Shot of Tequila (3 page)

T
he man named Tequila drove aimlessly through the city streets, car windows cranked down so the biting Chicago wind slapped at him on both sides. It tingled his scalp through his crew cut, and numbed his cheeks and ears. Tequila liked the very cold. He also liked the very hot, the heavy rain, and the few times a year when fog crept in from Lake Michigan and took over the shoreline.

Tequila wasn’t into weather as much as he was into extremes.

Though his expression rarely ever changed from the blank, bored look he constantly wore, at the moment Tequila was pleased. He had gotten Marty’s money, the weather was mean, and the remainder of the evening was open to him. Not even the Maniac, who sometimes endowed Tequila with supernatural abilities, would expect a collection this fast. Tequila could do what he wanted with the night, remaining on Marty’s extremely anal time clock without anyone the wiser.

He pulled the white Chevy Caprice onto Lake Shore Drive, pushing the car up into the nineties as he buzzed southbound. The car looked like, and was constantly mistaken for, an unmarked Chicago police car, from the hand spotlight next to the side mirror down to the three antennae on the roof, all of them cosmetic. Tequila hadn’t gotten a moving violation since buying the car three years ago.

The wind surged through the windows in freezing shrieks, drowning out the sound of the engine and the cars around him. He looked to his left and caught sight of the dead, frozen lake. He watched the light tower blink, halfway to Michigan, and wondered if the lake had frozen that far. He used to stare at that same lighthouse in his youth. Stare for hours, alone on an ugly stretch of shore far from the sunbathers and young lovers and joggers.

At 53rd Street he went over a short bump in the road that constituted a small bridge, and his chassis took air for the briefest of seconds and then bounced back to earth on reinforced shocks. Tequila got that tiny tingle in his stomach and groin and welcomed the sensation. He wondered if skydiving felt like that, multiplied a thousand fold. He’d try it someday, he decided. He’d made that decision dozens of times, driving over that bridge. On a whim a few months back, he’d even bought a parachute at an Army surplus store. He had no idea if it was operational or not, but the idea of owning one appealed to Tequila. It made someday a little closer.

At 57th he turned off LSD and passed the sprawling Museum of Science and Industry, which he visited once a week with Sally. She never seemed to tire of the coal exhibit, an informative ride in the museum that shuttled patrons through a fake mine on fake mining cars and showed examples of mining techniques that were probably thirty years out of date.

Tequila glanced at the digital clock on his dashboard and noted that Sally would be asleep by now. Her schedule was so regimented that she actually had preset times in the day to go to the bathroom. Tequila had once taken her to a movie on a weeknight, and she’d messed her pants during the flick because she’d missed her bathroom time. He’d since learned to heed her schedule.

From 57th he hung a left onto Michigan Avenue. The cold had driven everyone off the street. Usually there were dozens of bored black kids hanging out in front of the shops, drinking malt liquor from brown paper bags, waiting for something to happen. Something usually did, in the form of a shooting or an arrest or a fight. Nothing at all was happening with a wind chill of twenty below. The city, like the lake, was frozen.

Tequila found a parking space under a streetlight and set the car alarm on his keychain. He walked across the beaten asphalt toward the only sound on the block that competed with the howling wind.

When he opened the door the sound got louder. It came from a grizzled, ancient black man, singing an old blues song and accompanying himself on an even older piano. Tequila found a seat at the half empty bar and the fat black woman behind it set a rocks glass in front of him and filled it with three fingers of Applejack without being asked.

Tequila lifted the brandy and closed his eyes, letting his senses report. The air was cigarette smoky and stale, cut by the sharp scent of alcohol and apples under his nose. The room was hot, and the skin on his head and hands tingled as warm blood pumped into the cold flesh. The piano man, a kindly fossil named Bones, plunked away at an instrument missing at least five keys. It made his songs disjointed, and strangely, poignant.

Tequila put the Applejack to his lips and snarled. At the height of his snarl he emptied the contents down his throat. It burned from the tip of his tongue down to his ass, and he drew air in through his mouth to accentuate the tart aftertaste.

Bones ended his song short and went into
Dead Shrimp Blues
, a tune he always played when he noticed Tequila had come in. Tequila didn’t particularly like the song, but years ago, the first time he came into the
Blues Note
, he tipped Bones a hundred dollar bill while Bones was playing this tune. It wasn’t Tequila’s appreciation of the music so much as his sharing the windfall from a multi-thousand dollar job. Though Tequila hadn’t given him a cent since, Bones continued to play
Dead Shrimp Blues
whenever Tequila made an entrance.

Tequila opened his eyes and tilted his glass toward Bones, acknowledging him, and Bones ended the
Dead Shrimp Blues
and began
Come On In My Kitchen
, another old Robert Johnson tune.

Time passed.

Tequila drank another glass of Applejack and stared at the poorly mounted catfish hanging behind the bar in front of him. It was over a foot long, missing two fins, and resembled a gray boot with an unrealistic glass eye embedded near the heel. Tequila stared at it every time he came in. He reflected on why, and decided that he had his rituals just like Sally did.

Not once during the evening did he reflect on the man he’d killed.

After the third glass of brandy, Tequila left a twenty on the bar, nodded at the fat black woman who’d been serving him for years but whose name he’d never known, and got up to leave,
Dead Shrimp Blues
following him on the way out.

The night was a shock against his bare skin, and he welcomed it, the cold fighting the sleepy feeling the Applejack had induced. He stood for a moment, alone on the empty street, and took a deep lungful of dry, frigid air. Without telegraphing the move, he took two quick steps forward and slid on his belly over the top of an ‘85 Cadillac, tucking and rolling as he came down on the other side, landing on his feet facing the bar with a .45 in each hand. The entire motion was over in three seconds, and he hadn’t made a sound louder than his footsteps on the sidewalk.

Satisfied that his reflexes showed no trace of the brandy, he judged himself sober and put the guns back in his pockets. Then he walked lightly to his car, disengaged the alarm, and drove home, thinking about sitting next to a lighthouse, fishing for catfish shaped like boots.

M
atisse scratched at a new tattoo on his massive right biceps, causing it to bleed. He had various tattoos decorating his torso, all smeared because he clawed at them during the healing process. This new one portrayed a young-looking mermaid with large bare breasts and a hook through her head.

The caption below it read
JAIL BAIT
. Matisse picked at it again, smearing her face.

“Kind of cold in here,” Matisse said.

He looked to Leman for some sort of response. His fellow collector was cleaning his teeth with the edge of a Visa card, watching the television monitor in the corner of the room with obvious boredom. The monitor was hooked up to a camera outside the room’s only door. Anyone approaching the room was captured on tape before entering.

The door itself was reinforced steel, and it operated by a security code which Marty changed weekly. All four walls were also reinforced, essentially making the room a large vault. At any normal time there was between twenty and two hundred thousand in the room, ready to be escorted by armed bodyguards to whichever laundering location Marty chose.

“You’re ruining it.” Leman gestured at the way Matisse was butchering his latest skin art.

“Itches.”

Leman went back to picking his teeth. Matisse went back to scratching.

Marty wasn’t due for another hour or so. Matisse liked Marty. He liked paling around with such an important man. The money was great, and Matisse went through it like water, keeping a penthouse apartment, buying two cars a year, impressing the chicks he met while bouncing at
Spill
. Impressive for a high school drop-out who couldn’t make it as a mechanic. And Super Bowl week was the best week of the year. He’d get a huge bonus, get drunk with Marty and the guys, and Marty would set him up with some high class piece of ass to take home.

Marty himself never took a woman home, probably because he had a hard-on for money, not women.

Tequila never took one home either, but Tequila was strange. He scared Matisse, even though Matisse was easily twice his weight and a foot taller. When Matisse first signed on with Marty, he made the grave error of poking fun at Tequila’s short stature. Tequila had broken Matisse’s nose, ruptured an eardrum, and bruised his kidney before the other guys could pull him off.

Matisse pissed blood for a week. Neither of them ever brought the incident up again, and they’d worked fine together several dozen times, but Matisse was still wary of him.

Matisse liked Leman okay, because Leman was good to drink with and made a lot of jokes. He liked Terco, because Terco was just as big as he was and they’d work out together three times a week.

The last collector, Slake, scared Matisse as much as Tequila did. Maybe more. Slake was almost as tall as Matisse, but razor thin and mean as hell. It was the bad kind of mean, the kind where he liked seeing people hurt. Matisse once witnessed Slake use an electric sander on a ten-year-old boy’s arm in front his parents to get a marker paid. Slake had been grinning the whole time, singing softly to himself. It was the single most horrifying thing Matisse had ever witnessed, and still haunted him years later. Only recently had he asked Slake what song he’d been singing that night.

“
Hello Again
. You gotta love that Neil Diamond.”

Matisse shuddered at the memory and scratched his forehead, feeling a chill in his armpits.

“Are you cold?” Matisse asked Leman again. “Maybe the heat is broke.”

“What the hell is
that?
”

Leman stood up and yanked his .32 from his shoulder holster. He was staring at the vid monitor. Matisse took a look himself, and saw two people standing outside the vault door. Both wore ski masks, black jackets, black jeans, and gloves. One carried a suitcase, and the other had a hand truck hauling what looked like a keg of beer.

“Who the hell are these guys?” Leman asked.

Matisse didn’t know. The faces were hidden behind the masks. But one thing was clear; one of the men was very short.

“What are they doing?”

The accountants had stopped their counting and were also staring at the monitor. The short man outside the door opened up his suitcase, and assembled what looked like a machine gun.

“It’s a drill,” one of the accountants said.

His prediction proved correct when the short man attached a four inch drill bit to the base of the object.

“What’s he gonna do with that?”

What the short man did was touch the drill bit to the door and begin boring a hole in it.

“This ain’t good,” Matisse shook his head. “This really ain’t good.”

Leman’s eyebrows scrunched up. These guys were obviously trying to break in, but even if they did manage to get the door open, Leman and Matisse would shoot them dead. Neither of the intruders carried anything looking like heavy firepower, except for that keg of beer thing. How did they think they could rob the vault, unless…

Leman laughed. “They don’t know we’re in here.”

“Huh?”

“Take a look, muscle-head. They aren’t even armed. They don’t know we’re in here. They think they can just break in, take the money, and go.”

“So what do we do?”

“We just wait on either side of the doorway, and when they get in, we take them out.” Leman laughed again. “Stupid amateurs.”

“Alive, right? We’re not gonna kill them, are we, Leman?”

For someone so goddamn big who made a living breaking people’s bones, Matisse could be a real pussy.

“Naw. We’ll just bring them to Marty. He’ll take care of it.”

“Yeah. Good idea. Marty will know what to do with them.”

Torture them and kill them,
Leman thought.
Not smart trying to steal from Marty the Maniac.

Leman didn’t like his boss. He didn’t like the endless stupid lectures. He didn’t like the way Marty tried to pretend they were buddies, even while abusing them. The work was okay, but Marty insisted on a minimum sixty hour work week, and even demanded they punch a clock.

But the money was unbelievable. Sure, he was hourly, but Leman figured out that with bonuses, he averaged about thirty bucks an hour. That was eighteen hundred bucks a week, cash. A big step up from the six bills a week he was making as a member of Chicago’s finest. Plus it was a lot less dangerous than breaking up gang fights or investigating shots fired at a housing project. In five years, Leman figured he could retire. Move out to the tropics and sip drinks out of coconuts while native girls blew him.