Jack Daniels Stories

by J. A. Konrath

  Other possibilities had been, “Will do your taxes for food” and “I'm just plain lazy” and my favorite “this is a piece of cardboard.” But I went with brevity because I still didn't have a pencil and had to write it in sauce.

  I sat there for a little over and hour before George Drawbridge appeared.

  He looked like the picture his wife gave me, which wasn't a surprise because it was a picture of him. Balding, thin, pinkish complexion, with a nose so big it probably caused back problems. After exiting the bank he immediately went right, moving like he was in a huge hurry. I almost lost him, because it took over a minute to pick up the eighty-nine cents people had thrown onto the sidewalk next to me. But I managed to catch up just as he boarded a northbound bus to Wrigleyville.

  Unfortunately, the only seat left on the bus was next to George. So that's where I parked my butt, because I sure as hell wasn't going to stand if I didn't have to.

  I gave him a small nod as I sat down.

  “I'm not following you,” I told him.

  George didn't answer. He didn't even look at me. His eyes were distant, out there. And up close I noticed his rosy skin tone wasn't natural—he was sunburned. Only on the left side of his face too, like Richard Dreyfuss in that Spielberg movie about aliens. The one where he got sunburned on only the left side of his face. I think it was Star Wars.

  Unlike his wife, George didn't smell like sweaty feet. He smelled more like ham. Honey baked ham. So much so that I wondered if he had any ham on him. I've been known to stuff my pockets with ham whenever I visited an all-you-can-eat buffet. After all, ham is pricey.

  I restrained myself from asking if he indeed had any pocket ham, but couldn't help humming the Elton John song “Rocketman” and changing the lyrics in my head.

  “Pocket ham... And I think I'm gonna eat a long, long time...”

  I didn't know the rest of the song, so I kept think-singing that line over and over. After a few stops George stood up and left the bus. I followed him, keeping my distance so I didn't make him nervous. But after walking for a block I realized I could stand on the guy's shoulders and piss on his head and he still wouldn't notice me. George Drawbridge was seriously preoccupied.

  We went into an Ace Hardware Store, and George bought twenty feet of nylon clothesline He also bought something called a magnetron. I knew that there was something I needed to buy, but I couldn't remember what it was, and I hadn't written it down because I needed to buy a pencil. So I got one of those super large cans of mega energy drink. It contained three times the recommended daily allowance of taurine, whatever the hell taurine was.

  After the hardware store it was back to the bus stop. We were the only two people there. George didn't pay any attention to me, but I was worried all of this close contact might get him a little suspicious. So I made sure I stood behind him, where he couldn't see me. Then I popped open my mega can and took a sip.

  The flavor on the can said “Super Berry Mix.” The berries must have been mixed with battery acid and diarrhea juice, but with a slightly worse taste. It burned my nose drinking it, to the point where I may have lost some nostril hair. Plus it was a shade of blue only found in nature as part of neon beer signs. I could barely choke down the last forty-six ounces.

  The bus came. Again, the only seat available was next to George. I took it, and pulled my shirt up over my mouth and nose to disguise myself.

  “Goddamn germs on public transportation,” I said, loud enough for most of the bus to hear. This provided a clever reason for my conspicuous face-hiding behavior. I said it seven more times, just to be sure.

  We took the bus to Jefferson Park, a northwest side neighborhood named after that famous politico, Thomas Park. George exited on Foster. I followed, tailing him up Pulaski and into the Montrose Cemetery, my mind racing like a race car on a race track, driven by a race car driver, named Race.

  I never liked cemeteries. Not because I'm afraid of ghosts, even though when I was a child all the kids used to tease me because they thought I was. They would dress up like ghosts and try to scare me by visiting my house at night and threatening to hang us all because my family didn't go to church. They usually left after burning a cross on our lawn. Damn ghosts.

  No, I hated graveyards for much more realistic reasons. When a person died they shouldn't be kept around, like leftovers. People had a freshness date. Death meant discard, not preserve in a box. What ghoul thought that one up? Fifty thousand years ago, did some caveman plant Grandma in the ground hoping to grow a Grandma Tree? What fruit did that bear? Saggy wrinkly breasts that hung to the ground and smelled like Ben Gay and pee-pee? And what's with neckties? Why are men forced to wear a strip of cloth around their necks good for absolutely nothing except getting caught in things like doors and soup?

  As my computer-like mind pondered these imponderables, George cleverly gave me the slip by walking someplace I could no longer see him. That left me with three options.

  1. Wait at the entrance for him to come out.

  2. Search for him.

  3. Drain the lizard. Those eighty ounces of Super Berry Taurine had expanded my bladder to the size of a morbidly obese child, named Race.

  I opted for number 3, and chose Mary Agnes Morrison, Loving Wife and Mother, to sprinkle. Maybe the taurine would liven up her eternity.

  I soaked her pretty good, and had enough left over for the rest of the Morrison family, including the Loving Husband and Father, the Beloved Uncle, and the Slutty Skank Daughter.

  I made that last tombstone up, but it would sure be cool if it was real, wouldn't it? And wouldn't it be cool if someone made a flying car? One that gave you head while you drove? I'd buy one.

  I shook twice, corralled the one-eyed stallion, and began to look for George. An autumn breeze cooled the sweat on my face, neck, ears, hair, armpits, back, legs, and hands, which made me aware that I was sweating. I put a hand to my heart and discovered it was beating faster than Joe Pesci in a Scorsese flick. Because he beats people in those flicks. Beats them fast.

  Why was I so edgy? Had my subconscious tapped into some sort of collective, primal fear? Did my distant ancestors, with their reptile brains and their bronze weapons made of stone, leave some sort of genetic marker in my DNA that made me sensitive to lurking danger?

  I did a 360, looking for pointy-headed ghosts with gas cans. All I saw were tombstones, stretching on for as far as I could see. Hundreds. Thousands. Maybe even billions.

  “Easy, McGlade. Nothing to be afraid of. It's not like you desecrated their graves or anything.”

  Noise, to my left. I had my Magnum in my hand so fast that it probably looked like it magically appeared there to anyone watching, even though I didn't think anyone was watching.

  Anyone alive.

  My eyes drifted up an old, scary-looking tree, which had branches that looked like scary branch-shaped fingers, but with six fingers instead of the usual five, which made it even scarier. The sun was going down behind the tree, silhouetting some sort of nest-shaped mass on an extended limb that I guessed was a nest.

  “Chirp,” went the nest.

  My first shot blew the nest in half, and two more severed the branch from the tree.

  “Dammit, McGlade. Stay cool. You just assassinated a bird.”

  Which saddened me greatly. Magnum rounds were a buck-fifty each. Plus, I didn't have any extras on me. I needed to stay cool.

  “Chirp,” went the nest.

  BLAM! BLAM!

  By heroic effort I didn't shoot the nest a sixth time, instead walking briskly in the opposite direction. I was in a state that might be called “hyper-awareness,” which was a lot like being the lone antelope at the watering hole. I could feel the stares of flying insects, and hear the grass growing. It was freaking me out a little bit, so I began to run, tripping over something on the ground, skidding face-first against a tombstone. A damp tombstone.

  Mary Agnes Morrison.

  I scurried away, palms and knees wet, and saw the bright red
object that caused me to fall.

  The empty can of Super Berry Mix energy drink.

  So my paranoia wasn't really paranoia after all. It was just an unhealthy amount of caffeine in my veins. Which would have been kind of funny if I wasn't soaked with my own piss. Along with the taurine, the drink apparently contained a full day's supply of irony.

  I stood up and shook out my pants legs.

  “Get a grip, McGlade. And stop talking to yourself. You always know what you're going to say anyway.”

  I took three or ten deep breaths, holstered my weapon, and then set out looking for George.

  I had no idea that in just two minutes I was going to die.

  Chapter 5

  I didn't actually die. I'm lying to make the story more exciting, because this part is sort of slow.

  It starts to pick up in Chapter 8. Trust me, it's worth the wait. There's sodomy.

  Chapter 6

  It was a fruitless search, but that didn't matter—I wasn't looking for fruit. After a few minutes, I'd found him. He'd given me the slip by cleverly disguising himself as a group of three bawling women. Closer inspection, and some grab ass, revealed they really were women after all. I did my “pretend to be blind and deaf” act and stumbled away before any of them called the police or their lawyers.

  Luckily, I caught sight of an undisguised George heading into the mausoleum. I never liked mausoleums. Burying the dead was bad enough. Putting them in the walls was just begging for mice to move in. And not the kind of mice who wear red pants and open up amusement parks. I'm talking about dirty, vicious, baby-face-eating mice, the size of rats.

  Actually, I'm talking about rats.

  Speaking of non-sequiturs, I really needed to take another leak. The mausoleum was decent-sized, with a few hundred vaults stacked four high. Well lit, temperature controlled, silk plants next to marble benches every twenty feet. It was the kind of place that would have a bathroom, I thought, while pissing on one of the silk plants. The pot it was in wasn't any realer than the plant, because all of my piss leaked out the bottom. I stepped over the puddle and commenced the search.

  One of the techniques they teach you in private eye school is how to conduct a search, I bet. I have no idea, because I didn't go to private eye school. I wasn't even sure that private eye school actually existed. But it did in my fantasies. All the teachers were naked women, and wrong answers were punished with spankings. And the water fountains were actually beer fountains. If they had a school like that, I'd go for sure.

  George wasn't down the first aisle. He wasn't down the second aisle either. Or the first aisle, which I checked again because I got confused.

  “You do this?”

  I spun around, wondering who spoke. It was some little old caretaker guy, clutching a mop. He pointed at the puddle on the floor.

  “It was that other guy,” I said, thinking fast. “You see him anywhere?”

  “I only seen you, buddy. Did you go to the bathroom on my floor? There's a bathroom right there behind you. What kind of man does a thing like this?”

  “That's what happens when you don't go to college.”

  “You piss on the floor?”

  “You get a job cleaning up piss on the floor.”

  I left the guy to his menial labor and peeked down the second aisle again. Still no George. That led me down the third aisle, and I caught a glimpse of George crawling into a hole in the wall.

  Closer inspection revealed it wasn't a hole. It was a vault. He'd crawled into someone's open tomb. I didn't even want to think why he'd do that, but my mind thought of it anyway, and then started thinking of it in enough detail that made me nauseous, yet oddly disgusted. Maybe a necromancer was someone who got his freak on with corpses. It was certainly a cheap date—only a few bucks for Lysol and Vaseline—and unless your game was really weak you'd pretty much always score. Still, I liked my women partially awake, and aware enough to be able to fight me off and tell me no. Because no means try harder.

  I crouched down, peering into the blackness, and saw nothing but the aforementioned blackness. I fished out my keys, which had a mini flashlight attached to the ring, and illuminated the situation.

  This wasn't a grave after all. In the hole was a slide, like you'd find in a children's playground, if the playground was in a mausoleum, and the children were all dead. Probably wouldn't be a lot of kids begging to go to a park like that. Not the dead ones, anyway.

  I gritted my teeth. There was only one way to find out where this slide went.

  “Hey, old caretaker guy!” I yelled. “Where does this slide go?”

  “Go to hell!”

  “I told you, it wasn't me. I had asparagus on my pizza. Does it smell like asparagus?”

  “Go to hell!”

  I rubbed my chin. Maybe old caretaker guy was trying to tell me that this slide went straight to hell. I didn't really believe him. First of all, I didn't see any flames, and there wasn't any smoke or brimstone or screams of the damned. Second, hell doesn't really exist. It's a fairy tale taught by parents to make their kids behave. Like Santa Claus. And the death penalty.

  Still, going down a pitch black slide in a mausoleum wasn't on my list of things to do before I died. My list was mostly centered around Angelina Jolie.

  “This does smell like asparagus, you bastard!”

  A glanced over my shoulder. Old caretaker guy was hobbling toward me, his drippy asparagus mop raised back like a baseball bat—a stinky, wet baseball bat that you wouldn't want to use in a baseball game, because you wouldn't get any hits, and because it was soaked with urine and stinked.

  I decided, then and there, I wasn't going to play ball with old caretaker guy. Which left me no choice. I took a deep breath and dove face-first down the slide.

  Chapter 7

  When I was ten years old, my strange uncle who lived in the country took me into his barn and showed me a strange game called milk the cow. The game involved a strong grip, and used a combination of squeezing and stroking until the milk came. I remember it was weird, and hurt my arm, but kind of fun nonetheless.

  Afterward, we fed the cow some hay and used the fresh milk to make pancakes. When we finished breakfast, we watched a little television. It was a portable, with a tiny ten-inch screen.

  Many years later, my strange uncle got arrested, for tax evasion. So I have no idea why I'm bringing any of this up.

  The slide was a straight-shot down, no twists or curve. The dive jostled my grip and my key light winked out, shrouding me in darkness, like a shroud. I had no idea how fast I was going or how far I traveled. Time lost all meaning, but time really didn't matter much anyway since I'd bought a TiVo. Minutes blurred into weeks, which blurred into seconds, which blurred into more seconds. When I finally reached the bottom, I tucked and rolled and athletically sprang to my butt, one hand somewhere near my holster, the other cupped around my boys to protect them, not to fondle them, even though that's what it might have looked like.

  I listened, my highly attuned sense of hearing sensing a whimpering sound very near, which I will die before admitting came from me, even though it did.

  I'd landed on my keys. Hard.

  When I stood, they remained stuck in me, hanging from my inner left cheek like I'd been stabbed by some ass-stabbing key maniac. I bit my lower lip, reached back, and tugged them out, which made the whimpering sound get louder. It hurt so bad I didn't even find it amusing that I now had a second hole in my ass, and perhaps could even perform carnival tricks, like pooping the letter X. That's a carnival I'd pay extra to see.

  I found the key light and flashed the beam around, reorienting my orientation. I was in some sort of secret lower level beneath the mausoleum. Dirt walls, with wooden beams holding up the ceiling, coal mine style. To my left, a large wooden crate with the cryptic words TAKE ONE painted on the side. I refused. Why did I need a large wooden crate?

  Noise, from behind. I spun around, reaching for my gun, and a dark shape tumbled off the slide, rammin
g into me and causing my keys to go flying, blanketing me in a blanket of darkness.

  The ensuing struggle was viscous and deadly, but my years of mastering Drunken Jeet Kune Do Fu from watching old Chinese karate movies paid off. Just as I was about to deliver the Mad Crazy Hamster Fist killing blow, my attacker got some sort of weapon between us and smacked me in the face. The blow staggered me, and I reached up and felt the extensive damage, my whole head bathed in warm, sticky liquid that smelled a lot like asparagus.

  Then a light blinded me. A real flashlight, not the dinky one I had on my keys. I squinted against the glare, and saw him. Old caretaker guy. A light in one hand. His mop in the other.

  I spat, then spat again. My mouth had been open when he hit me.

  “I'm a private detective. My name is McGlade. I'm on a case.”

  “Does your case involve pissing on my floor?”

  I spat again. I could taste the asparagus. And the piss. It tasted like I always guessed piss would taste like. Pissy.

  “Listen, buddy, you're violating federal marshal law by interfering with my investigation. Climb back up the slide and go call 911. Tell them there's a 10-69 in progress, with, uh, malice aforethought and misdemeanor prejudicial something, rampart.”

  My knowledge of cop lingo didn't galvanize him into action.

  “Climb up the slide? How?”

  “Hands and knees, old man.”

  “I'll get all dirty.”

  “You're a janitor.”

  “I'm a caretaker.”

  “You clean up in a cemetery. Dirt shouldn't bother you.”

  The flashlight moved off of my face and swept the area.

  “What is this place? Some sort of secret lower level under the mausoleum?”

  I spat again. “No duh.”

  “Look, there's a crate.”

  Old caretaker guy waddled over to the wooden TAKE ONE box, opened the top, and pulled out a brown robe.

  “I guess we're supposed to take the robes.”