Frank Sinatra in a Blender (6 page)

“Bruiser?” I asked.

“Yeah, him.”

“That fuck with the goofy accent?”

“That fuck with the goofy accent.”

I thought about this news and what it meant. A tweaker with that much cash wasn’t long for this world. Somebody’d see to that.

“How much cash did that asshole Telly get?”

Big Tony threw up his hands. He didn’t know. Doyle shook his head too.

I took another drink of Southern Comfort and Mountain Dew and thought about my next move. The picture was beginning to form in my head. Everything was coming together. Bruiser and Telly paid a visit to Norman Russo and they beat him to death with a baseball bat. Then they did a piss poor job of making it look like he’d killed himself. Telly probably wrote the suicide note.

“Well?” Big Tony asked.

I needed time to think. It was all happening fast and any money recovered from the heist would be split three ways instead of one—something I didn’t like, but accepted. I took the last mouthful of booze and the last two ice cubes shifted, sloshing drink on my face. I wiped my lip clean with my sleeve.

Doyle looked at me and I could tell they were going after the money with or without my help. My options were limited—work together or by myself. Three sets of eyes on the street were better than one. I shook the cubes together in my glass.

“Okay,” I said. “I assume you have a plan?”

Doyle and Big Tony’d been putting their heads together. The plan they came up with was simple.

They’d show up at the meeting spot without the drugs and they’d rob him.

“That’s the plan?”
I asked.

Big Tony shrugged. “Works for me.”

“Works for me too,” Doyle agreed.

I pulled a Corona from the pocket of my sport coat and told Big Tony to turn up the heat.

•••••

The basement of the old church was bitter cold
. A thick veneer of ice crusted the stained glass windows as each breath they took filled the room with heat for a moment. Telly’s naked body was strapped to the metal chair. His feet were submerged in metal buckets of ice water that were nearly frozen solid around each foot.

“Lean him back,” Sid ordered.

Telly was sickly pale white and shaking so badly his teeth crashed together when he tried for words.

Sid kicked the buckets out of the way when No Nuts tilted him back and water washed over the floor. Mr. Parker had picked the building up at auction for a song. Now they just used it for storage or a place to cut up bodies.

“Hey dickhole!” No Nuts barked. He slapped Telly in the face to wake him up.

“Hear me in there?” No Nuts screamed. “You
will
talk to us.”

Telly whimpered and cowered down as low as he could.

“Where’s the money?” Sid demanded. “Don’t fucking lie to me, cocksucker.”

No Nuts opened his toolbox.

“C’mon Telly. Forget where you hid it already?”

Telly’s expression turned blank. He searched for words to save him but his mouth was paralyzed by cold and fear.

“Remember?” Sid asked him.

No Nuts shrugged. “I don’t think he remembers.”

“Well, he’ll remember being tortured,” Sid said.

Telly thrashed about.

“Go head, yell if you want too. Ain’t nobody gonna hear ya.”

When No Nuts set the toolbox next to his feet, Telly really began to fidget.

“You look uncomfortable,” No Nuts said indifferently as he removed a hammer. But it wasn’t just any hammer. It was an eight-pound stainless steel industrial hammer. The kind you’d use for driving stakes into the ground to pitch a circus tent. It was brand new; No Nuts pulled the price tag off the handle with his teeth.

Sid had to admit it was an awe-inspiring tool. “Where’d ya get that bastard, Johnny?”

Johnny No Nuts smiled like a son who just tied his shoe right for the first time. His round face beamed with self-importance. The wrinkles around his eyes expanded when he spoke.

“Lowe’s,” he said with pride. “Got it from the Bargain Bin for $12.99.”

“Son of a bitch that’s cheap.” Sid nodded quickly, raised an eyebrow in genuine approval for such a first-rate deal. He knew where he’d be getting his next hammer.

Telly shook uncontrollably now. His feet were frozen chunks of ice. He was slouching and trying not to cry. Sid grabbed him under his arms to raise him up. He tugged hard and some of Telly’s ass skin ripped off and stuck to the frigid metal chair. The sound the skin made when it tore loose was clean and quick, like paper tearing.

Telly didn’t like that, started screaming.

“Sorry,” Sid told him, and he meant it.

Then No Nuts shattered Telly’s right foot with the hammer and crushed his frozen toes.

The twelve-dollar hammer connected with tremendous force and Sid felt shock waves reverberate from the concrete up into his boots. Telly went crazy. His lurching caused more of his ass skin to bond with the chair and rip free. He expelled high-pitched, soaring notes that gave voice to his unbearable pain.

Then No Nuts raised the hammer.

Sid could see Telly’s deformed pinkie toe stuck to the end of the hammer. They both laughed, and Sid told No Nuts to feed it to him.

No Nuts arched his eyebrows sharply and said it was a hell of an idea.

The look on Telly’s face was one of genuine terror.

On impulse, Johnny pitched the toe into Telly’s mouth as he howled and it went right in, triggering new laughter.

“Lucky shot,” Sid told him.

Johnny said he knew it.

Telly spit the toe out with a force greater than a guy in his situation should’ve been capable of and it hit No Nuts in the chin. Another round of laughter followed. They were having fun. For a moment they forget how cold it was down in the basement, forgot about being hungry. Torture was a lot like quail hunting or bass fishing. While most would hesitate to call it a sport, there was just something about torturing a man that brought out the competitive nature in the two of them.

Sid took a step back from the situation, pulled a bottle of DeKuyper Blackberry brandy from the pocket of his coat and let the thick syrup run down his gullet. He embraced the slight heat it gave then offered a shot to No Nuts.

Telly started cussing and yelling. He was pissed off about his toe but what he wanted more than another toe was another foily. His goal: live long enough to do more crank. He screamed at Sid and No Nuts. Told No Nuts to go fuck his mother.

Sid chuckled and Telly told
him
to go fuck his father.

Sid didn’t like that; he was tired of Telly’s mouth. He wanted to enjoy the precise second the brandy buzz found him and it was hard to fully appreciate the moment with Telly going on like he was. Sid grabbed the back of Telly’s chair and pulled it across the floor until it set perfectly over the drain. He removed the handgun from its holster.

Telly’s eyes flared abruptly. He did what everybody did in his situation. He started to beg. Wanted to make a deal. He said he had the money after all.

“Oh,
now
you have the money. If you had the money we wouldn’t be here, ya wanker.”

Sid pointed the gun at Telly, pushed the steel barrel against his cold flesh. Telly started farting. Profound, commanding flatulence that ricocheted off the metal chair in thunderous rounds. He said he was gonna shit himself.

“Okay,” Telly screamed. “Okay, okay. I got it!” Spit jumped from his mouth. “Okay, I swear, I got it. I’m sorry, Sid. Don’t fucking shoot me, I’ll give it to you. We can split it three ways.”

Sid shook his head from side to side. He told Telly no with his eyes.

Telly started crying.
“Look at my toes, you cocksuckers!”

Sid took a step back and blasted a hot round into Telly’s forehead. His body rocked back and forth, the chair balanced on two legs momentarily then fell on its side. Sid tried to keep the blood off his suit, but despite his slapdash precautions he still took considerable blood splatter.

Sid looked down at his suit jacket as he put the gun away. “Bloody hell.”

Johnny laughed and said he wanted a taco, which was fine by Sid. It was getting late; he could eat. They’d just let Telly bleed out. They could always cut the body up after lunch.

•••••

We waited at Crestwood Bowl until just after dark.
There was no sign of Telly or the money. We listened to the scanner and the radio. As far as we knew he was still on the run.

With partial interest, I followed the Lincoln Town Car back to Cowboy Roy’s. We needed to talk things over. Had to stay on this if we wanted to get paid.

I’d used a pay phone outside the bowling alley to call Chief Caraway. I asked him what he knew.

He said, “Them boys was either damn lucky or damn good.” He asked me again what I knew about Norm Russo but I kept what I’d learned to myself. I still had a few angles of my own to work. I left out my involvement with Big Tony and Doyle.

The Chief told me, “Try a little harder. Do what you gotta do.” He said it was important. Maybe if I broke this case he could pull a few strings. Said he’d like to see me back on the force.

When he asked about my drinking I told him it was under control, I was sober as a judge. And for a couple of hours every day, I was.

“I want you to work with one of my guys on this.”

I was surprised to hear that. Usually if I did anything for the Chief it was in an
unofficial capacity.
And I always worked alone. I did things my way and got results. I wasn’t bound by the usual constraints. Words like
due process
and
Miranda rights
had no place in my vocabulary. My old man played by the rules and I saw where that got him.

“Who you have in mind?” I asked.

“Ron Beachy.”

Surprised, I asked, “Amish Ron?”

“The very same,” Chief Caraway replied.

I told him that was fine. Said I was happy to help but working this case with Detective Beachy was going to fuck everything up for me. Amish Ron was a legend in police work. He’d grown up Amish, but somewhere along the way he’d converted, became one of us. I supposed a man could only raise so many barns without growing jaded.

The parking lot was jam-packed tight when we arrived at Cowboy Roy’s. It looked like a hundred people standing around, eating and drinking in the cold.

Big Tony and Doyle had plans; they’d do whatever it took to get the money. The word on the street was somebody got paid. Not enough to finance a revolution, but more than enough to kill for. If Telly was as dumb as he sounded, he was dead already.

I parked the Vic and enjoyed the beginnings of what was sure to be another outstanding drunk as I stood next to the Lincoln and waited for Big Tony to do another line of coke. He offered one to Doyle but Doyle never touched that shit. He didn’t waste his time with drinking either, because it cut into too much of his time for stealing. When Doyle wasn’t stealing, he was thinking about stealing. Or planning to steal something. He was the kind of guy who dreamed of stealing every night. And when Doyle couldn’t sleep, he wouldn’t count sheep—he stole them.

Even the watch on his wrist belonged to someone else, an established thief named Chuck Porter. He and Doyle went back to the days when Moses wore short pants and they had a rivalry of one-upmanship that was unmatched. They tried to out-steal the other in a friendly competition that Doyle eventually won when Chuck accidently got locked in a safe and ran out of air.

In a bold display of audacity, Doyle slipped the watch off Chuck’s wrist at his funeral, while he was lying in the casket in front of everyone. Doyle’d been wearing it ever since.

I slammed the last of my Corona and threw the bottle in the dumpster. We passed people braving the cold. Drinking beer and eating chili.

Big Tony led the way through the doorway that not four hours earlier I’d stumbled out of. The same doorway where I’d passed that tweaker shit fuck Telly.
Goddammit.
If I’d only known. He probably had the money with him. Some detective I was.

Big Tony headed for his table and Doyle blazed a path to the shitter. Said it was the chili he ate earlier, the stuff they served in the parking lot.

I asked him about that.

“Every night in November,” he said. “Gotta love Chili Month.”

Indeed. As a man with a lifelong appreciation of strippers
and
chili, I found something extraordinary about the idea of combining them both under one roof. It was almost as if Cowboy Roy himself had created a Utopian Paradise to ensnare men for hours, separating them from their hard-earned dollars while giving them two of the greatest things life had to offer at the same time.

I waited for Flames to serve me up but a baby doll took my order instead. She was topless and wore a different-colored barbell through each pert nipple.