The first quarry q-7

by Max Allan Collins

  She reached for her check but I touched her hand.

  “Let me get it,” I said. “You’re a cheap enough date.”

  With a laugh, she said, “Thanks,” and slid out of the booth.

  “See you, Jack. You’re easy to talk to.”

  “You are, too.”

  Then she was gone.

  The iced tea had run through me, so I went back to the men’s room, thinking that since I knew Annette would not be returning to the professor’s until she was summoned, I could wait till tomorrow before my next step. After Dorrie Byron left the prof’s pad to take her meeting with me, and pick up those photos, I wouldn’t show up, being busy back at the cobblestone cottage, killing her straying husband and destroying his manuscript.

  Because my theory now was that this wasn’t about the manuscript Annette had carried out of the prof’s at all. No. The prof was writing his own in-depth book about Lou Girardelli, and Annette was just one phase of his research. He was encouraging her, building her up, to get more out of her, and not just blowjobs. I was convinced the prof had a book in progress that Annette knew nothing about.

  And that was the manuscript I’d been sent to destroy.

  I paid the check and was coming around the building when I spotted those two black guys again, the supercool dudes in the threads and pimp hats. They were at the rear of what I assumed was their car, a Cadillac Fleetwood Eldorado like the Broker’s, except bright red with white sidewalls, and they were stuffing something into the trunk.

  Annette Girard.

  EIGHT

  The good news was the girl wasn’t dead. The bad news was everything else.

  Well, maybe some more good news at that: they hadn’t seen me. Coming around the side of the restaurant like I had, I’d been able to slip behind some snowy bushes, and plaster myself against the stucco wall and peek around.

  The two black guys, whose presence at Sambo’s seemed ever less comical, were in their dark leather coats and had just completed dropping Annette into the trunk like a big golf bag that took both their best efforts. Since the girl probably weighed 130 pounds, those efforts had been expended in part by subduing her, though not knocking her out or chloroforming her (even these guys didn’t know where to get chloroform), just slapping some duct tape over her mouth, a slash of it covering much of her lower face, her eyes wide and wild above, and very much conscious. Her wrists were also duct-taped and so were her ankles. She wasn’t struggling now, fairly paralyzed with fear, I’d say.

  Then the one in the red hat, who was a little bigger than his partner, held up a palm toward the one in the green hat, who gave him, I shit you not, a high five. The slap rang in the chill night like a gunshot, and they both chuckled, the bigger one’s voice higher, the slightly smaller one having more of a low growly laugh.

  They seemed pretty proud of overcoming a coed in a Sambo’s parking lot. Some fucking people.

  I watched like an Indian behind a tree, scouting a cowboy campfire, as the red Fleetwood roared to life, the red-hat kidnapper behind the wheel (apparently color-coordinating). The driver made more noise revving up his engine than I would have, had I just thrown a live girl in my trunk (or a dead one for that matter), but no one noticed except me. Then they backed out of their space and drove out of the lot, turning left toward the Coralville strip.

  I knew where they were heading, or was at least pretty sure, and by “knew” I mean what city, which since the city was Chicago maybe was a little vague at that.

  Anyway, I got into the Maverick and went after them. I was fond of Annette, but that wasn’t why I took what I guess you’d call pursuit. Even on my first job, I knew this was not standard operating procedure; but I had inadvertently learned that her father was our client, and this was after all our client’s daughter being driven away to face a variety of possibilities, the most benign of which wasn’t very benign.

  I’d been told by the late Des Moines PI Charles Koenig that Chicago mobster Lou Girardelli was in the middle of a drug turf war with black gangsters. You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes or even Charles Koenig to figure out these two black thugs had been sent to kidnap the mob boss’s daughter for fun and profit. Might be a straight ransom kidnapping, might be a trade-off for turf rights (you get the girl, we get the South Side), might be they wanted to fuck her, torture her, fuck her again, kill her slow, maybe fuck her one more time, and dump her on daddy’s porch. That last one wasn’t the benign possibility, by the way.

  Two blocks down and a few more over were the east and west ramps onto Interstate 80. The Caddy would almost undoubtedly take the I-80 E ramp, and head toward Illinois and sweet home Chicago. I hadn’t thought much farther ahead than that, except for the possible futures for Annette outlined above, and had nothing specific in mind.

  I did know that if that pair of soul brothers made it to Chicago with Annette, I would not be able to lend the girl a hand. I needed them to interrupt their trip with a stop. It was a good four hours and change to Chicago, and considering they’d just been in a Sambo’s, both guys would need to piss and/or shit, sooner or later. Probably sooner.

  I was nervous. I don’t apologize for that. I’d been through rough stuff in the jungle, but a kind of adrenaline high plus the camaraderie of your fellow soldiers got you into it and then through it, and sniper duty was a whole other deal, more a Zen kind of state where nerves didn’t come into play, not if you wanted to survive.

  I liked surviving. It was about all I valued. I’d seen plenty of evidence supporting the notion that life and death were meaningless, and God was either nonexistent or uninterested, but what was wrong with breathing? Didn’t a decent meal and getting laid and watching something funny or exciting on television or reading a good western and did I mention getting laid, didn’t that all beat nothingness inside a box six feet under all to shit? So I tend to come down strong on the survival side.

  And these two guys were big. They were also black, and fuck you, I’m no racist, I fought alongside black guys and I bet you didn’t; so you go up against a couple of streetwise soldiers for the Black Mafia, taller than you, fifty pounds each on you, probably packing all kinds of shiny steel. Either one of those guys could fuck me up in a fair fight, and together they could throw me down and kick me till a busted rib punctured something and I drowned in my own goddamn blood.

  So, hell yes, I was nervous.

  But not scared, really. My nine millimeter was on the seat next to me, the radio tuned to an FM station where the Beaker Street program was going, DJ Clyde Clifford doing zonked-out intros to album cuts against electronic space music right out of Forbidden Planet, and while I hadn’t done weed since Nam, Clyde and his offbeat music choices chilled me out nicely, though “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida” (coming up on the drum solo) probably meant we again had a disc jockey who needed a bathroom break.

  The landscape was an ivory-washed blue once more, the snow frozen in odd clumps and clusters on the terraced earth along I-80, the temperature having gone up and down today, thawing, freezing, thawing, freezing, making modern art out of precipitation. The trucks were blowing past me again, and the traffic in general was heavier. This didn’t bother me, and even encouraged me, because it meant I could stay several car lengths away from the Fleetwood and not be spotted. An interstate in general was proving a great place to tail somebody; so what if you and somebody else were going in the same direction?

  Several exits for gas and restaurants slipped by, including the green dinosaur and the Cove. We drove such a distance that even “Vida” ended, and the Vanilla Fudge doing “Season of the Witch” took over, filled with screams and whimpering, and though normally I dug that cut, I ditched Clyde for an easy listening station. Frank, Dino and Sammy were more like it, anyway. I was doing a job for Frank’s pal, Lou, right? Even if Lou didn’t know it.

  As Frank sang “My Kind of Town,” we blew past the Quad Cities where the Broker and his Concort Hotel were. Then, with Bobby Darin doing “Once in a Lifetime,” just west of the M
ississippi River and north of Walcott, Iowa, they pulled off at a dinky oasis economically called the I-80 Truck Stop-two diesel pumps, four gas pumps, a small white enamel gas station attached to a slightly bigger restaurant.

  Shit.

  I’d been hoping for one of the state-run rest stops. With a little luck, at one of those-which were just toilets and vending machines-I might have what I needed to deal with Annette’s captors, which was no audience.

  I pulled off anyway. Were they going to eat again? Wasn’t that Sambo’s feast enough for them? Maybe they worked up an appetite overpowering a twenty-two year-old college girl.

  The Fleetwood pulled into one of the slots along the row of restaurant windows. If these guys had a brain between them, they would take the nearest window onto that stall. I stopped at the gas pumps, cut the engine, got out and instructed the kid to fill me up with regular, which was pushing forty cents a gallon, highway fucking robbery. Then I went into the gas station portion of the interconnected buildings. They sold some trucker gear, and I bought a rabbit-lined brown nylon zipper jacket.

  I’d left my corduroy jacket in the car. While I had no reason to think those two had noticed me at Sambo’s, I also had no reason not to. The gas station had all kinds of toiletries, so I was able to buy a tube of Brylcreem and a comb. I went into the Truckers Only restroom, which had showers and an array of sinks, at one of which I dumped water into my hands and dumped it on my head. Then I used the Brylcreem, and a little dab didn’t do me, no, I squeezed that shit out of the tube and combed my hair into a style that must have been at least as effective a birth control method as the Pill.

  After paying for the gas, and getting an odd look from the young attendant, since I seemed to be a different customer now, I drove the Maverick over into another of the stalls. I was still flying by the seat of my pants, and when I got out and then walked past the parked red Fleetwood, knowing that the girl was in that trunk, I wondered if I could somehow get her out of there and toss her in the Maverick and just book it the hell away.

  Problem was, her black escorts were seated at the window adjacent, as I’d figured they would (apparently they did have at least one brain between them). What was I supposed to do, shoot the lock off the trunk? I’d never tried that, and I doubt you have. I would have probably killed the girl and then those assholes would have come tumbling out the restaurant and jumped my ass, if they didn’t just fire through the window at me.

  Or I could shoot out the window of the Fleetwood, reach in and open the car and hope this vehicle had a trunk release button; that should be standard on a Caddy, right? But where? Under the dash, or in the glove compartment, and oh by the way, those black bastards have killed me by now.

  So I did what any other hero hoping to rescue a fair maiden would do: I went in and had a piece of coconut cream pie. I could use the sugar rush. The waitress was young and cute but not at all interested in a guy with greasy kid’s stuff on his hair. I ate my pie and drank my iced tea and did my best to listen to the two black guys in the booth right behind me.

  Green hat: “Man, why not have some fun? Enos is gonna kill her ass, ain’t he?”

  Red hat: “He might. He might not. Do you sit at the table with Enos and the others, planning shit? No. Do I? No fuckin’ way. We muscle. We goddamn good at it, but we muscle.”

  “We could go someplace with her. Some motel or some shit. We tell her we let her go, she’s nice to us. We can fuck her one at a time or each take a hole.”

  They were whispering, by the way. But I was right behind them, and even if I’m filling in a word here or there, trust me-I’m giving you more than the gist.

  Red Hat: “You think she go for that?”

  Green Hat: “Why not? These white girls, these college girl cunts, they sluts, they whores. And they curious about whether black men is all hung like fuckin’ horses, which I am and if you ain’t, that’s your problem.”

  The previous had been mixed with laughter and was clearly kidding, but the guy in the red hat said, “Fuck you and the horse cock you rode in on.”

  “Aw, come on, don’t be a dick. You think she won’t bargain?”

  “Then what?”

  “Then what, we tape her up again and take her to the boss.”

  “And she tells the boss his boys diddled her up and down? How’s Enos gonna like that shit? What if Enos wants to trade the little twat? He might want her not fucked up and shit.”

  “Well…I just sayin’.”

  “You say too much, Leon.”

  “Kiss my ass, Charlie.”

  Not another Charlie!

  They didn’t talk much after that. They had big platters of chicken and fries show up soon after. Yes, they ate chicken-fucking sue me. They ate chicken like all the white truckers around them were eating chicken. Jesus.

  And speaking of truckers, the I-80 restaurant was packed. The I-80 Truck Stop was popular and the possibility of me getting these two alone was somewhere between slim and none.

  So I finished my coconut cream pie and iced tea, and paid the check, and went back to my Maverick and started it up and sat waiting. Within minutes, Leon in his green hat and Charlie in his red hat returned to the Eldorado. Charlie again drove; maybe it was his wheels.

  I let them leave the lot and take their ramp before I picked up the chase, if you can call it that. I was praying that that chicken, which everybody in the truck stop was gobbling down like junkies jamming heroin, was as greasy as it had looked and smelled going by on waitress trays. That might mean a bathroom break would come our way, and with just a little luck, that would also mean a state-run rest stop, not a restaurant or gas station.

  Since I hadn’t seen either of them go off to the can, that meant those guys had the Sambo’s breakfast in their guts mingling with that greasy chicken, and if that combination didn’t explode into flying shit sooner or later, I didn’t know my chemistry.

  And less than forty-five minutes later, the Eldorado pulled into a little rest stop right off the Interstate.

  So did I.

  The brick building was small, a glorified shed. Through its smoky glass front doors glowed vending machines. A car and two open spaces were between the Eldorado and where I sat in the Maverick. I watched the now hatless Leon rush in, holding his belly. Casually I got out of the Ford and walked into the little rest stop building. I had been able to glimpse a disgusted Charlie sitting at the wheel of the parked Eldorado, beating the heel of his hand against the steering wheel, possibly in tune to something on his radio. The engine was going.

  Inside, the vending machines and a bulletin board that was mostly a big map of Illinois were in between the doors marked MEN at left and WOMEN at right. Next to the WOMEN’S door, just past the bulletin board, was another door that said PRIVATE.

  I tried that door; it was locked. Over in one corner was an abandoned mop and pail, and a yellow plastic sign, an inverted V that said, CLOSED FOR CLEANING. This sign was up against the

  brick wall at my far right, just shoved there when a lazy employee took off work. This theory was validated by a notice on the bulletin board above the map: NO ATTENDANT IN ATTENDANCE 10 PM-6 AM.

  That seemed awkward to me: “ATTENDANT”/“ATTENDANCE.” Maybe I was hanging around the Writers’ Workshop too much. Anyway, it was nice news, knowing I didn’t have to deal with some poor janitor.

  A guy came out of the MEN’S, a pasty-faced middle-aged character in a rumpled blue suit and no tie, probably a salesman. I had my hand on the restroom door, half-open, taking my time going in, watching the blue suit go out and cross to that other car parked between mine and the Eldorado.

  Good.

  I went in.

  Man, it smelled like shit in there. Okay, that’s no surprise, but the chicken clearly wasn’t sitting well with Leon, who was in one of two stalls making a lot of noise, some of it from his mouth. I waited for him. Pee-yew, I thought.

  I took a position at the electric hand drier, which I turned on, initiating its electronic w
heeze, just as he finally flushed. My back was to him, so he couldn’t see I was wearing black Isotoner gloves and that the nine millimeter was in my right hand. I was hoping he had some sense of hygiene, because this would be easier if he did.

  And, bless him, Leon went to a sink and began to wash up. “Man!” he said, and smiled over at me, flashing two gold teeth under the thickness of mustache. “I ain’t gettin’ any younger.”

  I turned and showed him the nine millimeter and said, “You might not be, at that.”

  He frowned; I’ve never seen more wrinkles in a face that young. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.

  “Are you shitting me, white boy?”

  “No. You’ve done enough shitting for both of us. This is a straight robbery. Behave yourself and we’ll be fine.”

  “You got your fuckin’ nerve — ”

  I was in the corner between the sinks and the drier, good positioning in case Charlie got impatient or curious or something and came in looking for Leon.

  “Very slowly,” I said, “take off that coat. I can see there’s something heavy in the right pocket, and since it’s probably a gun, I’d encourage you to go nowhere near it.”

  “Fuck you!”

  But he did it. He unbuttoned the jacket and folded it in half and laid it carefully across the sink, not wanting it to go onto the bathroom floor. Couldn’t blame him.

  “Now carefully empty your pockets onto that jacket.”

  He did. He had various stuff, including a fat diamond money clip, but what attracted my attention was the straight razor.

  “Okay. Now get into that stall. Make it the one you used.”

  That was the closer of the two.

  I didn’t have to ask him to put his hands up. As my gun and I moved forward, he backed up toward the stall, and edged in, his eyes moving fast. He was thinking. He was planning.

  “You wait five minutes,” I said, “before you come out. I’m going to leave you your watch. You exit any sooner, and you’re a dead man.”