The Book With No Name (18 page)

Jefe was about to put his gun away when he spotted the blood on the duvet cover on the bed. He peered over at it. The blood hadn’t actually sunk into the bedding yet, but was still lying in a pool on top of the crimson duvet cover. This blood was fresh. Just how fresh soon became clear when a drop from above landed and splashed in the middle of it. Jefe looked up slowly. His eyes moved up first, soon followed by his head. That’s when he saw the dead guy stuck on the ceiling. It was his blood that was dripping on to the bed.

The man had been impaled, literally pinned to the ceiling by a collection of small knives. Some pierced his hands, some his feet, and a couple his chest. Another had been run through his throat, two rather nastily through his eye sockets, and it looked like one through his crotch.
Goddam ouch!
It was hard to make out what the dead man had looked like because he was such a mess. His skin was varnished in blood, and his clothes had been reduced to tatters. To Jefe, it looked as if he had been savaged by a pack of wild beasts before being hung up to dry. The bounty hunter had seen hundreds of dead bodies in his time, but never one this badly messed up.

‘Fuckin’ hell, man. What’s
your
name?’ he asked aloud.

The dead guy didn’t answer at first, but then, as Jefe reached up and prodded him with the barrel of his gun, his answer came emphatically. A gold chain fell from around his neck and landed on the bed. It made Jefe damn near jump out of his skin, but once he had regained his composure and his heart had started beating normally again, he picked it up.
It was a fairly thick chain with a heavy gold medallion on it, bearing three simple letters: ‘TCB’. Jefe recognized this. ‘
TCB
’ – ‘
Taking Care of Business
.’ Elvis Presley had had this little acronym engraved on a pair of his sunglasses. It was the sign of the King. So no prizes for guessing who this dead guy was.

‘So you’re Elvis, huh?
Shit,
man. What the fuck happened to you? You look like you met the Devil in disguise.’

The corpse, unsurprisingly, did not respond. Jefe spent the next few minutes hunting around the apartment. He found nothing, and when Elvis’s weight finally loosened all the knives so that his body crashed on to the bed below, he decided he’d had enough and lit out of the filthy apartment. He shifted down the stairs as fast as he could walk without appearing to be in a hurry. The old man on reception didn’t even look up as Jefe passed him on the way out. He probably knew better than to check out all the people that visited his apartment block. No sense in being able to identify a criminal and have them feel the need to kill him.

Outside, relieved to be breathing in fresh air again, Jefe took several deep breaths of the stuff before heading down the street to his car. Retrieving the Eye of the Moon was now going to be extremely difficult. He needed a new lead. Who had killed Elvis? And where was the Eye of the Moon now? Did this kid Dante still have it? And if so, where the hell was he now?

The questions were running through Jefe’s mind thick and fast. They proved to be such a distraction that he didn’t even notice his old yellow Cadillac parked at the roadside when he walked past it to get to his shiny new silver Porsche.

Sanchez wasn’t so pleased to see Jessica on her second visit to the Tapioca that day. She had been pretty rude on the first occasion she had dropped in, and then, having shown no interest in him, her saviour, she had gone off with Jefe. So it was quite a surprise to him when she turned up in a much friendlier mood that evening. The bar wasn’t particularly busy and Mukka was doing all the serving while Sanchez rested his ass on a barstool on the customer’s side of the counter, sipping at a glass of his best beer.

Jessica made a beeline for him as soon as she walked in. She was dressed in the same black ninja-style outfit that she had worn earlier in the day. It just so happened that it was the same outfit she had worn on the night Sanchez had first met her, five years earlier. In fact, he had never seen her wear anything else, but then she probably didn’t have any other clothes, at least, none that she knew of. These clothes had been in tatters five years ago after being riddled with bullet holes, but Sanchez’s sister-in-law Audrey had made a pretty good job of patching them back together.

‘So, Sanchez,’ Jessica said, sitting herself down on the stool next to him at the bar. ‘You gonna buy me a drink and tell me who the hell you think I am?’

Although he hated to admit it, Sanchez was pleased that she had suddenly decided to take an interest in him. He had thought about her a great many times since the moment when he had first laid eyes on her. As well as being the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, she was also the most interesting. Effectively, he had known her for five years, yet
he knew virtually nothing about her. Right up until today she had been unconscious for all but the first couple of hours since they had first met.

‘Mukka, get the lady a drink.’

‘Sure, boss. What’ll it be, miss?’

‘Bloody Mary.’

‘Comin’ right up.’

Sanchez could only manage to stare and smile at Jessica while they waited for Mukka to serve her drink. Eventually, after about a minute of rattling glasses and bottles while he searched for the ingredients for her Bloody Mary, Mukka placed a tall thin glass of red liquid in front of her.

‘There any ice in that?’ Jessica asked, knowing perfectly well that there wasn’t.

‘You see me put any in?’ was Mukka’s sarcastic response.

‘Put some
fuckin’
ice in the lady’s drink, for
fuck’s sake,
will you!’ bellowed Sanchez.

Mukka obliged, although not without hissing mutinously under his breath just loud enough for his boss to hear.

‘Sorry ’bout that, Jessica,’ said Sanchez, offering his best smile. There was only one way, he reflected, to get this conversation started, and that was just to come right out and ask the girl about herself. He took a deep breath and then said the first thing that came into his head.

‘So … anyway … Tell me, how come I’ve known you for five years and yet I don’t know you at all?’

‘Oh for Chrissakes! Let’s not waste time with small talk, huh?’

This was going to be hard work, Sanchez thought, but he wasn’t going to give up without having a good crack. ‘Okay,’ he said evenly, ‘but this is a two-way thing, missy. I want to hear what you know about my brother and his wife.’

‘I’ve never met them,’ Jessica said looking confused. ‘
Have I?
’

‘Oh yeah, you’ve met them all right. They’re the ones who kept you alive for the last five years after I saved your life.’

‘
You
saved my life?
Bullshit!
’

Sanchez was more than a little disappointed that Jessica treated his claim to have saved her life so dismissively, as though it were an impossibility. Yet he swallowed his pride, and ploughed on.

‘Ain’t bullshit, neither,’ he said doggedly. ‘Five years ago you got shot and left for dead outside this bar. I picked you up and took you to my brother’s house. His wife Audrey was a nurse, an’ she took care of you and brought you back to health. These last five years you’ve been in a coma and she ’n’ my brother been keepin’ you alive on the off-chance you might come out of it one day.’

Jessica looked a little suspicious, which Sanchez figured was understandable. It would take time to establish her trust, but it would come. He just had to persist.

‘Why take me to
her
? Why not take me to a hospital like any normal person would?’ she asked, eyeing him carefully to check whether his response was genuine.

‘’Cos the hospital was full that day.’

‘What kind of an excuse is that?’ she scoffed.

‘’Bout three hundred men, women and children were shot that week. Most of ’em died ’cos the hospital couldn’t cope. My sister-in-law had been fired by the hospital a few months earlier, so I figured she was your best bet for survival. Besides, the fact that you were even alive when I got to you was some sort of miracle.’ He paused to look her over. ‘I had a feeling you’d be okay. Looks like I was right, too, don’t it?’

‘Sure does. I guess I should be thanking you.’ Her mind was churning with all he’d told her, not least because she had no recollection of any of the events he’d recounted.

Sanchez got the impression that she wasn’t actually going to thank him, but that in some small way she had come about as close to it as she was going to, which kind of counted as a thank you round these parts.

‘You can thank me by tellin’ me what the fuck happened to my brother and his wife.’

It was Jessica’s turn. This would be her opportunity to pay
him back for helping her. She could help him find his brother’s killer. Her response, however, was as typically unhelpful as he’d come to expect.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Who killed ‘em? That’s what I mean.’

‘Oh that.’

‘Yes, that.’

‘Don’t know.’

‘
Don’t know?
’

‘Right. Don’t know.’

‘You were there though, surely?’

‘I was – at least, I think I was. But I don’t know. I don’t really remember.’

‘How can you not fuckin’ remember if you were there when they were killed?’ Sanchez, by now more than a little impatient, was finding it hard to hide his frustration.

‘My memory kind of comes and goes at the moment,’ Jessica said softly, looking away into some distant place beyond the back of the bar. ‘I know I’ve got some kind of amnesia, but it isn’t just restricted to stuff that happened before I went into a coma. If I was in a coma … I keep forgetting where I am and how I got there. It does come back to me if I think hard enough, but even then I’m not sure if I’m remembering it right.’

‘You remember bein’ in here earlier today, right?’

‘Yeah. I remember that. And I remember leaving with Jefe, but then we went back to his place and he told me to wait there for him, and I waited but he never came back. Then I couldn’t recall why he wanted me to stay there so I thought I’d come back here and talk to you. I thought you might be able to enlighten me on a few things. You know, tell me if you thought I was a nice person or a bitch, because right now I’m not sure which I am.’

‘To be honest, Jessica, I ain’t sure either,’ Sanchez said with a sigh.

‘Oh.’ She seemed a little disappointed, and for a moment Sanchez felt that he might have hurt her feelings unnecessarily.

‘You know, you look too sweet to be a bad person,’ he said in an attempt to make her feel better.

‘Thanks.’ She took a suck on the straw in her Bloody Mary. The level of the glass had fallen about two inches before she suddenly jerked her head back.

‘Yellow Cadillac!’ she blurted out, immediately grabbing Sanchez’s full attention.

‘Yeah, what do you know about the yellow Caddy?’ he asked, his eyes lighting up.

‘You mentioned it earlier when you were talking to Jefe, didn’t you?’

‘Yeah. I saw it drivin’ away from my brother’s place after I found him dead. Do you know who was driving it? Did you see them?’

‘Oh my God! It’s coming back to me. There were two men. They killed your brother and his wife. I saw it. Least I think I did. No, wait a second … ‘

‘What?
What,
for Chrissakes?’

‘No, they weren’t dead. The two men were beating them. They were trying to get information.’ She stopped for a half second, then suddenly gasped.

‘Oh shit!’

‘“Oh shit” what?’

‘Oh shit, they were looking for
me!
’ She looked at Sanchez, wide-eyed and clearly upset.

‘Well, didn’t they see you?’ he asked.

‘No. No, for some reason they couldn’t see me. So I sneaked out, and that’s when I saw the yellow Cadillac.’

‘So what happened then?’ the bartender was frustrated, disappointed that she recalled so little, but he did his best to keep his tone even.

‘I just ran. I don’t know how long I ran for, but I just kept running and then eventually I ended up here.’ She paused in thought for a moment. ‘I don’t remember anything else. Not at the moment, anyway.’

She picked up her drink and sucked on the straw again. This time she finished the entire contents of the glass. It took
her about ten seconds. Sanchez didn’t really know what to ask next, and his opportunity for further questioning ended a moment later when Jefe burst into the barroom through the street door. The big bounty hunter made straight for the bar and took up a seat on the stool next to Jessica, so that she was now between him and Sanchez.

‘Whisky for me, and another drink for the lady,’ he ordered, staring up at Mukka, who had moved from the back of the bar where he’d been lurking.

The young cook-cum-barkeep, remembering Jefe’s last visit, jumped into action, putting a nearly full bottle of whisky and a glass down on the bar for him. Sanchez leaned across Jessica, picked up the bottle and twisted the cork out then poured a generous measure of the whisky into the glass. He thought Jefe looked a little shaken, which he guessed was unusual. He found it disconcerting. Men like Jefe weren’t supposed to look shaken.

‘Are you okay, man?’ he asked.

‘I will be once I’ve had a drink. You might want one yourself, too, when you hear what I’ve gotta say.’