Shot of Tequila (10 page)

T
equila was out when Terco punched him, but Slake tazed him again just to make sure.

“Take him into the vault,” Marty ordered. “Tie him up.”

Terco and Matisse dragged Tequila off.

“Let me interrogate him, Marty,” Slake smiled. “I’ll get him to sing like Domingo.”

Marty furrowed his brow. He didn’t like the fact that Tequila had been so insistent on his innocence. Sure, all guilty men were liars. But Tequila either lied better than most, or else he was telling the truth. And if he was telling the truth, Marty was going to kill an irreplaceable employee. What he needed was more proof before he started the interrogation. Once the torture began, it didn’t matter if Tequila were guilty or not. Marty would have to waste him. If he didn’t, Tequila surely would return the favor.

“I’ll do the interrogation. You go check his apartment, see if you can find the money.”

“How about his car?”

“Yeah. Car too. And Terco, go check Tequila’s alibi. The liquor store thing and that bar he mentioned, the
Blues Note
.”

They scurried off and another troubling thought occurred to Marty. If Tequila didn’t steal the money, who did? It had to be someone close to him. Someone who knew the routine, who had access to the vault.

One of the other collectors? Or maybe one of the accountants?

Marty thought of something he was always preaching to his employees. “Paranoia grows like weeds.”

It was certainly growing in Marty. He tried to shrug it off, but it clung like a tight sweater.

“You want me to get your toolbox, Marty?” Leman asked. He’d been standing in the office, waiting for Marty to give him direction.

“Yeah. My toolbox.”

Leman nodded and left.

Marty sat back in his chair, staring blankly at the paused image of a butterfly tattoo on his new television. That was Tequila. It had to be. He’d robbed Marty, and then hoped that his good record and his proclaiming innocence would be enough to avoid suspicion. And if the dumb son of a bitch hadn’t taken his gloves off, maybe he would have gotten away with it.

“Dumb shit,” Marty told the TV screen.

The Maniac clenched his fingers. By the end of the night he’d have his money back. Along with Tequila’s accomplice. He didn’t doubt it at all.

Slake appeared in the doorway, holding up a black sweater and a ski mask.

“These were in Tequila’s trunk.”

Marty grimaced at the stupidity of it all. Too stupid, maybe? It had crossed Marty’s mind that Tequila might have been framed. With enough planning, anyone could have done it.

He didn’t credit his entourage with enough brains to stuff a Cornish hen, but there was always the slim chance one of them recruited outside help.

But Marty knew from experience that the simplest answer, the obvious one, was usually the truth. He’d wait for Terco to report back on the liquor store and the
Blues Note
, and then he’d get the truth from the little shit himself.

In his day, Marty had been one of the most feared men in Chicago. He still was, but not in the same way as back then. Now days, people feared Marty’s power. Back in the sixties, they feared his rage.

There were seven unsolved murder cases in Chicago police files from those days. All had been linked by cause of death. Each of the victims had been systematically beaten to death. Almost every bone in their bodies had been broken, crushed, shattered, or fractured. Autopsy reports showed the use of hammers, pliers, wrenches, and even a vice. The work of a maniac, thought police. And they suspected a certain maniac up-and-comer named Marty Martelli.

Marty had been questioned for five of the murders, but had never been arrested. His friends had been too powerful, and he hadn’t left any evidence behind. The Maniac was as careful as he was thorough. Not only had he escaped prosecution, but every one of those men had given up the information Marty had been trying to drag out of them.

Tequila would talk, all right. He’d talk until his lips fell off.

Or until Marty pulled them off.

“Go to his apartment, look for the money,” Marty ordered Slake. “Bring Matisse with you. And I’ll give you both a double bonus if you can find the other guy in the video.”

Slake nodded and tossed the sweater and ski mask onto Marty’s desk.

Marty’s fingers twitched. He was itching to get his hands on Tequila, to use his toolbox on the little bastard.

Itching.

T
equila awoke bound to a chair, the side of his head throbbing where Terco had hit him. He instantly registered several things at once: He was locked in the vault room, he’d been tied with clothesline, tightly and expertly, with his hands behind his back, his guns were missing but his holster rig was still on, and he could feel his keys in his front pocket.

A bad situation, but not a hopeless one. On his key ring was a Swiss Army knife.

Tequila began to flex and relax his chest muscles, shrugging and shaking his shoulders at intervals. The line that was wrapped around his body, securing his torso to the chair, slowly and inexorably undulated down his chest, until it rested, still tied, around his stomach. This gave Tequila enough room to bend forward.

Flexibility is just as important as strength in gymnastics, and Tequila was more flexible than most. His diminutive size working to his advantage, Tequila was able to touch his chin to his lap. With a combination of neck and hip motions, he gradually nudged his keys out of the pocket of his loose-fitting chinos. They jingled to the floor with more noise than he cared to make.

He straightened his back out to normal and stretched, trying to work out the soreness in his neck. Then he adjusted his position with his toes, took a deep breath, and rocked the chair onto its side. He hit the ground hard, and his head rang from the impact, making the vault appear to blur and spin. After getting his bearings, Tequila felt around with his hands tied behind him, seeking out the keys. He’d predicted his fall correctly, and the keys were in his grasp within a few seconds of searching.

Sweating now, Tequila pictured the Swiss Army Knife in his mind and opened the longest blade from memory. Then, working his fingers like tiny pistons, he sawed back and forth at the rope binding his wrists.

The task required his total concentration. His fingers were strong, but the repetitive, restricted movement caused his hand to cramp up. Every so often his crippled fingers would spasm, and he’d dig the knife into his wrists. Sweat, and later blood, made the knife slippery, hard to hold. Tequila chanted his mantra silently in his head, as he did when working out, and willed the movement of the blade through the pain.

He had to cut through three knots, nicking himself dozens of times in the process, before the rope gave. Hands free, he made easy work of the rest of his restraints, and then looked around the vault. The door was the only entry point, and as expected it had been locked. Maybe with a battering ram and a few hours he’d be able to get it open. But he had neither. So he carried the chair over to the covered-up vent in the corner of the room.

The vent was about three feet wide and two feet high, and covering the grating was a sheet of metal, held in place with four screws. He worked out the screws using the Phillips head on his Swiss Army Knife, wondering why those idiots Leman and Matisse hadn’t noticed that the damn vent was blocked off the whole time they’d been in there.

The final screw dropped to the floor and he removed the sheet metal. The grating was behind it, and four more screws removed that as well. Not stopping to think about it, Tequila hauled himself up to the vent and wriggled himself into the tight shaft.

Two things struck him as he wormed his way into the darkness. The first was the incredible heat. Marty had it cranked up to boiling, and he couldn’t keep his hands in one place too long before they began to burn. But even more oppressive than the heat was the dust. It got in Tequila’s eyes and mouth, and breathing was only possible after pulling his shirt up over his nose and mouth to filter out the airborne grit.

Tequila moved as quickly as he could in an almost completely horizontal position, dragging himself forward by his hands and elbows and adding a little propulsion with his toes. A tight, hot, filthy, uncomfortable, claustrophobic journey, but infinitely better than waiting for what the Maniac had in store for him.

Each sound he made was magnified, and banging a knee sounded like taking an aluminum bat to a tin garbage can. When he stopped to rest, the radiant heat of the metal seeped into his knees, palms, and elbows, threatening first degree burns.

Twice he had to smother his face into his shoulder to prevent coughing fits. Another time he couldn’t stifle a sneeze quick enough and he heard it echo throughout the labyrinth of ducts, seemingly forever.

After four minutes of sweaty, painful crawling, his tunnel ended abruptly, meeting with a vertical shaft. Tequila squinted down into the darkness of the duct and was hit with a wave of heat that made his eyes dry and sticky. The furnace was down there.

So he went up.

He pulled his body into the larger vertical vent and held himself suspended by pressing his hands against the hot metal of the sides, very much like an iron cross on the rings. Spreading his legs, he turned sideways and placed his feet against the sides as well, thankful he had decided to wear gym shoes with rubber soles instead of his cowboy boots. Alternating his hand and foot holds, he made his way up the duct, mountain-climber style.

He was almost up to the next floor when he began to slide.

The sweat, conspiring with the blood seeping from his many wrist wounds, had soaked his palms and dripped down the walls of the vent. When his hands began to slip, he tried to hold his position with his splayed feet long enough to wipe his palms on his shirt. But all the dust, mixed with the blood and sweat, created a thin layer of greasy grime that his shoes couldn’t get a purchase on. He slid another meter, and forced his hands and feet out with all of his might, willing his descent to stop.

Which was when the grip of his shoes gave out completely and he fell, straight down, toward the furnace.

Tequila was no stranger to falling. It happened often enough in practice. But falling in darkness unnerved him completely, and while his arms waved around frantically for something to grab, he unconsciously tensed his body, something one should never do in a fall.

His flailing hands banged and echoed against the metal ducts, and the heat licked up at Tequila like the beckoning flames of hell. He’d judged he’d fallen about thirty feet before instinct kicked in and he relaxed his body for impact. The only tense part of him were his ankles, held tight together with the toes pointed out, paratrooper-style.

Then he hit.

His ass smacked against his heels, a thunderbolt of pain surging up from his coccyx through his spine and snapping his jaw shut. But before he could even assess the damage to his body, Tequila was surrounded by a heat so intense it was like climbing into a hot oven.

He reflexively touched the floor and his hand sizzled on the grating covering the furnace. The massive machine somewhere beneath his feet was blowing up superheated air, powerfully and relentlessly heating the entire building.

Tequila got to his feet and patted out the fire that had started on his ass from his chinos touching the grating. He held his hands out to the sides of the duct to climb and seared them badly. Taking off his jacket, he tried to wrap that around his hands, but the heat got through just the same, making his ascension impossible.

He smelled something foul and knew it was the rubber melting off of his shoes.

Thinking quickly, he removed his gun rig from his chest and pressed the button to magnetize the holsters. Hopefully, the building was old enough that the duct work was steel instead of aluminum. He touched the holsters to the side of the vent and they stuck there.

Wasting no time, Tequila chinned himself up on his holsters, the powerful ceramic magnets holding his weight. Then he touched his feet against the walls and found that they gripped well, due to the sticky rubber that was melting on their bottoms. He hit the button on his rig again and touched it to the side of the vent up over his head before remagnetizing them. Then he pulled himself up, and once more braced his body with his feet.

Slowly, inexorably, he got up high enough to where he could touch the vents with his bare hands without searing them. Then he wrapped the rig around his shoulders and doubled his efforts, muscles aching.

Tequila just passed the duct that led into the vault room when the bullets began to fly.