by AnonYMous
‘It’s been nice doing business with you,’ she said, getting up from her chair. She was not altogether insincere – five hundred bucks was five hundred bucks.
‘Yes, hasn’t it? Thank you, Annabel. I wish you a pleasant stay.’ Powell reached over the desk and shook her hand again, before adding one last question. ‘Did you work out who’s going to win the singing contest yet?’
The psychic grinned. ‘If I was a gambling woman, I’d say it’s someone whose name begins with J.’
Powell and Tommy once more exchanged a glance and then the security man opened the door for Annabel to leave. When she was gone, Powell picked up the receiver of the white telephone on his desk and pressed several buttons. The call was answered within one ring. A woman’s voice spoke.
‘Reception. How may I help you?’
‘Hi, this is Mister Powell. Can you tell me who is staying in room seven-thirteen, please?’
‘Yes, sir. One moment please.’
Tommy walked over and sat down in the chair across the desk from his employer. A second later, the receptionist gave Powell the name he was seeking and he replaced the handset on the phone.
‘So, was the mad old bitch right, or not?’ asked Tommy.
‘Well, I’m told she only ever gets fifty per cent of her predictions right, but that’s not a bad ratio. As long as she’s given us the right room number for this hitman, then I’m happy.’
‘So who is he?’
‘According to reception, his name is Sanchez Garcia. Send some guys up there to find him. And make sure they’re armed. If he really is a hitman he could be very dangerous.’
‘What do you want them to do?’
‘Interrogate him.’
‘And if he is here as an assassin?’
‘Find out who he’s working for and kill them both.’
‘And if he’s not the assassin?’
Powell shrugged. ‘Just kill him.’
Nine
Having finally arrived at the Hotel Pasadena, the Bourbon Kid had made straight for the bar. He had a lot to reflect on. And as a man who didn’t generally like to indulge in reflection, he allowed himself just one day a year to remember the past and dwell on how things might have been if, ten years earlier, Halloween had panned out differently.
He had picked the quietest of the hotel’s bars, a lounge just off the lobby, and was sitting on a stool at one end of the bar, staring into a half-filled glass of bourbon. The barmaid, Valerie, a diminutive young woman with dark hair tied back into a ponytail, had wisely sussed out within a second of laying eyes on him that he wanted no small talk. His body language spoke volumes. He deliberately gave off a hostile vibe (although most days he did that unintentionally anyway). She had poured his drink quickly, and with minimum fuss had set it down in front of him on a coaster on the bartop.
There were no more than twenty people in the bar. As if picking up on his sour mood, none of the other customers had taken a place at the bar. They were all seated at the tables set artfully around the room, engaged in polite, hushed conversations. This was not the usual kind of lowlife hangout the Bourbon Kid was used to. It was a bit too classy and its customers too well-mannered. But in his present mood, that suited him just fine.
He had headed to the Devil’s Graveyard for a number of different reasons. Getting drunk was the first order of business. That way he wouldn’t remember so much. It was ten years to the day since, as a sixteen-year-old, he had killed his mother. On top of that, that same night he had left his teenage sweetheart, Beth, at the local pier with a promise that he would return before the witching hour was up. That had been before he had discovered what was left of his mother. It still regularly gnawed at him that he hadn’t been able to make it back to Beth that night. He’d had more pressing matters to attend to, like finding a home for his distraught younger brother, Casper. Casper had been born with severe learning difficulties, and the news that his mother was dead had sent him into a hysterical fit. To make a bad situation worse, the Kid, who was known as JD back in those days, had also broken Casper’s father’s neck later that night in a fit of temper. The two brothers had been fathered by different men. JD hadn’t liked his own father any more than he liked Casper’s, he just hadn’t got around to killing him yet.
Yet it was Beth who filled his thoughts for most of the time, on the rare occasions when he allowed the past to come back to him. Just on this one day each year he let himself remember her exactly as she had looked when he kissed her for the first time. They had been to a Halloween party together at their high school in Santa Mondega. JD’s mother had made him a scarecrow outfit to wear, and although it wasn’t exactly his kind of thing, he knew she’d gone to great trouble to make it. It had turned out to be an unintentionally brilliant choice because when he arrived at the Halloween disco, he had found Beth there dressed as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Seeing this as a good omen, the two of them had ditched the dance to head to the pier. The road there wasn’t exactly made of yellow brick, but that hadn’t done anything to dampen their mood. Events later in the night had done that.
The Kid stared at his reflection in the glass of bourbon and allowed himself a slight smile. In his mind’s eye, he could still clearly see Beth skipping along the school corridor singing ‘We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz’. He’d cut her off pretty quickly, so that she never made it to the end of the first chorus. Given the chance, he would have loved to go back to that moment and this time let her sing the whole goddam song. Even if she had looked silly. She wasn’t much of a singer, either, as he remembered. Yet it was such simple imperfections that had made the memory of her so precious to him.
The Kid had plans to go back to Santa Mondega one day and find Beth, in the hopes of – what? Of rekindling a relationship that had never got under way? He had stayed away from the place for much of the last ten years in the knowledge that she hadn’t been there either. On that screwed-up Halloween night ten years earlier, Beth had been arrested and charged with murdering her stepmother. The Kid didn’t know the details of the case, but it looked like she’d been framed by a local cop named Archibald Somers. Beth had ended up in jail, sentenced to twenty years for first-degree murder. If she was still the sweet, demure girl he had known back then, there might be a chance she would be released early for good behaviour. Matter of fact, that was something that might be due to happen any day now.
Nothing in the Kid’s life was quite as black and white as it seemed on the surface though. His problem with Beth was that even if she was released, he couldn’t go looking for her, for the same reason he couldn’t go to visit her in jail. He had way too many enemies. If anyone knew he cared about her, she’d be a target for any number of murderous creatures, be they vampires, werewolves or just rotten slimeball humans.
He rolled the whiskey glass in his hands. For a split second he saw reflected in it the grinning face of the vampire that had destroyed his mother. The image made him grip the glass tightly and he quickly relaxed his hold on it to avoid shattering it in his hand.
There was one main reason why the Kid was spending Halloween at the Hotel Pasadena. Truth was, he liked nothing more than a good, old-fashioned, Halloween killing spree. On a trip through Plainview, Texas, a few weeks earlier, he had discovered during an arm-wrestling bout with a guy named Rodeo Rex that the Devil’s Graveyard was rife with the undead. Particularly on Halloween. During the match, Rex had tried to throw the Kid off his stroke by bragging about heading to the Graveyard to do a job on behalf of God, killing off the undead. By then it had looked like the bout might go on for ever because the two of them were so evenly matched. So, although he hated to lose any kind of contest, the Kid had let Rex win. After allowing the giant biker to slam his arm down and claim victory, the Kid had then made a point of squeezing his opponent’s hand crushingly hard and breaking every bone in it, to ensure he wouldn’t be able to keep his appointment in the Devil’s Graveyard. The task of killing the undead would now be all
his own. Having put Rex out of action, he had headed into the Devil’s Graveyard to generate some carnage.
A Sid Vicious impersonator walked past him and out of the bar, towards the vast theatre that took up most of the hotel’s ground floor. The sight of him snapped the Kid out of his black reverie. The Back From the Dead show had brought a whole bunch of interesting faces to the hotel. People pretending to be dead singers were everywhere, and, as the idiot Michael Jackson impersonator had proved beyond all doubt earlier, they were a bunch of freaks. All of them. And all of them had the same simple quirk in common. They felt more comfortable in someone else’s skin.
The Kid had not removed his sunglasses since entering the hotel. His eyes were most likely bloodshot and bleary from the hours on the road, and the drinking and lack of sleep preceding his arrival. The shades also did a good job of keeping strangers away. No one could make eye contact with him, and no one was going to misinterpret the dark lenses as an invitation to make small talk. With his trademark black clothing, the sunglasses were doing a fine job of maintaining his ‘leave-me-the-fuck-alone’ look. It certainly worked on the staff, who stayed well away at the other end of the bar when they weren’t serving anyone near him.
On the bartop, next to his glass of bourbon he had placed an unlit cigarette taken from a recently opened pack, which he had set down next to a small silver tray intended for tips. He knew that the bar staff were praying to God that he didn’t light the cigarette, because that would mean they would have to ask him to put it out. To a casual observer, it may have looked as though he had no intention of lighting the cigarette, or had simply forgotten that it was there. To anyone who knew of his reputation, however, it was clear that it was there to provoke an argument with someone who didn’t like smokers.
After twenty minutes or so of staring at his half-filled glass, he picked it up and downed the contents in one. He slammed it back down on the bar hard enough to catch the attention of Valerie, the barmaid who had served him earlier. She scuttled nervously over to him.
‘Same again, sir?’
He nodded, and she poured him another half glass of Sam Cougar. In return for her pouring the drink without offering any conversation, he tossed a crumpled twenty-dollar bill on to the bar.
‘Keep the change.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
As she was ringing up the sale in the till at the back of the bar, a man’s voice called out from behind the Kid.
‘A bottle of your finest champagne, Valerie,’ it said cheerily. It was deliberately pitched at a level so that everyone in the bar would hear. And, its owner hoped, be impressed.
He was obviously a man the barmaid recognized and loathed, for she turned immediately and forced a fake smile. One that suggested she didn’t like him, but had no choice but to kiss his ass if she wanted to keep her job.
Slightly to his surprise, the Kid recognized the man from news reports. His name was Jonah Clementine, the former chairman of a high-profile international bank, which had recently been liquidated after more than a hundred years of lucrative trading. Thousands of hard-working employees had lost their jobs with little or no severance pay, but Clementine had survived the scandal with his fortune, if not his reputation, enhanced. After years of awarding himself and his fellow senior partners bonuses in excess of twenty million dollars a year, he had then contrived to walk away with a thirty-million-dollar payoff shortly before the bank went publicly, and very messily, bust. He was exactly the sort of customer that the hotel staff would most hate. He would treat them as inferior beings almost beneath his notice, and they would no doubt have to smile and give him preferential treatment. Which appeared to be what Valerie was doing.
Clementine also had a reputation as an international playboy. A blonde model in her early twenties clung to his arm. She had an improbably large pair of (mainly silicone) breasts tucked into a tight white T-shirt, which she pressed tightly against her companion’s upper arm. Her long legs, tanned a perfect golden brown, were on display almost all the way up to her waist, just south of which disappeared into an abbreviated pair of gold hot pants. She was, in short, the perfect foil for Jonah Clementine in his three-thousand-dollar hand-tailored grey Savile Row suit. Since the scandal about his profiteering had broken on virtually every news service, he had obviously had time to employ the services of a personal-fitness trainer. Despite being in his early forties, he had a physique that was no longer that of an office drone. He had a muscular upper body, which, coupled with a sharp orange tan that was surely fake, made him look quite the handsome hunk. He wore a cream silk shirt under his suit jacket, with a red-and-black-checked neckerchief tied loosely around his neck. Unlike the sort of customers the Bourbon Kid was used to sharing bars with, he was clean-shaven and smelled of expensive cologne, while the short, spiky styling of his black hair looked as though it had taken an hour in front of a mirror to perfect.
‘Sir, how many glasses would you like?’ Valerie asked him in response to his request for a bottle of champagne.
‘Just two please, Valerie. Get yourself a drink too, though, won’t you? I’m on a lucky winning streak today.’
‘Aren’t you always?’ the barmaid joked politely as she headed to a fridge at the back of the bar to fetch the champagne.
While she was picking out a bottle of Diamant Bleu (a rich man’s drink if ever there was one), the millionaire was eyeing up the Bourbon Kid. The Kid had picked up his unlit cigarette and slipped it into the corner of his mouth, where it hung idly for a moment before it suddenly lit itself. It was a trick that had impressed many people over the years. It would not impress Jonah Clementine, however. He was the type of guy who was only impressed by things he could control. A flake like the Bourbon Kid was only ever going to get under his skin. And that was exactly what the Kid intended to do.
‘Excuse me, you’re not permitted to smoke at the bar.’ The words were reasonable enough, but were clearly intended as an order.
The Kid ignored him.
‘Hey, you! I’m talking to you.’
The Kid took the cigarette from the corner of his mouth with his left hand and looked over at Jonah Clementine. Then he blew a lungful of smoke in the playboy’s direction.
‘What the fuck’s the matter with you?’ snapped Clementine. ‘There are other people here besides you. Not everyone wants to breathe in your second-hand smoke.’
‘What’s your point?’ A more cautious man than Clementine, one less used to getting his own way, would have noted the gravelly tone to the words. Noted, and maybe reflected on what it might mean. But he blustered on, astonished that anyone should defy him.
‘My point is, put your goddam cigarette out, or I’ll have you thrown out.’
‘Nope.’
Clementine raised both eyebrows. ‘Nope? That’s it? Nope?’
‘Yep.’
‘Okay. You’re giving me no choice. Valerie, call security and have them throw this guy out. Now.’
Standing behind the bar, the girl visibly cringed. On some level she was probably pleased that Clementine had made the call about the guy smoking for her, because she didn’t want the man in the sunglasses to blame her for his imminent removal from the bar. But she still dreaded the unnecessary commotion that was about to descend on the place.
Set out of sight beneath the bar was a security-alarm button, placed there for just such occasions. Valerie leaned down and pressed it, hard. Within forty-five seconds a burly member of the security team arrived through the main entrance to the lounge and made his way to the bar, looking for any visible signs of trouble. His name was Gunther, and at the age of forty he was one of the oldest security men on the hotel staff. Tall and well-built, he had a short, flat-top military haircut, which he had kept as a reminder of his time in the army. He wore smart black chinos and a black T-shirt that showed off a set of well-defined muscles. His face was well worn, suggesting that he had taken his fair share of punches in his time.
‘Whassup, Valerie?’ he asked.
‘I see.’ Gunther turned to the Kid, who was sitting unconcerned on his stool, taking a drag on his smoke. ‘Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to put that cigarette out.’ The words were polite, but there was a steely edge to the security man’s voice.
‘So ask.’
Gunther took a look at Clementine, and nodded. He obviously felt the same way about this flake smoking in the bar.
His tone hardened. ‘Okay, bud. C’mon, let’s take a walk.’
As he spoke, he reached out and grabbed the Kid’s right shoulder. His intention was to pull him, gently but firmly, off the stool in the hopes that he would come easily.
He didn’t.
With his own right hand, the Bourbon Kid reached up, grabbed Gunther’s massive paw and squeezed his fingers together hard, almost crushing them. As he did so, he lifted the security guard’s hand away from his shoulder without moving from his stool.
‘Don’t touch me again.’
He released his grip and the security guard stepped back, wiggling his fingers to ensure they all still worked. Satisfied that his hand wasn’t broken, he took a closer look at the Kid. One long, hard stare later, his face revealed the recognition that he’d gotten off lightly.
‘I know you,’ he said.
‘Good.’
‘Enjoy your cigarette.’
‘I will.’ He took another drag and added, ‘One more thing ’fore you go.’