Shot of Tequila

by J. A. Konrath

  “What the hell you think I’m trying to do here?” The sweat on Chico’s body was a living thing, running over him in itchy waves.

  The short man stood calmly, hands in his pockets.

  “I’ll wait. But you’d better hurry. You’ve been in here for a minute and forty-three seconds, and the owner there tripped his silent alarm right after you pulled your gun.”

  Chico began to shake like a withdrawing junkie.

  “Give me the damn money, old man!”

  “I can’t. It’s a time lock.”

  Chico threw the champagne at the old man, but it was lefty and he threw like a girl. The old man caught the bottle.

  The short guy turned his ear to the front door, keeping both eyes on Chico. “Sirens coming this way.”

  “Shut up!”

  Chico unconsciously pushed the hairnet up off his face and rubbed his forehead to think. No thoughts came, other than maybe gambling wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

  “Better move your ass, Billy.”

  “I said shut up!”

  The short man waited.

  The old man behind the counter stared, probably memorizing Billy Chico’s face.

  Then Billy Chico made the biggest mistake of many big mistakes throughout his miserable little life. He began to swing his gun from the shop owner over to the short guy.

  “Billy… don’t.”

  Billy Chico hesitated. It was obvious he was leaving here empty handed. But he definitely wasn’t going to leave with some broken fingers, or a busted arm or leg. He continued to bring the gun around, ready to shoot his way out of here if he had to.

  “Drop it, Billy!”

  The tone was so sudden, so commanding, that Billy Chico had to react. His brain offered three instantaneous choices: Drop the gun, wet his pants, or fire. Billy’s finger began to pull the trigger.

  He never got a chance to. In a blur the short guy whipped out two semi-automatic .45s from the pockets of his Starter jacket and fired sixteen shots into Billy Chico. His left hand put a controlled burst of eight into Billy’s chest, and his right hand punched eight more into Billy’s head and neck.

  Billy Chico ended instantly. His heart never had a chance to stop beating, because it was carved out of his chest. His brain never had a chance to realize he was dead, because it got scrambled the same instant his heart was chewed away.

  Chico’s body jerked in electrical spasms and tangled itself in a cardboard display featuring several bikini-clad women holding beers. His body landed an instant before his gun clattered to the floor where he’d been previously standing.

  The shop owner, who’d seen a few things in his day, wasn’t sure whether to cheer or scream. The skinny man with the gun was scary, but it was a familiar kind of scary. In the almost three decades he’d been in business, he’d been robbed forty-six times, half of those within the last seven years as the neighborhood continued to decline. Junkies, gang members, ex-cons, and all shades of desperate men had walked into Teddy’s Liquors looking to make a quick buck. The skinny guy wasn’t an exception. He was part of a trend.

  But this short guy with the two guns, this was something different. Something even scarier. When he killed the skinny man, his face had no expression. It didn’t even look like he blinked. How can you shoot someone a dozen times and not even blink?

  The old man forced a smile—something damn near impossible with his peripheral vision clogged red with spilled blood—and managed to sputter out, “Thanks, buddy.”

  The short man shook his head.

  “I still have to collect his debt.”

  “But the safe is on a—”

  The short guy placed the hot barrel of the .45 in front of his lips like a giant finger and said, “Shhh.”

  He pocketed the guns, and in three steps leapt the counter without touching it, jumping much higher than the old man thought possible. Within seconds he located the safe, in a cabinet under the cash register.

  The sirens grew louder. The short guy stared at the safe for a long second.

  “This isn’t a time lock safe. This thing is older than I am.”

  The old man was too afraid to shrug, but he managed to sputter, “New safe costs a few thousand dollars. Sign was only $10.99.”

  “How about you give me the combination?”

  The old man tried to swallow but he was all out of spit.

  “The owner hasn’t told it to me.”

  “Then how about give me your wallet?”

  “My wallet?”

  “Does that have a time lock too?”

  The old man dug his wallet out with trembling hands and offered it up. The short guy avoided the money inside, instead removing the Driver’s License.

  “This is Teddy’s Liquors, right?”

  The old man nodded.

  “Your name is Theodore. Is it worth having your fingers broken, Teddy, for a few thousand dollars that are insured anyway?”

  The old man shook his head, knelt down, and opened the safe. He held up a money tray, head bowed, like an offering to the gods.

  The sirens were much closer, screaming up the street.

  The short guy quickly and efficiently counted two thousand dollars; the amount of Chico’s debt. It went into his Starter jacket. The rest of the money from the tray went into an empty Jim Beam box that was lying behind the counter. He put another box inside the box with the money, so it looked like two stacked empty boxes.

  “Hide this in back and then claim it all on your insurance. Busy night like tonight, they’ll owe you at least five or six grand. Just don’t let the police find it.”

  The old man nodded, getting it. He went from being terrified to strangely elated. The insurance company—those premium-hiking bloodsuckers—always demanded receipts and double-checked inventory to make sure his claims weren’t inflated. This would be the very first time he was robbed and actually came out ahead of the game.

  “Thanks,” the old man said, realizing as soon as he did how strange it was.

  “Remember to describe me correctly to the police. A very tall black man in a green jacket. I’d hate to have to come back here and find out you got my description wrong. Got it?”

  The old man stared into the blue eyes of the short white guy. His stare wandered down to the man’s hand, the back of which was covered with an extremely ornate tattoo of a Monarch butterfly, so realistic it appeared ready to take flight.

  “No tattoos, either.”

  “Got it,” the old man croaked.

  “Take care, Teddy,” the short guy said, and he slipped out the door into the night.

  The 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.

  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 m
ean, 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…