Quarry's Vote

by Max Allan Collins

  And there had been, but so what? That was al­most always true.

  “I understand,” she said, nodding sagely, and came over and hugged me, gun and all.

  The girl’s new insight into me apparently came from her adding the truth that I’d been in combat to the lie about my sainted mom and pop being shot down in their grocery store. I was just a poor, sensitive, traumatized soul, wasn’t I?

  I wasn’t packing the gun when we drove down to Chicago for the day, however, though one of the three automatics was in the glove compartment. We were picking up her brother Chris at O’Hare early that evening—he was coming in from Atlanta, Georgia—and Linda suggested we go in early, spend a day in the city Christmas shopping. Even mid-week, the city was jammed with traffic, side­walks packed with people, and was a good reminder of why I lived on a quiet lake.

  She shopped at Water Tower Place, six floors of trendy expensive nonsense, equal parts marble, glass, plants and people; it was the sort of shop­ping center where women in mink coats rode es­calators. I quickly found my way to the theater com­plex and parked my butt in a fairly comfortable seat and watched Clint Eastwood pretend to be a ma­rine for a couple of hours. I met Linda for lunch at a cafe next to the theater—where two people could have pie and coffee and get just enough change back from a twenty to leave a tip—and she was bubbling over about the things she’d bought, including several hundred bucks worth (using the word “worth” loosely) of metal signs, replicas of vin­tage advertisements for Coca Cola, Crackerjacks, Heinz pickles and so on, for decoration in the Wel­come Inn’s rustic dining room. She’d also bought some presents for me, which she was dying to tell me about but managed to contain herself. She was a sweet kid. I didn’t deserve her, but then who does deserve what they get in this life, good or bad?

  We walked to Gino’s East a few blocks over and shared a medium pepperoni pizza, the best deep dish pizza (so they said) in a town famous for deep dish pizzas. The walls were carved up with graffiti (it was encouraged—it gave the place atmosphere, and having your customers provide the decoration made more sense than buying little tin advertising signs yourself) and she coaxed me into carving our names there. Too many romance novels. What the hell, I did it, using the serrated part of a table knife, a heart with Jack and Linda in it, squeezed between THE BOSS FOREVER and BON JOVI SUCKS.

  I never met her brother before, and when he showed up—his flight an hour late, his only bag a tan leather carry-on—I wasn’t sure I wanted to. He was very blond, very tan, and prettier than Linda. He wore a loose-fitting pastel blue shirt and off-white, baggy, pleated linen pants; he also wore huaraches and no socks.

  “Sis!” he said, beaming, and hugged her. Then he backed away, with her still in his arms and said, “I’m freezing my nuts off.”

  What kind of dildo would fly into Chicago in November dressed like the fucking beach? This kind of dildo.

  “Here,” I said, and gave him my plaid hunting jacket. “It isn’t Ralph Lauren, but it’ll keep you warm.”

  “Why, thanks, sport,” he said, and he had a nice smile, white teeth in a face as tan as his Gucci carry­on. He slipped the jacket on and it fit him fine. Well, in terms of size it fit him fine.

  “I thought I’d never get here,” he said, slipping his arm around her shoulder. She looked up at him adoringly. I fell back, following them down the wide aisle toward the main concourse. “All these delays, and the turbulence? I’d have lost my lunch, if I’d eaten any.”

  “You look great, Chris.”

  “I feel terrific.”

  “Are you being careful?”

  “I’m being careful.”

  She’d never mentioned her brother was gay, but I had figured it out. First he lived in San Francisco, then in Atlanta—both centers of such activity—and he was thirty-five and unmarried. I know you can be thirty-five and unmarried and live in one of those cities and not be gay, but not when you have a succession of male roommates, and particularly not when you have a sister who cries every time she reads about AIDS in the papers.

  “Safe sex,” she said, shaking a lecturing finger at him.

  “I know, I know.”

  “But you broke up with Ray . . .”

  “I’m looking for a monogamous relationship. I’m not by nature promiscuous.”

  I stopped listening about then. I wasn’t interested in the conversation, and I was distracted by the sight of Preston Freed’s clean-cut disciples peddling his Democratic Action party magazines and bumper stickers (the latter seemed pro-nuclear energy and anti-Jane Fonda).

  I went and got the car, not minding the cold at all, and picked them up amongst the cabs. He squeezed in back, behind me, with Linda’s many packages, and she sat in front but looking his way. They chattered all the way back, mostly about his work (he was an artist, and had had some gallery showings in several cities—an abstract painting in pastels of his hung at the A-frame, and I didn’t mind it). Later in the conversation Linda revealed that she was “expecting,” and he seemed thrilled, maybe even envious. He patted me on the shoulder and I smiled at him in the mirror.

  “I’ll make a fabulous uncle,” he said. “I just love kids.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted the details.

  Finally, I pulled in the restaurant parking lot, and Linda said, “It’s getting a little late—I’d rather wait till tomorrow to show Chris around the Inn.”

  “Why don’t you kids go back and chat,” I said, getting out of the car. “I have something here I want to work on.”

  “Jack,” she said, “come with us—we’ll make a fire, have some drinks . . .”

  “I’ll be home by midnight,” I said. “You have a lot to talk about. Family stuff. You’ll both see plenty of me over the next week.”

  She seemed a little disappointed, but she smiled anyway, said, “Okay, honey,” and slid over into the driver’s seat. Chris got out of the back and got in front next to her.

  Gravel stirred as they pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road. I went into the Inn and set­tled myself at the bar and watched the Tonight Show and then David Letterman and drank a cou­ple of caffeine-free Diet Cokes. I wanted to sleep tonight.

  “You okay, Jack?” Charley wondered. Business was slow and he was sitting on a stool behind the bar, watching TV, too. He was bald and round and wrinkled, a friendly old hard-ass.

  “Ungh,” I said.

  “Your wife’s brother’s arrived,” he said, smiling on one side of his face, nodding.

  “Yeah.” I shrugged.

  “That comes with the territory. In-laws.”

  “He seems like an okay guy.”

  “I’m sure he is.”

  “His idea of a good time is sticking his dick in some guy’s hairy asshole, but hey, who am I to judge?”

  “Don’t be an asshole, yourself, Jack. We can’t choose our relatives. Besides, maybe he prefers bein’ the stickee.”

  “I know, I know. I got nothin’ against the guy.”

  “You just don’t like fags.”

  “I don’t give a shit about that.”

  And I didn’t. I worked with one for many years, and he was, for the most part, as good a partner as any. Why somebody’s sex life should be of con­cern to somebody else is beyond me, anyway.

  “You just like your privacy,” he said.

  “Why don’t you polish a glass or something? Do I pay you to watch television?”

  “Fuck you, Jack,” he said cheerfully. “You’re just like anybody else. You don’t like being invaded.”

  I shrugged again. “Our place isn’t big. Having an­other human being under foot for a week, well . . . fuck it, I’ll live.”

  “Sure you will. Why don’t you put him up here at the Inn? Business is slow.”

  That perked me up. “Not a bad idea. Of course, we got room for him at the A-frame—he was going to crash on the couch in the loft . . .”

  “You want my advice? You got a sweet little girl there. Don’t cause her any trouble. Show h
er and her brother a nice time—take ’em to Lake Geneva, and Twin Lakes, and do touristy shit—eat at a nice restaurant every night. Days, find work to do up here, give ’em some space. She can drive him around and show him antique shops and shit. She’s going to want to spend time with him, and you can cover for her at the restaurant, or work on cars or do any damn thing you want. We got plumbing problems upstairs, y’know, if you’re ambitious.”

  “That makes sense, Charley.”

  “And at night, well you send the boy up here where he has a private room. He can even enter­tain an occasional guest, if he likes. Beats sleep­ing on a couch.”

  “Charley,” I said, and smiled a little, climbed off the stool, “forget about polishing a glass. Watch TV till your eyes burn, if you want. You just earned your keep.”

  “No problem, Jack. Just remember that faggot is all the family your little wife has in the world.”

  “Well,” I said, thinking about what was growing inside her, “that’s not entirely true, but I appreci­ate the sentiment. I know I got a good thing going. I’m no fool. I’m not about to fuck it up.”

  He nodded and turned his attention back to the tube.

  I walked outside and started back home. It was less than half a mile to the turn-in, off of which was my drive. The night was cold, particularly with me minus my hunting jacket, and overcast; the moon was glowing behind some clouds up there, not hav­ing any luck getting through. About half-way home I noticed a car parked alongside the road. Headed north. I was walking north, but on the other side of the road. It was a dark blue late-model Buick and the man behind the wheel was pale and blond and skeletal. He wore a black turtleneck sweater. He didn’t look at me as I passed.

  There was no reason for him to be parked there. He wasn’t parking in front of a house or anything.

  The house he was parked nearest to belonged to Charley, a quarter-mile away, and no other houses were immediately around; it was a gently wooded area near the lake, after all.

  His plates were Illinois. Rock Island County. The Quad Cities.

  Where the Broker had lived.

  Without picking up my pace, I walked into the brush lining the road, wanting to make myself less of a target. I was not armed. My shoulder holster was in the closet; the other guns were in their usual positions in glove compartment and nightstand drawer. But the house was nearby, and all I had to do was get in there first.

  My past had come looking for me; the lingering feeling I’d had that I’d fucked up had been valid. I’d chosen the wrong fucking option.

  Well, it wasn’t too late. All I had to do was get inside that house and get one of my guns, and I’d start exploring other options.

  I went in the side, rear door, quietly as I could; it was after midnight, but I figured Linda would still be up, talking to her brother in front of the fire. Lights were on in the front part of the house, so that seemed a safe assumption. I hoped to get in and get my gun and go back out, without alerting Linda or our house guest I’d even been home.

  I opened the drawer of the nightstand, felt inside; my hand touched the cold gun.

  That was when I noticed that Linda was in bed already, but she hadn’t made a sound; I hadn’t dis­turbed or frightened her, either, coming in as I had.

  Because she was dead.

  4

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  HE DIDN’T HEAR me come up behind him.

  I had slipped out of my shoes. Left them in the bedroom, next to the bed, where what had been Linda was soaking up the sheets, getting them red. She hadn’t suffered; that was something. My guess is she’d been asleep. He’d put one in her head, and three more in her chest and stomach. But it was clear she hadn’t stirred. She was on her side, like a fetus. His first shot, the head shot, had been enough. Why the other three?

  And so I had walked on shoeless feet in the dark­ness through my familiar house and had made not a sound. It was something I had learned to do a long time ago and apparently, like riding a bike, it sticks with you. I was right up behind him, be­fore he sensed me, and before he could turn, my gun was in his neck.

  “You fucked up,” I said. My voice sounded strange to me. Probably to him, too. But to me it sounded distant. Like something playing on tele­vision in another room.

  He didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t blame him. He was just a dark shape standing over the corpse of my brother-in-law. Chris was seated in my big soft leather chair, facing the dying fire, which was the only light in the room; a beer that had been in his hand had spilled onto the floor, soaking our new carpet. Linda had picked it out just a few months before; carpet samples had littered the floor for days.

  “You killed the wrong man,” I said.

  “Please,” he said.

  “He was my brother-in-law. I loaned him my jacket, and you took him for me. Nice piece of work, dipshit. Toss the gun to the floor. Underhand toss. Now.”

  He did. It was a nine-millimeter, too, but not a Browning: a Luger with a rather bulky homemade silencer attached.

  “Turn around, slow.”

  He did, and as he did, I stepped back and had a look at the man who had taken so much from me. He wasn’t big, he wasn’t small—about my size, five-ten, heavy-set but not fat; he was perhaps thirty. He was in a black sweatshirt and black pants and black gloves. He had short dark hair and dark fright­ened eyes in a round, pale face dotted by several dark moles. His cheeks had Nixon shadow.

  “He doesn’t even look like me,” I said, gesturing to dead Chris. “He’s got blond hair, for Christ’s sake.”

  He didn’t know what to say. His lower lip was trembling. He knew he was going to die. He knew there was nothing he could say that would change that. Maybe I could make him believe otherwise.

  “I understand,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I understand.”

  “Understand?”

  “That you’re just hired help.”

  His eyes tensed.

  “That this is nothing personal. I used to be in this business myself. I was a hell of a lot better at it than you, and I never killed a whole fucking fam­ily, but . . .” I got ahold of myself and smiled tightly at him. “. . . but I want you to think about telling me who sent you. If you do that, I might give you a pass.”

  He shook his head. “They’d kill me.”

  “What do you think I’ll do?” I said, and I whapped him on the side of the head with the nine-millimeter. He went down on the soft carpet, hard. He was out, or pretending to be, a trickle of blood like a red thread down his temple. I took off my belt and quickly lashed his wrists behind him. I kicked his gun under the sofa. I could have used the thing, the silencer would’ve come in handy, but I didn’t want to touch it. Not that gun.

  I went to the door. Before I dealt with him, I had to deal with the back-up man. The man who’d been parked alongside the road. He might be gone, now. Seeing me come bopping along, when I was sup­posed to be home getting shot, might have sent him running. Or he might be coming in any min­ute now to help his partner. Those were pretty much the probabilities.

  Thinking it over, I went back through the dark house to the side door. You could smell death in that house. I’d forgotten that, or anyway hadn’t thought about it in a long time. The smell of it. Of blood. Of shit. Of death.

  I opened the back door and he was standing there, on the steps, about to come in, a ghostly pale presence in black, skinny and taller than me and with a revolver in his hand. A fucking revolver! Even his idiot friend knew enough to carry a silenced au­tomatic . . .

  Him standing there was a surprise to me, but then he was surprised to see me, too, so we both lost about the same amount of time and before he could raise and fire his revolver, I kicked his balls up in him. He howled and doubled over and I kicked the gun out of his hand, thankful that he hadn’t fired it reflexively. Then I slapped him with the nine-millimeter and he looked up
at me with a face as pale as a sick child; cheek streaked with blood, eyes begging, he said, “No . . . please no . . .”

  I slapped him again with it and he went down on the small cement area, like so much kindling.

  I really didn’t want to shoot him with the nine-millimeter. I hadn’t had time to map any of this out, but I knew I wanted to contain it; I knew I didn’t want to fill the night with gunfire. I was hovering over him indecisively when he reached out and grabbed my ankle and sat me down hard on my ass.

  He didn’t want to stick around to fight; he didn’t even bother looking for the revolver he dropped. He just wanted to get away from me, from here, from everything. He ran, ran back toward the brush and trees that separated my house from the road, where his car waited. He was perhaps fifty feet away when I hefted the nine-millimeter and hurled it, hit­ting him in the back of the head, sending him face down to the ground. He didn’t move. Maybe he really was unconscious this time.

  Enough fucking around. I went over to the wood­pile and got the axe and went over to him and swung and it split his head like a melon.

  Some of him splashed on my face and I knelt and untucked his sweatshirt in back and wiped my­self off. On the ground around him, I felt around for the nine-millimeter; found it. Over nearer the house I found his revolver, which I heaved into the trees. Then I went back in the house where his part­ner was waking up.

  “Your partner seems to have taken off without you,” I said.

  “Oh God,” he said, quietly, pitifully. He was sit­ting up, hands still behind him. He was sitting next to Chris, who sat in my big comfortable chair star­ing with vacant eyes at the fire, which was damn near out by this time.

  I untied his hands, put the gun in my waistband, slipped my belt back on. I stood over him, but didn’t want to wave the gun in his face. Wanted him to think he might have some chance, at some point, to overpower me.

  “And now,” I said, “you’re going to tell me who sent you. I think I know. But you’re going to tell me . . .”

  He shook his head. “You’re going to kill me any­way.”