Shot of Tequila (11 page)

S
lake and Matisse rolled up to Tequila’s apartment building in a 1979 Monte Carlo. It was a muscle car, dark silver with side engine vents that looked like gills. The vehicle resembled a shark, which was the reason Slake bought it. With his salary he could have had any car. But this one suited his personality.

They parked across the street and Slake reviewed their options. This was a security building, which meant that both entrances were monitored, and no one would be admitted without a resident’s permission. The lobby was watched by a doorman. The garage was watched by an attendant.

Or at least, it should have been. In this case, the attendant was napping.

They walked up to the garage doors, and Slake gave Matisse a nod. Crouching by the door, Matisse took a firm grip on the handle at the bottom, straightened his back, and flexed his legs as if ready to attempt a deadlift.

The world record deadlift was almost nine hundred pounds, executed by a man weighing two hundred and seventy-five. Matisse weighed two-eighty, all of it muscle, most of it steroid-induced. The garage door weighed only eighty pounds, and the mechanical arm that opened and closed the door added four hundred pounds of pressure to the total.

Matisse vs. The Garage Door.

The Garage Door lost.

Slake was inside the garage, his knife in his hand, before the attendant had even opened an eye. He was already though the door to the security room when the attendant finally stirred, realizing something was wrong. The knife at his throat was the first clue.

“Caught you napping,” cooed Slake, his stiletto tickling the man’s Adam’s apple..

“Take the keys.” The attendant quavered, pointing to the rack of car keys hanging on numbered hooks behind him. Several tenants preferred valet parking to the do-it-yourself option, and the attendant, assuming the intruders were car thieves, had no hesitation in trading them all for his hide. “You want a Cadillac? Benz? Corvette? How about a Ferrari? Take all you want.”

“How about a white Chevy Caprice Classic that looks like a cop car?”

“I don’t have his keys.” The attendant shrank. “He parks himself.”

“What’s his room number?”

“I don’t know. I swear.”

Slake looked at the Rolex on his wrist.

“You have exactly fifteen seconds to find out.”

The attendant paled. He wasn’t even fully awake yet. One minute he’d been having a dream about rubbing suntan lotion on Carmen Electra’s butt, and now he was being threatened with death by some knife-wielding psycho who wanted information he didn’t have. If only he hadn’t been asleep, then he could have called the police before this wacko got in. He blamed Dr. Stubin, his chemistry professor. Mitch had been up the entire previous night studying for that asshole’s midterm. This was all Stubin’s fault.

Matisse came into the security office, having jerked the garage door back down after entering. Mitch flinched at the sight of the new man, whose appearance made his situation even worse.

Damn you, Dr. Stubin.

“Ten seconds,” Slake said, eyes on his watch.

The attendant scooped up the phone in front of him and dialed the extension for the phone in the lobby.

Please, God, don’t let Frank be in the john.

“This is Frank.”

Thank you, Jesus. “Frank? Mitch. Who’s that short guy, crew cut, drives the Caprice?”

“Five seconds.” Slake tapped at Mitch’s chin with the knife edge.

“Tequila Abernathy. Lives in 3014. Why?”

“Thirty-fourteen? Thanks Frank!”

The attendant smiled at Slake, his face a cross between hope and relief.

“Tell him his lights are on,” Slake told him.

“His lights are on, Frank. I’ll call him.”

“Lights are on? He went out earlier tonight, hasn’t come back yet.”

“I guess he walked somewhere.”

“That’s strange.”

“Tell him you have to go,” ordered Slake.

“Gotta go, Frank. Have to piss.”

The attendant hung-up and grinned weakly.

“What’s the name of the day doorman?” Slake asked.

“Steve.” Mitch was eager to please at this point.

“And are there any vacancies?”

“Uh, yeah. Some guy just moved out of, uh, twelve-ten. No. Twelve-twelve. That’s open.”

“Thank you.”

The man’s eyes got wide. “Did I do good?”

“Yes, Mitch. You did good.”

Then Slake rammed his knife into Mitch’s neck. He clamped his free hand across the attendant’s mouth to block off the scream, and gave the knife a vicious twist.

The scream came out of the hole in Mitch’s throat instead of his lips, but with the vocal chords severed and the blood running freely the bubbly sound he made was scarcely louder than a fart in the bathtub.

The killer withdrew his blade and set Mitch’s head down on the desk, leaving him to die without ever knowing if he had passed his Chemistry midterm or not. He hadn’t.
That asshole Dr. Stubin.

“Jesus, Slake, did you have to kill him?”

Slake wiped his knife blade off in the dead man’s hair and grinned. “No, I didn’t.”

A shiver crept up Matisse’s back and caused his shoulders to shake. Slake folded his knife and tucked it away, and wiped away his fingerprints on the door with his sleeve.

They went through the garage over to the lobby entrance. Walking in smoothly, appearing as if they belonged, Slake and Matisse headed straight for the elevator.

“Gentlemen?”

Frank the doorman raised an eyebrow at them. If they’d gotten through the garage, they were obviously tenants or friends of tenants. But Frank made it a point to recognize everyone—a necessary trait for someone who depended on tips to earn a living—and these two he didn’t recognize.

“You must be Frank.” Slake smiled widely. The smile didn’t quite work on his harsh face. “The name’s Collins, just moved into twelve-twelve. I hope you’ll be as helpful as Steve was this morning. I chose this apartment for its privacy, and he seems like a man ready to protect mine.”

Slake shook hands with Frank, offering him a palmed bill. Frank took it without glancing at the denomination.

“Privacy is something that should be protected, Mr. Collins.” Frank grinned, snuck a look at the bill—a twenty—and grinned wider. “I’ll certainly do my best.”

Slake nodded, and Frank pressed the button to call their elevator. He eyed the pair peripherally. Big tippers aside, there was something about them that wasn’t quite right. The big one looked nervous, and the thin one looked, well, sinister. And it was quite odd that neither the Building Association, nor Steve, had told him about any new tenants.

Frank wondered if maybe they were misrepresenting themselves. Not tenants at all, but burglars or criminals of some sort. He’d lose his job if he let anyone like that into the building. He wondered what to do about it. Call Mitch, ask him? No, Mitch said he was taking a leak. Besides, Frank’s duty was to the tenants, and if these two were tenants, offending them would be inexcusable.

They all waited for the elevator with mounting tension. Matisse began to sweat, hoping Slake wouldn’t kill anyone else. He hated working with Slake. Slake reminded him of that Nazi commander in that movie
Schindler’s List
, the guy who shot prisoners from his balcony when he was bored.

“You know,” Frank began. Matisse closed his eyes, knowing what was coming. “Steve didn’t even mention to me that you moved in.”

“Really?” Slake appeared uninterested.

“Yeah. Kind of an odd thing for my brother to do, don’t you think?”

Matisse swallowed loud enough to create an echo.

“Brother?” Slake grinned. “Forgive me for asking, but is one of you adopted? Because the Steve I met this morning was white.”

“I meant figuratively,” Frank said quickly. “He’s my brother because we got the same job. You know what I mean.”

“Yes,” Slake said. “I’m familiar with spade talk.”

The elevator arrived with a ding. Matisse opened his eyes and took a breath.

“Be seeing you, Frank.”

Frank nodded curtly, and Matisse and Slake entered the lift.

“Dumb nigger,” Slake swore as the doors closed. “Testing to see if I’d met Steve this morning.”

Slake jabbed the button for twelve.

“How’d you know he was white?” Matisse asked.

“I dropped Tequila off here once during the day, saw the guy. Total luck. I think when we’re done, I’m going to waste that bastard. Curiosity kills the coon.”

The elevator stopped at twelve.

“I thought he’s on thirty.”

“He is,” spat Slake. “From here we walk.”

They found the staircase and began their ascent.

In room 3014, China and Sally slept in innocence, unaware that death was on its way up.

I
t was the silence that woke Jack Daniels up. She raised her head from her desk and stared over at the dot matrix printer next to the computer. It had finally stopped.

Daniels checked her watch. Creeping up on three in the morning.

“Faster than I thought.” The sleep made her voice sound clogged. She suddenly remembered a brief snatch of the dream she’d been having before she awoke. Jack was a child, second or third grade, the only girl in class. All the boys were teasing her, flicking spitballs, pulling her hair. She went crying to her husband, who was the only adult in the room, and he smashed a spitball the size of a toaster oven into her face.

Didn’t need to be Dr. Freud to figure that one out.

“Let’s see what we’ve got.” Jack pushed the dream and its images out of her mind. She swiveled over to the continuous printout of paper that the printer had spit up all over the office floor. Lots of names in there. Lots of rap sheets. Lots of possibilities. Hopefully, in one of the lists, there was a short man with a butterfly tattoo on his hand.

Trying to be optimistic, she decided to look at the last search first. The one that listed all white males under five-seven with tattoos.

It was a list of eighty-six names, the shortest of the three. Jack scanned through it, looking for butterflies.

On name forty-six, she found one.

“Tequila Abernathy. Age 32. Height 5’6”. Blond hair, blue eyes. Arrested May 1990 for assault. Charges dropped. Case number 8867584. Tattoo of a Monarch butterfly on the back of his right hand.”

Could this be the guy? Jack went to the computer terminal and pulled up the case number. As expected, she came up empty. Dropped cases weren’t normally entered into the computer. The only way Jack could find out why the charges were dropped would be to manually pick up the hard copy down in the archives of the 12th Precinct, where Tequila had been arrested.

Either that, or she could call the arresting officer. Jack jotted down the officer’s name and badge number. Then she picked up the phone and called the Desk Sergeant.

“Peters.”

“Daniels. Has Binkowski left yet?”

“About two hours ago, Detective.”

“He finish the composite with the sketch artist?”

“Yeah. Got a copy right here.”

“Send one up.”

She hung up the phone and pulled Tequila’s file on the computer, including prints and mug shots. The precinct had two laser printers down in Records, and Jack sent the file to be printed down there.

“Tequila,” Jack mused. “Who would name their kid Tequila?”

A uniform came in with the sketch and Jack scrutinized it. Binkowski’s drawing looked tougher, and meaner, than the man in the mug shots. But there were a lot of similarities. A hell of a lot.

Jack looked at the clock again. Ten after three. It was late, but not too late to get a murderer off the streets. She doubted she could get a warrant with what they had, but if Binkowski IDed the mug shots, she could bring this Tequila in and hang the bastard.

Jack found Binkowski’s home number on the incident report and punched the right numbers.

“Hello?” came the sleepy voice.

“Mr. Binkowski? Detective Daniels. I’d like to come over and have you look at some mug shots.”

“What time is it?”

“Time to put this lunatic behind bars. I’ll be over in half an hour.”

Daniels hung up. Her fatigue was magically erased. Going over to the computer, she printed up four more random mug shots to show Binkowski along with Tequila’s. Then she exited the office and went down to records, to pick up the color laser copies.

Maybe this bad feeling she had about this case was wrong. Maybe Tequila was their man, and they could bring him in before he killed again. As it happened in all types of work, sometimes cops just got lucky.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t going to be one of those times.