Absolute Instinct (54 page)

“
Marty sent me to collect your debt, Billy,” The short man had the low, steady voice of a talk radio jock.

“
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.

-2-

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.