The first quarry q-7

by Max Allan Collins

  He leaned in with his yellow grin. “But that’s a good thing, Jack. See, we can serve both our masters and still make some real money.”

  “How?”

  He shrugged elaborately. “Your boss wants to confirm that the prof is banging his daughter. You’ve pretty much accomplished that by now, so I figure before long? You, or one or more of the Chicago bent-nose boys, will come lean on the prof and teach him, for a change.”

  “You mean kill him?”

  “No! No, I don’t think so.” He laughed heartily, genuinely amused. “I’m not supposed to think you’re a hit man, Jack! Please. Nice clean-cut kid like you-you really fit in around here, which is great. I could use somebody like you, your age, able to blend with these hippie shits.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Naw, the girl’s father will put the fear of God into that horny bastard, and the prof will stay away from daddy’s little girl in future, out of fear of something worse happening.”

  I shifted in the booth. “Okay. Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say you’ve figured this out perfectly. Where do our interests converge, Charlie? Where’s money to be made for you and me?”

  The grin widened and the Nixon jowls turned into chipmunk cheeks. “If I give my pictures of daddy’s little girl going down on the Prof to my client…Mrs. Prof? Of sweet Annette riding Byron’s pecker like a rodeo queen? Then those photos could find their way into divorce court, and lots of embarrassment, the tabloid variety, could ensue.”

  “Okay. I can see that.”

  With the hand not holding the gun, Charlie held up a finger, as if he’d just had a brilliant idea, though he’d obviously been working on this a while. “ But — I also have pictures of the prof with the little blonde, every bit as damning. These I could give to my client. Then I will sell the pictures of Annette and the prof, and the negatives, no tricks, none whatsoever, to her father. We don’t need the Annette shots to make the divorce case. Your client is happy. My client is happy. We are happy. What do you say, Jack?”

  “It makes sense. You have a figure in mind?”

  His eyebrows lifted. “What do you think the market will bear? I mean, this is not the kind of person you want to piss off, the girl’s father.”

  I lifted my eyebrows. “No he isn’t.” I leaned forward conspiratorially. “Could you live with ten grand?”

  He thought about that, then demonstrated his math skills out loud: “Half of ten, five for me, five for you?”

  I shook my head. “No-I think ten apiece is possible. Without seeming too greedy and getting our asses in a sling.”

  The tiny eyes glittered. “Cool! We have a deal then?”

  I grinned at him. “We have a deal.”

  Again I held my hand out for him to shake. This time he put the. 38 on the table and extended his hand and I picked the gun up and shot him between the eyes, right above that disgusting nose.

  After the sharp crack of the gunshot, I said, “Goodbye, Charlie…or as the French say, adieu.”

  Knowing how much he appreciated my sense of humor.

  But he didn’t hear me, too busy flopping onto the tabletop, his forehead making a dull thump as he left on the wall behind him a nice splash of color in this drab kitchen.

  FIVE

  I had things to do, and Charlie wasn’t going anywhere, slumped as he was at the breakfast nook tabletop, like a school kid napping at his desk. In his right trench-coat pocket I removed not only my nine millimeter but his car keys and also, on a separate little ring, three keys-each had tiny strips of masking tape with black-marker lettering that identified one as FRONT, another as BASEMENT and the other, which was somewhat smaller, as PATIO.

  His gun I dropped into my right-hand corduroy jacket pocket, and I slipped out the back way into the cold, my feet crunching on snow that had turned crispy with ice. My nine millimeter was back in my waistband and I figured anything that came up, Charlie’s. 38 would do nicely, a gun after all traceable to him. I went into the garage not to get my car, but to remove a flashlight from my glove compartment; the flash I dropped in my other coat pocket, and then I returned to the great out of doors.

  Perhaps I was overcautious, but I moved along the back yards of the half dozen split-levels on my side of the unlived-on lane. No street lamps were up yet on the nameless street but that full moon illuminated the landscape, so I felt I should take a roundabout route to the split-level opposite mine, where Charlie said he’d been camped out. He had not mentioned working with anyone (other than me, had I gone along with him), but I saw no reason to trust a sleazy little character who would sell out, or anyway compromise, his own client. A round-the-clock surveillance, if that’s what Charlie had been up to, might mean a second PI in that other split-level.

  Of course, they might be trading shifts, with Charlie alone with his partner due to show up any time- assuming I wasn’t just imagining this partner. At any rate, a look inside that house might tell me if Charlie had or had not been working alone.

  So I went all the way down to the end of the lane and beyond into a wooded area, through which I cut just a little ways to come up through the back yards of the other half dozen split-levels. The snow was crunchy back here, too, but I moved very slowly and carefully; on the other hand, if the interior of Charlie’s split-level had that same plastic on the floor, I might wind up fucked.

  The back yard of the corner split-level, the doppel-ganger of mine, rose up at the left to a patio area and dropped at the right to accommodate a driveway and allow entry to the basement and garage. One of these keys apparently opened the glass doors onto the patio. These would open onto a family room, where plastic on the floor would almost certainly await.

  The basement door seemed my best option. Much as I didn’t relish entering into darkness and then going up the stairs and opening a door onto God knew what (or I should say God knew who), going in the patio way and snap-crackle-popping across a covered floor held even less appeal.

  Of course when I said I’d be coming up from the basement into God knows what, that was an exaggeration, even an inaccuracy, because I knew darn well the kitchen-the only room in my split-level where the floor hadn’t been covered with protective plastic-would be waiting. Of course, so could Charlie’s partner, should he happen to exist.

  So I used the basement key and went on into darkness and, remembering the layout across the street, made my way fairly easily to the stairs. I slipped out of my boots and went up in my stocking feet. At the top I turned the knob as slowly as I could, creating only the faintest click, and pushed the door open onto a darkened kitchen.

  My night vision was good. Nobody was in the kitchen, unless you counted me. No lights seemed to be on in the house, which had been the case across the street, as well. But as I moved cautiously toward the expansive living room beyond the kitchen, I heard a soft, faint voice and froze.

  Despite the low volume, the voice was sonorous, commanding and familiar.

  It should be: it belonged to Ben Cartwright, or that is, Lorne Greene. The “Bonanza” TV theme kicked in as a television, in the living room, went to commercial-a little portable on the floor over by the window that faced Country Vista, with a view on a certain cobblestone cottage. The lighthouse beam of the tiny television illuminated the living room somewhat, creating light and shadow, and told me there were indeed some differences between my quarters and the late Charlie’s.

  First of all, no plastic covered the carpeted floor. Second, and most surprising, the place was furnished; no one was living here yet, no one was living in any of these split-levels except me (and the late Charlie), and yet new furniture smell joined the paint and plaster and antiseptic odors, the blocky shapes of undistinguished contemporary furnishings, right out of a Sears catalog, revealed by the TV’s cathode rays.

  The furnishing was fairly sparse, however, and I had little trouble maneuvering. No sign of Charlie’s partner, who was starting to feel nonexistent to me. Near that floor-positioned TV, where Ben and Little Joe an
d Hoss were currently having an intense if barely audible conversation on horseback, Charlie had a fucking La-Z-Boy pulled over to where in my parallel world I’d been leaning against a sleeping bag. An open package of Ruffles Potato Chips was propped against the chair, and Budweiser cans were littered on the floor. The new house smells were tainted by cigarette smoke and an ashtray with eight or ten butts was on an end table he’d pulled around on the right side of the recliner.

  Room by room, level by level, I searched the house. I entered doorways low, 38 in my right hand, flash in my left, sweeping the rooms with frantic slashes of light, like Zorro making one Z after another, and revealing nothing except a fully, blandly furnished house that showed no signs of humans living here.

  No humans, that is, except Charlie, who had actually been sleeping on the premises. The master bedroom had a queen-size with quilt and blankets and sheets, and Charlie had tucked himself in for the nights he’d been here, really making himself at home.

  And yet nobody lived here, that was for sure. No family pictures, no clothing in closets, none of the signs of life except for Charlie’s food in the refrigerator, which ran to beer and cold sandwiches. A house in this price range wouldn’t be sold furnished, would it?

  Then it came to me: Charlie, the lucky stiff, had selected the development’s model home! This struck me as foolish and even dangerous, since people might eventually come around. But maybe Charlie had known that the model home wouldn’t be open for inspection for a time, making his squatting feasible. The Broker had known that I could safely camp out across the way, hadn’t he? And obviously Charlie had his own reliable intel.

  I spent quite a while in that house, maybe an hour. I found Charlie’s camera, a high-end Nikon with a tele-photo zoom attachment, and half a dozen rolls of undeveloped film, which was a nice catch. No other weapons presented themselves, not even a box of shells. I looked for a notebook and didn’t find one. That was a disappointment.

  I thought about wiping the house down of Charlie’s fingerprints, but I couldn’t convince myself it was necessary. What would the owners of the model home find? Signs that some asshole had moved in for a few days. I did take a few things with me, the kind of things an ambitious homeless guy taking advantage of an empty house wouldn’t leave behind: Charlie’s personal items, toiletries, changes of clothes, and skin mags, all stuffed in a little duffel bag, and that portable TV, which I thought might be nice to have.

  You could access the garage through the basement, which I did (after I got my boots back on), and I put Charlie’s duffel bag in his car’s trunk, where I had a nice piece of luck: I found a fresh roll of electrical tape among some tools of the road. I dropped this in the same pocket as my flashlight. The little TV I rested on the rider’s side seat. On an otherwise empty workbench, I found a garage door opener that made my life easier and soon I’d moved Charlie’s car-a light-green Chevelle-over into the driveway of the split-level (right behind mine) whose garage was where I parked the rental Ford while on stakeout.

  Back in my own digs again, I got out of my corduroy coat because I was working up a sweat, despite the cold, and tossed it onto my side of the breakfast nook. The splash of gore on the wall behind where Charlie slumped needed cleaning up, but I’d have to stop and buy paper towels and spray bottles and so on, and that just wasn’t a priority. Right now I wasn’t even sure I’d be in this house again, once I’d left to dispose of Charlie. That would be up to the Broker.

  I did have a pocket knife on me, and that allowed me to cut just the right size sheet of plastic from the floor to roll Charlie up in. Some blood and stuff got on the kitchen linoleum, but if I did come back, that would spruce up easy enough. Charlie was awkward and heavy and he smelled bad-and I don’t just mean the cigarette smoke on him and his clothes, that would have been a relief compared to the stink of shit from the bastard evacuating himself when he died. Shouldn’t be critical-he couldn’t help it.

  He made a nice fat plastic cocoon when I was done, and I used the entire spool of electrical tape to make it happen. The fucker was literal dead weight, though, and back in my cord jacket again, I had to drag him out of there like a dog pulling a sled. The plastic mummy slid over the top of the frozen snow, and the slope down to the driveway next door was steep enough that Charlie almost got away from me. That might sound funny to you, me chasing a corpse across a bunch of snowy yards in the moonlight, but the idea of it sure didn’t make me smile.

  I managed to maintain control over my plastic-wrapped charge, and before long I was down in that driveway, popping the trunk and hauling him up and in. It took some doing, but rigor hadn’t set in yet and Charlie was pretty pliable.

  The interior of the Chevelle needed fumigation, but that was a luxury I couldn’t afford; but let me tell you, chain-smoker Charlie was lucky he hadn’t died of cancer. Plus, he was a slob-the front and back seat floors littered with crushed sacks and drink cups from McDonald’s and Dairy Queen, with the back seat a kind of reading room, and not the Christian Science Monitor variety, either: boxing magazines, the National Enquirer and the Globe, men’s magazines like Stag and Male, with guys fighting wild animals on some covers and sexy female Gestapo agents torturing bare-chested he-men on others. Also a few more skin books, notably Dapper and Follies, where the cover models looked like the mothers of your high school pals only in pasties and not aprons.

  My karma had caught up with me-I’d killed the fucker, and now was condemned to drive his car. I backed out, drove the fraction of a block to the stop sign at Country Vista and turned left, going past the cobblestone cottage, whose resident seemed suddenly very low on my “to do” list, and made my way to the nearest pay phone, which was at a Standard Station on Dubuque Street.

  I called the emergency number and, to his credit, the Broker himself answered it, on the second ring.

  “We have a problem,” I said.

  “Oh dear.”

  “We need to meet.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “Right now?”

  “Right now.”

  “That would be most inconvenient.”

  “I’m already driving a car that has something inconvenient in its trunk.”

  “Well, good heavens.”

  “Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.”

  “Do I need to bring someone with me?”

  “Let’s put it this way-I’ll be driving a car that I’ll have to leave behind. And I’ll need a ride somewhere.”

  “Somewhere?”

  “Where that somewhere is will be up to you.”

  “Oh. So this is a serious wrinkle.”

  “It’s fucking pruney.”

  “All right. Understood. I have someone who can help us.”

  “Peachy.”

  “Where shall we meet?”

  “Pick an all-night truckstop on the Interstate, why don’t you? Between where I am and where you are.”

  “Fine. Drive east, toward the Quad Cities. Exit at Moscow. Look for the dinosaur.”

  “Moscow? Dinosaur?”

  “It’s one of those Sinclair gas station dinosaurs-at the Moscow, Iowa, exit.”

  “If you say so.”

  “When will you be leaving?”

  “Now.”

  “All right-go ahead. I can organize my end quickly and you have just a little farther to go.”

  “I’ll say.”

  I hung up.

  When I started out, it was close to eleven. Interstate 80 was mostly big fucking trucks and me. I rolled along at seventy and might have found the ivory-cast winter landscape, with its gentle rolling terrain, serenely soothing if the tobacco smell in the car, which cracking the window didn’t seem to help, wasn’t damn near choking me. Charlie would have his revenge…

  And then one of those big fucking trucks I mentioned would come along and, ten four good buddy, about blow my ass off the highway. Christ, I was almost glad to see first one and then another pulled over by the cops, or as glad as a guy with a pla
stic-wrapped stiff in his trunk can be to see the cops.

  Charlie had some eight-tracks but it was all shit- country and western-and his radio seemed intent on pulling in Holy Roller preachers (“This is Garner Ted Armstrong, saying…”), additional hillbilly music (“Hello, Darlin’ ”), and really wretched rock stations (if “ABC” by the Jackson Five and “I Think I Love You” by the Partridge Family could be considered rock). Somewhere Charlie was laughing his ass off at me, although not in the trunk-he was nice and quiet back there.

  Right alongside the Interstate, the green dinosaur loomed from in front of a Sinclair station truckstop, and I now knew the Broker’s instructions hadn’t been a hallucination on either of our parts. I took the Moscow exit and pulled in to a graveled parking lot filled with bigger, modern day dinosaurs, the semi variety; truckers not taking a nap in their rigs were inside having coffee and cholesterol. The Chevelle I left in a front space in front of God and everybody, and strolled into a brightly lit, wholesome-looking restaurant with a long counter.

  I found a window booth, from which I ordered an iced tea, cheeseburger and fries. My waitress was a thousand years old, but was efficient for her age, and I enjoyed my meal while I waited for the Broker to show.

  When he came in about fifteen minutes later, he didn’t look any more out of place than Rex Harrison at a 4-H meeting. His tan camel’s hair topcoat probably cost as much as every trucker at the counter’s red-and-plaid jacket put together, and his long face with the angular cheekbones and soft blue eyes and stark white hair wouldn’t be any more memorable than Martians landing, should the cops ever come around asking.

  With him was a guy in a denim jacket and blue jeans, hands in the pockets of the jacket, which wasn’t near warm enough for winter. He was a fairly small specimen, maybe five six and of average build, but his burr haircut and dead dark eyes in a chiseled, weathered face said he was ex-military.

  That didn’t surprise me. I figured most of Broker’s recruits came from the ranks of Uncle Sam’s cast-offs. His business worked best with outsiders, trained killers who were not mob-affiliated or otherwise burdened with criminal records and backgrounds. Clean-cut all-American mercenaries.