by AnonYMous
‘Right. Thanks.’ This was Jensen’s cue, an olive branch of sorts offered to him. He was already feeling pretty spare, like he was cluttering up the crime scene. Not wanting to be in the way, he decided to check on what Scraggs was up to in the bathroom.
‘Hey, Lieutenant, you found anything in here?’ he asked, poking his head around the bathroom door. Scraggs was actually checking out his reflection in the mirror above the sink. He seemed slightly startled and a little embarrassed to be caught posing by Jensen.
‘Nothing, sir. Do you have a theory on this yet?’
‘I’ve got nothing at the moment,’ Jensen conceded. ‘But it’s kinda early days. Have you ever seen anything like this before?’
Scraggs seemed to have recovered from his initial awkwardness at being caught looking at himself, and turned back to the mirror to run his hands through his thick dark hair and adjust his thin blue tie.
‘I’ve seen plenty of bodies like this before, and I’ll tell you this for nothing, Detective: this ain’t the work of the Bourbon Kid. Your partner Somers will tell you it is, but he’d pin the death of JFK on the Kid if he could.’
‘How can you be so sure this wasn’t the Kid?’
‘Because it’s never the fuckin’ Kid,’ snarled Scraggs, turning to face Jensen. ‘The Kid is history. Came to town one week, killed a shitload of people, and disappeared. Somers lost just about everyone he cared about that week, all killed by the Bourbon Kid. He tries to pin everything on the Kid ’cos he thinks it will help to catch him, but all it does is make the legend of the Kid grow so that he’s like some kind of modern day John Wesley Hardin.’
Scraggs picked up a pair of surgical gloves that had been put down by the side of the basin. He put them on and marched past Jensen and back into the bedroom, where he came unnervingly close to treading on the mortal remains of the Weasel. Jensen hurried out after him.
‘Is that what everyone thinks?’ he called out to the Lieutenant.
Scraggs stopped, but this time didn’t turn back to face him. ‘No, it’s not what everyone thinks. It’s what everyone knows.’
Scraggs stepped around a few chunks of flesh on the carpet and walked out of the room via the hole that had once been a doorway. As he went through it he blanked Detective Archibald Somers who passed him on the way in, carrying two cardboard cups of coffee. Somers stopped dead in his tracks once he was inside the room. ‘What have you got up here then, partner?’ he asked Jensen.
The younger detective watched as Somers took a look around the room. His eyes soon stopped on the dead mess on the carpet that was Marcus the Weasel.
‘Well, not much,’ Jensen replied. ‘Eyes haven’t been gouged out on this one, and the tongue has been sliced but not ripped out.’
‘Nice,’ said Somers, sniffing at the lid of one of the drinks. ‘Here,’ he said, holding out one of the warm cardboard cups to Jensen, ‘I brought you a coffee.’
‘No thanks. I don’t drink the stuff.’
‘Suit yourself.’
Somers looked around for somewhere to put the spare cup. There wasn’t actually anywhere in the entire room suitable for having a container of steaming hot coffee placed on it. The forensic guys certainly wouldn’t appreciate him putting it down somewhere where they were about to dust for prints or DNA, so he leaned back out of the door for a sight of Scraggs heading for the stairs.
‘HEY, SCRAGGS,’ he called out. ‘CATCH!’
All Jensen saw was Somers throwing the container down the hall in the direction that Lieutenant Scraggs had taken. There followed a scream, suggesting that the lid had come off the cardboard cup, causing the contents to scald some vulnerable part of the unfortunate Lieutenant. There followed some sort of cursing from Scraggs, no doubt at Somers, but the forensics officer didn’t reappear to vent his fury face to face with the grumpy veteran detective.
‘Did you find anything out from the guy on the desk?’ Jensen asked.
Somers stepped back inside the room and took a sip of his coffee.
‘Shit, that’s hot,’ he said, licking his lips, which he had obviously scalded a little. ‘Oh yeah, the porter says that his buddy on the nightshift saw Elvis come up here.’
‘Elvis?’
‘Yeah. Y’know, Elvis, the King of Rock ’n’ Roll.’
‘Whoa! Hang on there a minute,’ said Jensen, recalling an earlier conversation he’d had. ‘One of the ambulancemen back at the farmhouse this morning mentioned Elvis.’
‘That so? What did he say?’
‘He said that Sanchez the bartender would hire Elvis to kill whoever it was that murdered his brother and his wife.’
‘What? Shit. Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ Somers turned angrily, as though looking for something to kick out at in his frustration. Since the only object in range was Marcus’s body, he thought better of it.
‘Well, I guess I thought he was being sarcastic.’
‘Oh Christ, no! Jensen, you should have told me this. Elvis is local muscle for hire. Real mean bastard he is, too, and this looks like his handiwork.’
‘Really? You don’t think the Bourbon Kid did this, then?’ Jensen was surprised. The other cops he’d met said Somers pinned everything on the Kid.
‘No. Elvis did this all right. Whether we can actually find any hard evidence or not is another matter. He’s a pro. He let the porter see him, because he wants to be identified as the killer so he can pick up his bounty, but he won’t have left a single trace of DNA here for the forensics team. We’ll get nothing here. What we need to know is, why the hell has he gone to town on this poor sonofabitch? Marcus the Weasel could never have killed Thomas and Audrey Garcia, no matter what that lamebrain bartender Sanchez might think. He’s – he was – a thief, not a killer. Elvis got the wrong man here if he was doing this for Sanchez.’
Jensen was annoyed and disappointed with himself for not having mentioned the Elvis business to Somers before. Maybe the life of this Marcus the Weasel guy could have been saved if he’d said something. Lesson learned: in Santa Mondega, if someone tells you something that sounds a touch crazy, it’s probably a good bet that it’s true.
‘So where will we find this Elvis guy?’ he asked.
‘Well, if he’s still looking for the person who killed Sanchez’s brother, he’ll turn up in the morgue pretty soon. Elvis is a mean sonofabitch, I mean really mean, but if he tracks down the Bourbon Kid he’s gonna find he’s bitten off more than he can chew.’
Eighteen
This wasn’t something that happened very often, and it wasn’t something that Sanchez liked. At the best of times the arrival of El Santino in the bar was bad news, and with all else that had been going on in town at the moment, there was a fairly high chance he’d be in a seriously evil mood.
‘Sanchez,’ he said, nodding in greeting. ‘How’s business?’
‘Good, thanks. You?’
El Santino didn’t really give a damn about how business was with Sanchez, and the bartender was smart enough to know that. On the face of things Sanchez was happy that El Santino didn’t seem to be going to kill him.
The gangster was a giant of a man. Really big, really imposing and, unfortunately, a real mean sonofabitch. He was wearing black boots, black leather trousers with silver buttons spaced at intervals down the sides, and a silver-coloured silk shirt. Over the top of this he wore a heavy, wide-lapelled black leather coat that reached almost to his knees.
Anyone who hadn’t met El Santino before would have known he was the most feared man in town the second they laid eyes on him, even if they’d never heard of him. His distinctive, shoulder-length dark wavy hair was tucked away behind his ears and held in tight under a black cowboy hat. His face was a mesh of stubble and scars overshadowed by a thick set of dark eyebrows that almost merged at the bridge of his nose into a monobrow. Standing behind him by the entrance to the bar were his two bodyguards, Carlito and Miguel. They looked so like El Santino, and were dressed so similarly, that they might have been h
is younger brothers. The only significant difference was that they wore black shirts instead of silver, and neither was quite as tall as his boss.
The history behind El Santino’s local dominance went back many years. To some he was an urban legend along the lines of Keyser Soze. For years he had been a fairly prominent businessman dealing in prostitution, with Carlito and Miguel as pimps reporting directly to him. One day his most highly prized hooker, a stunning Scottish girl known as Maggie May, was poached by a rival gang headed up by the notorious and greatly feared Vincent brothers, Sean and Dermot. They were a pair of hard-drinking paddies from Ireland. Not that anyone would ever have referred to them as ‘paddies’, for they were inclined to be a mite touchy about anything to do with the Ould Country.
Maggie had been El Santino’s favourite hooker, and the only one of his girls he would even so much as touch himself, so it was a deadly insult when she left him for the Vincents. His vengeance was drawn out and distinctly unmerciful. The Irish brothers were jumped while out drinking in the Nightjar. Four of the drinking buddies who were with them at the time were beheaded by Carlito and Miguel who, if the rumours were to be believed, carried katanas – samurai swords – that night. The same fate befell Maggie May, in punishment for her stinging betrayal. Truth to tell, it was probably something of a relief to her, for El Santino had left her to the mercies of Carlito and Miguel for some hours.
Sean and Dermot Vincent were not so lucky, however. It was said that they were kept as prisoners in the dungeons beneath El Santino’s castle on the edge of town. On a nightly basis they were handed round as sex toys to the deviants and lowlifes whom the gangster entertained on a regular basis.
With the Irish brothers out of the way, the giant Mexican pimp became the undisputed Mr Big, the most ruthless and feared gangster in Santa Mondega. Every time Sanchez laid eyes on him an image of the Vincent brothers being raped and tortured would immediately occupy his mind. It was doing so now.
‘So, Sanchez, you seen anythin’ you wanna tell me about?’ El Santino asked in a voice that you wouldn’t want to put a face to. The silence in the bar that followed his question could have been cut with a blunt knife.
‘Well now, I seen that guy Jefe in here a coupla times.’ Sanchez reached under the bar and picked up a cloth and a beer glass. On edge and needing to do something to keep his hands busy, he began to wipe round the rim of the glass. El Santino was intimidating, and he made Sanchez very conscious of his hands.
‘Yeah? Did Jefe say anythin’ to you?’ El Santino asked.
‘No, but I heard him say he was lookin’ for you.’
‘Did he, now?’
‘Leastways, I think that’s what he said,’ Sanchez added, concentrating on his glass cleaning.
‘Sure you do.’
‘Can I pour you a drink … on the house?’
‘Sure. Whisky. A triple. And one each for Carlito and Miguel.’
‘Comin’ right up.’
Sanchez was careful to find the best whisky he had and poured out three glasses of it for his new clients. He could see that his hands were shaking and did his best to pour the drinks quickly for fear of it being noticed. The measures were as equal as he could get them in the circumstances and when he had finished pouring them he placed the three glasses on the bar next to a glass of whisky he had been drinking himself.
‘Salud y dinero, guys,’ he babbled, forcing a wary smile. El Santino fixed him with a hard stare.
‘Sanchez,’ he said.
‘Yeah?’
‘Shaddup!’
‘Sure. Sorry.’
The big man made no attempt to touch his drink, and his bodyguards didn’t even bother to approach the bar.
‘So, Sanchez, did Jefe have anything for me? Huh?’
‘Yeah, he had something for you.’
Sanchez knew better than to tell even half a lie to El Santino. The man was renowned for sniffing out untruths, and was apt to be not very forgiving of anyone who tried to deceive him.
‘So why hasn’t he brought it to me yet?’ the big man asked, once again looking Sanchez squarely in the eye. ‘What’s he doin’ with it?’
It was no use, Sanchez thought. He was going to have to tell him the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and with no help from God either.
‘He had it stolen from him by a man named Marcus. But I’m helping him to get it back.’
‘You’re helping him?’
‘Yeah. I know someone who specializes in finding stuff that’s been stolen. A guy with contacts.’
Just for a second the look in his eye suggested that El Santino thought Sanchez might know more about the theft of the stone than he was telling.
‘I see. An’ how much is Jefe paying you to find the stolen goods?’ he asked.
‘Twenty thousand.’
El Santino allowed himself a very brief and very false smile.
‘Tell you what, Sanchez. You find my merchandise before Jefe does, I’ll give you fifty thousand to bring it straight to me. We go back a long way, you an’ me, and I trust you.’
‘Sure thing, El Santino. Whatever you say.’
‘Good,’ said the giant gangster, finally picking up his glass of whisky. ‘You know why I trust you, don’t you, Sanchez?’
The bartender could feel himself breaking into a sweat. He hated being asked awkward questions by El Santino, and in this case, as always, he waited as long as possible before answering, in the hope that the other would answer his question himself. Which he duly did.
‘I trust you, ’cos you’re not stupid enough to double-cross me. You know me well enough not to. And that’s the only thing I actually like about you.’ He paused, then added, ‘You know where to find me.’
He downed the triple shot of whisky, slammed the glass back on the bar and walked out of the Tapioca the way he had come in, flanked by Carlito and Miguel, who had not even touched their drinks. Sanchez picked up their glasses and poured the contents back into the whisky bottle. His knees were trembling as well as his hands, and he thanked whatever passed for a god in Santa Mondega that Jefe had left the bar with Jessica just twenty minutes earlier.
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.
Nineteen
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.