Jack Daniels Stories

by J. A. Konrath

  According to Mom, Tanya had never run away before.

  “I know she looks different,” Phoebe had said, showing me a picture of a frowning brunette with five nose rings, three eyebrow rings, and too many earrings to count.

  “I hope she stays out of lightning storms.”

  “She's really a good girl. Straight A's. Doesn't do drugs or have a boyfriend.”

  “She hangs around with other Goths?”

  “Yes. All of her friends are into that.”

  I figured that Tanya was probably in an alley somewhere, stoned out of her mind, while a bike gang ran a train on her.

  I shared these thoughts with Phoebe, but it didn't seem to ease her worries.

  “I want you to find her and bring her home, Mr. McGlade.”

  “I get five hundred a day.”

  “That's a lot of money.”

  “I'm expensive, but I'm worth it. You're not just paying for the job. You're paying for peace of mind. Once the check clears, I'll find her. Even if she turns up dead and dismembered in an alley.”

  She burst into tears, obviously relieved I was on the job.

  I spent the rest of Day 1 working on the case, subconsciously while I slept.

  Day 2 involved me interviewing one of Tanya's school friends, a guy named Steve who'd recently bisected his own tongue down the middle in an effort to look more like a lizard. Steve wasn't talking—his mouth was too swollen. But he had some killer skunk bud and we lit one up.

  Day 3 wasn't very productive. I spent most of it at the ballgame, watching the Red Sox kick the hell out of the Cubs. I kept an eye out for Tanya, but she didn't show up.

  Day 4 I spent drinking, and can't remember much.

  On Day 5 I caught a break. A phone call to a guy I know who works for a credit card company informed me that Tanya's Mastercard was getting a workout down south. Phoebe provided me with plane fare, and I followed the paper trail to a leather bar in the suburbs of Chamber, Florida. Flashing around Phoebe's picture was met with the usual blank stares, until President Grant helped one punk regain his memory.

  “Oh yeah, she was here yesterday. Hanging out with some Pires.”

  Further interrogation revealed that the Pires were a gang of Goths who only came out at night and liked to wear fake fangs and drink each other's blood. I could relate; there wasn't much good on TV anymore, and kids can get bored in the 'burbs.

  After spreading around a lot of Phoebe's cash, I managed to track down the Pires' main hangout, owned by a guy who called himself Vlad. Word on the street, Vlad was thirty-something, balding and overweight, and wore contact lenses that made his eyes look bloodshot. Just the kind of daddy-figure teenage girls found irresistible.

  I was in the middle of breaking into Casa de Vlad when sauce-boy wandered over, witnessing my felony-in-progress.

  “Look.” He tried to smile, but it looked funny with my gun on his cheek. “This is really none of my business, and I really have to get home while the pasta is still al dente or I'll be sleeping on the sofa for a week. And our sofa has these big, pointy springs that stick out of the cushions that feel like fish hooks.”

  “You think I'm an idiot?”

  “Actually—”

  I gave him another love tap with the butt of my Magnum.

  “Here's the deal, sofa-man. I have to get into this house and grab someone. This someone may not want to go with me, and she may have some friends who don't want to see her go. So this is going to be complicated enough without having to worry about the police showing up in three minutes because your pansy sofa-ass went whining to them.”

  “I won't call the police. The police and I don't have a very good relationship. I kind of annoy them. I—”

  I tapped him on the head again. “I wasn't finished.”

  “Can you please stop—”

  Tap. “You're still talking.”

  He looked at me and opened his mouth to say something, but thought better of it.

  I hit him anyway.

  “But I didn't—”

  “You just did.” Tap.

  I may have tapped him too hard, because he went from his knees onto his ass.

  “The thing is, Saucey, much as I'm just dying inside to trust you, it's probably better if I don't. Do you have ten feet of clothesline on you?”

  He didn't say anything, which I took to be a no.

  “Neither do I. So my only alternative is to knock you out. Now stand up so I can hit you on the head again.”

  He didn't move.

  “Would you prefer me shooting you?”

  Slowly, molasses slowly, he got to his knees. I might have felt sorry for the guy, but the sympathy gene skipped a generation.

  I reared back and cracked him a good one on the noggin, which made a sound like a belt being snapped. He teetered over and ate the lawn.

  I watched him for a full minute. No movement. But he may have been faking unconsciousness to discourage me from smacking him again. Some people are savvy like that.

  “You awake?” I asked.

  No answer.

  “Look, I have to know for sure, so right now I'm going to stomp as hard as I can on your gonads. I'm sure you understand.”

  I raised a foot and watched him shift slightly.

  “Aspirin...” he groaned. “Plentiful aspirin...”

  I sighed. Hitting him again might kill him. Plus, my arm was getting tired.

  “Get your ass up. We're switching to Plan B.”

  The guy took his time getting to his feet, wobbling a little in the process.

  “Okay, Saucy. Use the pry bar to break into the house.”

  “Me?”

  “You see anyone else out here?”

  He blinked. Then he blinked again. “Why don't you do the manual labor on your own felony?”

  “I've got to hold the gun.”

  “No problem. You can let me hold the gun.”

  I faked another strike at his head, and when he flinched I stomped on his foot, heel first.

  “Put down the goddamn sauce and grab the crowbar. You're pissing me off.”

  He obeyed.

  “Make sure it's in the jamb really good, then put some weight on it.”

  The door moaned in protest, then popped open. I shined the penlight inside, but it wasn't strong enough to breach the dark room. I held my breath and listened. No sound came from within.

  While I was preoccupied, Sauce-boy took the opportunity to swing the crowbar at me. Luckily, my catlike reflexes switched on and I ducked before he took my head off. I shoved the gun in his face and he froze.

  “Sorry. Crowbar slipped.”

  “Drop it.”

  He complied.

  “Into the house. Stay quiet or the last sound you'll hear is your brain exiting through your eye sockets. It's sort of a bang/slurp sound. Trust me, you wouldn't like it.”

  “This probably isn't new information, but you're kind of a prick.”

  “You caught me on a bad day. Now move it. Nice and slow.”

  I marched him three steps into the dark house, unable to see a damn thing. There wasn't a single light on, and all the curtains were drawn. I smelled incense, and something under it. Something funky.

  My partner took another step, made an uumph! sound, and pitched forward.

  I flashed on the penlight to see what he tripped over, and saw it was a naked dead guy with his throat ripped out.

  While sauce-boy flailed around like a fish, I played the penlight around the floor, noticing something distinctly odd. The throat wound was so deep the neck vertebrae were exposed.

  But there was surprisingly little blood.

  Excerpt from FLOATERS by J.A. Konrath and Henry Perez

  -1-

  CHAPA

  I was merging from Harlem Avenue into mid-afternoon traffic on the Kennedy when word came in that another floater had turned up in the Chicago River.

  “I phoned you first, Mr. Chapa.” Zach Bridges, an intern at the news desk, had taken the call. “
Just like you always tell me to.”

  I steered with my knee for a moment, one hand on my cell and the other fiddling with the air conditioning. There was a snowflake symbol on the dial, meant to indicate frigid. It was lying to me, blowing tepid breaths in my face that did little to combat the sticky summer air. I settled for lowering the window enough to get a breeze but not so much that it disrupted my conversation.

  “That was good of you, Zach. Remind me to talk to Sully about getting you a regular news beat.”

  The kid got all excited but there was no reason for him to. It was an empty hope, he just hadn't figured that out yet. The newspaper industry was dying, slowly, painfully. The Suburban Herald, my employer for the past fifteen years, was just like all the other rags that had gone terminal before anyone realized what was happening.

  Reporters have always fought over stories with front page potential, but at least there was usually enough space to go around. These days, we often spend our time wrestling over every precious column inch.

  “Is Sully around?”

  “No, Mr. Chapa, he's in another meeting with the accountants, all the editors are.”

  I thanked Zach for the tip, then called Matt Sullivan's line and left him a voicemail. I took the next off-ramp, crossed over the expressway, and headed back toward the Loop. I'd be on the story before my editor had a chance to wonder whether someone else should be instead.

  My office is located in the western suburbs, but I was in the city that day following a lead from Nina Constentino, a pint-sized woman in her late sixties who offered me a cup of green tea and a well-used chair to sit in while I drank it. I passed on the tea, and standing would've been the wise choice.

  “You're my last hope, Mr. Chapa.”

  “Please call me Alex.”

  From the looks of it, Nina was wearing the same makeup she put on the day her husband went missing.

  “Emil would never disappear like this. Not without telling me. It's been two days now, and I know something bad has happened.”

  Truth is I normally would've given her a gentle brush-off. People do sometimes get lost for a day or two. These stories pop up all the time.

  “You've tried the police?”

  “They came by, took my information. But they didn't seem to be in a hurry to do anything. Said he hadn't been gone long enough.”

  “I don't want to cause you any more worry, but have you tried the hospitals? Maybe he got in some sort of accident.”

  She raised her voice, probably as much as her frail frame would allow. “I've called every hospital and clinic in Chicago asking for Emil or anyone unknown fitting his description. I'm not a fool, Mr. Chapa.”

  “Alex,” I said gently.

  She nodded, sniffled, then I lost her face to a yellowed, embroidered handkerchief that I would have bet was older than I was.

  “I'm sorry, Alex. Didn't mean to snap at you. I haven't been able to sleep, and I'm a wreck. But I've tried the hospitals, and everyone we know, and the police, and I don't know what I'm going to do next.”

  The handkerchief returned to her face, but she continued.

  “This isn't the sort of big story you like to be involved with, I know that. But even after forty years of marriage Emil still makes my heart jump. He's all I have.”

  I leaned in to comfort her, but thought better of it when the chair crackled and squealed.

  “There are private detectives.”

  “I called one, but he wanted to be paid much more than I can afford. Our finances lately, because of the business—well, I just don't have it, Mr. Chapa.”

  I felt for her, but didn't see what I could do. Sadly, this wasn't really news. Maybe if I spun it, took the human interest angle, something about how no one cares for the senior citizens in our society.

  “I can write a story, print his picture. Maybe someone will recognize him.”

  “That's not enough. I need to go looking for him. Do you have a car?”

  “Yes, but Mrs. Constentino—”

  “Please. I'd go myself, but Emil has our car. I don't have anyone else to turn to.”

  I let myself entertain the notion, cruising around Chicago with an elderly woman. For a moment I pictured something resembling All the President's Men meets Driving Miss Daisy, and I wanted no part of it. But lately it had been kind of slow in the suburbs, and I'd grown tired of writing about the wife beaters, gang bangers, and sexual predators that crowd the police blotter. This would certainly be something different.

  “Mrs. Constentino, you need to stay here in case he calls or shows up.”

  “Does that mean you will you do it?”

  I'd already decided to write the story. What could it hurt if I checked out some of Emil's haunts and talked to a few people? It would be a way of getting background information.

  “I can try.”

  That brought a cautious smile to her face, the kind that reminds you why you became a reporter.

  The Constentinos had been antique dealers for more than a quarter century. They made a decent living through the eighties and nineties, until the collectibles bubble burst near the end of the last decade.

  “At first we thought the internet would be a godsend for us dealers. But it didn't work out that way.”

  She explained that quality items had become hard to find as amateurs flooded the business, and that's why Emil drove to the city.

  “He goes once a month to check in with some people who buy stuff at garage sales and thrift stores. We used to do that too, but it's hard to find the energy anymore.”

  “Do you sell these things online?”

  “No, too much competition. We stick to mostly flea markets, and collectibles shows.”

  “Can you tell me who he was planning to visit on this last trip?”

  “Sure. But I already tried to call them.”

  “I should double check.”

  She handed me a small piece of lavender paper with three names and addresses written on it in textbook perfect longhand, and a photo of her husband.

  “The first one is a man he's dealt with for a while, the other two are new, I think,” she said, then waited for me to respond with a word of hope.

  I wasn't going to lie to her.

  “I'll call you as soon as I know anything,” I said, then walked to my car and drove away without looking back.

  As soon as I pulled onto the expressway I put a call in to the Chicago branch of the FBI and asked for Special Agent Joseph Andrews.

  “I'm telling you right up front, Al, I do not have the time to be doing you any favors right now.”

  “Busy, huh?”

  “Very.”

  “I understand, and you know I would never waste your time.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “I just need access to some IPASS records from two days ago,” I said as casually as I could, referring to Illinois' automatic toll system which can make it easy to track a car's movement, as long as the driver is registered for the program, which Emil Constentino was.

  “Al, that's a favor.”

  “Not really. The driver of the car in question has been missing for two days. His wife believes he was driving into the city from Batavia, which means he would've passed through at least two toll booths.”

  I heard him sigh, then silence. I'd been friends with Joe Andrews for more than twenty years, been best man at his wedding, a pallbearer at his father's funeral, so I knew what was coming next.

  “Goddamnit, Al,” another sigh, “what's the plate number?”

  Half an hour later, I was driving through the tunnel beneath the old Chicago post office when Andrews called me back and confirmed that the Constentino's ten-year-old Chevy Impala had indeed passed through two eastbound toll booths along I-88.

  “But that's it, there's no record of a return trip,” he added.

  I thanked him, promised to check in later that day, then drove to the first address on the list. It turned out to be a small curio shop on Clark, situated in a corn
er of an eighty-year-old building, just north of the river.

  It had once been a drugstore, complete with a lunch counter and regular customers. The business space next door looked like it had originally been part of a larger whole, and the two still shared a display window. Now one half was a coffee shop catering to twenty-somethings and poseurs, and the other was the store, crammed with a mish-mash of old junk, some of it valuable, most of it not.

  I walked past collections of movie memorabilia, baseball pennants, and a dozen stacks of men's magazines, to the middle of the store. A tan, very muscular man in a St. Louis Cardinals cap and faded blue t-shirt was kneeling next to a box of old comics, flipping through them. The guy I needed to talk to was manning the counter.

  “Yeah, sure, I'm Sam Preston, who are you?”

  Preston was tall and narrow, and he might've been an athlete, but I got the sense he didn't come from that kind of family. Long, thin black hair draped his pale face.

  “My name is Alex Chapa, I'm a reporter, and I'm looking for Emil Constentino.”

  He reached out to shake my hand, revealing a roughly inked tattoo of a lightning bolt on the inside of his forearm. I filled him in on the details, and he confirmed that Emil had been there two days before.

  “Emil's a hell of a guy, comes in every once in a while. He buys shit I'd never be able to sell. I give it to him below cost a lot of the time on account of I like the guy, and he's a good customer.”

  “What kind of things does he buy?”

  “Junk. But then, it's all junk, isn't it? One person's trash, another man's treasure. Buy a box of cereal, keep it unopened for thirty years, someone will pay five hundred bucks for the toy inside. Crazy world, right?”

  He leaned back against a door behind the counter on the common wall between the two businesses. It was covered with Garbage Pail Kids stickers, most of which were faded and pealing.

  “Is that the kind of junk he normally buys from you?” I said, pointing to the awful stickers that I vaguely remembered from my youth.

  “No, not this shit, exactly, but sort of. Emil never liked the antiquey stuff. He's into collectibles. You know, baseball cards, records, movie posters. Most of those things hold their value, but Emil sometimes buys up stuff no one seems to want any more. You know, like Pokemon cards. Some of those used to go for a few hundred bucks a piece. Now you'd be lucky to get ten bucks for a trunk full. Just couldn't hold their value.”