Absolute Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  He’d love to know that Dobbins had landed on her ass. Still not reason enough to postpone a good suicide, he told himself and went about the attempt anew.

  Excerpt from Shot of Tequila by J.A. Konrath

  CHICAGO

  1993

  -1-

  Winter meant death in Chicago.

  Death to the homeless, turned away from overcrowded shelters and forced to stuff their ragged clothes with day-old newspaper.

  Death to the motorists, skidding on filthy, snow-covered highways into the paths of trucks and guard rails and head-crunching support posts.

  Death to the elderly, slipping on sidewalks and shattering brittle bones, and to the poor, unable to pay both the food bill and the gas bill.

  Death to Billy Chico.

  Chico was a small-time hustler and big-time loser who liked to bet the ponies and hit women. He was more successful at the latter. On his more reflective days—and there weren’t many—Chico figured he’d lost more than eighty thousand dollars in the ten or so years he’d been placing bets. He would have lost even more if the puta he married hadn’t sent the Man after him for child support. Chico knew the kid wasn’t really his. That child was bug-eyed, bare-assed ugly, and couldn’t have had any of Chico’s genes in his roly-poly body. Chico often compared himself to the ponies he loved to throw money after; sleek and muscled and hung, with a mane of gorgeous black and eyes that could stare through you, sister. A thoroughbred if there ever was.

  Unfortunately, the thoroughbred just caught a bad tip, and couldn’t cover the bet he’d made with his very connected bookie. Two thousand bucks worth of bad tip, baby, five weeks of factory wages. A debt he couldn’t pay, especially since he had to fork out cash for rent, the bills, and child support for that skank and her ugly brat.

  Chico, in a word, was powerfucked. And getting more PFed by the minute, because his marker was due and Marty the Maniac had definitely alerted his goons to begin collection proceedings.

  Collection proceedings didn’t involve friendly chit-chat over coffee. They involved hurt. Lots of hurt. And Chico was far too fine to have anything broken, scarred, burned, or severed.

  So Billy Chico took his last sixty bucks, bought a piece from a runner with gang ties, and went out to rob Teddy’s Liquors on 23 and Cal.

  It was cold, cold enough to freeze the juice that your brain floats in. Chico wore his trademark black leather jacket with the fringes hanging from the sleeves and he looked fly, even though it kept him warm for shit. The liquor store he picked was three blocks from his apartment; one with late-night hours and a constant flow of business. Not a corner store that just sold beer by the bottle, but a classy joint that had all that expensive wine and gift packs and overpriced whiskey in ceramic jugs shaped like Corvettes. Fancy shit like that. Chico figured on one of the busiest liquor days of the year—Super Bowl Sunday—the place would have at least two k in green. He might even come out a couple bucks ahead on the deal.

  Billy Chico stopped at the front door, his skinny ass cheeks knocking together like two frozen oranges, an icy hand wrapped around the butt of the .32 in his jacket pocket. He hesitated. Having grown up on the streets, fear was something common to Chico, so fear wasn’t what gave him pause. But staring at his reflection in the heavy glass door made him realize he’d forgotten to bring something to cover his face. The asshole in the store could identify him. Murder never occurred to Chico, because that was for psychos. He was too good-looking to do hard time. Prison scared him, almost more than that crazy bookie did.

  Almost.

  He considered turning back when he remembered the mesh hair net covering his wavy mane. With a nervous giggle he stretched it down over his face, staring out through fishnet.

  In and out. Should be quick. He took a deep breath of cold city air and pushed the door open, rushing in with his weapon pointed.

  “Gimme all the money! Now!”

  The proprietor was an old white dude, skinny and small with tiny little Santa Claus glasses. He held up his hands and looked appropriately terrified.

  “Move your ass, old man!”

  Chico thrust the revolver into the prune’s face, letting him see death through the half-inch hole in the barrel.

  The old man stood stock-still, not moving an inch.

  “What the hell is your problem, Grandpa? You deaf? I said get the goddamn money pronto or I’ll shoot off your head!”

  The old man remained where he was.

  Chico stole a nervous glance at the door to see if any customers were coming in, then got closer to the old man, cocking his gun to show he wasn’t playing around.

  “I can’t open the safe,” the old man said.

  “What?”

  The old man pointed to the large sign sticking to the counter. Chico backed away and read the oversized words silently, even though his lips moved.

  THE SAFE HAS A TIME LOCK AND CANNOT BE OPENED.

  “What the fuck is a time lock?”

  “Magnetic lock. Can only be opened in the morning at eight a.m.” The old man swallowed. “You’re welcome to wait around, if you want.”

  “Then gimme the cash register money!”

  He pointed to another sign.

  THE CASH REGISTER CONTAINS LESS THAN $50.

  The .32 in Chico’s hand felt heavy and foreign. His heart was beating in his throat. Even if he took the fifty, the gun cost him sixty, so he came out behind in the deal. What the hell should he do now? Leave and rob someone else? Or beat this old bastard senseless to see if he was lying?

  The answer came to him in the shape of a champagne bottle. All Chico had to do was conk him on the head a few times with a magnum of Totts, then we’d see what was up with this time lock bullshit. Chico used his free hand to grab the handy bottle neck, holding the champagne like a club.

  “You want to play rough, old man? I’ll give you a punt-shaped head!”

  A sound; the electronic bell attached to the front door, beeping when a customer left or came in. Billy Chico and the old man looked to see a short guy in a Blackhawks jacket enter.

  “Get on the floor, corto!”

  The short man gave Chico an even stare and stopped where he stood.

  “On the goddamn floor or I’ll blow your little head off!”

  The man remained standing where he was. Weren’t people afraid of guns anymore?

  “Marty sent me to collect your debt, Billy,” The short man had the low, steady voice of a talk radio jock.

  “What the hell you think I’m trying to do here?” The sweat on Chico’s body was a living thing, running over him in itchy waves.

  The short man stood calmly, hands in his pockets.

  “I’ll wait. But you’d better hurry. You’ve been in here for a minute and forty-three seconds, and the owner there tripped his silent alarm right after you pulled your gun.”

  Chico began to shake like a withdrawing junkie.

  “Give me the damn money, old man!”

  “I can’t. It’s a time lock.”

  Chico threw the champagne at the old man, but it was lefty and he threw like a girl. The old man caught the bottle.

  The short guy turned his ear to the front door, keeping both eyes on Chico. “Sirens coming this way.”

  “Shut up!”

  Chico unconsciously pushed the hairnet up off his face and rubbed his forehead to think. No thoughts came, other than maybe gambling wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

  “Better move your ass, Billy.”

  “I said shut up!”

  The short man waited.

  The old man behind the counter stared, probably memorizing Billy Chico’s face.

  Then Billy Chico made the biggest mistake of many big mistakes throughout his miserable little life. He began to swing his gun from the shop owner over to the short guy.

  “Billy… don’t.”

  Billy Chico hesitated. It was obvious he was leaving here empty handed. But he definitely wasn’t going to leave with some broken finger
s, or a busted arm or leg. He continued to bring the gun around, ready to shoot his way out of here if he had to.

  “Drop it, Billy!”

  The tone was so sudden, so commanding, that Billy Chico had to react. His brain offered three instantaneous choices: Drop the gun, wet his pants, or fire. Billy’s finger began to pull the trigger.

  He never got a chance to. In a blur the short guy whipped out two semi-automatic .45s from the pockets of his Starter jacket and fired sixteen shots into Billy Chico. His left hand put a controlled burst of eight into Billy’s chest, and his right hand punched eight more into Billy’s head and neck.

  Billy Chico ended instantly. His heart never had a chance to stop beating, because it was carved out of his chest. His brain never had a chance to realize he was dead, because it got scrambled the same instant his heart was chewed away.

  Chico’s body jerked in electrical spasms and tangled itself in a cardboard display featuring several bikini-clad women holding beers. His body landed an instant before his gun clattered to the floor where he’d been previously standing.

  The shop owner, who’d seen a few things in his day, wasn’t sure whether to cheer or scream. The skinny man with the gun was scary, but it was a familiar kind of scary. In the almost three decades he’d been in business, he’d been robbed forty-six times, half of those within the last seven years as the neighborhood continued to decline. Junkies, gang members, ex-cons, and all shades of desperate men had walked into Teddy’s Liquors looking to make a quick buck. The skinny guy wasn’t an exception. He was part of a trend.

  But this short guy with the two guns, this was something different. Something even scarier. When he killed the skinny man, his face had no expression. It didn’t even look like he blinked. How can you shoot someone a dozen times and not even blink?

  The old man forced a smile—something damn near impossible with his peripheral vision clogged red with spilled blood—and managed to sputter out, “Thanks, buddy.”

  The short man shook his head.

  “I still have to collect his debt.”

  “But the safe is on a—”

  The short guy placed the hot barrel of the .45 in front of his lips like a giant finger and said, “Shhh.”

  He pocketed the guns, and in three steps leapt the counter without touching it, jumping much higher than the old man thought possible. Within seconds he located the safe, in a cabinet under the cash register.

  The sirens grew louder. The short guy stared at the safe for a long second.

  “This isn’t a time lock safe. This thing is older than I am.”

  The old man was too afraid to shrug, but he managed to sputter, “New safe costs a few thousand dollars. Sign was only $10.99.”

  “How about you give me the combination?”

  The old man tried to swallow but he was all out of spit.

  “The owner hasn’t told it to me.”

  “Then how about give me your wallet?”

  “My wallet?”

  “Does that have a time lock too?”

  The old man dug his wallet out with trembling hands and offered it up. The short guy avoided the money inside, instead removing the Driver’s License.

  “This is Teddy’s Liquors, right?”

  The old man nodded.

  “Your name is Theodore. Is it worth having your fingers broken, Teddy, for a few thousand dollars that are insured anyway?”

  The old man shook his head, knelt down, and opened the safe. He held up a money tray, head bowed, like an offering to the gods.

  The sirens were much closer, screaming up the street.

  The short guy quickly and efficiently counted two thousand dollars; the amount of Chico’s debt. It went into his Starter jacket. The rest of the money from the tray went into an empty Jim Beam box that was lying behind the counter. He put another box inside the box with the money, so it looked like two stacked empty boxes.

  “Hide this in back and then claim it all on your insurance. Busy night like tonight, they’ll owe you at least five or six grand. Just don’t let the police find it.”

  The old man nodded, getting it. He went from being terrified to strangely elated. The insurance company—those premium-hiking bloodsuckers—always demanded receipts and double-checked inventory to make sure his claims weren’t inflated. This would be the very first time he was robbed and actually came out ahead of the game.

  “Thanks,” the old man said, realizing as soon as he did how strange it was.

  “Remember to describe me correctly to the police. A very tall black man in a green jacket. I’d hate to have to come back here and find out you got my description wrong. Got it?”

  The old man stared into the blue eyes of the short white guy. His stare wandered down to the man’s hand, the back of which was covered with an extremely ornate tattoo of a Monarch butterfly, so realistic it appeared ready to take flight.

  “No tattoos, either.”

  “Got it,” the old man croaked.

  “Take care, Teddy,” the short guy said, and he slipped out the door into the night.

  -2-

  The man named Tequila drove aimlessly through the city streets, car windows cranked down so the biting Chicago wind slapped at him on both sides. It tingled his scalp through his crew cut, and numbed his cheeks and ears. Tequila liked the very cold. He also liked the very hot, the heavy rain, and the few times a year when fog crept in from Lake Michigan and took over the shoreline.

  Tequila wasn’t into weather as much as he was into extremes.

  Though his expression rarely ever changed from the blank, bored look he constantly wore, at the moment Tequila was pleased. He had gotten Marty’s money, the weather was mean, and the remainder of the evening was open to him. Not even the Maniac, who sometimes endowed Tequila with supernatural abilities, would expect a collection this fast. Tequila could do what he wanted with the night, remaining on Marty’s extremely anal time clock without anyone the wiser.

  He pulled the white Chevy Caprice onto Lake Shore Drive, pushing the car up into the nineties as he buzzed southbound. The car looked like, and was constantly mistaken for, an unmarked Chicago police car, from the hand spotlight next to the side mirror down to the three antennae on the roof, all of them cosmetic. Tequila hadn’t gotten a moving violation since buying the car three years ago.

  The wind surged through the windows in freezing shrieks, drowning out the sound of the engine and the cars around him. He looked to his left and caught sight of the dead, frozen lake. He watched the light tower blink, halfway to Michigan, and wondered if the lake had frozen that far. He used to stare at that same lighthouse in his youth. Stare for hours, alone on an ugly stretch of shore far from the sunbathers and young lovers and joggers.

  At 53rd Street he went over a short bump in the road that constituted a small bridge, and his chassis took air for the briefest of seconds and then bounced back to earth on reinforced shocks. Tequila got that tiny tingle in his stomach and groin and welcomed the sensation. He wondered if skydiving felt like that, multiplied a thousand fold. He’d try it someday, he decided. He’d made that decision dozens of times, driving over that bridge. On a whim a few months back, he’d even bought a parachute at an Army surplus store. He had no idea if it was operational or not, but the idea of owning one appealed to Tequila. It made someday a little closer.

  At 57th he turned off LSD and passed the sprawling Museum of Science and Industry, which he visited once a week with Sally. She never seemed to tire of the coal exhibit, an informative ride in the museum that shuttled patrons through a fake mine on fake mining cars and showed examples of mining techniques that were probably thirty years out of date.

  Tequila glanced at the digital clock on his dashboard and noted that Sally would be asleep by now. Her schedule was so regimented that she actually had preset times in the day to go to the bathroom. Tequila had once taken her to a movie on a weeknight, and she’d messed her pants during the flick because she’d missed her bathroom time. He’d s
ince learned to heed her schedule.

  From 57th he hung a left onto Michigan Avenue. The cold had driven everyone off the street. Usually there were dozens of bored black kids hanging out in front of the shops, drinking malt liquor from brown paper bags, waiting for something to happen. Something usually did, in the form of a shooting or an arrest or a fight. Nothing at all was happening with a wind chill of twenty below. The city, like the lake, was frozen.

  Tequila found a parking space under a streetlight and set the car alarm on his keychain. He walked across the beaten asphalt toward the only sound on the block that competed with the howling wind.

  When he opened the door the sound got louder. It came from a grizzled, ancient black man, singing an old blues song and accompanying himself on an even older piano. Tequila found a seat at the half empty bar and the fat black woman behind it set a rocks glass in front of him and filled it with three fingers of Applejack without being asked.

  Tequila lifted the brandy and closed his eyes, letting his senses report. The air was cigarette smoky and stale, cut by the sharp scent of alcohol and apples under his nose. The room was hot, and the skin on his head and hands tingled as warm blood pumped into the cold flesh. The piano man, a kindly fossil named Bones, plunked away at an instrument missing at least five keys. It made his songs disjointed, and strangely, poignant.

  Tequila put the Applejack to his lips and snarled. At the height of his snarl he emptied the contents down his throat. It burned from the tip of his tongue down to his ass, and he drew air in through his mouth to accentuate the tart aftertaste.

  Bones ended his song short and went into Dead Shrimp Blues, a tune he always played when he noticed Tequila had come in. Tequila didn’t particularly like the song, but years ago, the first time he came into the Blues Note, he tipped Bones a hundred dollar bill while Bones was playing this tune. It wasn’t Tequila’s appreciation of the music so much as his sharing the windfall from a multi-thousand dollar job. Though Tequila hadn’t given him a cent since, Bones continued to play Dead Shrimp Blues whenever Tequila made an entrance.