Shot of Tequila (13 page)

M
atisse answered the phone without speaking. He had to cover up the mouthpiece to muffle the screams coming from the retard’s bedroom.

“Slake?” asked the voice on the phone.

“No. Matisse.”

“It’s Terco. You guys find the money?”

“We didn’t find shit.”

Sobbing from the bedroom now as Slake appeared, zipping up his fly.

“That Tequila on the phone?” Slake grinned. “Tell him his retard sister isn’t a virgin anymore.”

“It’s Terco.” Matisse automatically handed over the phone. He’d
absolved
—a word he learned from watching that smart Alex Trebec on
Jeopardy
—himself from the responsibility of the evening. First the killing of the parking lot attendant. Then Slake slicing up that fat black woman after they’d tricked her into opening the door by saying they were the police. And now this. None of this was the reason they came. They came to find Marty’s money. The money might have been here too, but Slake hadn’t even bothered to look for it. He’d been too busy acting out the role of crazed psychopath.

Matisse stood back and gave him room, quietly absolving.

“Couldn’t find the cash, Terco,” Slake said. “Tequila’s got it stashed someplace else. Marty get anything out of him yet?”

“He got away, crawled into the heating vents. We’re gonna smoke him out. You’ve got to come back to
Spill
. Leave Matisse there in case Tequila escapes and goes home.”

“Fine.”

Slake hung-up and frowned. How could Tequila have gotten away?

“You’ve got to stay here,” he told Matisse. “That little shit escaped. He may come back.”

Matisse didn’t like that at all. What if the cops showed up? What if a neighbor called to complain about the screaming? He didn’t want to take the blame for Slake’s little blood bath. Hell, it wouldn’t be too long before someone discovered that parking lot attendant, and the place would be crawling with pigs. And what about that nosey doorman? He got a good look at both Slake and Matisse. Too many loose ends.

“What about the bodies?”

“I’ll take care of the guy downstairs,” Slake said, though he had no intention of doing so. “Why don’t you take a knife to that fat coon bitch and flush her down the toilet a piece at a time? Shouldn’t take more than two years.”

“Seriously, Slake.”

“Well, stop being serious.” Slake got in the bigger man’s face. “Go have a siesta with Tequila’s beautiful little sister in there. I’ve already got her broken in.”

“What about the doorman?”

“Let him find his own piece of ass.”

Matisse picked up the phone and began to dial the number for
Spill
, but Slake hit the hang-up button and his switchblade magically appeared at Matisse’s neck.

“Look here, big man. We’re going to do what Marty says, and Marty wants you to stay. You’ll probably get a call in the next hour or so. Wipe down everything here that we might have touched. I’ll take care of the door man. Got it?”

Matisse didn’t answer. Slake flicked his fingers and opened up a line of skin on Matisse’s chin. The blood tickled as it ran down his neck.

“Fine,” Matisse, said trying not to show the fear he was feeling. Watching Slake systematically cut up that black woman was even worse than the time he watched him skin that little kid’s arm. Matisse was almost double Slake’s weight and could probably rip his arms from his sockets, but the thin man still scared the hell out of him.

Slake grinned, and gave Matisse a tiny kiss on the cheek that revolted Matisse so much he had to fight not to flinch.

“Call you later, baby.” Slake began walking towards the front door. “Before you leave, don’t forget to kill the Mongoloid. Such a shame too. I think, given time, she would have become a real pro.”

Slake left. Real class act, that Slake. Matisse had never been
adverse
—another
Jeopardy
word—to taking a piece of ass if he wanted it, but a retard? That was sick. And the only men Matisse had killed were in self-defense. Sure, he may have provoked the fights, but at least the men he fought had a chance. Slake had killed two people in less than fifteen minutes, and both were totally helpless.

Maybe he should talk to Marty about Slake, tell him he was over the edge. Yeah. That’s what he’d do. Fuck Slake. Matisse picked up the phone and was about to punch some numbers when he heard tones coming from the receiver.

“What the hell?”

He dropped the phone and hurried to the retard’s bedroom. She was gone. He found her in Tequila’s room, kneeling by the phone, sobbing.

“You little bitch!” he screamed. With a big paw he swatted her away from the phone, knocking her sprawling across Tequila’s bed. She curled up into a ball, hysterical.

“Mergency! Nine-one-one is mergency!”

“I’ll give you an emergency, you dumb shit!”

He grabbed her by her hair and dragged her screaming into the hallway. She kicked and tugged and managed to turn around and bite his hand. Her teeth sunk into his knuckles and gripped like a pneumatic press.

Matisse didn’t mean to hit her as hard as he did. But he was angry, and in pain, and too damn strong for his own good. He brought his fist down on the back of her neck, right at the base of the head, in an effort to get her to let go.

Her spine snapped like dry kindling. She was dead before she hit the carpet.

“It’s your fault, you stupid retard!” he yelled at the body. “You didn’t have to bite me!”

Sally didn’t answer, but her blank, staring eyes accused him.

Matisse cradled his injured paw in his good hand and looked at the damage. Blood was flowing freely, and he caught it before it dripped onto the carpet. The cops could get DNA—deoxygen newribo acid according to Alex Trebec—from blood. The last thing he wanted to do was leave them evidence.

He hurried to the bathroom and rinsed away the red, grimacing at the jagged edges of his wound. Didn’t he once hear that human bites were dirtier than dog bites? He rubbed a bar of soap into the cut, concerned about infection. Maybe more than infection. Maybe, since a retard bit him, he would become retarded. He should probably go to the hospital, get an anti-retard shot. This situation was getting worse and worse.

Finding gauze in the medicine cabinet, he wrapped a makeshift bandage around his wound and secured it with white tape. The blood seeped through, so he wrapped another layer of gauze over the first. Then he looked at the bloody mess he had made in the sink and panicked, thinking about DNA evidence again.

Now he was just as guilty as Slake was. Murder One. No absolvinglution. And Illinois had the death penalty.

“Oh shit,” he mumbled, suddenly overcome by self-pity. He didn’t want to go to prison. He definitely didn’t want to get gassed, or electrocuted, or whatever they did in this state.

Matisse went into the kitchen and found some
Liquid Plumr
, and he poured that all over the dead retard’s face and mouth and then down her throat to destroy any of his blood she may have swallowed. Then he took a wet rag and began to wipe down everything, absolutely everything, that he or Slake might have touched.

“This isn’t fair,” he said to himself over and over. “Not fair, not fair at all.”

The
Liquid Plumr
foamed bloody in Sally’s dead mouth.

Matisse kept wiping.

T
equila Abernathy heard Marty’s threats echo around him as he continued his climb up the heating duct. He heard them, but didn’t pay attention to them. Tequila’s mind was totally focused on the task at hand, and that task was getting out of the damn vent.

The heat and the strain were taking their tolls. Twice Tequila had to stop his ascent for fear of passing out. Passing out meant a drop down to the furnace again. He was at least four stories up now, and if the fall didn’t kill him, he had no doubts that the heat would.

The problem was that all of the ducts horizontally adjacent to this main one were too tiny. He could barely get his head into some of them, let alone his whole body. The vent running from the vault had apparently been some kind of fluke in its size, because Tequila hadn’t found another as big to climb into, and he had to be at least halfway up the building.

He paused to rest again, making sure his feet had a firm grip on the walls before wiping the blood and sweat off of his hands and onto his shirt. That didn’t help much anymore, because his shirt was equally drenched.

Wouldn’t it be funny if the only way out of this duct was back through the vault room?

He began to climb again.

Though his eyes were by now accustomed to the dark, they still couldn’t penetrate the all-encompassing blackness. That’s why he was completely surprised when he reached the grating.

His right hand touched it on the side of the duct, and he almost lost his balance. Planting his feet, he moved his fingers around the edge, getting a feel for what it was.

It covered an opening almost three feet by two feet. Though Tequila couldn’t see it, he sensed space beyond the barrier. He clicked his tongue quietly, and listened to the sound extend down this new duct. It probably led to some office, or maybe to one of the bathrooms that graced every floor. If Tequila could remove the grate, then he’d be able to move horizontally for a while instead of vertically. Even if it didn’t lead anywhere, it would at least give him a space to lie down and rest for a bit.

He pulled on the grate but it didn’t give. It was thick, like fence mesh, though with smaller holes. Tequila felt around for a release lever and came up empty. Then he tried feeling for screws, but his burned, tired hands lacked the sensitivity to find their holes.

Tequila stifled a cough. Then he had to stifle another immediately. Something was different. He opened his nostrils and took a tentative sniff of the air around him.

Smoke.

Coming from below.

The bastards were trying to smoke him out. Either that or the building was on fire.

Either way, he was in trouble.

Tequila tried to make the decision. Keep climbing? Or try to force the grate open?

He pressed his face against the grating and found he could breathe a little better from the clean air coming through it. Smoke rose, which meant it would follow him as he went higher. If he had any chance at all, this was it.

No longer worrying about noise, Tequila grabbed the grating with both hands and yanked as hard as he could.

It didn’t budge, and his feet slipped, causing him to hold himself suspended by the fingers he had wedged into the grate. The wire bit into them like tiny teeth, and he flailed his feet around until he finally got another grip with them.

Okay, pulling didn’t work. Maybe pushing would.

Tequila coughed again, a burning sensation beginning to fill his lungs. He climbed up the duct another twenty inches, until one foot was on the grating. He put his back against the duct wall opposite it, and put his other foot on the mesh as well. His hands holding onto his holster which he had magnetized to the duct wall, Tequila pushed against the grate with both feet.

He grunted with effort. Little flashes of color danced before his vision. His jaw clenched hard enough to crack marbles. He focused all of his energy into his legs, willing them through the barrier.

Then, suddenly, the grating burst inward.

Tequila’s hands slipped off of his rig at the sudden loss of tension, and he began to fall. But his legs were now past the grating and into the new duct, and he splayed them out and managed to hang upside from the opening by his knees.

The smoke was thick as soup now, and Tequila wasted no time pulling himself up to the new opening. Before sliding into it he took his rig off the wall and pushed it ahead of him. Then he began to crawl through the duct on his belly.

The smoke followed. Tequila tied part of his soggy wet shirt around his mouth and nose in a futile effort to breathe better. After crawling ten yards down the curving duct he began to suffer the primary effects of smoke inhalation. He became disoriented. Lightheaded from lack of oxygen. His throat and lungs burned as if on fire. Passing out was only minutes away when he finally reached the vent.

He pounded at the new barrier with his palms. On the third hit one of the screws snapped. The fourth hit snapped the other screw, and the vent fell down into a room.

Tequila pulled himself out after it, gulping in the clean air. The room was completely dark, but the cold tile floor and the echo of his coughing told him he was in a bathroom. He got to his feet, still shaky, and felt his way through the dark until he bumped into a sink.

The water was like honey in his throat. After drinking his fill he splashed it over his face and arms and body. He felt around for the liquid soap dispenser by the sink and rubbed the sweet smelling gunk into the cuts on his wrists. It hurt, but hurting meant he was still alive, and Tequila welcomed the pain.

He was just about ready to leave when the door burst inward and the lights came on.

Squinting against the sudden brightness, Tequila saw the looming form of Terco blocking the doorway.

“You look like shit,” Terco told him.