“Excuse the delay,” Broker said. “My wife and I were entertaining a houseful of guests, and it was most difficult getting away.”
“Having a party, huh, Broker? Well that’s one way to establish an alibi.”
“Please, Quarry.” His mustache quivered.
“You and your pretty wife are eating caviar and sipping cocktails and I’m out here in the rain getting my nuts shot off by a cripple.”
I could see Carl in the rearview mirror. I could see his face get tense. But he didn’t say anything.
I said, “You might be interested to know that my business in Port City has been settled, and without rousing the police or causing J. Edgar Hoover to rise from the dead.”
Broker’s expression turned grim. He nodded slowly and said, “I received a call from the party who contracted your services . . .”
“Mrs. Springborn, you mean.”
Broker couldn’t keep back the sharp look this time. But it passed quickly. He said, “The party informed me of your visit, and that you had promised to leave Port City.”
“That’s right.”
“And that you demanded and were paid an additional four thousand dollars. How do you think that makes me look? I’m not a blackmailer, Quarry, I won’t condone extortion.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh at the bastard or strangle him. I told him so.
“Quarry, please!” The Broker patted his hands at the air. “Please. I shouldn’t have brought up the subject.” He cleared his throat. “My friend, we could drag this out forever, shouting at each other, accusing each other of all sorts of things. You could tell me again of your distaste for that job at the airport, and reexpress your general displeasure with my management of your affairs these past several months. And I could remind you again of your unpardonable behavior in Port City, and, successful or not, could you really refute the insanity of staying on the scene after a job and, in the name of God, investigating? I think not. This is unfortunate, this is all most unfortunate, and rehashing all of our grievances will get us nowhere. I’m sorry our mutually beneficial working arrangement must be dissolved in so disagreeable a way, after so long a period of time. It’s obvious reconciliation is impossible. I’m fond of you, I really am, and you’ve done good work for me. But in recent days we’ve treated each other badly and have left our relationship in a state of damage beyond repair. Tonight, and I admit my judgment was faulty, tonight I tried to have you killed. Just as you, while working for me, betrayed our trust and kept for yourself valuable property belonging to me. Well, one hand washes the other, as they say, and I say let us dispense with past differences and get on with the business at hand.”
If he’d been running for something, I would’ve voted for him. The rain beat on the roof of the car like applause.
“Well, Quarry?”
“Okay,” I said.
The Broker nodded gravely and withdrew from his inside suitcoat pocket a thick, sealed envelope. He ripped the envelope open with a great sense of the dramatic, and displayed the thickness of green bills.
I dug into my pants pocket for the key. I handed it to him.
He said, “The airport? A locker at the airport?”
I nodded.
“Reckless,” the Broker said, softly, “most reckless.”
He handed me the envelope, without ceremony this time. I spread it open, ran my thumb across the edges of the bills. The bills were new and crisp; they even smelled new. I started to count the money, and from the corner of my eye I saw the Broker make a movement of his head and in the rearview mirror I saw Carl nod back.
And I saw that the glove compartment was open.
Sometime during Broker’s pompous speech, Carl had quietly opened the glove compartment.
Carl was watching me in the mirror to make sure I wasn’t watching him. I waited until his hand was inside the glove compartment and on the revolver and then I grabbed Broker by the arm and yanked him over hard and plastered myself against the door and Carl fired.
Carl fired and his bullet caught Broker in the right eye and the back of Broker’s head flew off and sprayed-splattered a surrealistic, mostly scarlet design across the back window.
There was a moment when it could have been over for me. Broker had fallen on me, a thousand pounds of dead Broker had fallen on my lap and I couldn’t get to the automatic, but somehow I shoved Broker over toward the other door and got my hands on the gun and brought it up to return fire.
I should have been dead by that time, but Carl had hesitated; he had hesitated and let his mind get in front of his reflexes. He had hesitated and had had time to realize what happened, to see through the smoke and red mist, to see Broker’s ghastly mutilated face, and Carl knew what he had done, and the look of horror on his face lasted only a fraction of an instant, because that was when the nine-millimeter came mercifully up and rested against his cheek and kissed his face into nothing at all.
Fingers fumbling, I unlocked the door, jerked the latch, rolled out of the car, gratefully crawled into the muddy gravel, choking on the smell of cordite, ears ringing from the explosion of Carl’s unsilenced revolver going off in the confines of the car.
My instinct was to leave immediately, just get the hell out. I got to the Ford and inside and drove up out of the quarry access road and by the time I was back onto the open area where the Buick was parked, the engine still purring, I had decided on a course of action. I guess it had been in my mind all along. If I’d been honest with myself, I would have admitted that my relationship with the Broker couldn’t have ended any other way. But I hadn’t faced the truth. I’d waited for the inevitable situation to come around, and had met it as though it were a surprise.
I placed my nine-millimeter automatic in Broker’s limp hand. I put Vince’s wrench under the front seat of the Buick. The investigating team would have a merry time sorting it all out. They’d get as far as a crossfire between Broker and Carl and then would face a maze leading at one turn to a locker in the Quad City Airport, a locker with a little plastic bag full of heroin in it, leading into an even vaster labyrinth of mob activity. Another turn of the maze would lead back to Port City and Boyd’s corpse and Albert Leroy and maybe even the Springborns. But not me. I’d be gone. Like I’d never been there.
I didn’t like leaving the nine-millimeter behind like that. The gun had been with me for a long time. But then so had Broker, and I was leaving a lot of things behind at the stone quarry on the river road.
30
* * *
* * *
A PRETTY GIRL in a yellow bikini was running and I didn’t see her. She bumped into me as I was getting out of my Opel GT and knocked me down. Her hair was long and just a shade lighter yellow than the bikini. She helped me up and smiled, her white teeth accented by the darkness of her tan, and excused herself. I told her not to worry about it and she smiled again and said that’s a nice car you have. I returned her smile and watched her bounce off, going on ahead to meet her boyfriend, who was waiting up by the penny arcade for her. They joined hands and, in step with each other, crossed the street and disappeared into the swarm of flesh on the beach.
Late August is a frantic time around Twin Lakes. The high school and college kids seem desperate to get every last drop of sun-and-fun squeezed out of the dying summer. I wasn’t moving near so fast, but then I didn’t have to start back to school after the weekend.
I’d come to the arcade hoping to play some pool, but the place was all but empty. It was too clear and hot a day to waste in here, for the kids anyway; the front end of the arcade was open to the street, with the beach just across the way, and a breeze blowing in from the lake was enough to keep me satisfied. I fed several dollars into a machine that gave me change and started in playing the various pinballs. I got lucky with a shooting machine, bagging damn near every jungle animal that reared its head over the green-painted metal bushes. But shooting got boring after awhile and I abandoned the machine and got myself a Coke and wandered outside, sip
ping it, to get closer to the breeze. Before long I found myself staring at the phone booth on the sidewalk in front of the arcade.
Was it too soon to call her? Or maybe too late. I’d been back in Wisconsin four days now, and this was the first time I’d stuck my nose outside my A-frame cottage, other than to swim and fish in the lake that came up to my backyard. Mostly I stayed inside and watched television, listened to my stereo, cooked myself TV dinners. And sat around feeling paranoid.
Boyd had said I was getting paranoid and maybe he was right. Broker was dead and I should’ve felt fine, nothing to worry about, but I was sitting around like a man expecting a heart attack. I’d even dug out that .38 I’d smuggled back years ago from Nam, and I was carrying it with me all the time, ready to take a potshot at the first thing that moved.
Of course I did have some legitimate cause for concern. Broker had kept me necessarily in the dark about the larger aspects of my work. Perhaps Broker had been some kind of regional manager, reporting back to higher-ups somewhere; if that was true, my name would be known to those higher-ups, of course, and maybe they could put two and two together regarding Broker’s demise and come up with me.
And there was that white powder in that little plastic bag. From what I knew of Broker’s work, he shouldn’t have been involved with that kind of thing. He’d always insisted that he wasn’t hooked up to the mob, that we did only piece work for the Family. But suppose Broker was directly linked with mob people? Then what? If paranoia is when you think people are out to get you, then are you still paranoid when people are out to get you? I mean, shit. It isn’t pleasant sitting in a room knowing maybe some stranger’s going to walk in off the street with a gun.
The operator told me how much money and I dropped the coins in. I listened to the phone ring and pictured the apartment in my mind and she answered. “Hello?” she said.
I said nothing.
“Hello,” she said, “who is this? Hello?”
“Hello, Peg.”
“. . . Quarry?”
“Hello, Peg.”
“God. God, Quarry. You’re alive.”
“How are you, Peg?”
“The papers were full of blood the day after you left. The papers are still talking about it. It’s horrible.”
“Oh?”
“When Vince turned up dead, I thought . . . but you couldn’t have done that to him. The papers said his body was . . . you didn’t do that to him.”
“Peg.”
“Yes?”
“It’s good to hear your voice.”
“It’s good to hear . . . Quarry, people are in town asking questions.”
“What sort of people?”
“I don’t know. Different sorts. FBI. People like that.”
“I see. What sort of questions they asking?”
“I don’t know for sure. They haven’t talked to me yet. I hope they don’t. I don’t know what I’m going to say to them if they do.”
“Don’t say anything.”
“You know I won’t tell them anything about you. But what about me? My mind’s full of what I can’t tell anybody.”
“Forget all that.”
“How can. I? Quarry?”
“Yes?”
“Why did you call?”
“I wanted to talk to you. I’d like to see you again, Peg.”
“Quarry . . .”
“Not right away, maybe, but I want to see you. I have some money saved up, Peg. I could help you. Maybe you and I could . . .”
“Quarry, what are you talking about?”
“Peg.”
“I’m just a broad you shacked up with once. For a fucking day, at that. Why talk like it’s something else?”
“It is something else.”
“How do you know? How do you know you’re not just another one-night stand for me, huh? I’m a one-night stand sort of person, you know.”
“I feel something for you, Peg.”
“Oh, Quarry, goddamn you . . .”
“I want to see you again.”
“I don’t know.”
“What? You don’t know what?”
“I don’t know if I want to see you.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve been thinking, Quarry. I’ve been thinking about things that happened while you were in town. I’ve been thinking about certain things you said. I’ve been thinking about what’s been in the papers.”
“Forget all that.”
“Okay. Okay I will. But first I want you to tell me something. I want you to tell me what you do. What do you do, Quarry? You said you were like Frank. Something illegal. Okay. I can live with that. But be specific. What is it you do, Quarry?”
I kill people.
“You kill people, don’t you?” she said.
I said nothing.
“Good-bye, Quarry,” she said.
The line went dead.
I played with the shooting machine for another half an hour, and when I quit there were ten free games left on it. Then I went back to my A-frame and for the rest of the afternoon I swam.
Afterword
* * *
* * *
I BEGAN THIS novel in 1971 when I was studying at the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. I was in my last semester, and my mentor, Richard Yates, was no longer teaching there. My current instructor was William Price Fox, the gifted humorist, who was not impressed with my opening chapters, nor were many of the other students in my workshop section (each week the class dissected several stories or chapters by fellow students). Several in class, however, came to my defense and even singled out what I’d done as the best thing they’d seen that year.
Fox and a handful of other instructors who—unlike that fine mainstream fiction writer Yates—had been dismissive of my work suddenly changed their tune, and even claimed me as a prize student, when my first two novels, Bait Money and No Cure for Death, sold later that same final semester. Only one other writer in the program sold anything professionally that year. (Both novels were written under Yates’ tutelage.)
I was generally considered an eccentric black sheep at the workshop, but having a mentor like Yates offset that. Several other of my instructors also championed me to various degrees, including Gina Berriault and Walter Tevis. But no respectability had been granted by the workshop to genre fiction, and as a budding mystery writer, I had an uphill battle. My thesis was developing three novels that demonstrated crime fiction could be written using a common Midwestern smalltown setting (the fictional Port City, based upon my hometown Muscatine, Iowa, where I still live) rather than the much more common New York or Los Angeles. Regionalism was just around the corner for mystery fiction, but I didn’t know that.
The thesis consisted of Bait Money, No Cure for Death and the unfinished Quarry. My memory is fuzzy (not advancing age—it’s always been fuzzy) but I believe I set Quarry aside to write sequels to the two novels that had already sold. Quarry was probably finished by around late 1972 or ’73. It did not sell till 1975.
The idea behind Quarry was two-fold. I’d already followed my other mentor, Donald E. Westlake, into writing about a thief (Bait Money was an homage to his Richard Stark-bylined Parker series, homage being French for “rip-off”). I had trained to write private eye fiction but the times were wrong for that, and also wrong for cop heroes—cops were guys with nightsticks clubbing friends of mine at the ’68 Chicago Convention. So the anti-hero crook was a convenient retreat for a writer who was (as my first agent Knox Burger put it) “a blacksmith in an automotive age.”
But I thought Parker and Nolan were to some degree cop-outs. They were “good” bad guy thieves—oh, sure, hardbitten as hell, but they stole mainly money and only killed other bad guys. In the ’60s, banks and the Establishment in general were worthy targets of fantasy revenge. Also, “Richard Stark” and I both wrote our crook books in the third-person. Safe. Detached.
I wanted to take it up a notch—my “hero” would be a hired killer
. The books would be in first person. In the opening chapter, Quarry would do something terrible, giving readers an early chance to bail; late in the book he would again do something terrible, to confront readers with just what kind of person they’d been easily identifying.
And Quarry himself would be somebody like me, just a normal person in his early twenties—not a child of poverty or cursed by a criminal background, but a war-damaged Vietnam veteran. I had a good friend (now deceased) who was very much like Quarry—a sweet, smart, funny guy who had learned to kill people for “Uncle Sugar.”
In addition, I wanted to make a comment about Americans in general—that we had, through Vietnam, become numb to death. That we had grown used to watching body bags being loaded onto planes even as we ate our TV dinners taking in the nightly news.
This book, when originally published in 1976 by Berkley Books, was retitled The Broker. This was done without my permission or even knowledge. When my character Quarry grew into something of a cult favorite by the 1980s, and I was approached by Foul Play Press to have the first four published in trade paperback, I restored the original title. Now those Foul Play Press reprints are as rare as the original paperbacks, and I’m pleased that John Boland’s Perfect Crime is bringing those first novels, and the fifth Quarry written in the mid-’80s, back into print.
Quarry apparently is again a cult favorite, in part because Hard Case Crime invited me to write several new novels about him. But I never forget what Don Westlake told me: “A cult favorite is seven readers short of the author being able to make a living.”
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