Shot of Tequila

by J. A. Konrath

  “So where to, Tequila? We can’t parachute out of this one. And all the exits are covered.”

  “Almost all of them,” replied Tequila, pointing up to the thirty foot ceiling. Above them was a skylight.

  “Great,” muttered Jack. “I get nosebleeds sitting on bar stools that are too high.”

  “You don’t have any blood left for your nose to bleed. Move your ass.”

  They began to climb up the steel shelving unit, using it like a large ladder. It was hard going. Both of them were badly hurt, and Tequila kept catching the blade of the knife in his arm on boxes, jiggling it around.

  Finally, near exhaustion, their endurance almost gone, they made it to the top shelf.

  The skylight was still eight feet above them.

  It might as well been a thousand feet to Jack. She’d lost enough blood to recognize the early stages of shock coming on. She winced, forcing some of her shirt into the bullet hole to slow the bleeding.

  Below them forty armed men entered the warehouse, roaming around like worker ants. It would only be a matter of time until one of them decided to look up.

  Tequila stared up at the skylight, trying to figure out how to reach it. There was nothing on the top shelf for them to stand on. Except…

  “Get on my shoulders,” Tequila said.

  Jack rolled her eyes. “You’re joking.”

  “I boost you up there, you pull yourself onto that ledge next to the skylight. Then you can open it and go through.”

  “How about you?”

  “When you get on the roof, lean down and stick your hand through. I’ll grab it.”

  “You can’t jump that high.”

  “I have a better chance than you do. Do you have any other ideas?”

  “Yeah. We lie really still and if anyone sees us we just say we’re mannequins.”

  “Get on my shoulders.”

  “I can’t.”

  Tequila helped Jack to her feet, then squatted down while Jack awkwardly sat on Tequila’s back, her legs around his neck.

  Grunting with effort, Tequila stood up, Daniels sitting high on his shoulders. Jack reached for the ledge, but it was still a foot away.

  “Can’t get it.”

  “Step in my hands.”

  Tequila locked his fingers together, and Jack placed her right foot in Tequila’s palms. The muscles in the gymnast’s back were screaming, and his legs began to shake as Jack leaned her weight forward.

  “On three,” Tequila grunted. “One, two, three!”

  Tequila heaved up with all of his remaining strength and Jack jumped out of the man’s palms and up to the ledge. She grabbed it and held, and Tequila moved under Jack’s swinging feet and let Jack step on his shoulders and hands to hoist herself up.

  “They’re on the shelf!” someone cried from below.

  Sitting on the ledge, Jack fired twice at the lock on the skylight and blew it off. Then she lifted the window up on hinges and climbed onto the roof.

  Lying down next to the opening, Jack stuck her hand down for Tequila to grab.

  “It’s too high!” Daniels yelled. “You won’t be able to grab it!”

  “Just don’t drop me when I do!”

  Jack winced. Michael Jordan couldn’t have grabbed her hand from this height, and he was over a foot taller than Tequila and had a better vertical jump. He also didn’t play basketball with a switchblade stuck through his arm.

  “Come on, buddy,” Jack urged. “Do it.”

  Tequila eyed the hand, then measured off ten paces away from it down the long shelf.

  He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

  Someone began shooting.

  Tequila concentrated on his body. He tried to will the pain away, force back the exhaustion. He was an athlete. He had a job to do.

  Win. His job was to win.

  He opened his eyes again, staring at Jack’s hand.

  Win.

  He ran forward, hitting the shelf in a cartwheel, turning that into a hand spring, a foot spring, a single flip, and a double, high enough to make the judges catch their breath.

  He came out of the double with Jack’s arm almost in his face. Reaching frantically with both hands, he caught Daniels by the wrist, his momentum almost pulling Jack down through the skylight with him.

  But Jack stayed up, and held on tight. Tequila swung back and forth on the arm, and then got his feet onto the ledge. He levered himself up onto the roof with a smile on his face.

  “Nice catch,” he told her.

  “I think this arm is six inches longer now.”

  They moved quickly across the rooftop, over to the edge where a Dumpster waited below them.

  “Try to land relaxed,” Tequila said as they both stared down at the twelve foot jump. “Or else you’ll break something.”

  “We don’t want that. Any more Demerol?”

  “That was the last of it.”

  Jack sat on the ledge. “Maybe I’ll just stay here, wait quietly for death.”

  “It’s easy. Watch.”

  He pushed off the edge of the building and floated down to the top of the Dumpster, barely making a sound when his feet hit the metal.

  Jack knew she wouldn’t float like that. She’d drop like a rock.

  He looked up, motioned for her to jump.

  “Shit,” she said.

  Oddly, she thought of her husband. Alan loved her, she knew. But it was a selfish love, about what he could get rather than what he could give. That made Jack defensive and selfish as well. Two people taking, neither of them giving.

  It wasn’t easy for a woman to rise up through the ranks in the CPD. She knew she spent too much time on the Job. And then, when her husband became resentful, she spent even more hours working rather than go home and fight with him.

  But now, staring down at Tequila, she realized if she made half the effort at home that she made at work, maybe her marriage wouldn’t be in trouble. Hell, she was jumping off of buildings for her job. Couldn’t she come home early every once and a while for the man she loved?”

  Jack promised that if she lived, she’d try harder at home.

  She left the edge of the building and tried to relax as she fell, realizing in midair what a stupid piece of advice that was.

  Jack hit like a sack of rocks, even with Tequila catching her.

  “You didn’t relax,” Tequila said.

  “I don’t like you anymore.”

  They scooted off the Dumpster and dragged themselves down the alley. There were no Mafioso to be found. All of them had gone into the warehouse to look for Royce.

  The alley let out onto Kedzie, and Tequila ran into the middle of the street to stop a cab. He and Jack got in.

  “The nearest hospital,” Jack said, flashing her badge at the terrified Hindu driver.

  “Yes, ma’am, Misses Police Officer Lady. But please do not get blood on my spotless cab, or my owner with make me pay for it. Do me the honor of putting these pages from the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune under you.”

  The driver handed them the thick Sunday paper from the front seat, and Jack and Tequila spread out the sections and sat on them.

  No longer worried about blood stains, the cabbie made good by depositing them at the Emergency Room entrance of Holy Trinity Hospital four minutes later. Tequila handed him a bloody hundred dollar bill, and the duo staggered through the automatic doors and had nurses rush at them from three sides.

  Tequila staggered and fell face first to the floor. He was picked up and wheeled off on a gurney.

  Jack was taken to surgery.

  “I’m a cop,” she told a nurse. “That man who came in with me. Make sure he doesn’t run away.”

  Jack was put under and stitched up.

  Tequila refused to be put under, got stitched up, and was out the door ten minutes after being given a room.

  It took almost a half an hour for Slake to calm down after discovering the missing money. He spent most of that half hour kicking, cu
tting, and stomping on the bodies of his so-called watch dogs. Finally, beaten and exhausted, he began the task of cleaning up.

  Leaving town had occurred to Slake more than once during his rampage, but he didn’t have anything to leave town with. The thing to do was to stick around and play it cool. If Tequila had left with the money, Marty had enough eyes throughout the world to find him eventually. If Tequila were still around, Marty would find him as well.

  Slake just needed to stay alert and wait for his chance. He had to somehow get Tequila away from Marty without Marty knowing, find out where the money was, and kill Tequila before he could talk.

  All wasn’t totally lost, just a lot harder.

  The next day was case and point for Slake. His objective was to stay close to the Tequila search, but Marty had sent him to go kill that idiot Terco in the hospital. Under police protection yet. It was a near impossible job, and Slake had to bite his tongue not to protest it.

  But, if he pulled it off, he would be in Marty’s good graces for a while, which would make him privy to all the goings on of the search.

  Slake went to Rush-Presbyterian Hospital.

  Through discreet observation and a few careful questions to the nursing staff, he found out Terco occupied room 324, bed two, and was guarded by two plainclothes policemen.

  Slake tried to recall all the movies he’d seen which involved killing someone in a hospital. Maybe he could dress up as a doctor or an orderly, and give Terco a shot of something lethal. But that would only work while Terco was asleep, because Terco would recognize him. If Slake watched the nurses for a while, he could figure out their routine and slip something fatal into Terco’s food or medication, but that would take too long. Slake wanted to be in and out, so he could get back to the search for Tequila.

  So, he went with the distraction ploy.

  Going into room 302, he found a lone patient lying in bed asleep. Making sure no one was looking, he shot the man four times in the chest and then ran out of the room, gun in pocket.

  “A man’s been shot!” he screamed. “He’s been shot! The guy’s getting away!”

  As people rushed into the room, Slake stood aside and stepped into the background, passing himself off as a curious bystander.

  As he’d expected, both of the cops guarding Terco had come running over, pushing through the forming crowd.

  Slake slipped into Terco’s room and had the knife to his throat before the big man could so much as utter a single word. He cut deep enough to guarantee death, and then plunged the knife once into Terco’s heart just to make sure.

  Then he was walking briskly down the hall and to the elevators, stepping into the first one that opened. It was going up, which suited Slake. By now the cops were checking the staircases and the elevators on the first floor anyway. They would expect for him to try to escape, not to go up.

  Slake rode the lift to the sixth floor and walked down a series of meandering hallways until he was in the other wing of the hospital. There he took the stairs to the ground floor, where he walked straight to the car he’d parked next to this exit.

  He was back at Marty’s house fifteen minutes later, just in time to hear about Tequila and that dumb cop being trapped in the warehouse.

  “I’m sending Royce in after them,” Marty squealed like a school girl, rubbing his palms together.

  Slake sat on Marty’s couch and waited, occasionally eyeing the blood stain on the oriental carpet. Eventually curiosity got the better of him and he asked Marty about it.

  “Leman tried to quit,” the Maniac said.

  They waited in silence for word from the warehouse. When it finally came, Marty exploded.

  “Dead? He can’t be dead!” Martelli screamed into his phone.

  “His head is gone, Marty.”

  “Where is it?”

  “It’s all over the place. One of the men slipped on it and busted his knee.”

  “So who got Tequila?”

  “Tequila got away.”

  Slake hid his smirk as Marty hurled the cellular phone across the room, shattering it against the wall. The Maniac had to go to his Cadillac in the garage to get his car phone so he could call the men back. Slake tagged along, the seed of an idea germinating in his head.

  “What happened to the cop?” Marty asked, barely containing the rage coursing through his veins like speed.

  “She got away too.”

  “I have one more question.”

  “Yeah, Marty?”

  “How do you guys take a shit with your thumbs up your asses?”

  “You’re the one who wanted to send Royce in alone, Marty.”

  “Who the hell are you to talk back to me, you cheap dimestore hood? Is this the kind of help Fonti is recruiting these days? When I talk to your boss I’m going to have him bust your sorry ass down to diaper boy at the Great Oaks Nursing Home!”

  “What would you like us to do next?”

  “Find him, for chrissakes. Was the bastard at least wounded?”

  “We think so.”

  “Then start checking hospitals. Every damn one in the area. If you guys don’t find him, I swear I’ll break every one of your goddamn knees!”

  Fonti’s man hung up. Marty couldn’t quite believe it. Forty men had two men trapped, and the two men got away.

  Even more unbelievable was what happened to Royce. Marty had been positive nothing could kill Royce short of a nuclear explosion. How the hell had Tequila and that dumb bitch cop managed that one?

  It didn’t matter now. All that mattered was getting Tequila.

  Marty glanced over at Slake, who was staring at him with a smile as wide as a zebra’s ass.

  “What are you looking at?” Marty demanded.

  Slake walked over to Marty and stood right in his face, almost nose to nose.

  “A first class, pig-headed, asshole,” Slake replied.

  Marty’s eyes widened with rage. “What did you say?”

  “Marty!” Slake screamed as loud as he could, hoping it would carry into the house. “Don’t do it!”

  Then he pulled Marty’s .38 from the Maniac’s waistband and shot him in his ugly, gaping mouth.

  Marty Martelli’s last thought—hammering Slake in the face—flew out the back of his head with the rest of his brains. The spray coated Marty’s new Cadillac, which would have pissed the shit out of the Maniac if he hadn’t been already dead.

  Even as Marty fell, Slake was kneeling over his former boss, pressing the gun into the Maniac’s dead hand. Now Slake didn’t have to worry about Marty catching Tequila and finding out the truth. Now Slake didn’t have to wait two months after recovering the money to go to Mexico. Now Slake would never have to listen to Marty’s fat, ugly mouth ever again.

  The guards came rushing in, pistols drawn.

  Slake was kneeling next to the body, shock spread across his face.

  “I tried to stop him,” he said quietly. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Hands in the air!” the first man yelled.

  Slake raised up his hands and two men grabbed him, one of them removing Slake’s 9mm from his holster. The man sniffed Slake’s gun and shook his head. The gunpowder smell wasn’t coming from there. He looked down at the pistol in Marty’s hand, still smoking.

  “What the hell happened?”

  “Tequila got away. After Marty got off the phone he ate his gun. I can’t fucking believe it.”

  “Anyone see it?” the man asked.

  They all shook their heads. One of them spoke up and said he heard Slake yell for Marty to drop the gun.

  “Ah, shit. Someone call Fonti,” the man ordered. “Bring him in the house.”

  They took Slake into the living room and sat him on the couch next to Leman’s blood stain. He remained there, guarded by armed men, until Fonti showed up forty minutes later.

  Fonti was a short, hairy man in his early sixties. He had great bushy eyebrows and furry ears and a constant twelve o’clock shadow, even after just shaving. He w
as as ruthless as he was hairy, and he exuded control like only the most powerful men in the world could.

  Fonti stared hard into Slake’s eyes, boring into his brain and saying with his look that only the truth would do.

  “What happened?” the loan shark asked.

  By now every soldier in the county had shown up, and Marty’s living room was filled with Fonti’s men. They were all silent, eyes on Slake.

  “Marty broke his first cellular phone because he was so angry Tequila got away, so we went to his car phone in the garage. He talks on the phone for about a minute, gets real angry, and hangs up again. Then he says, I’m fucked.”

  “He told you you were fucked?”

  “No, he said it about himself. Then he pulls his gun and shoves it in his mouth. I yell for him to drop it, but he pulls the trigger.”

  Fonti continued to stare at Slake, waiting for him to squirm or look away or give any other sign that he was lying.

  Slake gave him blank, meeting the man’s stare, thinking about killing Terco. That was the secret to lying well, saying bullshit and then thinking about something else entirely.

  “You’re lying,” Fonti said flatly.

  “You think I killed him?”

  “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  Slake switched on a liberal dose of outrage.

  “Marty was like a father to me!” he screamed, standing up. Five thugs rushed him, pinning him down, but Slake continued his tirade. “I loved him! I loved that man! I tried to stop it! I tried to stop him!”

  Slake struggled and screamed, and was eventually forced back onto the sofa, a hand over his mouth. He radiated anger at Fonti, burning holes through him with his eyes for suggesting such a horrible thing.

  “Cool it,” Fonti said. “I believe you. It all checks out. Marty was losing it. He even killed one of his own men today. I was just checking to see if maybe Marty drew down on you, and you shot in self-defense.”

  Slake’s rage intensified, but Fonti held out a placating hand.

  “I know you didn’t. We checked your gun. It had a full magazine, hadn’t been fired. My men were there right after the gunshot, you couldn’t have reloaded. And I highly doubt you got Marty’s gun away from him and shot him yourself. The Maniac wouldn’t have let that happen. Plus there’s no point for you to kill Marty. Why would you do that? There wasn’t any reason. He was your boss. He paid your bills.”