The first quarry q-7
Page 15
“Yeah. Kind of turns your stomach.”
The wild eyebrows climbed high, even above the goggle glasses. “Problem is, Jack, my generation, we had it tough. We survived the Depression. We survived World War Two, you know?”
What I knew was, Girardelli had gotten rich in the Depression off bootleg booze and brothels, and spent the war stateside and out of uniform, getting richer, selling black-market meat and tires and counterfeit ration stamps.
“Yeah,” I said. “Moral decline. It’s a pisser.”
He nodded vigorously. “Well, our problem was, we spoiled our kids. Wanted to give them what we couldn’t have, wanted them not to have to live through any of the tough times we suffered through.”
I was drinking Coke. Somehow I managed not to do a spit take.
Girardelli was saying, “So I don’t blame Annette. She can’t help it that, when she was little, I spoiled her little ass. I gave her everything a father could, and more.”
That was for sure.
“Anyway, she’s a wonderful girl, and very talented, really gifted, you should see the poetry she wrote in finishing school.” He shook his head and let out a weight-of-the-world sigh. “But she’s of her times, it’s these times, she’s one of these kids, wild and free and rejecting the old values, rejecting her own father, sometimes.”
“Kids today.”
He leaned forward. His sandpapery voice got a little rougher. “So it’s possible she was helping that prick with his book. Possible. Possible. And maybe, just maybe, she has a carbon copy or some shit.”
“I guess that’s not beyond the realm of possibility.”
He was almost purring now despite that rough-edged voice. “She likes you. She trusts you. Jack, I don’t mean to get personal, but did you have relations with her?”
“I won’t lie to you, sir. I kissed her.”
He threw up his hands. “She’s a beautiful girl. I don’t blame you.” Then he leaned in again, buddy buddy. “What I’m asking is, could you stay on and get closer to her? Just for a day or so? You can search her room. Or you can get her out of that apartment, and my guys can toss the place.”
“Well…maybe. I guess.”
“I can offer you ten thousand on top of all the other money, and it goes straight to you. Never mind your Broker. And if you turn up a copy of that manuscript, well, I’ll double it.”
“Well…I could do that, I guess. Who couldn’t use ten grand? Or twenty?”
“Good. Good!”
“But, sir-one thing does concern me. As I mentioned, normally I would be in the dark about all this-I wouldn’t know you, the client; I wouldn’t know about manuscripts and…it does worry me.”
“Why? How?”
“You maintain a degree of safety by requiring those levels of insulation we talked about. I don’t want to be a threat to you. I don’t want to be seen as a loose end. Or the Broker, either. You need to know I’m loyal. I’m discreet.”
I watched his eyes carefully as he responded.
“Jack, I know how to reward loyalty.”
His smile was winning, almost charismatic. The smile wrinkles around his eyes were convincing, too. But those eyes. Those black-button eyes. Those shark eyes.
He left a ten on the table on top of the check, and we headed outside. The night had grown colder and darker, the moon lurking behind cloud cover, and I put on my gloves. We came along the side of the restaurant, and I went ahead a few steps and pointed.
“That’s where they grabbed her, sir,” I said.
And I walked over to the spot. Only a few cars in the lot, and no people but us.
He came over.
“Really, Jack, it doesn’t matter,” he said.
“Actually, it does.”
The. 357 magnum came out of my pocket in a flash of shiny silver and I slapped him alongside the head, its long, thick barrel colliding with bone and tearing flesh. His knees buckled and he went down, not unconscious but stunned, a pile of meat in a green leisure suit. I kicked him in the head and now he was unconscious.
The Sambo’s lot might stay empty only a few seconds, so I had no time to waste. At the street, I waited for a car to pass, then trotted across and over to the apartment house parking lot, and came up along the rider’s side of the Thunderbird.
The heavier-set pock-faced weasel was behind the wheel again, and I startled him a little. I leaned in and grinned at him and made the roll-the-window-down motion, even though I knew the windows were electric, and when the glass was no longer between us, he said, “You scared me for a second, you dumb shit,” and I shot him in the head.
The other weasel jumped a little as his partner’s brains splattered him in the face like a cream pie, and he hadn’t had time to get over it when I shot him in the head, too, that bullet going through and taking some brain and blood to splash and streak the now spider-webbed rider’s side window.
Then I trotted over to the Sambo’s lot, where Lou Girardelli was just coming around, pushing up on one hand.
“What the fuck,” he said, blood streaming down his face from where the. 357 barrel’s sight had torn his flesh. The dead little eyes had some life in them, for once. “What the fuck, Jack?”
“Just tying off a loose end, Lou,” I said, and fired once and the dead little eyes were dead again.
I was wearing the Isotoners so I didn’t need to wipe off the handle of the. 357 I’d taken off Charlie back at the rest stop, and just tossed it near Girardelli’s body. He was on his back and the entry wound was about the size of a quarter and the seepage under his skull was something I was careful not to slip in as I left the lot to cross the street.
One more loose end to deal with.
I kept my head down in case any of the apartment tenants were peeking out their windows after hearing sounds that could have been shots. The nine millimeter was in my waistband and the corduroy jacket was unzipped as I went up the cement stairs.
After I knocked on Annette’s door, I said, “It’s Jack!”
She cracked the door, then opened it, her eyes wider than I’d seen them and I’d seen them pretty damn wide.
I stepped inside. “Your father’s dead. I’m sorry.”
She said nothing, her hand splayed to her mouth.
“They got the two downstairs, too,” I said, “then took off, fast.”
Her eyes somehow got even wider, moving side to side now.
“I don’t think you’re in any danger, not with your daddy dead. But I can’t stay.”
Now they narrowed. “Oh, please, you have to-”
I put a hand on her arm. “Honey, I’m not really a PI from Des Moines. I do freelance work for guys like your father, and if I stick around, I’ll be hip deep in shit.”
“You lied to me?”
“If I’d told you I was just another soldier, how would you’ve reacted? I have to go.”
What, did you think I was going to shoot her in the head, too? What kind of prick do you take me for? She didn’t know anything. She couldn’t hurt me.
She was shaking her head, overwhelmed. “Will I…see you again?”
“Someday,” I said.
Maybe a hundred years from next Tuesday.
I touched her face, and slipped out. She was just a silhouette in the doorway, then, and not even that for long.
Some first job. Six kills but not the guy I was hired for. Two beautiful women and more sex than I’d had in the last six months. I’d survived it all, but hoped this shit wasn’t typical. I wanted to live a while.
It was a risk, removing a client before getting paid. But killing Lou Girardelli’s ass was only prudent, in this case, and anyway, the Broker did enough business with Chicago that they’d surely pay off for their associate, so tragically and brutally murdered by those black bastards from the South Side.
As I headed west on I-80, toward Cedar Rapids to turn in my rental car and catch the next plane north, I had a pang or two about Annette. She’d have some rough days ahead-I’d left her with dea
d Daddy and his just as dead goombahs in her lap, and then there’d be the news about the murder/suicide at the cobblestone cottage. But she’d get over it.
Hadn’t I left her a hell of a last chapter for her book?
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Document creation date: 16.01.2012
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