Quarry in the Middle

by Max Allan Collins

  “Right-o. That’s how I see it, at least.”

  I sipped my Diet Coke. Shrugged. “So the job is, take care of Jerry G?”

  “Yes. Are we agreed as to price?”

  “Considering the work I did eliminating the old man from the equation, let’s call it thirty.”

  He considered that. Then he shrugged. “All right. For all the grief it’ll save me, it’s a goddamn bloody bargain.”

  Soon I was downstairs on the main floor, heading past the dining room toward the Paddlewheel exit when a husky female voice called from the bar: “Jack! Come say hello.”

  In a little black dress that exposed a nice amount of bosom, redheaded Angela was in her favorite booth, sitting with a yellow pad in front of her, smoking a cigarette as she made notes.

  I joined her. “You go on this early?”

  “No. This is just the closest thing I have to an office. Going over my set list. Making a few changes.” She turned the wide-set green eyes loose on me, and they quickly tightened in concern, as she took in my colorful face. “My God! What happened to you?”

  “Couple of Jerry G’s guys took me through the Jane Fonda workout. Do I look slimmer?”

  She touched my hand. “You take awful chances, don’t you? I thought…nothing.”

  “What?”

  “I hoped to hear from you. I…the other day, morning I mean, at your room…rather sweet. On the…special side, I thought.”

  “A lot more pleasant workout, I’ll grant you. Hey, I’m sorry, I really did get my ass handed to me, and I’ve been recuperating.”

  She gave me a smirky kiss of a smile. “Then you weren’t shacked up with some sweet young thing?”

  “Yeah, right. I was cheating on you, screwing a twenty-year-old stripper.”

  That made her laugh. I love telling the truth; often the best way not to be believed…

  “You wouldn’t want to stop by and catch my last set? Maybe buy me breakfast?”

  “I better take a rain check. I’m on the clock.”

  The green eyes widened. “On the clock, around the clock?”

  “Right now I am.”

  Out that hallway, where the private elevator emptied, trotted Cornell’s little squeeze, Chrissy, yellow permed curls held by a hot-pink sweatband, making her head look like a ginger ale bottle that fizzed over. She was in tight jeans and a hot-pink shirt tied in a big knot under her pert boobs, and her feet were shod in sandals that showed off red toenails, to match the fingernails she’d been painting. All freshened up, pink lip gloss, blue eye shadow, and no white powder on her nose at all…

  “What’s the story on baby Madonna?” I asked.

  “She’s just the latest little lay on Dickie’s roster,” Angela said, light but with a bitter edge, letting smoke out her nose like a lovely dragon. “One little blow-up doll’s pretty much like any other.”

  “Does she live with him out at the plantation? Or maybe up in his Hefner hideout upstairs?”

  “No. She’s from River Bluff. Another of these community college girls, if you can believe it.”

  I didn’t, actually.

  “Excuse me,” I said, and smiled at her, and she gave me a curious look that I let hang.

  When I got to the parking lot, Chrissy was pulling out in a red Firebird convertible with a crysee vanity plate—Illinois, not Iowa, where the community college was. I moved toward my lesser Pontiac, but didn’t run or anything.

  Pretty sure I knew where she was headed.

  Chapter Ten

  At a quarter till eight or so, the Lucky Devil parking lot wasn’t close to full. This was a Friday, and one of their big nights, but the Lucky was chiefly an after-hours joint, so Chrissy had no problem finding a parking spot near the building.

  I took a space in the row behind her, shut off the engine and sat in the dark watching her, trying to figure out what the fuck to do. Tailing Chrissy’s Firebird to the Lucky hadn’t allowed a stopover at the Wheelhouse motel to grab my spare nine millimeter.

  So I didn’t have a gun on me. And I didn’t have a plan. All I had was my brute strength, and we’ve seen how well that had served me in this venue…

  Well, maybe I had a vague plan.

  The Lucky Devil parking lot was about as handy as a pair of gloves with two lefts—the three doors facing the lot all were exit only: that one off the soundproofed private poker room, another off the casino, and one with FIRE EXIT ONLY written on it for the strip club.

  To gain entry, you had to cut over to the sidewalk and walk around the building, or cut through the alley where not long ago I’d had so much fun. I figured to watch Chrissy and follow her on whichever path she chose, and intercept her before she could go in, only fuck me sideways—she was heading for the casino exit!

  And now she was knocking on the thing…

  It must have taken a while for the bouncer to climb down off his perch and answer her insistent pounding. He was unfamiliar to me, a bushy-brown-bearded bruiser bursting his black Lucky Devil polo with both muscles and fat, and he was not happy to be disturbed.

  Finally emerging from her self-absorbed stupor, Chrissy was animated, words and spittle flying out of her. The bearded guy scowled, nodded, but shut the door on her. She dug into her little pink purse and got out some cigarettes and was lighting up when I grabbed her.

  “Let’s talk,” I said, and the cigarette hit the gravel as I pulled her by the arm toward my car. The night was unseasonably chill, and her nipples were erect under the t-shirt, but for some reason that just annoyed me. Her expression was a hissing cat’s, but she was too thrown to do much about it.

  Still, the parking lot was lighted, if half-heartedly, and my actions were right out there for the world to see. Several patrons, groups of guys, a couple of couples, some girl duos, were laughing and making their way toward the Lucky from their various cars, but nobody thought twice about some jackass dragging a protesting girl along. Again, just that kind of town…

  “You fucker!” she said, her upper lip curling back. “You’re in trouble!”

  We were to the car now, and she started to scream, and I slapped her. The sound rang in the open air like a gunshot. She gave me a look that wondered how I could be such a brute to a beautiful girl like her.

  “Shut up,” I told her. “I’d rather kill you than fuck you.”

  She had a hand to her red-blossoming cheek, but that statement crinkled her forehead as her brain tried to process it.

  I had her wrist in one hand and used my other to work the key in the trunk. The lid opened and I nodded toward the yawning space.

  “Get in,” I said.

  “Fuck you,” she said. But quietly.

  “We need to talk, but here is not good. I won’t hurt you if you behave. Get in.”

  By the way, I’d driven the Sunbird over to River Bluff on Wednesday, to give it a thorough cleaning, not that it would have fooled any forensics experts. But at least it wasn’t blood-crustedly awful in there. I’m not that big a monster.

  Anyway, she was crawling in, frowning, but more confused than afraid, when a hand grabbed my arm, and it was the bearded bouncer.

  “That’s not nice,” he said, and head-butted me.

  If I’d had the time for a thought, it would have been:This is what happens, going around unarmed.

  But I didn’t have the time.

  When I woke up, I was lying on my back and looking up at ceiling tile.

  “Little early for the game, aren’t you, Jack?”

  I knew the voice: Jerry G’s.

  And by now I knew where I was—supine, with my knees up, on one of the room-length built-in couches in the Lucky Devil’s private poker room with its creamcolor carpeted floor and walls. I could feel the adhesive strip across my mouth, and more of it was around my wrists—silver duct tape—and more yet around my ankles above my running shoes.

  “Only it isn’t ‘Jack,’ is it? It’s Quarry. What kind of name is that? Some kind of hired gun, aren’t you? Working for Need
le-Dickie Cornell?”

  I didn’t answer, because I couldn’t. Anyway, these were rhetorical questions, or at least ones that Jerry G already knew the answers to: his little yellow-permed spy with the red Firebird had told him.

  Most conversations between Cornell and me that might have been heard by Chrissy in part, or even in whole, had been somewhat elliptical. Only that had changed this evening with our most recent conversation, which had spelled it out so well that Jerry G didn’t need to hear about it from me.

  And, of course, Chrissy’s spying ways explained how Jerry G had known I was an interloper at the Lucky Devil, a Cornell infiltrator at his card game, and arranged to have me beaten and maybe killed, if my mobile-home angel hadn’t come along to save my ass.

  Somehow I didn’t think she’d come flying in to whisk me to safety this time.

  Jerry G and I were not alone in the room. Two bouncers were also present—the big bald black guy, and the bearded bruiser who had head-butted me. The black guy had an automatic stuffed in his waistband—a nine millimeter, I thought, but not a Browning like mine. Smith and Wesson maybe. The bearded guy had a Mad Max-style sawed-off shotgun in one beefy fist. He had too much belly for a gun to fit in his belt. Did I mention he was wearing amber goggle-type sunglasses? In fucking doors? Should be a capital crime.

  As for my host, in a gray silk jacket over a black t-shirt with gold-chain necklaces and stonewashed blue jeans, he didn’t appear to be armed—the jacket was open and no weapon showed in his waistband, nor any telltale bulge under either arm.

  So all I had to deal with were a measly nine mil and a sawed-off. And a couple yards of duct tape. Piece of cake.

  “You don’t look the part,” Jerry G said.

  His horsey features had a dreamy cast, and I figured this was as philosophical a soliloquy as I could ever expect from him, even if I’d had a future.

  He was saying, “You don’t look tough. You don’t seem like a psycho. Maybe that’s how you stayed alive this long. But you know what they say—all good things must come to an end, you motherfucking prick.”

  He brought his elbow down into my nuts, like a wrestler faking a nasty blow, the kind that misses and jolts the canvas, only he wasn’t faking and he didn’t miss.

  The pain was so intense, I saw flashing red and yellow stars, not cute cartoon ones, rather exploding ruptures, like the Fourth of July going off inside your skull. I’d heard Jerry G was a hothead, but he hadn’t shown that side to me, leaving it to his boys to teach me that lesson in the alley the other day.

  This, however, was over the line. He knew damned well this was just business. Put a bullet in my head and be done with it. But there’s no reason, no excuse really, to lose your temper, and turn sadistic asshole. Unprofessional. Uncool.

  “Cover this shit up,” he was saying. “Dump his sorry ass.”

  I could see the carpeted room fairly well—Chrissy wasn’t there, just Jerry G and his two bully boys. But on the floor was a canvas tarp, and the black guy reached for it, and that’s what they were going to cover me up with.

  But first the black guy swung the walnut-grip butt of his nine millimeter at my head. The angle was weird, and he couldn’t put much swing into it, and in that half-second or so, I figured it probably wouldn’t kill me, but likely would put me to sleep.

  It did.

  When I came to, I was under the tarp on a metal surface and I could hear a raspy rumble, and feel the lurch and bounce and sway of what I quickly realized was a motorboat cutting through somewhat rough waters.

  I got my bearings. I was in the bottom of the boat. My head was toward the stern, where the motor was grinding up foam at a pretty good clip. Twenty miles an hour? I was on my side, so my duct-taped hands were against the deck, which was steel and gently curved, nothing fancy—a jon boat?

  I minimized my movement, but the tarp was so heavy, and the boat’s trajectory loping enough, the engine noisy enough, that I figured I needn’t worry too much. The tape looped around my hands put them in a praying position, but I hadn’t stooped to prayer just yet. I still had better options.

  And the best one was to find something sharp enough to work at the duct tape. These guys weren’t the brightest, or maybe their boss Jerry G wasn’t, because if they’d used any kind of rope, I really would have been praying—and making every promise to the Man Upstairs you can think of, about my new reformed life. As it was, they’d used duct tape.

  And duct tape is designed to tear easily.

  “River’s a rough fucker tonight,” a high-pitched, whiny voice said from the bow.

  “Pretty, though,” came a more mellow, lower-pitched voice from nearer me, at the stern, working itself above the motor. “Nice clear night, for so choppy.”

  This was the black guy, I’d venture. He had a soothing bass, with an Isaac Hayes vibe to it. The asshole at the bow was clearly white, probably the bearded head-butt artist with the beer belly.

  “Wish to fuck I’d brought a jacket,” the white guy said.

  “You got that right.”

  “Is that why the river’s so empty? Too fuckin’ cold?”

  “Yeah. Normally, this time of year, even this time of night? You’d have some assholes out drinkin’ and drownin’.”

  “There was a few up nearer River Bluff.”

  “Yeah. They’ll be more down Ft. Madison way.”

  The river seemed to settle down a little. I wished they would start talking again. I’d thought the way my wrists were bound, I might be able to get my fingers down to where I could get enough purchase to do some judicious ripping. But that wasn’t happening. So now I was trying to explore the bottom of the boat, and find something sharp to work the duct tape on.

  Two or three minutes went by before the white guy blurted: “Will you look at that full the fuck moon! Not a goddamned cloud in the sky. Look at them fuckin’ stars!…Ever wonder if anybody’s up there lookin’ back down at us?”

  “What, like God, you mean?”

  “Naw, not Jesus or nobody. I mean, outer-space-type aliens. You know, Star Trek shit. E.T. phone the fuck home?”

  The black guy chuckled.“I don’t think so.”

  “What, so then, like, we’re all alone down here? Whole great big universal galaxy, and it’s just us idjits? I mean, what are the fuckin’ odds?”

  “Odds, one hunnerd percent.”

  “How you figure?”

  “One hunnerd percent, fool. Ain’t no aliens on a star.”

  “And why is that, smart-ass?”

  “Because a star is a gaseous mass.”

  The white guy made a farting sound with his lips. “You’re a gaseous mass.”

  “Maybe so. But I ain’t a ignorant redneck gaseous mass.”

  That shut the white guy up.

  I was enjoying the conversation—not because of its intellectual aspects, or its rustic American humor, but liking that these two stupid sons of bitches were distracting each other, while I was moving my hands down to where the metal hooks for a middle bench would’ve been, had it not been removed so the boat could be used for hauling contraband and dumping bodies and other fun and games.

  I damn near laughed—the black guy on a bench at the stern, the bearded idiot on a bench at the bow, and me in the middle again. Didn’t take long at all, and made zero noise (at least any that registered), using the metal edge of that fastener to carve through the duct tape.

  The white guy asked, “Where should we dump the cocksucker?”

  “Let’s give it another ten miles or so.”

  “Before Ft. Madison, though.”

  “Yeah. Before.”

  “…You know, my brother’s in there.”

  “Huh? Where?”

  “Ft. Madison! The pen!”

  “What’s he in for?”

  “Killed a dude at a register, 7-Eleven.”

  “That was stupid.”

  “Well, the dude had a gun under there. That’s self-defense!”

  The black guy had no
comment.

  I had removed the duct tape from my mouth, for comfort, not practicality, but had decided that I could not risk undoing the tape locking my ankles—that would likely create obvious movement under the tarp.

  “Somethin’ about me,” the white guy was saying, as they spoke across my prone form, “might surprise your black ass.”

  “Such as?”

  “I like that soul music.”

  “You do, huh?”

  “I ain’t no redneck. That’s racial. You shouldn’t say that kind of racial shit.”

  “Yeah. Sorry. So. What do you listen to? Otis? Wicked Pickett? Aretha maybe?”

  “Who? No, no! I like them Blues Brothers.”

  “…You gotta be fuckin’ shittin’ me…”

  “What?”

  “Them pasty white boys can’t sing that shit.”

  “Hell they can’t!” Then he started singing “Soul Man,” which I thought was pretty funny, though I didn’t laugh, too busy taking a chance lifting the edge of the tarp near my head just enough to get a fix on where the black guy was…

  The black guy, who told the white guy to shut the fuck up—which only made the bastard sing louder, intermingling it with laughter—was wearing gray running shoes. Big ones—size elevens, anyway, with some miles on them. I got a good look, because those stompers were about five inches from the edge of the tarp.

  Then the white guy started singing “Rubber Biscuits,” and this the black guy found funny as hell, lightening up, and he was laughing right up until my hands gripped his ankles and brought him sliding down hard onto the floor of the boat, rocking the little craft.

  I stood up, like a ghost waking, and flung the tarp off and at the bearded bouncer at the stern, getting a glimpse of the sawed-off, which wasn’t in his hands, rather down in the floor of the boat, a nice break for me.

  The black bouncer, whose nine mil was still in his waistband, had let go of the stick guiding the motor (and the boat), which now ran sort of on automatic pilot. He was fumbling not for the gun but for something to push up on, so he could get on his feet and deal with me. He was also saying, “Fuck!” over and over again.

  The guy was big all right, but right now he was just a bug on its back, and I didn’t have that much trouble shoving him over the side, rolling him off; he made a smaller splash than you’d think, and—on my knees on the metal floor—I grabbed for the stick and swung the boat hard left, sending the bearded guy, still tangled in the tarp, over the right side (the dope still had the amber sunglasses on—at night!), and a hand that had just got hold of the sawed-off lost its grip, leaving the weapon behind.