Absolute Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  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.

  -3-

  Matisse 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 ho
using 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.

  Five minutes later, the amateurs had managed to drill a hole through the door the width of a finger. Leman had everyone be quiet and move against the wall on either side of the doorway, where they wouldn’t be seen when the burglars entered. Then he turned the monitor toward him so he could watch their progress.

  But instead of trying to open the door, the burglars kicked a large wedge under it. Then the short one pushed a long tube through the hole he’d made.

  “What’s that?” Matisse asked.

  Leman told him to shut up, watching as they hooked the other end of the tube up to a nozzle on the keg.

  Leman frowned and said, “Gas.”

  “What?”

  “Gas! I was wrong. They know we’re in here. They’re gassing us.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Cover up the hose!”

  Matisse backed away. “You cover up the hose!”

  A faint hiss came from the tube, and Leman took a deep breath and plugged up the end of it with his thumb. The hissing continued. He stared at the tube and saw that the two feet of hose hanging into the room was perforated with hundreds of tiny holes.

  “Help me seal up the tube! There are too many holes!”

  Matisse and one of the accountants put their hands on the tube, trying to cover up all the holes. The other accountant sat in a corner and hugged his knees, trying to make himself very small, which was a trick he learned in Kindergarten.

  “It’s still coming through!” Leman said through clenched teeth.

  “What do we do?” Matisse’s eyes were wide with panic. Leman took out his pocket knife and tried sawing at the tube. The hose was made of some material that didn’t cut.

  “I’m feeling funny,” one of the accountants said.

  Leman noted that he was feeling strange too. Though he was trying to hold his breath and take in good air over his shoulder, some of the gas was obviously getting to him. He was lightheaded, and it would only get worse.

  Leman looked around for the air vent. Maybe he could survive by breathing the air coming in. He saw it in the far corner of the room, near the ceiling. Though he hadn’t noticed during the past two hours he’d been in the room, the vent had a piece of sheet metal covering it up, screwed into place.

  Matisse saw it at the same time.

  “I told you it was cold! They cut off our air!”

  “Shut up!”

  “We’re going to die!”

  “Shut up!”

  Matisse threw up on the floor. Leman, becoming dizzy, held his .38 up to the point of the hose that met the door. He tried to angle it so he just shot the hose off. Then they could shove something in the hole and stop the gas. Or maybe he could even shoot at the burglars through the hole. The problem was the metal door. If his bullet hit the door it would ricochet around in the room. But if they were dead anyway...

  The ex-cop fired. The bullet neatly severed the tube, almost flush with the door. Leman, vision blurring, shoved his finger in the hole.

  “Stopped... it...” He smiled drunkenly.

  Then his eyelids fluttered, and he jerked his hand back and began to wail. Blood ran in rivulets down his arm. The spinning drill bit appeared briefly through the hole, and was then removed and replaced by another two feet of tubing.

  The hissing began again.

  Before everything went black, Leman heard someone order a drink.

  No, it wasn’t a drink. It was someone’s name.

  Someone, very clearly and loudly, said, “Tequila.”

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