Seven Ways to Kill a Cat Read Free

him to say something, give me a good reason to smash his face. But he’s a crafty fucker, he knows me too well. He’s got what he wanted. So he just gives a soft laugh and says nothing. I clench my fists and walk out, my heart hammering in my temples.

CODE VIOLATION
    IN THE SPLIT second between Fat Farías putting the key in the lock and turning it, and the crowbar hitting the back of his head, which slams against the metal door and pushes it open, a thousand different thoughts burn through my brain. I’m off my face on coke. Chueco’s fifty-peso bill might have been dud, but it was real enough to get us three grams of
merca
, and we’ve already snorted the lot.
    I think: what’ll happen if Farías recognises us? Chueco says we’ll be fine, but with him you never know. Not that I’d give a shit if we killed the fat bastard, but then I think about Yanina, Farías’s daughter. Supposedly she’s out dancing down at the local
cumbia
club like every Thursday – that’s why the job has to be tonight – but what if she’s inside watching TV? And even if she’s not, what if this shit goes bad? Farías might be a son of a bitch but he treats that kid like a princess. Yani’s mother died a couple of years ago and I don’t fancy leaving the kid an orphan. I say ‘kid’, but these days Yanina’s got one hell of a body on her. Far as I know, she hasn’t got any other relatives. If anything goes wrong and she’s left to look after the bar on her own, she’ll be eaten alive.
    I think: what if someone sees us? I jerk my head round, check no one’s watching before I whack Farías. Chueco’s never had a moral code. Now I don’t either. But in the barrio, there is a code everyone lives by: you don’t shit on your own doorstep. Any shit that goes down in the barrio is generally the work of some dumb fuck who accidentally wandered onto our turf. The code in the barrio makes sense. Least you know when you send your kid down the bakery, your neighbour’s not going to mug him, because if he does he won’t live long enough to brag about it. And it means you’re not going to jump that girl walking down an alley at night because you don’t want someone else fucking your wife or your sister or your daughter.
    I can’t see anyone, but you never know. In the darkness, there are thousands of restless eyes. All it takes is one person looking this way and we’re fucked. Well and truly fucked. Because we’d be better off getting beat down by the Feds than having the people round here remind us of the code.
    As Farías’s head slams into the metal door, time starts up again. And I stop thinking.
    ‘Come on, come on, move it …’ Chueco hisses, trying to push Farías’s body inside. When I whacked him, he keeled over in the doorway. I step over the body, grab his shoulders and haul him inside. Chueco closes the door. A dog is barking somewhere and I can barely hear Fat Farías’s hoarse moan. He’s half conscious. Chueco wraps his head in a burlap bag he got from fuck knows where. He always comes prepared. He takes off his belt and lashes Farías’s hands behind his back.
    I tiptoe down the corridor. The place is dark, deserted. I come to some sort of living room. The glow from the street lights streams through the half-closed venetian blinds. I turn a light on. A table, three chairs, a television balanced on a plastic beer crate, and everywhere you look, there’s rubbish.
    Chueco comes in and starts poking around. There’s nowhere much in here to hide any cash. After couple of minutes, we move on to the kitchen. The place is filthy: dirty dishes, cockroaches, burnt saucepans. There are no doors on the cupboards or the cabinets under the counter. We don’t need to touch them to see what’s inside – just as well since I’m figuring they haven’t been cleaned since Yani’s mother died. And probably not for a couple of years before that. The fridge is empty, maybe broken. Chueco checks it out, then starts opening