The last quarry q-6

by Max Allan Collins

  “Blew your cover?” she asked bitterly.

  “Or,” Julie said with a nasty little smile, “maybe climbed under yours, huh, Sis?”

  “You be quiet,” Janet said.

  “You asked about the gun,” I said. “This is why.”

  She was shaking her head, grappling with all this. “You’re a, a what…bodyguard? Why would he do that? Why would my father hire someone to protect me? He doesn’t care enough about me to-”

  “I’ve come to that same opinion,” I said. “Which is why I think you may be at risk.”

  Janet didn’t seem to hear my last statement, asking, “What…what kind of work do you generally do for my father?”

  I shrugged. “Troubleshooter.”

  “Well…that’s certainly vague.”

  “Right.”

  “I…I really should hate you.”

  “Probably.”

  Her chin started quivering and her eyes were getting moist. “You… goddamn you. Goddamn me — I let you into my life.”

  I nodded. “I know the feeling-I let you into mine.”

  We looked at each other…

  …and suddenly it was fine between us.

  Or I was pretty sure it was, and held my hand out.

  She gave me her hand and I squeezed it, and Julie, said, “I’m gonna need way more Scotch…”

  Our food came soon, and neither Janet nor I did much more than nibble at it. Julie ate about half of hers, but was downing the booze like a pro.

  “What did you mean,” Janet said, pushing her plate away, “I’m at…risk?”

  I pushed my plate away, too. “You’re coming into a lot of money, soon, aren’t you?”

  “Yes…”

  Julie, chewing cheeseburger, said, “And if you flat-line, sister dear, guess who gets the gold?”

  Janet frowned and then it turned into a smile of disbelief. “Oh, come on…you can’t think…our own father? Even he wouldn’t… would he?”

  “He would,” I said. “It’s…a problem.”

  Janet’s eyebrows went up. “A problem?”

  “And I know just what to do about it,” Julie said. She grabbed the passing waitress and said, “Scotch rocks, double-my sissy sis’ll no doubt want a mar-garita…and how about you, big boy?”

  “Coke,” I said.

  “Give him a twist of line,” Julie said, “and let him live dangerously…and keep ’em comin’.”

  When the waitress had departed, Janet leaned across the booth and took some of the stress out on her sister, saying bitchily, “That’s always your solution, isn’t it? Getting drunk!”

  “Or stoned,” Julie said, “or laid. But this? This I think calls for drunk.”

  That was when I noticed someone at the bar, his back to us, as he watched us in the mirror-a brawny big-shouldered guy in gray sweats in his twenties with a close-cropped blonde haircut.

  “Excuse me, ladies,” I said, and slipped out of the booth.

  I sat on the stool next to the guy.

  “Hello, DeWayne,” I said.

  Jonah Green’s flunky, his sweatshirt labeled usmc, sipped his beer and said, “Don’t talk to me. Are you crazy?”

  “That’s a matter of opinion. Why are you here, DeWayne? What are you up to?”

  DeWayne didn’t look at me. He whispered: “Mr. Green has me following that crazy cunt.”

  “Julie?”

  He forgot to whisper this time, saying, “You see any other crazy cunt around here? Mr. Green was afraid she’d screw things up. With the…you know, job.”

  “ My job, you mean,” I said.

  Now he looked at me.

  The close-set sky-blue eyes in the oval Clutch Cargo-ish face stared at me unblinkingly; his upper lip approximated a sneer. This was apparently his menacing expression.

  “Your job,” he said nastily, “which apparently includes hangin’ out in public with the intended? What are you doin’, making contact with-”

  I put my hand on his sleeve, and smiled pleasantly. “Leave, DeWayne. Go home. Right now.”

  “You can’t-”

  “Do you want to die, DeWayne?”

  That stopped him. But then he managed, “You don’t-”

  “Leave, DeWayne. Or die. Those are the options. Choose.”

  DeWayne turned away and looked at himself in the mirror. He was bigger than me and younger and he didn’t like taking this from a geezer like me-he was trembling, whether with rage or fear or some combo, I couldn’t say.

  But take it from me he did. He finished the beer, threw a crumpled five-spot on the bar, and headed out the door almost at a trot.

  I joined the sisters at the booth.

  “Who was that?” Janet asked.

  I looked sharply at Julie and shook my head; she, of course, knew who DeWayne was, but she nodded back, almost imperceptibly, and I told her sister, “Nobody, really. Just somebody I thought I knew, but didn’t.”

  “Well, that’s funny…” Janet’s eyes narrowed, watching where DeWayne had gone. “…I’m pretty sure he was at the library today, just hanging around.”

  I said nothing.

  We spent several hours in the bar, and I asked Janet and Julie lots of questions about their father, about his business, his private and public life. I was fairly subtle about it, and both young women were drinking enough to make my information-gathering relatively inconspicuous. By the time the evening was over, I had plenty of information on Jonah Green and his whereabouts and his patterns.

  When it was time to go, I drove Janet home in my rental Ford-she’d had way too many margaritas-while Julie drove her sister’s Geo. Julie was pretty drunk, too, but she was used to it, and could navigate well enough. Still, I followed her, to make sure she stayed on the road.

  No one tailed us, by the way-just as there’d been no sign of DeWayne in Sneaky Pete’s parking lot. Maybe he’d had the sense to follow my advice and survive.

  Julie parked the Geo in the lot behind the building and entered through the kitchen to meet us at the apartment’s front door. I carried the plastered Janet in my arms like a bride over the threshold into the apartment. Julie, with a display of intense concentration, worked at getting the door night-latched, and made her way to the couch-this time I didn’t have to throw her over there.

  I carried Janet into the bedroom, left the lights off, and settled her on top of the covers, taking off her shoes but otherwise letting her sleep there, fully clothed. Already she was snoring gently.

  Then I returned to the living room and checked the door, finding it locked and successfully night-latched. I turned off the lights and only a little neon from the street pulsed in-I glanced at the double windows past Janet’s comfy chair and footrest; across the way, the windows of my surveillance post were dark and anonymous.

  Janet’s sister was curled up on the couch, in a fetal position. The heat was on but cool air leeched in those double windows, so I went off and found a blanket and came back and covered Julie with it.

  She stirred a little and looked up at me, blinking. “You…you really do love her, don’t you, you big jerk?”

  I said nothing.

  “I thought so,” she said, and smiled a little, and then it faded dramatically and she said, “Daddy… Daddy’s got something bad planned for Jan, doesn’t he?”

  “You’re on a roll,” I said.

  I sat on the edge of the couch. I felt fond of this kid, suddenly, and I didn’t even want to fuck her. I was getting so goddamn soft.

  “Were you supposed to do it?” she asked.

  “Do what?”

  “The bad thing to Janet for Daddy.”

  I nodded.

  “And now…instead…you’re going to stop it?”

  I touched her lips with a finger. “Get some sleep. You know where the bathroom is? ‘Cause you’re gonna have to piss like a racehorse.”

  “I know where the bathroom is…Some night?”

  I frowned at her. “What about ‘some night?’ ”

&
nbsp; She got herself more comfortable. “Some night, when you’re sittin’ all bored and shit…with only my mousy little sis to keep you company…?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Maybe it’ll occur to you.”

  “What will?”

  “That you wound up with the wrong sister.”

  I stared at her. She did her drunken best to stare back.

  “Well,” I said, “you are more like what I deserve.”

  In a goofily good-natured way, she said, “Fuck you,” stuck her tongue out and smiled and I tucked her in some more and she was asleep.

  My nine millimeter and I went out and prowled the back alley, including checking the parked cars in the lot beyond, where the Geo was. Then I came back in and locked up and returned to the bedroom.

  Janet was still on top of the covers, fully dressed, really sawing logs now, looking not at all glamorous, and incredibly beautiful.

  I placed my nine millimeter on the bedstand beside me and stretched out next to the slumbering woman, and lay there in the dark, elbows winged, staring at the ceiling.

  Fourteen

  The explosion jolted me from deep asleep to fully awake-or the sound of it did, anyway, coming from outside the apartment, to the rear.

  Still fully dressed from the night before, I sat up straight, as if from a nightmare; but I was waking to a nightmare, and knew it, as I noted the absence of Janet on the rumpled bed next to me.

  I grabbed the nine millimeter off the nightstand and bolted toward the noise, which had shifted from full-scale world-rattling boom to lion’s roar of fire punctuated by snapping of flames.

  The kitchen opened onto a small unenclosed porch and a half-flight of stairs down to the alley, across which lay half a block of metered parking lot, from which the smoke and flames curled a question mark into an overcast morning sky.

  Something had exploded in that lot, and it didn’t have to be Janet’s car, could have been someone else’s or something else entirely, gas main maybe, only I knew in my tightened gut that it did have to be Janet’s car…

  I took the steps three at a time and sprinted across to where I could see the Geo, transformed into a twisted mass of steel abstraction decorated with lashing tongues of flame and billowing smoky hands that turned to black fists opening to gray fingers.

  Gun ready but with nothing and no one to shoot at, I dropped to my knees as if to pray. But I was not in a prayerful mood-my eyes were ignoring the smoke and taking in various sad, sick sights, from burnt-edged scraps of Janet’s brown suede coat to jagged sections of smoldering human flesh.

  Not far from where I knelt, half a female arm lay, fingers twitching, just a little, not burnt at all, not even the stump, as if cut off rudely at the elbow and discarded, flung to the asphalt, which was dotted with the red rain of blood. A little ways away, a shoeless foot had landed on its sole, like the person it belonged to had stepped away, leaving it behind.

  Mostly, however, the lot was littered with charred chunks of meat, as if the explosion had been in a butcher’s shop, not rigged here in this lot to blow sky-high when the key of the little Geo had been turned.

  A sane man might have gone mad.

  I went coldly sane, getting to my feet, ignoring the civilians starting to approach the fiery scene, a chorus of Oh my Gods and Oh my Lords making a frantic premature funeral out of the ungainly pyre. But I was in no mood for ceremony and just turned away and headed for my rental Ford, which wasn’t in the lot, parked instead over on the next side street.

  In a weird way, the carnage of it made it easier for me to snap into the necessary gear-this was no clean kill, out of my more recent life, but a flashback to Vietnam, where I’d seen any number of friends blown to kibble thanks to land mines and mortar shells. Where you learned to react by retreating inside yourself, but not inviting the emotions in.

  So I was in combat mode when I went looking for him.

  Homewood had only seven motels, three of them major chains (Holiday Inn, Comfort Inn, Econo Lodge) which was where normally I would have started; but I had a hunch he would be staying close to my digs, since he was obviously keeping an eye on me.

  That’s why I began where I was staying, at the Homewood Motor Court. I even parked in my own space by my own door, and on foot prowled the line of cabins, looking over the parked vehicles, studying license plates, peering in windows to take in anything showing in front and back seats.

  Not many cars were in the spaces, as the motel catered to salesman and other mid-range business people, who were off with their cars pursuing their livelihoods. And when I made his ride, I was relieved to see it parked in the last space belonging to the last cabin at the far end, with no vehicles parked in the nearest four spaces.

  That was good.

  And the car hadn’t been hard to make-on the passenger seat of a Jeep rental were fanned-out magazines, Soldier of Fortune, Black Belt and several body building rags.

  Seeing those had made me smile. Not much of a smile I grant you, a bitter little slash; but a smile. The magazines not only said who this car belonged to, it indicated a guy reading on the job, bored by surveillance work. Usually reading indicates intelligence.

  Not this time.

  Through the crack of the window, between the wood frame and the drawn blinds, I could see him, hurriedly packing his duffel bag, which was emblazoned with a Marine Corps insignia. The sweats had been replaced by a short-sleeved pale yellow shirt and dark brown slacks and shades-of-brown running shoes. He might have been the president of the Young Republicans on a campus somewhere.

  When I went to his door, the nine millimeter was in my left hand, in front of me, so that anyone passing by wouldn’t see it.

  Not that anyone was passing by. The Homewood Motor Court on this Monday morning was deader than the driver of the Geo. I knew housekeeping didn’t come on for another hour. Plenty of time.

  The day, I noticed, was crisp and almost cold, the threat of rain making the sky dark. Days like this were surprisingly common in Vietnam, even if muggy hot ones were the norm, in the jungle.

  I knocked with my free hand.

  The door opened, allowing the room’s inhabitant a suspicious look over the night latch, and I was tempted to replay what I’d done to Louis, just shoot the prick in the eye and be done with it…

  …but instead I shouldered through, popping the night latch, shoving the door shut behind me with my right hand, and pointing the nine at him with the other.

  DeWayne, stunned by the intrusion, belatedly raised the glock he’d had sense enough to take with him answering the door, and with my free hand, I batted it out of his grasp, like a mean sibling slapping a rattle out of a baby’s pink fingers.

  The gun landed on the nearby bed and bounced off onto the carpeted floor with a clunk, out of view, and reach.

  DeWayne’s room was larger than mine, a businessman’s mini-suite with a meeting area. The framed paintings were abstractions, as if gore had been spattered around in here already.

  My reluctant host-a little taller than me, and about as heavy, but overly muscular in a steroid-ish way-just stood there agape, his stubbly blond gyrene haircut seeming to stand on end. His light blue eyes-disturbingly long-lashed pretty eyes, really, feminine in the midst of all that otherwise rugged-jaw masculinity-had the same startled expression they’d worn when I slipped in beside DeWayne in his car outside the Log Cabin, a few months ago.

  Right before he thanked me for not killing him and I locked him in his trunk-remember?

  I shoved my nine millimeter in my waistband. But that didn’t seem to make DeWayne feel any better- in fact, he seemed unnerved, perhaps because I appeared so calm.

  And I was in fact calm, entirely matter-of-fact and unemotional. Which he should have been thankful for. If I hadn’t slipped into my battle zone, he’d have been dead now.

  I asked, in a purely conversational tone, “What the fuck was that about back there, DeWayne?”

  DeWayne blinked.

  I rai
sed my eyebrows. “The car, DeWayne? The one you rigged that blew up this morning? Oh, but maybe you didn’t hang around to watch.”

  His mouth twitched, like it couldn’t decide whether to smile or frown or scream.

  “In which case,” I continued affably, “you’ll be pleased to know it did go off and blow Janet Wright’s car to hell and gone-driver and all.”

  His expression tightened into defensiveness. “Well, somebody had to do it! After you’ve been farting around for days!”

  “…How long have you been watching me, DeWayne?”

  He shook his head. “I told you-I followed Mr. Green’s slutty little princess here. She wasn’t supposed to be part of the mix, you know.”

  My hands were on my hips. “But, then, neither were you, DeWayne. Was that the plan? Let me do the job, then get rid of the loose end?”

  “No! Hell, no! I told you-”

  My eyes slitted. “I told you, last night. This is my job.”

  DeWayne risked getting in my face, just a little: “Which included fucking her, I suppose? Where is that in your job description, old man? You ain’t exactly a stealth missile.”

  I drew in a breath, let it out. “Car bomb,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Car bomb. Yeah. That’ll play as an accident.”

  My remark took the boldness out of him, replacing it with chagrin. “Yeah, well…things were…out of control. I made a…a pre-emptive strike. But you don’t need to worry.”

  My eyebrows went up again. “I don’t?”

  He smirked humorlessly. “No-you’ll get your money.”

  “…Well, isn’t that thoughtful. And then there’s all the credit-I’ll get that, too.” Finally I frowned at him. “Jesus, DeWayne-I’ve been seen all over town with that woman!”

  Now his eyebrows went up. “Is that my fault?”

  “No,” I admitted. “That’s my fault. Blowing her up in her car, that would be yours.”

  He backed away, hands half-up, saying, “Listen, I’m sorry I stepped on your fuckin’ toes…but I had orders to follow…and now I got a plane to catch.”

  Cautiously DeWayne returned to the duffel bag he was packing; his gun was over there on the floor, somewhere. Part of me wished he would go for it, please go for it, right now, go for it…