The First Quarry (Hard Case Crime (Mass Market Paperback))

by Max Allan Collins

  Another thing I remember is the chill I felt, when I realized this guy had researched me. Who was I, for anybody to look into me? But the Broker had it all down, chapter and verse, and now it gets vague in my memory. He didn’t come straight out and ask me if I was interested in killing people for hire, of course not; it was more like, How would you like to make real money at home doing what you did for almost no money overseas?

  Looking back, I was ripe for the Broker. I might have gone in any direction about then. Maybe if that had been Amway at the door, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I’d have gone off into some other form of lunacy. But it was the Broker who caught me at just the right time, thank God.

  And, anyway, Amway or the Witnesses wouldn’t have offered me an advance of fifty thousand dollars. That was attractive to a guy living in two dingy rooms. So was the notion that half a dozen jobs a year would bring in another fifteen thousand or so; and when the fifty K had earned out (I’d be getting only half of each fee till it was), I’d be at thirty a year, minimum. The average yearly income for an honest man was under ten grand.

  I would have a bogus job to pay taxes for, though I wouldn’t have to record my real income, the bulk of which would be in cash. I would be a salesman with a sample case and could even call on clients if need be, to establish a cover. My wares? Lingerie. That made the Broker smile, and I smiled, too, but just to be nice.

  The Broker, you see, was “a sort of an agent,” a middleman in the murder business, insulation between client and killer. I would not know the client’s name, and the client would not know mine.

  That had been two months ago. In the meantime I had bought a house, a little pre-fab A-frame cottage on a small lake in Wisconsin. When summer rolled around, that lake would be nice to swim in, but in the meantime I joined the YMCA at nearby Lake Geneva, and swam every day. It was my only exercise and perhaps my only passion. It relaxed me, and helped me think, when I was so inclined, but didn’t demand it of me, if I wasn’t.

  The A-frame was perfect for my needs. This particular lake was underdeveloped and I had a lot of privacy, though I anticipated the warm months would be anything but private. On the other hand, that Lake Geneva was a vacation area suited me. I liked the idea of having access to good-looking college girls who could come and go. I got a kick out of the Playboy Club, and would dress up a little and get that James Bond vibe on, Bunnies dipping to serve up a drink and a view of the hills of heaven, name entertainers taking the stage, and the food a big step up from what I could rustle up for myself.

  Life at the A-frame was dull and that suited me fine. I had television, although the reception was poor and I would eventually have to put in an antenna half the size of the place, and I liked to read, Harold Robbins and paperback westerns and science fiction, mostly, nothing heavy. I was living a life of leisure and started thinking the Broker was just this crazy asshole who went around spreading demented stories and piles of cash. Like that guy on TV when I was a kid—the Millionaire. Writes you a check and then disappears. Cool.

  But the Broker didn’t disappear. He called and summoned me; I felt like I’d been tapped for jury duty.

  I had a little green Opel GT that had cost me about four grand of that fifty Broker had given me, and I drove it to the Iowa/Illinois Quad Cities, specifically Davenport, where as per instructions I checked into a ten-story hotel called the Concort Inn near the government bridge. The Broker either owned the place or had a piece of the action—at least that was my theory. Because he seemed to feel perfectly comfortable meeting with me openly at the hotel, even housing me there.

  I liked the hotel. The room I’d been provided was spacious, nicely furnished in an anonymous modern way, with a view of the Mississippi River where you could see the other cities across the way. The television reception was outstanding, and the room service wasn’t bad, either. The swimming pool was medium-size and the water was too warm, but nice to have, anyway.

  You might think the Broker would come to my room to confab, but on this occasion, at least, he had me meet him in the lounge downstairs, a Gay ‘90s-theme bar with a modest nightclub-style dance floor and stage. At 3:30 p.m., the place was closed and we had the whole room to ourselves, just us and the gaudy San Francisco whorehouse decor. Broker was already ensconced in a red faux-leather button-tufted booth, his double-knit suit tan, his wide silk tie shades of tan and brown.

  He was organized, the Broker. A pot of coffee for him and a glass of ice with two bottles of Coke waiting at my seat. The bottles were unopened, but of course an opener on a napkin was nearby. On Broker’s side of the table, a pack of Viceroys and a gold Zippo and an ashtray were poised for his use.

  The baritone was warm and mellow: “Accommodations suit you, Quarry?”

  That was the name Broker had started calling me. Whether it was a first name or last never came up— but the Broker was usually polite, so the absence of a “mister” in front of it may have indicated first. I had a feeling it was a sort of code name for the Broker, who did have a cute streak—a single-o, like Liberace or Tarzan or Cher.

  Or Broker.

  “Swell,” I said. “Pretty nice hotel, considering the neighborhood.”

  A seedy warehouse district was nearby.

  The Broker shrugged. “The traffic flow is ideal, and with the bridge right here? People who come to the Cities with business to do at the Arsenal find it most convenient.”

  The Rock Island Arsenal was a major employer in the Quad Cities. I figured I was right—the Broker had a piece of this place, otherwise why the knee-jerk puff job?

  I glanced around at the red brocade wallpaper; you could see people moving out in the kitchen through windows in steel doors. “This is a little public, isn’t it? Not exactly where I expected us to meet.”

  He waved a hand heavy with gold and diamonds in Pope-like benediction. “There’ll be no dark alleys, Quarry. We’re business associates. No need for paranoia, discretion suffices. I have enough clout around here that we can meet in comfort and relative seclusion without having to resort to ridiculously surreptitious measures.”

  “Yeah, that would suck.”

  He was studying me. His smile went up and his white mustache drooped down. A hundred years ago, this was a man who’d have bought and sold slaves. But I wasn’t perfect, either.

  He said, “Judging by your confident demeanor, I would say you’ve had no second thoughts about the direction of our business relationship.”

  “I spent a bunch of the money,” I said. I worked the opener on one of the Cokes and it made a pop. I could say it sounded like a gunshot, for dramatic effect, but it didn’t, really. “So I’m in. There’s a job?”

  “A first job,” he said, and he chuckled, as if he were about to tell his twelve-year-old son about the birds and the bees. “And the first job is of course the most important.”

  “Really? I’d think the final job.”

  His brow furrowed. “And I do wish, right out of the gate like this, that I had something...simple for you. Something straightforward and not at all complex. Although I admit seeing how you handle a challenge will be instructive all around.”

  I frowned. “My understanding was that my role would always be pretty straightforward. And never complex.”

  The Broker reached for the pack of cigarettes and selected one and lighted it up with the golden Zippo. “Life is inherently complex. The human organism itself is complex, with enough moving parts to make the inner workings of a Swiss watch seem about as complicated as a slingshot. And human relationships...my God, they are even more complex than that!”

  “Death isn’t.” I sipped Coke. “It’s just a switch that gets turned off.”

  A white eyebrow lifted in the tan face. “You are correct, Quarry. Unarguably correct. Each death, each killing, is inherently simple, a mere stoppage...but you will not be not dead, Quarry, after you’ve done your fatal work: you must live to kill another day, even though you are caught up in the complexities of the life that you’ve
just taken, complexities that continue on after death—and I speak not of the decay of the flesh, rather the remnants of human relationships.”

  Did I mention he was a pompous motherfucker?

  He was saying, “A switch you turn off, you say, that’s what death is. Fine. Let’s accept that premise. So you turn off a switch on the second floor of a house with which you’re unfamiliar—what do you do? You stumble in the dark. Perhaps you fall down a flight of stairs to your own death.”

  “You’re saying this is not about blundering in, pulling a trigger, and blundering out.”

  “Correct.”

  “Well, I know that.” I shrugged and poured some more Coke. “I learned this particular skill taking part in missions that were well-thought-out.”

  “Really? How is that war going?”

  Well, he had a point.

  He exhaled smoke. Then he sipped coffee. And smiled. How could that fucking smile be so white with all the cigarettes and coffee he sucked down? Too complex for me.

  “Quarry,” he said, damn near purring, “the act itself may indeed be simple—a trigger is pulled, a heart is ripped apart, a skull is shattered and the brain within turned to useless sludge. But what leads up to the act does indeed take care and precision and information. Not unlike a military operation, as you indicated.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  The blue eyes gave me a laser look. “In the future, you will be paired with another member of my little army.”

  I shook my head. “Not what we talked about. I work alone.”

  He turned a hand over. “Actually, this time you will work alone. You may do several jobs alone before I team you with another. That is, in part, a precaution on my part.”

  “I don’t need protecting.”

  “Perhaps not, but I do.” He sipped coffee, then gazed at me coldly. “I am not risking an employee into whom I’ve invested time and money and effort and energy on a...new recruit, shall we say. You will have to prove yourself in the field before I pair you up with a partner, a partner of my choice.”

  I was frowning. None of this had come up in his sales pitch. “Why the hell would I need a partner?”

  His eyebrows lifted in a facial shrug; we might have been discussing a sales campaign for this year’s model whatever-the-fuck. “The way our contracts are carried out is a time-proven technique and a painstaking approach that I am pleased to say has never yet resulted in either an arrest or death for any of my associates.”

  Later I would come to question this assertion, but at that moment, I felt reassured by it, and I stopped fighting the notion of working with somebody else, at least long enough to let him explain himself.

  Which he did: “Each contract initiates a two-pronged effort. First, a man goes in and quietly gathers information, primarily through established surveillance techniques. We will spend as much as a month getting down the pattern of a target, and never less than a week. We are preparing for a surgical strike, and we need to know when the time is right for getting in and getting out without any collateral damage.”

  “That I like,” I admitted. “I don’t want to go around killing innocent people. I’m not some sick fuck.”

  A smile twitched under the mustache, which itself stayed steady. “Good. You seem already to understand the basic tenet of this business, and of your craft— these individuals we target are...well, let me back up: we do not target them. Others target them, and once these individuals have been targeted, they are already dead. They are obituaries waiting to be written. We have nothing to do with their deaths, other than the trivial detail of how those deaths are carried out.”

  “Because these are inevitable deaths,” I said.

  A crisp nod. “Correct. These are terminal cases before we ever get on the scene. You’re a surgeon removing a tumor.”

  “I just won’t have much of a recovery rate.”

  That made him smile a little. “Not true—those whose lives our targets afflicted will be free from their misery. Our clients are the patients in this medical metaphor, not the targets, who would in this case be the tumors.”

  “I get it,” I said. “I did okay in English.”

  Did I mention he was a pretentious windbag?

  “Normally, you would go in for the last few days of surveillance, and be briefed in person and in detail by your partner, who would remain to provide back-up in the event something might go less than smoothly.”

  “By goes less than smoothly, you mean, gets fucked up.”

  “Yes. But as I say, we have a flawless record.”

  I sipped Coke. Studied him. “Only on this job, this first job, I go in alone?”

  He nodded. “We’ve had a man on the scene for over a month—he’ll have left by the time you get there. You don’t have any plans for Christmas, do you?”

  “Just singing carols at orphanages and old folks homes, why?”

  As if I hadn’t been kidding, he said, “But you’ll be free on the day after?”

  “Yeah. I should have all my good works polished off by then.”

  His eyes seemed sleepy suddenly, half-lidded, though his tone was crisp, the mellow baritone taking on an edge: “You’ll go in on the twenty-sixth. Don’t drive your own vehicle. Never drive your own vehicle, always rent. You’ll fly out of Chicago.”

  I was pouring myself more Coca-Cola. “You said this was complex. What’s complex about it?”

  A jaw muscle twitched. “You have to do more than just eliminate the target.”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “Normally. But in this instance, the target has made a real nuisance of himself. You’ll need to find some documents.”

  “And deliver them to you?”

  “No, destroy them. You can burn them in the fireplace of the cottage where your target lives.”

  “Good thing it’s the day after Christmas, then.”

  “Oh?”

  I grinned at him. “Would hate to singe Santa.”

  He just looked at me. Then he smiled, big, taking the mustache along for the ride this time. “Very droll, Quarry,” he said. “Very droll.”

  “That’s what it said in my high school yearbook, Broker—Most Likely to Be Droll. Now, who do I have to kill?”

  THREE

  That first night camped out in the split-level turned into morning—three in the morning, actually—before I decided that my non-Mouseketeer Annette would be spending the night in the cobblestone cottage with her favorite professor, tuckered out after her oral exams.

  I admit that I had considered several scenarios designed to bring this assignment to its desired conclusion and right away. None of these, however, suited the Broker’s mandate of care and caution, and mostly included me going over there and somehow dealing non-violently (or anyway non-fatally) with the brunette, and then snuffing the prof, finding the manuscript pages Broker wanted destroyed, destroying them, and heading back to the lake and my A-frame to wait for money and praise to arrive from the Broker.

  Some of these scenarios were pretty fanciful, involving chloroforming the girl (where would I get that stuff, exactly—a heist at the University hospital?) or knocking her out gently, like they do on TV, only in real-life that kind of blow kills you half the time. Pretty much all of these idiot plans had me shooting the prof multiple times, watching him shake, rattle and roll in Wild Bunch slow motion while I grinned maniacally. Somehow this didn’t seem in line with the Broker’s low-key wishes.

  What was my problem, anyway?

  What was the philandering Byron to me? Why did I care how many coeds blew and/or boffed him? I was generally in favor of girls blowing and boffing guys, although old farts like the prof (fucker was pushing forty) getting blown and boffed by young girls made me a little queasy, admittedly. I mean, there are limits.

  So part of why I threw in the towel at three a.m. on my first stakeout was a sense that I needed rest and refreshment of my faculties, and anyway I did not want to fall asleep in this cold house where my pants c
ould catch fire being too close to the space heater while the rest of me froze its nuts off.

  By three-thirty I was in my Holiday Inn Room all snuggled up in my wee little bed. I didn’t need a lot of sleep and woke up around eight-thirty a.m. The window view told me that snow had fallen during my slumber and the world was a winter wonderland out there, thick fluffy stuff and evergreen trees plump with white, but the plows had been out, so you could go and enjoy Jack Frost’s handiwork without winding up dead in a ditch.

  I showered, threw on a sweater and jeans and went down for breakfast. The motel was pretty dead—this was the Sunday after Christmas and the usual businessman clientele were not on the road and the other guests seemed to be made up of family members who were overflow from the homes of relatives who’d run out of spare rooms.

  That meant that later, around ten, when I went down for a swim, I had to share the chlorine-scented echo chamber with squealing, splashing kids, whose shrill glee would have sent a guy with a hangover looking for a drill press to squash his head in. But I didn’t have a hangover, or a drill press for that matter, and anyway didn’t hate children any more than the next guy, so I settled into the whirlpool bath and let the hot, churning water soothe me.

  A woman who presumably was the mother of at least one or two of the eight or nine turning the swimming pool room into a combination day care center and horror show padded over in a bright orange one-piece swimsuit. She’d put on a little weight having kiddies, but there was no doubt why somebody had wanted to have kiddies with her in the first place—she was a redhead with an Afro-ish tower of permed but tousled hair and a roundish pleasant face and displayed the kind of curvy frame that makes you really lenient about cellulite.

  She settled in across from me. In ten years, she wouldn’t rate a second look. But right now the way her full breasts hit the top of the water and the crinkles around her dark blue eyes as she smiled at the pleasure the water jet at her back was giving her was giving me a hard on. The hard on was safely beneath the water, not causing anybody any trouble, not even me, but I wondered what the hell was wrong with my ass. A woman almost ten years older than me, tending her kiddies at a pool, had my dick throbbing.