The Shaft (41 page)

    Not coke. Crank. More kick clean Sweet 'N Low.

    Bauhaus snapped his fingers and Lord Allred stiffened. His toes drummed the shag like he didn't have enough to do. 'Get out of here,' Bauhaus said. 'Take your leave. Go fuck yourself.' Lord Alfred hurried away to do as he was told.

    Bauhaus resumed his James Bond villain pose. Now was his time for speechmaking, to hiball toward a bon mot-laden denouement. 'Sweetness, do remember that certain drugs fog the memory.'

    'What about Jonathan?' She watched Emilio drain the coffee mug all at once.

    'I don't need you to give me his address because I'm sure Marko has it knocked by now. But do you know what the funny, funny thing is?'

    She was supposed to ask. She didn't. Brauhaus frowned. 'Why, as soon as Marko left the hospital, our stout associate Cruz just… vanished. It was as if he'd risen from his sickbed and, I don't know, strolled right out of there. You wouldn't have any notion of where he might have gone, would you, my jewel?'

    Jamaica 's eyes narrowed. 'You mean you sent Marko to choke Cruz and he gave you the slip.'

    'In sum, yes.' His gecko eyes flickered up, warning her not to laugh. Bauhaus' good pal from Florida, Emilio, was reddening with each mention of Cruz's name.

    'I haven't seen him.' To miss a beat now would be fatal. 'Jonathan either. What do you think I'm doing here? I figured everybody would wind up at one of your parties. All things considered, Kenilworth isn't exactly the safest place for Cruz to hang just now.'

    'And what, pray tell, became of Jonathan?'

    'He went to the movies. He fell down a hole. How the hell should I know?'

    'You seemed a touch protective of him the other night.' He took one more fat puff of his malodorous cheroot before abandoning it. 'Fuck him last night?'

    She held her tongue.

    'Ahh.' He sounded as though he'd just loosed a satisfying fart. 'Look at her face, Emilio. She did it. She let young Jonathan jam his bat up her gooey little twat. I think she's holding out on us.' He drew the sibilant out into a hiss of mean pleasure.

    ''I think we should give the lady the benefit of the doubt, and our understanding,' Emilio offered smoothly. 'Some things, don't forget, are won of kindness, Bauhaus - not intimidation.'

    She looked from one to the other. From oil to grease.

    'Tell us, dear,' Emilio said. 'We only want you to help us to help Cruz. Is there anything else that might clue us in as to where he's gone? Bauhaus says he was injured. That worries me. If he left hospital in a sedated haze, why, he might… have an accident.'

    Chari made a blind grab for Bauhaus' groin. He shoved her back and she began to search for her clitoris.

    'Like I said, I haven't seen him since I saw him here.' Bauhaus nodded. It was the expression of a high school teacher working his way through my dog ate my homework. 'The other night your friend Jonathan stole some merchandise from me. With your help.'

    'What?' This was getting wearisome.

    'I'll play back the tapes for you, if you wish. They depict, clearly and in spite of the low light, your own sweet self filling several straws with my finest Number Four and hiding them in Jonathan's parka. Remember now?' he snorted. 'My party favors are for the guests, dearest, but I think you really should have asked.'

    'Gimme a break.' The pistol nestled against her hipbone nudged her, gently suggesting fast solutions. 'He sampled. I primed him for you. You'll have another budding user beholden to you in a month. What the hell do you care about an ounce or so?'

    'Seems I've been giving away too much free lately without being consulted. Like those two kilos Cruz says he donated to Chicago Public Works via the sewer system. Emilio informs me that Cruz may be highly motivated to turn that big a taste around - into cash - and leave our fair state without compensating his benefactors.'

    Just when Jamaica wanted to ask why Bauhaus gave a pinch of shit about helping some out-of-state 'caine slinger, she spotted the Haliburton case on the dining room table. Dealers who watched too many movies just loved them. This one would be full of dope or greenbacks or both.

    'Relax, Bauhaus.' Emilio stood up. He was shorter than Jamaica. 'Shelve it. I'm positive that little Jamaica - that is your name? - only wants to help and dislikes being grilled and threatened. Here.' He clasped her forearm gently. 'Let me show you something that'll make you wet.'

    He led her to the Haliburton, clicked the combination latches and flipped back the lid. Inside both shells was wall-to-wall money. Seven stacks across, three vertical, Treasury-banded Franklin notes.

    'Nice.' Jamaica kept her eyes on Emilio.

    He slipped a hundred dollar bill from one of the stacks, rolled it into a tube as though preparing to whiff a line, and instead slipped it behind Jamaica 's left ear like a reserve cigarette. He paused to grace her feathered earring with thick, dark fingers. 'Nice,' he said back.

    Her stomach tried to clench. No way. Not with this guy, not ever.

    
USE me,
the gun insisted.
Jam me into that overpriced dentition and blast his slug brains across one of those abstract nightmares Bauhaus bought as a tax deduction
.

    'Such gorgeous green eyes,' Emilio said to his good pal. 'Green attracts green. Your girl likes money, Bauhaus. I don't think we'll have any difficulty.'

    She suffered his touch as long as it stayed around her face. Seeing the money made her consider an alternate angle of attack.

    'Inhospitable outside tonight.' Bauhaus' tone was blase and bored now. He was so sure he steered, all the time. 'Too late for the better private clubs. The drive would be inconvenient. Hazardous, even. Please feel free to employ any of my guest rooms; they're all made up.' He jerked his head in the direction of the black, lacquered doorways beyond the kitchen. 'The red bedroom's the nicest in cold weather. Champagne? I'll have Lord Alfred fetch it for you.'

    'P.J.,' said Emilio. 'I like the flowers on the bottle.'

    'Chilled and ready.'

    'You got cameras? I'd like to run some tape.'

    'Every room. In fact, the tripod is in the red bedroom just now. I am delighted to have anticipated your excellent tastes.'

    Bauhaus had smelled Emilio's anus and was making a happy face. Jamaica realized it was critical for Bauhaus to impress this creature. Was Bauhaus afraid of Emilio?

    'You may lead,' Emilio said to Jamaica.

    She clicked on her work face. They had to buy it. Emilio's hard-on for her had put the Cruz mission on hold. Eyes lidded, now sassy and feral, she reached into the Haliburton and peeled away two more century notes, crumpling and tucking them into one of the snap pockets on her bomber jacket.

    She did her strut toward the red room, making them watch. Chari started snoring on the couch, popcorn crumbs in her pubic hair.

    Emilio grinned like a mandrill. Plenty of time to deal with Cruz; all the disadvantages were his. Chicago was a happening place.

    He did not want his reckoning with Cruz to come swiftly. He wanted the payoff to linger, savorably. He had faith in his power over women, and it would be sporting to win Jamaica 's trust, then run her betrayal past Cruz seconds prior to the whistle of the axe. Emilio loved the reactions of patsies and suckers when they tipped. They made the funniest faces. Then he made the faces even funnier, and more garish, with his razor.

    He might slice this bimbo just for laughs. Cut her while he was shooting off into her. That was a pleasure he had not availed himself of for a while. Chiquita had been born to bleed for him, and Cruz had thieved away that joy. Other women had suffered fast because of it.

    Jamaica led but did not take Emilio's hand.

    The choice of rooms in Bauhaus' tacky mini-motel really didn't matter. Jamaica had, at one time or another, fornicated in all of them.

    

    

    I'M A LITTLE STINKER, read the T-shirt worn by the glistening thing pasted to the far corner of Kenilworth 's creaky elevator. The shirt was pink with watery blood and the logo was darkened wetly. Mid-sternum it trailed away to tatters, exposing an undercarriage of dorsal plates and pitted moist tissue like some mad amalgam of snake and slug. Puckered pores secreted mucoid lubricant; dry tracks of it shined silvery on the walls of the car.

    When the doors opened and it saw Cruz standing there it recoiled, its idly twisting tail making wet dishrag noises as it slapped the floor and close walls, leaving stains.

    It had Mario Velasquez's face, sort of.

    The child's eyes had been reproduced too large, as though inspired by a velvet painting in a 'family motel'. The irises were copper, lacking pupils. The mouth was too wide, too big, a downtured lipless slash, an overstated clown-frown spoiled by the crowd of needled fangs ganged within. The slim points meshed crookedly and jutted like thorns in a hedge. An ill fit all around.

    While Cruz stood there, mouth agape and doing nothing, it yawned back, imitating him. The sounds it made were nasal and congested. Cruz thought of a python's jaws, dislocating to swallow prey wider than its head. He thought of the savage meat-gob with steel teeth he'd seen in ALIEN, his favorite party flick back in the real world.

    
No fucking way, dudes.

    As he stood rooted, still doing nothing, the slippery little beast sucked in one more labored wheeze of breath, then looped its segments up the wall of the car and out the open ceiling hatch. Its blunt, olive-colored tail-tip flicked through last.

    Cruz remembered his bumpy elevator ride to the second floor. That's when it fell on top of the ascending car, maybe got hamstrung in the cables; that was why the car had convulsed to an unscheduled halt between floors. Maybe its bottom half had gotten pinched in the gears and tom away. Maybe…

    Yeah, and maybe he wasn't really seeing any of this. He forced himself to move cautiously; go slower. Remember Spider Man and his fate by blowtorch. That guy's clear sensorium had left him with absolutely no doubt he was seeing and feeling dozens of icky spiders crawling all over his spiderless body. What else had he seen before he flinted his flame? What visions accompanied him into the emergency ward, his lung tissue fried golden-black by freebasing? What had he been looking at seven days later, when he died wearing a straitjacket?

    Cruz opened his eyes. No monster prawn in the elevator. The bloodslime trails still gleamed in the car's wan light. A clot of gunk collected on the service hatch dripped free and hit the car's grimy floor like a warm pat of butter.

    Time did its elongation trick. Bustworthy as Hitler, Cruz stood there, thinking with a perspicuity awesome in its precision and focus: It lives in the gap between floors; that's where it hides out, and if I want to stash stuff there, I've got to kill it.

    Still, all those teeth.

    The sun was on the rise. If he looked out a window right now he'd see a filthy bedsheet of sky snugging taut to ruin everyone's morning. His eyes felt red, the lids pinned back. His sinuses were petrified; his joints called in sick. He could feel his neckbones grate when he turned his head. He was aswim in that insomniac anxiety that six lines of really good coke - or ten of bad - could deliver, out-of-tune brass band and all. Did the dope make him nervous? Nahh. The thing that made him nervous had just scuttled into the elevator shaft, a head on a body that had no physical right to exist.

    Simple, then. It flashes mug, you blow it away. The Sig Sauer was loaded with smooth-bore subsonic rounds, flat-nosed motherfuckers that could tear away pounds of meat wherever they hit.

    Instead of a rumble, Cruz could just burn ass out of this dump. No reason he couldn't just split.

    
Hide the kilo. Oh, right.

    His nape hairs rose like fog-stirred reeds and he caught the prickle of eyes monitoring him, as though he was still in range of Bauhaus' security cameras. Any second now a stampede of cops would buzz all over Kenilworth Arms in a pushy search for their stolen brother in blue - the cop whose coat was stiffening in several quarts of blood down in 107. It would be a spectacle… but not one Cruz could afford to hang for, because he had just watched a book vanish into a bloody slit in the wall of Jonathan's apartment, a fissure that had folded petals and erased itself, leaving a scar on the wall. He hadn't believed that, either. And now another monstrous joke had just slid contrary to gravity and hoisted its coils into the darkness of the elevator shaft. These were not hallucinations, not paranoia, pain, nor drugs. He had seen these things.

    Powerful persuaders were held in his hands. He could power up that shaft, blast the Snail Pail Kid to filets and tuck away his dope wherever he goddamn well wanted to stash it! Electricity fired in his extremities, hot, pure, insistent. Two more toots would kick him into high-burn and he could play superhero.

    He dug in with his index finger and did the fun thing, feeling his ears pop as he snorted. Ice-white contrails climbed nimbly, then Stuka-dived to cannonade his brain, one salvo for each hemisphere.

    He lifted the hall table to use as a temporary step-up. The Folger's can with the plastic flowers went rolling, clanging too loud, too long, too much.

    An accusatory face poked out about three doors down. 'Hey, stop making so much noise out there, man!' The face was youngish, brownish, dirty.

    Cruz's lip spasmed. He hauled the Sig Sauer full out, aiming like a killer and bellowing. 'Go fuck yourself, asshole!'

    The door slammed shut with amazing speed and lack of further protest.

    
What hey, this stuff really works!