Sindee's Story

My father was the Irish mob kingpin Charlie “The Cat” O’Malley, so named for his skills as a cat burglar, I was his adorable redheaded daughter Sally.  Daddy raised me in the underworld of crime and I developed a gourmand’s taste for the family business.  It didn’t take long for me to learn the tricks of the trade:  homemade car bombs, smuggling, extortion, running numbers (which got me into some bloody confrontations with the Italian mafia), and impeccable skills with a straight razor.  As I got older, I found that I could use seduction to get my way.  Among the criminal underground, I became known as Sindee Lux for my numerous crimes and cardinal sins.  In my illustrious mob career I was beaten, stabbed, shot, strangled, electrocuted, smothered, drowned, starved, hanged, crushed, immolated, poisoned, and I survived it all with a smile on my face.  My father may have been “The Cat” – but I had more lives than any feline ever did. 

After doing some dirty deeds for the IRA, I was forced to go on the lam.  I spent most of my time in barrooms and boxing gyms.  One night I was in a twelve-round bout with a fast-talking hustler named Lucky Dukes, fighting for twenty bucks and a case of Jameson whiskey.  The fight was a draw, and Lucky and I became great friends.  We split the case of whiskey and spent a week forcing tattoo artists to give us ink at gunpoint.  That Sunday we burst into a tattoo shop and found a half dozen guys sitting around and watching TV.  One of them made a crude advance on us, so I whipped out my trusty straight razor, cut off his tally-whacker and stuffed it into his mouth.  “I just came from Mass,” I snarled, “and I’m not in the mood to hear that kind of talk!” I grabbed another one of the men and held my blade to his throat, then forced him to tattoo TROUBLE across my chest.  Even with six inches of sharp steel against his throat, he had a gentle touch.  So I let him live, but not before I left my mark:  “S.L.” carved with a flourish above his heart.

Lucky and I raged across Texas, raising Hell and taking lives, but one night she said she had to go to Vegas for awhile.  She didn’t explain why – all she said was that she’d come back for me with the best score ever.  So I drank my way through the border towns, looking for trouble and usually finding it.  One night I was introducing a bartender to my trusty brass knuckles after he gave me a beer with a napkin wrapped around the glass.  I was so busy pounding him, I didn’t notice the bouncer creeping up behind me with a baseball bat.  A shot rang out, and the bouncer fell to the floor.  I turned around to see my old friend Lucky Dukes standing in the doorway, with a smoking pistol in her hand.  My old partner in crime had returned, just as she promised.  But there was something different about her.  There was something evil in her, more evil than I had ever seen.  Her eyes had a mysterious red glow as she approached me.  “I’ve found where I belong,” she whispered, “and it’s where you belong, too.”  She led me out the back door into the alley, and pointed at a dilapidated building across the way.  “Go through that door over there.”

I walked across the alley and opened the door.  There was a staircase, lit with a single flickering red bulb.  I walked down twelve steps into a basement room with a long bar across one wall.  The place was empty except for the bartender, who smiled at me as I approached.  “Hello, Sindee.  I’m so glad you’ve come to meet me.  Let me make you a drink.”  He began to mix bubbling liquids from different bottles into a pint glass.  “Tell me why I’m here,” I said. 

“You’re a chosen one, Sindee.  You’ve known all your life that you were different.”  I kept one hand on my straight razor and looked him up and down.  “How do you know about that?” I asked.  The bartender laughed.  “You’re a legend in the Irish mob.  Not only are you an expert in explosives, you’ve also survived every hit that’s been put on you.  And I was the one who arranged for you to have that special ability.  Now I want to give you more.  In exchange for a small one-time payment, I’ll give you immortality – you’ll be completely impervious to injury.”

“What’s the payment?”

“Your soul, Sindee.  That’s all I ask.  I’ll even throw in a free drink ... the last drink you’ll ever need.  It will intoxicate you forever.  Do we have a deal?”

As much as I love a good drink (or ten, or twenty), I hate it when the buzz wears off.  And even though I’d survived all those hits, I’d gotten pretty banged up in the process; it was a certainly tempting prospect to come through my misadventures without a scratch.  “We’ve got a deal!” I said, and grabbed the bubbling flask from the bartender’s hand.  I drank the whole thing in a single gulp.  All of a sudden, I felt a weird gurgling in my stomach.  A thin, Guinness-scented smoke poured from my mouth and swirled into an empty bottle that sat on the bar.  The bartender quickly capped the bottle, and slipped it into his pocket.  “Go back to Lucky,” he said.  “She has some friends who are dying to meet you.”

I walked back up the twelve steps into the alleyway.  Lucky was waiting for me behind the wheel of a cherry hot rod.  There were other girls in the car, beautiful girls clad in vinyl and fishnets.  They all had the same evil red glow in their eyes, the same glow that Lucky had – I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror, and saw that my eyes glowed, too.  

Lucky was right.  I had found where I belonged.