited for the two-headed Kaiju headdress and the dancing
California Roll before making my final judgment.
    The singing was exactly like a choir of
angels, if they were the fallen kind and had picked up an illiteracy problem on
their way down or smoked two to three packs a day. What I'm saying is: Jesus
Christ, pass the