The Book With No Name (12 page)

After showering for a good fifteen minutes, Marcus the Weasel spent a few more minutes in the bathroom drying himself off and covering his entire body in the complimentary talcum powder the hotel offered. He had no clean clothes with him so he just slipped back into his loose-fitting black leather trousers from the day before. This was not an uncommon procedure for Marcus, even though the leather stank of beer and cigarettes. As he buttoned them up he heard Kacy closing the door on her way out of the room. Fifteen more minutes and he would be seeing her again, if she kept her word. And he had a strong feeling that she would.

He wandered back into the bedroom to observe her handiwork. She had made the bed immaculately and there was a fresher smell about the place, too. Marcus was just contemplating whether or not he had enough time to dash out and buy a clean shirt before meeting up with Kacy when there was another knock at the door. Maybe she had forgotten something and was back already?

‘Let yourself in,’ he called out.

There was a pause, then another knock. Pretty hard this time. Marcus felt a cold shiver sweep over him momentarily. Could this be someone else knocking? Not Kacy? A man perhaps? Jefe even? Surely Kacy would have a passkey to let herself back in? Wouldn’t she?

‘Kacy?’ he called. ‘That you?’

No answer.

Another cold shiver passed right over him, making him shudder briefly. Could it
really
be Jefe? Could he have caught
up with him already? And more worryingly, where had Marcus put his gun when he got in the shower?

‘Hang on. I’m just coming,’ he yelled in an attempt to buy himself some time.

Looking frantically around the bedroom for his gun was making him start to panic. There was no sign of the weapon there, so he raced back into the bathroom. His eyes scoured the whole room inside half a second. Where was that fucking gun? Dammit! It wasn’t in the bathroom either. Where the
fuck
had he put it? He turned and scrambled back into the bedroom. Under the pillows?
Must be.
He picked up the pillows on the bed and looked underneath them. Nope, it wasn’t under the pillows either. Fuck, fuck, FUCK! He was going to have to answer the door.

Why had he called out? If he’d kept quiet, his visitor would have assumed Marcus wasn’t in his room. He figured it would be wise to take a look through the spyhole in the door and see who it was – after all, it might just be room service. But the fact of the matter was that he couldn’t find his gun, and he was very nervous about that fact.

One of the oldest assassins’ tricks is to knock on a door, wait until the target is heard approaching on the other side, and fire through the spyhole when the room’s occupant looks through it. BANG! – blows a big hole through the unsuspecting target’s head. Being more than familiar with this trick, Marcus tiptoed over to the door, and slowly – ever so slowly – moved his head into what might potentially be the firing line. For reasons best known to himself he had his eye half closed, as though that would help to lessen the impact of a speeding bullet.

One half glance was all he needed. He jerked his head back and threw himself out of the way quicker than you could say ‘
Woah! There goes my eye!
’ On the other side of the spyhole was the muzzle of a pistol. Luckily, its owner had not realized that Marcus had been standing right in front of him for a split second, with only the door between them.

He tiptoed back over to the freshly made double bed.
Where the fuck was his gun? His bottle of whisky was still on the bedside table so he picked it up and quickly took a swig. Think! Think, goddammit! What were his options?

Find the gun.

He lifted up both the pillows again. Definitely no gun there. Back into the bathroom.
Shit, where was it?

A third, even longer lasting cold shiver swept over him. There were two reasons for this. The first was that there came another, much louder knock at the door, and the second – well, the second was the real killer.
His wallet was gone.
Kacy had put it by the basin, but it wasn’t there any more. That’s where his gun had been, too. He remembered now: he had picked his gun from the bathroom floor and put it by the basin too. That fuckin’ bitch had shafted him after all!
Oh fuck. Fuckity-fuck.
He rushed back into the bedroom. What other options did he have? Maybe he could get out of the bedroom window, then make his way down the front of the building or into an adjacent room.

No, he couldn’t.
He was seven floors up and he suffered badly from vertigo. He must have another option, surely?

The blue stone.
Marcus had heard rumours about that stone. He knew that El Santino wanted it, and he knew it was worth a lot of money to him. He also knew that there was a story, a myth even, about the night Ringo was killed by the Bourbon Kid. The way he’d heard it, Ringo was unkillable for as long as he was wearing the blue stone around his neck. The Bourbon Kid had shot him a hundred times, but he didn’t die until the Kid took the stone from him. It was a bullshit story and Marcus had never believed it, but right now it was his only option. But what had he done with the necklace? He remembered putting it somewhere safe the night before, but he had been pretty goddam drunk. Where the hell had he put it? Think … THINK … THINK!

The answer suddenly came to him like a bolt of lightning. Before going to bed he had put his gun under the pillows like he always did, but the necklace with the blue stone he had put
inside
the pillowcase, just to be extra safe. But which
pillow? He jumped on to the bed and picked up the nearest one. It didn’t feel different, but he ripped the pillowcase off it anyway. Nothing. He picked up the second pillow. It seemed slightly heavier, suggesting there was something in it. With his nerves shrieking he scrambled frantically to get the pillowcase off. There was another bang at the door, but this time it wasn’t someone knocking. This time it was someone trying to kick the door down. No time for mincing around, Marcus just ripped the second pillowcase off and out fell a necklace. Relief …
but only for a second.
Relief quickly turned to horror, as he realized it was not the necklace he had stolen from Jefe the night before. This was a different one. A cheap silver necklace with a silver ‘S’ pendant on it. That bitch Kacy had shafted him again.

CRASH! Marcus turned around in time to see the door of the apartment come flying off its hinges. Cringing on the bed, he raised his hands above his head in surrender as a gunman entered the room.

He didn’t even hear the first shot, just felt the agony as his kneecap exploded, spraying blood everywhere, even into his eyes. He fell off the bed and on to the floor, screaming like a scalded baby, and for the next seven minutes of his life he wished he was dead.

In the eighth minute, Marcus the Weasel got his wish, but by that time he had seen what most of his insides looked like. He had even been force-fed some of his own fingers and toes. And worse – much worse.

Dante had been working as a receptionist at the Santa Mondega International Hotel for just two weeks. Goddam nightshift, too. Well, his two weeks were about to come to an end. Just after starting his shift at midnight the previous night, a drunken lowlife had staggered in off the street, demanding a room. The man was so drunk he had no idea how loud and embarrassing he was. If the hotel manager, Mr Saso, had been around he would never have allowed the man to set foot in his hotel in the first place, but being as Dante was the man behind the desk he was in charge of who stayed and who didn’t.

The drunk had insisted on taking one of the better rooms and wanted to pay cash, so Dante had charged him for the best room and given him an average one. That way he managed to pocket around forty dollars for himself from the transaction. Yet this wasn’t what had got Dante so excited. No sir. He was on edge this morning, because the man in question had been somewhat careless in showing off a very expensive-looking blue stone that hung around his neck on a gold chain.

Dante had been waiting for an opportunity like this. A drunken idiot with a wad of cash – he had stupidly waved his wallet around when he dug out his driver’s licence – and a precious blue stone that could be worth a few thousand, this was Dante’s ticket out of the hotel-receptionist business. It was a woman’s job, anyway, and the uniform they made him wear was clearly a faggot’s outfit. A pink blazer, for Chrissakes! It wasn’t just the pink blazer and the miserable pay and the ‘Yes, sir-No, sir-Thank you, sir’ meniality of the job that bothered him, however. It was the fact that he was now in
his mid-twenties and life was passing him by. He had flunked out of school, so a decent-paying career was always going to be hard to find. Usually when he was being interviewed for a job, the only chance he had of getting it was to hope that the interviewer was a woman. He was a good-looking guy, with a thick mop of dark hair and a glint in his bright blue eyes that older women, in particular, for some reason found hard to resist. With the naturally confident aura he had about him, these women became putty in his hands and the job was his every time.

By the time the midday sun had reached its zenith, Dante’s plan to get his hands on the drunken fool’s money was well under way. Everything was looking rosy. When Stuart the early-shift porter had arrived at nine a.m., Dante had convinced him to take time off and let him cover his shift for him. Stuart was only too happy to oblige, especially as Dante offered to fill in for free. It had meant almost five hours of extra unpaid work, but now, in the early afternoon, the time had arrived to make it all worthwhile by putting his plan into action. He was only minutes away from being a lot better off than he had been at any time since he had arrived in Santa Mondega three months earlier. His mind was already racing with plans to buy a car and move to a better apartment, and that was just the beginning. The place he and his girlfriend had rented for the last few months was barely big enough to house a family of gophers.

Just recently, things hadn’t panned out for Dante the way he’d planned. He had come to Santa Mondega initially in the hope of finding a decent-paying job. Within a week of his arrival an old friend of his father had fixed him up with a job in a museum, but an awkward incident that had ended with Dante smashing a priceless vase over a customer’s head had resulted in him being fired, and he’d been lucky to escape being charged with assault. Since then, Fate had dealt him a pretty poor hand, and the only job he’d been able to find at short notice was as a receptionist at the Santa Mondega International. He had been working there for two weeks, and
Christ, it had dragged. During that time all he had thought about was how he was going to get a break, whether it be by meeting a rich client who would offer him a better job, or simply by robbing one of the wealthy clients. He wasn’t fussy, either. It was all about which was easiest. A gullible guest who could be robbed without anyone batting an eyelid was probably the simplest option, and that gullible fool had arrived. The moron who had taken a room the night before would not get much sympathy from the hotel manager when he claimed he had been robbed, simply because he didn’t look like he had any money. And he was a drunk.

Dante’s plan to relieve the man of his money and his precious blue stone was a pretty simple one. Although it wasn’t exactly watertight, it was marvellous in its simplicity. True to form, however, just as he was visualizing himself counting out the man’s money, fate threw a spanner in the works. A big guy dressed like Elvis strutted into the lobby and made his way over to Dante’s desk.

‘You gotta guy staying here who answers to the name Jefe?’ he asked, pleasantly enough.

‘I’m sorry, sir, I’m not at liberty to give out that sort of information.’ Dante came back with the hotel’s standard line.

Elvis leaned in and slipped a fifty-dollar bill into the young man’s hand. ‘Don’t make me ask again, huh?’ There was now a gravel quality to his voice.

‘Sorry, but I still can’t give you that information, sir,’ Dante replied, making no effort to offer back the fifty-dollar bill.