Chapter 2
Julia
When his father bought it, he named the SkrillaKilla’, which is apparently nineties slang for “money pit.” The engine is hitching and coughing like a pack-a-day smoker.
The pit needs filling and the skrilla needs killing.
I keep that rhyme to myself out of respect for the soberness of the conversation on the back deck.
“Our problem now is the same problem we had before Catalina.” Tonya spins her laptop to face us. It’s a sea of red. “Money.”
Of course it is.
We needed a new truck to get from home to jobsite and home again. Then we got a job at the Catalina Island sex-party estate of legendary rich dickhead, Jaeger Duke. Tonya and I got trapped on the island with the expectation that we’d take part in the upcoming sex-party.
Then my screwdriver turned into a naked man I had to hide.
That’s a whole story. We met Dan, the guy who owned the local surf shop, and he helped us get off the island when Duke got a little too insistent about the sex-party.
I didn’t think I was a vengeful person until Duke drugged Tonya.
Once we’re on our feet, he’s paying for that. Somehow.
Now, we’re on Dan’s boat after having abandoned our apartment. We don’t have to pay rent, which is nice, but it’s hard to sleep when the bed is so small and Caspian is so big.
“We’ll be fine once Duke pays us,” I say. “Then I’m going to kill him.”
“Please don’t,” Tonya says.
“He’s going to live forever if we’re waiting for him to pay first.” Dan’s hands brace against the back of a bench that’s bolted to the deck. “There’s a reason he can’t get contractors on the island.”
“He’ll pay.” Caspian, my ex-screwdriver, is eating an apple with his feet up on Dan’s seat.
He’s broad at the shoulders and tight at the waist, with thick arching eyebrows and a jawline prone to two o’clock shadow.
He doesn’t fit into Dan’s clothes, so we thrift-stored him a wardrobe.
Today, he’s wearing a plaid shirt with pointed yokes and pearl snap buttons, like a cowboy.
His top two buttons are open, teasing the hair on his chest.
“He’s got better lawyers than you, dude.” Dan slaps Caspian’s leg to get his feet off the chair so he can sit. It doesn’t work.
“They gonna write a brief with broken hands?”
When Caspian first changed from a screwdriver to a man, I nearly killed him with every tool in the box.
He seemed as shocked as I was. Eventually, he won me over.
I learned that in the 1990s, he and his crew were cursed to be tools when they didn’t pay enough tribute to their mob boss back in Italy.
Of course, I didn’t believe it at first. But as I said, he won me over. And for what it’s worth, I’m not completely gullible and stupid. I found contemporaneous proof on the Internet. I’m only mostly gullible and stupid.
“No mob shit, please.” I rub my eyes. “Even if we go after Jaeger Duke, we need money now.”
“My sister’s sending some,” Dan offers. “For the boat. The engine’s holding together with spit and chewing gum.”
“That doesn’t feel right.” Tonya looks away, shaking her head. “Her working at the surf shop while you’re floating around with us.”
“It’s her boat too.”
“That’s not going to put us on our feet,” I say. “We need a couple of good jobs and we’ll be fine.”
“Jaeger Duke’s already badmouthing us all over LA.” Tonya closes the laptop. “And the connection keeps dropping.”
“Come on, dude.” Dan pushes Caspian’s legs, and my screwdriver-man finally relents. Once Dan has a seat at the table, he gets serious. “Listen, I gotta fix this boat. We can be in the Newport Beach Marina tomorrow.”
“Newport Beach?” Tonya wrinkles her nose. “I’m not going deeper than the dock.” She’s allergic to rich enclaves unless we leave it with more money in our pockets, but this is stronger than usual.
“Few hours is all I need,” Dan says. “I gotta get a new gas pump, install it, bang, boom, we can head back to LA for the rest of your tools.”
The tools we could travel with are on the boat, distributed among whatever empty cabinets and slots we could find. The rolling storage bin is strapped to a table on the upper deck, where the captain steers.
“Then what? Dude.” Caspian tosses his apple core into the trash. It lands like a three-pointer. Nothin’ but can. “They’re in LA with all their tools. When that fuck gets on them again, what are you going to do about it?”
“What are you doing but eating the apple money?”
Caspian’s eyes go dark. He tenses up to give Dan the noogie attack of his life.
“Enough!” I stand. “Dan. We’ll go to Newport Beach so you can fix the boat. We’ll all keep figuring out a way to get money in faster.” I give him a look loaded with meaning. He knows exactly what I’m talking about. “Tonya…” I wave my arms and come up with nothing. “Do whatever the fuck you want.”
“Sure will.” She smiles. Her left eyebrow flicks up and she looks at Dan’s butt as he walks up the metal stairs to the upper deck, where the helm is. “After we’re on course.”
“To the land of the ultra-rich,” I say. “We should eat a few of them before we leave.”
I take Caspian’s hand and pull him up so I can drag him into our stateroom.
Maybe we’re calling it a guest cabin. Whatever.
We have the smaller one in the back because, in all fairness, it’s Dan’s boat—which didn’t stop Caspian from dragging his knuckles across the surfer’s scalp to try to get him to switch.
It’s all bed with everything else tucked into clever drawers and cabinets. Caspian can barely stand up straight. Not that there’s more than two square feet of floor space to stand on.
I’m not complaining. I’m really grateful, and living on a boat for a while is cool. Even if the bed is only a little wider than a twin, and there’s one bathroom with a squeezy shower that spits cold salt water at you.
Caspian stretches out onto the mattress and pats the spot next to him.
“Hang on.” I open a low door and pull out the toolbox. “You said the level.”
“Tony. Yes.”
I rummage around the toolbox. The pliers, awl, wrench, they’re all just tools.
The hand saw, thank God, is just for wood and doesn’t have a guy trapped inside it.
The hammer, level, chisel, and of course, screwdriver, are all men cursed to live as inanimate, sentient objects.
They were part of a tight mob crew that worked out of the Port of Long Beach back when Clinton was president.
When their boss in Italy found out they weren’t remitting the right tributes, it got weird.
The boss’s reps arrived in the form of crows and put the guys into tools.
I wouldn’t believe any of it, except I’m a full-grown woman who runs hot, and I went to Catalina without a sex toy.
So I used what was on hand. A screwdriver.
Just as I was hitting my personal heights, the tool turned into a man.
And you know, I still wouldn’t believe it.
Except that he turned back into a screwdriver and then back into a man again.
Sometimes the reason he changed was obvious, and sometimes, not so much.
The other tools have other guys, and they all have their own talents.
I hold the eight-inch level.
Tony.
The money guy.
The problem… Caspian changed when the screwdriver’s nice round handle gave me an orgasm. I’m a human person with soft, curved parts and a level is, by definition, not any of those things. How are we supposed to solve that?
I run the pad of my thumb over a particularly well-made edge.
“Are you absolutely sure? He does more than keep the books, right? We already have someone who does that.”
Caspian’s lounging as if this is all easy-peasy, bare feet all toe-twisting cute. I’m holding a tool that’s wood and metal and right angles.
I take my place next to him. He puts his arm around me.
“He’s an artist. He had accounts all over. Stocks. Bonds. They’ve been just sitting there all this time. And that was just one set of books. We had a separate set of books.”
“Yeah, two sets of books is like, duh. Every movie ever.”
“Three sets.”
“What?” Now he has my attention.
“One for the cops. All the above board shit.” He counts on his fingers. “One for the boss. The above board plus under the table. And a third one for the real money. The stock trading.”
“How did you hide that?”
Caspian shrugs. “I have no idea. But before we got cursed, he said he put a lot of it in energy. At the time, that was the move. That’s what he said. I don’t know.”
“Energy’s still good. You’re probably all billionaires now.”
He takes the level and slaps it against my thigh. “Only one way to find out.”
“That doesn’t fit anywhere.”
He pulls me close. “I know you have a better imagination than that.”
Maybe I do. I just don’t know if what we’re talking about is going to work. He doesn’t either. He’s just into the process.
“I’m going to go wash this off,” I say.
“Good idea.”
He kisses me and I slip out the door, snapping it closed behind me. There’s only one bathroom on the boat.
“Tonya’s in the head,” Dan calls from above. The staterooms and head have no windows, but the upper decks are drenched in sunlight. He’s washing cups in the galley, which is a sink, two burners, and a dorm fridge under a narrow counter.
I shove the level in my back pocket, go upstairs, and grab the towel to dry as he washes.
“When are we getting to Newport?”
“The navigator says it’s about three and a half hours. I’ll start at sunrise and we’ll be in swimming distance by breakfast.”
“I didn’t bring a bathing suit,” I lie.
The bathroom door opens with a big clack. Tonya comes out, closes it, and holds onto one of the bars attached to walls all over the boat.
“We’re not swimming anywhere,” she says from below.
“The public docks are super crowded in Newport.” Dan takes the cups from me and puts them in a cabinet. “And I’m not supposed to be doing repairs there, so I gotta be sneaky.”
Dan got us out of the Duke compound by being sneaky. He still doesn’t seem like the type.
“We’ll cover for you,” Tonya says.
“I got it.” He kisses her. “You make yourself small. It’s a state of mind.”
Before I go into the head, Tonya shoots me an amused look.
“That’s just survival, honey.” She swats his butt.