The Book With No Name (17 page)

This was extremely fortunate, for two reasons. Firstly, El Santino would probably have killed Jefe and a few innocent bystanders if the bounty hunter
had
been there without the stone. And secondly, it meant that if Elvis could find the stone before Jefe did, they stood to earn the grand sum of fifty thousand dollars from El Santino between them, instead of the twenty on offer from Jefe. Of course, there was the problem of what Jefe might do if he was cut out of the deal, but Sanchez figured Elvis could take care of that.

Time to get Elvis back on the phone,
he thought. The hitman had tracked down Marcus the Weasel quickly enough, so he had a head start when it came to finding the stone. It seemed that neither El Santino nor Jefe actually knew yet that Marcus was dead. Obviously, news like that would travel round Santa Mondega quicker than a monk could spit out a mouthful of piss, so Sanchez knew that it was only a matter of time before they found out.

Jefe rocked into the Santa Mondega International Hotel and headed straight for the night porter, who was sitting behind the reception desk looking bored out of his skull. He didn’t know it, but the bounty hunter was about to make things a little more interesting for him.

‘What fuckin’ room is Marcus staying in?’ was his first question. The porter, a young Latino in his late teens, sighed and looked up at Jefe as if he had been asked the same question a thousand times and was tired of answering it.

‘Marcus the Weasel?’ he asked, yawning.

‘Yeah.’

‘He’s dead.’

‘
What?
’

‘They found his body up there this morning. Police have been swarming all over the place all day.’

‘Fuck. They know who killed him?’

‘Nah,
they
don’t.’

Jefe was pissed now.
Really fucking pissed.
The porter had been more helpful than he’d expected, but he hadn’t got the news he was looking for. If Marcus’s killer didn’t have the stone, then the cops would have it by now. And what had the porter meant when he’d said ‘
They
don’t’?

‘How d’you mean,
they
don’t?’

The porter was a naive young man and was clearly not aware of whom he was talking to. In a manner which, in Jefe’s opinion, showed insufficient respect, he beckoned the bounty hunter to lean in a little closer.

‘I’m just working here as cover. The normal guy quit last
night, just walked out, him and his girlfriend the chambermaid. And they ain’t coming back. Word is, they saw something. I figure they know who killed the poor bastard and they’ve lit out in case the killer comes after them.’

Christ-on-a-bike!
Jefe’s nostrils flared as he sucked in a deep breath of air. He wasn’t just a touch disappointed at what he’d just heard. He was absolutely livid, although controlling it well by his standards.

‘Where do I find the old porter, then? Where do him and this bitch of his live?’ ‘That information don’t come for free.’

Mistake.
Jefe grabbed the porter’s head and smashed it down hard on the counter.

‘Listen up, you piece of shit,’ he hissed. ‘Tell me where I can find ’em or get ready to pick your nose up off the floor with your ass.’

‘Okay okay.
Jesus,
no one wants to pay for this information, do they?’

The young Latino was grimacing in pain and looking more than a little dazed.

‘Whadda ya mean? Who else’s been askin’?’

Since the porter’s response wasn’t instantaneous, Jefe smashed his face down on the counter again. This time there was an unpleasant cracking sound as his nose broke. There was no doubting who was boss in this conversation. An elderly couple sitting on one of the sofas near by looked up as if about to speak up on the porter’s behalf. A quick glance in their direction from Jefe and they wisely chose not to. As the young man’s head came back up he was smart enough to answer Jefe quickly this time, even though it was a struggle, with all the blood and snot pouring from his nostrils.

‘Well,’ he gulped indistinctly, ‘the cops wanted to know, and so did this weird guy dressed up like Elvis. Real mean muthafucker he was, man.
Real
fuckin’ mean. He was here about an hour ago.’

‘And you told him where to find them, the other porter and his bitch, right?’

‘Hey, man, I had no choice! He made me tell him. Look, the bastard did this to me.’

He lifted up his left hand, which had a thick white bandage wrapped around it. He pulled the bandage aside to reveal a deep cut right across his palm from thumb to little finger. It looked almost bad enough to have cut his hand clean in two. Jefe stared intently at it for a second and offered the young fellow a look of sympathy. Then he pulled out his gun from inside his black leather vest and shot a hole right through the wound.

BANG!

Blood sprayed everywhere. There was a two-second delay as the porter registered what had just happened to him, then he screamed in agony and promptly fell backwards off his chair.

The elderly couple got up off their sofa and walked out of the lobby on to the street without saying anything. Jefe didn’t pay any attention to them anyway. He didn’t care how many people saw him. He needed that stone back, and no one and nothing was going to get in his way.

‘Now, you little piece of fuckin’ shit. Who’s more of a worry to you now, me or this Elvis bastard?’

‘You, man!
Definitely you!
’ the porter whined as he tried desperately to hold his hand together.

‘Good. So now we’ve established that, you fuckin’ tell me where I find this flyboy ex-night porter and his bitch. And I wanna know everything about them that you think I might be interested in. You can start with their names.’

‘
Dante.
His name’s Dante and his girlfriend is called Kacy.’

‘And where do this Dante and fuckin’ Kacy live?’

The porter was now a trembling, whimpering mess curled up on the floor in the foetal position, desperately wishing that someone would come to his rescue.

‘Shh … shh …’ he stammered.

‘Don’t you fucking shush me, you piece of shit,’ Jefe snarled. He aimed his gun at the porter’s head.

‘Shh … shh … Shamrock House … apartment six,’ the petrified young Latino blurted out in the nick of time.

Jefe pointed his gun at the ceiling, out of harm’s way.

‘What’s your name, son?’ he asked in a calmer voice.

‘G … G … Gil.’

‘Well Gil, don’t you ever shush me again.’

‘I … I won’t … I swear.’

BANG!

Jefe fired a bullet through the middle of Gil’s face, and stood watching without emotion as the wretched youth’s brains sprayed out over the carpet and the wall behind him.

‘And don’t you fuckin’ swear, either, you cunt.’

With the information he required safely stored in the corners of his mind, Jefe turned and headed back out of the hotel through the main doors at the front. He paused momentarily to shoot an old woman in the foot as she passed him on her way into the lobby. She fell to the floor in agony, and before she was able to gather her senses and realize what had happened, Jefe was long gone. Off to Shamrock House, to kill Dante and Kacy.

And to take the blue stone back.

Shamrock House, apartment six. Jefe wasn’t actually expecting to find Dante and Kacy in there. Or not alive, anyway. They were probably stupid, but even if they were stupid enough to have stayed in their apartment, they would probably have already been killed by this Elvis dude.

Jefe wasn’t sure where Elvis fitted into the whole equation. He could be working for El Santino, or he could be someone that Sanchez had hired to find the stone. In which case the bartender had moved fast. Either way, if Elvis had found Dante and Kacy he could be a few steps ahead in the race to find the Eye of the Moon. Of course, it was possible he might not even be looking for the stone. Not knowing what this Elvis guy knew, or for whom, if anyone, he was working, was a real pain in the ass. Unfortunately, as it turned out, the problem was too low down on Jefe’s list of priorities for him to stop and spend any quality time trying to work it out.

There was an old man in a grey cardigan sitting at the rather dirty and rotten-looking wood-panelled reception desk in the lobby of Shamrock House. He made no attempt to gain this new visitor’s attention, and Jefe was more than happy to ignore the old bastard. As if a mutual understanding had been reached without words or even eye contact, Jefe walked past the desk and, ignoring the ratty-looking elevator, on up the damp wooden stairs to the apartments. It wasn’t obvious where he was going to find apartment number six, but as the building was quite narrow there was a possibility that it wouldn’t be on the first floor.

As it happened, the apartment he was looking for proved
to be on the third floor, and by the time Jefe had worked this out he was regretting not having just asked the old man on the reception desk. Door number six was at the end of a cold, dank corridor with a sticky dark green carpet running along the floor. The wallpaper had probably once been a cream colour, but now it was a stale yellow with dark patches of damp rising from the floor to stain it. In many places, it was actually in the latter stages of peeling from the walls.

When Jefe finally reached the door with a rusty figure 6 screwed on to it he checked he was still carrying his gun. This was part of a routine he instinctively followed when calling on someone he intended to kill. Although he did it unthinkingly, he considered the action to be a kind of talisman, a routine that he could stick to religiously. After all, it was instinctive, so he was never going to forget it. Reassured that he was still packing a piece, he puffed out his chest, pulled his shoulders back, and knocked three times on the door.

‘Hello? Anyone home?’ he called.

No answer. He knocked again. Still no answer, but now he had that horrible feeling. The one where it felt like he was being watched and the people watching him were laughing at him. A glance back down the dim, shitty corridor suggested he was alone, but he still had that feeling. Now wasn’t the time to be dwelling too much on vague feelings of unease, though. It was a time for action.

CRASH!

He kicked the door in. He only had to kick it once and it came open real easy. So easy, in fact, that it damn near came off its hinges. Now Jefe knew he was strong, but the ease at which the door came open suggested that the lock was already fucked. The door itself was pretty rotten, due to dampness, so it would be no great surprise if the area round the lock wasn’t up to scratch. Jefe, however, didn’t concern himself with the state of the door for long. Finding out if anyone was hiding inside the apartment was his top priority. He drew his gun, ready for action, and jumped into the apartment in the approved fashion of a cop in a TV show, checking both ways
and randomly spinning back and forth as he advanced, just to make sure no one was hiding behind anything.

There didn’t seem to be much to see, at least not at first. It was a one-room apartment, and all that was in it was a double bed with a crimson-coloured duvet covering it, an armchair facing a small portable TV set, and a filthy yellow basin with a scum-covered mirror above it. The wallpaper was in an even worse state than the stuff in the hallway, and there was an almighty stink, as if someone had left a steak under the bed and forgotten about it.