The Wrong Quarry (Hard Case Crime)

by Collins, Max Allan

  I answered it anyway.

  “Yeah?”

  “Jack...oh God, Jack.”

  It was a female voice.

  “...Jack, he’s here at my house...”

  Whispering.

  Frightened.

  “...he’s crazy, running around...crazy...”

  Sally.

  “...he says he’s leaving and wants to take me with him...I said I didn’t want to go, and now...I don’t know what the fuck he’s going to do, Jack....”

  “Honey, just take it easy.”

  “...I’m afraid, Jack, I’m really, really afrai—”

  And the line, as they say, went dead.

  * * *

  The charcoal clouds were rolling again, but no thunder growl or electrical strobe signaled rain, or would that be snow, considering the temp? Would one of those freak snowstorms with lightning erupt to make this night even weirder?

  I was guiding the Pinto, no lights, down the gravel road with the walls of cornstalks hovering on either side of me, the breeze catching them, making them rustle, making shivering shapes out of them, as if they too felt the cold.

  I could see the farmhouse up ahead, and the barn Sally rented out, and two cars parked where the gravel lane widened—his red Corvette, her blue Mustang. I swung the car over off the gravel onto what little shoulder there was, brushing up against the scratchy stalks, their fingers clawing and scraping at the vehicle.

  I got out and crept along the edge of the cornfield, staying low, the nine mil in my right hand, again in surgical gloves. Still in my white shirt and tie, fleece-jacket over them. The .38 snubnose was in my left jacket pocket, the switchblade in my right pants pocket, the hunting knife clipped in its sheath on my belt.

  There it was, the moon, gray balls of cloud rolling to either side to give it a window to throw ivory across the rural landscape and, along the way, bathe me in light that I didn’t want. I waited for those clouds to roll back over it and conceal the motherfucker, but they didn’t.

  Moonlight or not, I had to cross the open space between the edge of the cornfield and the two vehicles sitting on that gravel apron.

  I took several breaths, my exhales like car exhaust in the chill, then made my move. If I’d been hunkered down any lower, I’d have been crawling. As it was, I moved like an ungainly Munchkin. The moon loved me, stroking me, bringing out my hidden beauty.

  Seconds that felt like minutes later, I was behind the Corvette, where I withdrew the hunting knife from its sheath and cut a nice wide gash in a beautiful tire, letting out air that also smoked in the night, hissing like a cranky librarian. I did both rear tires, just to be safe. Then I did the same thing to the rear tires of Sally’s Mustang, next to the sally vanity plate, figuring she would understand when I explained I did not want to give the man terrorizing her any means of escape.

  Quite a few lights were on in the house, both upstairs and down, squares of subdued yellow indicating shades were pulled. The windows were mismatched, as if the builder, likely the farmer himself, had used whatever he could salvage or pick up cheap. A side section looked tacked on, its roof a little crooked. How Mateski would have loved this slapped-together place— one of his ugly paintings come to life.

  Now I had to cross the distance between the Corvette and the house. Again, I stayed very low but moved quickly, and then I was at the side of the house.

  And heard something—a muffled cry.

  I knelt by a round-topped many-paned window, just another weird element in the patchwork place, and peered in and, Christ, there she was...

  ...Mustang Sally herself, in a skimpy scarlet nightie, bathed in the stark illumination of a single hanging bulb, heavy coils of hemp rope securing her to a vertical steel post, looped around the post and her wrists—you could hitch a fucking yacht with that much rope. Her red lipsticked mouth filled with an S&M-style ball gag that strapped behind her head, her big blue eyes screaming at me, her long tawny hair a frizzy flowing mane that seemed as hysterical as she was.

  I raised a reassuring hand, gave her a look that said, Stay calm, and she nodded in frantic understanding.

  Then I looked for a way in. The big roundtop window seemed secure. Another more traditional basement window was no help, either. But in back of the house were double storm doors that led down into the basement. They had a simple padlock.

  Also back there, up four sloppy wooden steps, was a kitchen door. I went cautiously up and glanced in—the kitchen, looking like it hadn’t been remodeled since the ’40s and shy of appliances or much of anything really, showed no signs of life. Certainly no sign of Vale. I tried the back door. Locked.

  Both my options were fairly easy pickings, literally, but I went with the padlock. That would take me directly down into the basement to get to Sally. We could duck right back out the storm doors and to my car, where I could deposit her while I went back and dealt with this prick.

  The same two tools from my billfold that I’d used on the deadbolt at the dance studio worked on the padlock, only in five seconds, not fifteen. My biggest worry was making too much noise lifting one of these ancient wooden-slat doors. I shifted the nine mil to my left hand, then slowly eased open the right-hand door. It creaked, but nothing major.

  Soon I had gone down the handful of cement steps into the dirt-floor cellar, letting the door gently back down behind me. Sally was beaming over at me, a sexual sadist’s fantasy realized with that ball gag and nightie and heavy rope binding her.

  Nine mil still in my left hand, I undid the buckle at the back of the ball gag strap and it fell into her lap.

  “Jack,” she whispered. “Thank God. You’re wonderful.”

  I whispered back: “Where is he?”

  “Upstairs somewhere. Can’t you hear him?”

  I couldn’t. Turning, I looked up the steep steps. “First things first,” I said. “Get you untied and out of here, then I can—”

  I heard something and swung my gun and myself in that direction—an old furnace and a newer water heater on a little cement platform.

  Nothing.

  “Those things make noise,” I observed, and then I felt something small and metallic and very much like the nose of a revolver in my neck.

  “Fooled you!” Sally said giddily. “Toss that gun—not hard, ’cause they go off!”

  Shit fuck cunt piss hell, said the bishop when it hurt when he peed.

  I said to her, “The ropes—trick knots you could slip right out of?”

  “That’s right! Roger taught me.” Then she yelled: “Sweetie! Olly olly oxen free!”

  “What are you, six?” I snarled at her—she was still behind me, and, yes, that was a revolver’s nose.

  “No,” she said. “Twenty-six.”

  “I should have known,” I said with a dry laugh. “Those posters were the wrong era. Jimi, the Fudge, the Doors...here I thought you just had good taste.”

  “I do have good taste,” she said kittenishly. “Didn’t I taste good? You tasted good.”

  The door up there in the kitchen opened and I heard his footsteps on the wooden steps before I saw him. Actually, I saw his gray tennies with white laces first. Then Roger Vale, in a black t-shirt under a Members Only jacket with gray slacks, trotted down into view and came down to stand smiling before me, hands on his hips. No weapon in sight. Putting about four feet between us.

  “How’d we do tonight, Quarry?” he said, grinning. He had shaved off the mustache, getting ready for his next role. His hair had a brown tint now. “Did the old man die easy or slow?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “Alive and well. I finally figured out I was working for the wrong guy.”

  He frowned. “Well, that pisses me off. He’s really alive, Quarry?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do I get a refund?”

  “Oh, did you ask me out here to pay me, Roger? Or to tie off a loose end?”

  A sharp laugh; he was already over the disappointment of Clarence being among the living. “An
d now you’re, what? Here to kill me for the old fart?”

  “No. I thought you’d be in the wind by now.” I did a tiny head bob back at Sally, whose revolver continued to kiss the back of my neck. “I was just rescuing the damsel in distress.”

  He chuckled. “She’s fantastic, isn’t she? You’d never believe she wasn’t a teen.”

  “I’m starting to believe it.”

  He frowned and grinned simultaneously. “What have you got on there, Quarry? Are those surgical gloves? Planning on performing an operation?”

  “Maybe.”

  His expression turned stone serious, as he looked past me to his partner. “You be very careful. Mr. Quarry here is a very dangerous individual...I’m going to get the weapons off him. Be ready to squeeze that trigger, babe.”

  “You got it,” she said.

  “Take off your coat,” he told me, “slowly, and hand it to me. Nice and easy.”

  I did, that revolver nose hard against the top of my spine all the way.

  He removed the .38 from my jacket pocket, pitched the gun gently to the dirt, sending it a distance. Tossed my jacket to land on top of the nine mil, also a ways away.

  I said to the girl with the gun, conversationally, “That was a good story, about your aunt and living by yourself. Any of it true?”

  “A long time ago,” she said, “some of it was.”

  “Helpful, Roger,” I said, giving him a casual smile, “having a high school girl on the inside, to steer victims your way.”

  He shook his head and smiled at me as if disappointed. “Oh, it wasn’t like that. Mostly we seek out girls who like to party. Who, like the song says, wanna have fun. Candy was one of those.”

  “But the fun got out of hand.”

  “Sometimes it did,” he said, trying to look sad but still smiling. “With Candy it did. She was a wild thing herself, and it sort of...escalated. We don’t do it that often, our...special thing. Once or twice, maybe three times a year. All the rest of the girls, well, it’s more or less consensual. None have ever ratted us out.”

  “I think a few did rat you out,” I said, challenging him gently. “Heather Foster, for example.”

  That startled him. His head moved to one side, slightly, but he looked at me straight on, eyes tensed. “Where did you hear that name?”

  “Clarence Stockwell. He has the names and places of all of your unwilling playmates.”

  His smile was weak. “No. I don’t know how you stumbled onto that one name, but—”

  “What were some of the places? Funny names, some of them. Buckhorn. Rocky Fork. Highland Hammocks. Right, Mr. Dorn? Or is that Dane? No, wait, it’s Varney, isn’t it?”

  He was not happy, a vein standing out on his forehead like a welt. “You shut up! Sweetie, come around and take that hunting knife off of him.”

  The cold nose of the gun gave me one last kiss and then she stepped around in front of me, an insane little bitch whose pert breasts overflowing the red nightie did not do a fucking thing for me. Even my dick pulled its head in for safety. We were both ashamed of ourselves for banging this little sociopath in her glow-in-the-dark snatch.

  She passed Vale her revolver, and was approaching me when he stopped her by the arm. He said to me, “Wait a second, hon. Stand back a tetch. Quarry. Empty your pockets first.”

  I took my car keys and my Holiday Inn room key from my left pocket and tossed them on the dirt.

  “Check it,” he told her, and she did, leaning toward me to pat the pocket.

  “Nothing,” she told him.

  She smiled up me, pretty as Charlene Tilton, crazier than a shithouse rat.

  Eyes still on me, but speaking to him, she asked, “Can’t we have some fun with him first? Does it always have to be girls? He’s got a nice motion in his ocean.”

  I said, “It’s just the waterbed.”

  “You’re funny,” she said, backing away just a little. “Now the other pocket, honey.”

  I reached in there and withdrew the switchblade, clicking it open as I did, and swung the blade across her throat, getting a good splash of arterial blood in my face for my trouble, but it couldn’t be helped, though I must have looked like a goddamn lunatic. Her amazed gaping face above the gaping wound tilted left and then right, like her head was trying to decide whether to fall off, squirting red along the way, and she was between me and Vale, when he fired, accidentally shooting her in the back of the head, with her own damn gun. I’d already ducked down, not wanting the bullet to find me, and that spatter, at least, missed me, brains and bones and what had been a big blue eye splashing against a cement wall and dripping like a big squashed bug, his shot propelling her forward, the bloody mess of her on top of me now.

  He had a little blowback blood on his face, too, though he hardly needed any to look nuts, as he leaned in to try to get a decent shot at me and, with the dead bitch still on top of me, I whipped the thin sharp blade out and down his right wrist, drawing a red line. He yiped, the fingers of that hand popping open, the revolver falling away. I kicked at it, sending it across the room, way back by the furnace.

  If I’d been him, I’d have grabbed one of the other guns off the floor and kept at it, but my coat was covering one, the .38 God knew where, Sally’s revolver back by the furnace now, and anyway he wasn’t used to dealing with people who could really fight back, so he made a scrambling retreat up the stairs, tripping a little, but making it.

  I shoved dead Sally off of me, onto her back, then paused— should I take time to go after one of the guns? What the hell, I wanted him, and I wanted him right now, and I still had the switchblade in hand. I didn’t figure him for having a gun up there, because if that was the case, wouldn’t he have brought it down with him?

  I was almost to the top of the steps when it occurred to me that there’d be knives in the kitchen....

  But when I got to the kitchen, he was already in the dining room, and when I got to the living room, he was halfway up the stairs. He was athletic, dancer that he was. Was he after something? Was there a gun up there?

  I took the steps three at a time, yet when I got up to the hallway, saw no sign of him. Half a dozen rooms up here, including the bath. But as I moved slowly down the hall, I noticed that all the doors stood open but one—the door to that bedroom where Sally had done her black-light hoochie koo.

  I gave the fucking door a good, hard kick, in honor of the sloppy farmer-turned-carpenter who had slapped this house together, and it tore off its hinges, slamming to the floor.

  But the room, in all its trippy ’70s glory, nightstand lamp on, appeared empty. You can’t hide under a waterbed. Maybe he’d ducked into one of those mirrored closets—maybe there was a goddamn weapon of some kind in there....

  Contemplating this for half a second, I was still standing on the door when he jumped me from behind, with enough force to knock me down, onto the fallen wood slab, the switchblade flinging itself from my fingers like it was abandoning ship. He had a knee in my lower back, which I’d wrenched in the scuffle with the Pettibone kid, and suddenly my hurt ribs were howling, and he looped an arm around my throat, choking me from behind, yanking my head back, working at breaking my neck. I slipped my hand under myself and with minimal fumbling got the hunting knife from its sheath and with the thing clutched blade-down in my fist, brought it back and down and stabbed and sank it three inches into his right thigh, then yanked it back out, with a little blurp of blood.

  He screamed and reflexively relaxed his grip on my neck, and I bucked, threw him off, and got to my feet, only to find him sprawled on his back on the waterbed, trying to get his balance, like a bug on its shell wiggling its many little legs.

  I climbed onto him like I wanted to fuck him, but in case he was getting the wrong impression, I pressed a knee into his stomach. His mouth popped open like a fish begging for water.

  Which was an excellent goddamn idea.

  I lifted the hunting knife high, its wide, sharp blade winking at the wide-eyed man u
nder me, and his eyes were filled with terror, thinking I intended the blade for him; but instead I plunged it down, through the silk sheet, and into the bed. Water gurgled as I ripped open a foot-wide gash.

  Then I tossed the knife aside and shoved him through the slit and down under there, held him down with my hands on his neck, while he thrashed and got water everywhere, all over me, my sleeves drenched, but then I had all that blood from Sally on me, so I could stand cleaning up some. He kicked and slapped at the air but he didn’t touch me. Drowning takes a while, but with me also sort of strangling him, three minutes, more or less, did the trick.

  When I climbed off, he was halfway down inside the bed, which wasn’t emptying itself because the tear was on top, just kind of caving in, its contents sloshing. His gray shoes with the white laces were draped over the edge of the wooden framework, much of the rest of him submerged, his body lolling a little, maybe the way that girl Heather had, when she rolled into shore.

  I retrieved my knives. Found the bathroom and cleaned up, dried off, as best I could. I went downstairs to gather my coat and guns and things. Her red nightie soiled and rumpled and not at all sexy, Sally was on her back on the dirt floor, staring with the remaining big blue eye at the rough-beamed ceiling, her mouth dismayed, her cut throat grinning, a twenty-six-year-old teenager who would never be sixteen again. Or twenty-seven.

  Behind the wheel of the Pinto, halfway down the cornstalk lane, I shook my head.

  “Fucking amateurs,” I said.

  FOURTEEN

  I went back to the Holiday Inn and showered and fell naked into bed. You might think I’d have trouble sleeping, after that horror show, but you’d be wrong. I was drained of every ounce of energy and emotion, and the idea of getting on the road that very minute was out of the question.

  I slept till the seven A.M. wake-up call. Showered again and so on. Some of my clothing from last night was crunchy with dried blood and would have to be tossed rather than cleaned. I found a plastic dry-cleaning bag in the closet and put the things in that, and stuffed it in my suitcase, to dispose of later. My fleece-lined jacket hadn’t got any blood on it, which was a relief.