Shot of Tequila (29 page)

Jack stared at Tequila’s dark form from the bunker, wondering if his plan had any merit. He was trying to draw Royce out, but Royce was too damn smart. Jack tried to think like Royce, wondering how she would subdue Tequila, and when she figured it out the hair on the back of her neck stood up.

I’d take the cop out first.

Daniels whirled at the sound to her left, bringing up her .38. It was kicked roughly from her hand and went skidding across the warehouse floor. Jack sprang over the top of the metal shelf at the kicking form, tackling him mid-body, pinning him to the ground. She brought her fist down hard into Royce’s face, feeling teeth bend and snap.

The gun went off next to her ear, the sound so loud and painful it hurt almost as much as getting shot. She rolled away, her hand pressed against the side of her head, trying to stop the agony.

Then she felt a spike drive into her back, and realized she had been shot, and that her earlier assessment had been wrong.

Being shot did hurt worse.

She dropped the gun and darkness took her.

“I
killed your cop buddy, Tequila.” Royce was crouching behind the metal shelf. “Tell me where the money is, I’ll let you go.”

“Jack!”

No answer.

Rage bubbled up in Tequila. Jack had been a decent person. She shouldn’t have died like that. If only he’d kept his cool, stayed in the enclosure…

“The money, Tequila.”

“Ask Slake. He’s the one that stole it. Check his house out. In his garage, there’s a body with a tattoo like mine. He set me up.”

“Then you have nothing to fear from Marty. Throw down your guns, we’ll talk this out.”

Throwing down his guns was suicide. The Maniac wouldn’t care if Tequila took his money or not. He’d torture him to death anyway.

But Tequila was out of ammo, so the guns were worthless. If he pretended to give up, maybe he’d have a chance at taking Royce one on one. He’d heard legends about this man, how unstoppable he was. A one man army. Tequila didn’t doubt Royce was good, but did he have an enormous ego to match his talents?

Only one way to find out.

“I’m tossing over my guns.”

They clattered to the factory floor somewhere near Royce’s direction. Then Royce yelled, “Light!”

All at once, the lights went on in the warehouse. Old, incandescent lights, many of the bulbs broken, but still enough to illuminate the entire storage area.

Tequila squinted against the glare, feeling exposed but keeping his posture erect and his hands raised. His stare locked on Jack, lying face-down a dozen yards away, her back a bloody mess. Then his eyes found Royce.

“Didn’t I see you in the Wizard of Oz?” Royce asked. “You’re one of the Lollipop Kids.”

His grin was bloody—the cop had gone down swinging and knocked out a few of his teeth. Good for her.

“And you were on my cereal box this morning. Count Chocula. You don’t look nearly as badass as the rumors I’ve heard. You look like a pussy.”

Royce’s grin dropped a fraction.

“I can take you easy,” Royce said.

He probably could too. The wound in Tequila’s thigh hurt like a branding iron was being pressed against it, his ankle had swelled to the size of a grapefruit, and the stitches from the dog bite had opened. The only thing keeping him upright was adrenaline, amphetamines, and bravado.

“You better not try it. Marty wants me bad. It’s safer if you just call in the goon squad, surround me. In fact, you should probably shoot my knees out right now. I’m too dangerous for you.”

Tequila watched Royce’s reaction. A pro, a real pro, would do just what Tequila said.

But Royce did have an ego as large as his talents. He was used to being feared, even exalted. Nobody insulted him. Nobody.

He needed to teach this midget a lesson.

Royce bunched up his fists and stalked over. Tequila moved in quick, feinting with a lunge kick and coming instead with a right uppercut. His fist whirred through open air, Royce dodging the blow and dropping an elbow onto Tequila’s shoulder, making his whole arm go numb.

Tequila tucked and rolled away, coming up to his feet and whipping around his left leg in a reverse kick where Royce should have been.

But Royce wasn’t there anymore. He was at Tequila’s side, throwing a combination punch that split open the smaller man’s lip and bruised his right kidney.

Again Tequila rolled away. He found his footing and stared at Royce. The man wasn’t even in a fighting stance. He was standing there with his hands on his hips, looking bored.

This time Tequila didn’t attack. He let Royce come to him.

Royce did so leisurely, coming within three feet of Tequila before executing a flawless karate kick to Tequila’s chest. There had been no telegraphing the move, no way to duck it, no way to block it. The man was fast enough to fight pro.

Tequila was knocked onto his back. Royce casually strolled over and his fist shot out like a snake, grabbing Tequila’s right wrist. Before Tequila could pull his hand back Royce had twisted hard and broken his pinky.

Tequila’s vision went red with pain.

“Now admit it,” Royce said. “You’ve never seen anyone that fast.”

Tequila kipped up to his feet and threw his palm at Royce’s chest. He knew Royce would dodge it, but he also knew where Royce would go this time after the dodge. Predictably, Royce rolled away from the punch to the left, and Tequila did a quick reverse kick that smacked the know-it-all look right off Royce’s ugly face.

Royce was immediately on guard for the follow-up attack, assuming a classic defensive karate stance.

Well, if the guy knew karate, Tequila would hit him with a little judo.

He tossed a slow hand at Royce, watching for the block. When the block came he grabbed rather than punched.

The grab threw Royce off balance, and Tequila used the momentum to flip the bigger man over his shoulder and throw him across the floor.

Royce hit hard, but was already in motion to gain his feet when Tequila delivered a devastating kick to Royce’s ribs.

It wasn’t karate at all. It was a football punt. Royce had gotten his hand up to block, but the force from the kick was still enough to strip the air from his lungs.

Tequila brought up his foot to stomp on Royce’s head, but the fanged man shot out two stiff fingers at the inside of Tequila’s thigh, near the injury, prompting white hot agony that doubled Tequila over.

He staggered back and Royce was on his feet again, lashing out with a solid chop to Tequila’s head.

Tequila went down.

Royce advanced.

Tequila knew he was outmatched.

Over by the fallen shelves, Homicide Detective Jack Daniels opened her eyes.

“I’m going to break every bone in your legs,” Royce told Tequila. “Then I’ll use your balls as a leash and make you walk out of here.”

Tequila blinked at the double image above him, and brought his knees in tight to his chest, kicking them straight up into the air. The move wasn’t karate or judo. It was straight gymnastics. He caught Royce under the chin and sent him sprawling backwards.

Before Royce could recover, Tequila was on his feet and charging. He hit the bigger man with a shoulder tackle and drove him hard into the ground. Pinning him there, Tequila threw punches into Royce’s sides, hitting him with all that he had, trying to drive his fists through the man’s body.

Unable to throw Tequila off, Royce pulled his knife from his sheath and cut a trail of blood across Tequila’s chest. Tequila rolled away, feeling as if he’d been seared with a poker.

Jack reached up a hand, felt the exit wound in her shoulder. The wound was leaking, pretty bad.

Royce lunged at Tequila, the blade dull with Tequila’s blood. Tequila parried the lunge with his forearm, getting a razor sharp cut from the elbow to the wrist.

“I’m the best!” Royce screamed. He jabbed at Tequila with the blade, poking at him like a chef with a meat fork, his eyes glazing over with an insane, violent lust.

Tequila backed away from the thrusts, trying to avoid getting cut again. Royce kept moving forward, keeping Tequila off balance, not giving him a chance to plant his feet and throw a solid punch or kick.

Then Tequila’s back hit a wall. There was no place else to retreat, and Tequila had no way to stop an experienced knife thrust. He was effectively trapped, and his opponent knew it, breaking into a monstrous smile.

Royce lunged hard at Tequila’s chest.

Tequila put up his forearm to block, taking the blade neatly through his arm up to the hilt, between his radius and his ulna. Then, using his bones as leverage, he twisted the knife from Royce’s grasp and brought his forearm down across the man’s face. The three inches of blade protruding from Tequila’s arm raked down Royce’s scalp and lodged firmly into the vampire’s eye socket.

Tequila grabbed the handle of the knife and pushed hard, through his arm, into Royce’s head. Then he brought up a leg and kicked Royce backwards, free of the blade.

Royce sprawled out onto his back, not moving.

Tequila looked at the knife sticking in his arm and almost fainted. He put his head down between his legs to get blood to his brain.

“Pussy,” he said to Royce.

Rather than reply, Royce jerked up to a sitting position, gore dripping from his black eye socket, his custom .45 pointed and ready to fire at Tequila’s chest.

Then Royce’s head burst into a brilliant explosion of red, blood spraying out in all directions like a shaken up beer can. His headless body jerked to the ground, the gun clattering to the floor next to it.

Tequila looked over at Jack Daniels, who was lying on her left side fifteen yards away. The .38 smoked in the Detective’s hands.

“Little help here,” Jack mumbled.

Tequila limped over.

“Royce!” a strange voice called out. “You get him yet?”

“Can you walk?” Tequila asked Jack.

Daniels nodded, allowing Tequila to help her to her feet.

“Looks like you need a Band-Aid,” Jack said, indicating the knife sticking out of Tequila’s arm.

“I’m afraid if I pull it out, I won’t be able to stop the bleeding.”

“Keep it there, then. It makes you look tough.”

They stumbled down the aisle, and Tequila recovered his .45s from where he’d thrown them, putting them back into his shoulder rig. Then he tugged the Demerol and syringe out of his pocket. He gave himself two injections, and then offered the last of it to Daniels.

“What is it?”

“Demerol. It’ll numb you.”

She nodded, and he plunged the needle into her shoulder, next to her gunshot wound.

“Royce!” someone yelled again.

Jack cocked an ear at the voice. Tequila came to her side, also listening.

“So where to, Tequila? We can’t parachute out of this one. And all the exits are covered.”

“Almost all of them,” replied Tequila, pointing up to the thirty foot ceiling. Above them was a skylight.

“Great,” muttered Jack. “I get nosebleeds sitting on bar stools that are too high.”

“You don’t have any blood left for your nose to bleed. Move your ass.”

They began to climb up the steel shelving unit, using it like a large ladder. It was hard going. Both of them were badly hurt, and Tequila kept catching the blade of the knife in his arm on boxes, jiggling it around.

Finally, near exhaustion, their endurance almost gone, they made it to the top shelf.

The skylight was still eight feet above them.

It might as well been a thousand feet to Jack. She’d lost enough blood to recognize the early stages of shock coming on. She winced, forcing some of her shirt into the bullet hole to slow the bleeding.

Below them forty armed men entered the warehouse, roaming around like worker ants. It would only be a matter of time until one of them decided to look up.

Tequila stared up at the skylight, trying to figure out how to reach it. There was nothing on the top shelf for them to stand on. Except…

“Get on my shoulders,” Tequila said.

Jack rolled her eyes. “You’re joking.”

“I boost you up there, you pull yourself onto that ledge next to the skylight. Then you can open it and go through.”

“How about you?”

“When you get on the roof, lean down and stick your hand through. I’ll grab it.”

“You can’t jump that high.”

“I have a better chance than you do. Do you have any other ideas?”

“Yeah. We lie really still and if anyone sees us we just say we’re mannequins.”

“Get on my shoulders.”

“I can’t.”

Tequila helped Jack to her feet, then squatted down while Jack awkwardly sat on Tequila’s back, her legs around his neck.

Grunting with effort, Tequila stood up, Daniels sitting high on his shoulders. Jack reached for the ledge, but it was still a foot away.

“Can’t get it.”

“Step in my hands.”

Tequila locked his fingers together, and Jack placed her right foot in Tequila’s palms. The muscles in the gymnast’s back were screaming, and his legs began to shake as Jack leaned her weight forward.

“On three,” Tequila grunted. “One, two, three!”

Tequila heaved up with all of his remaining strength and Jack jumped out of the man’s palms and up to the ledge. She grabbed it and held, and Tequila moved under Jack’s swinging feet and let Jack step on his shoulders and hands to hoist herself up.