The mark was a real estate agent, a prosperous one. A congenial, well-dressed little man in his early fifties with a toupee and a weight problem. He had an office in the tallest building in the business district of a large Southwestern city, a hundred-thousand-dollar ranch-style house out in the country, a wife, no kids, three poodles, and mob connections.
Now, the Broker claimed not to be in the direct employ of the so-called Mafia or Family or whatever, and most of the people I helped kill had nothing to do with the mob, or, anyway, that’s what I was told. But some of what those of us who worked through the Broker did was unquestionably mob related, and this supposedly fell into the area of piece- work we did for them now and then, hits that for some reason or another would be better handled by outside people.
And there was no doubt that this Southwestern real estate agent had mob connections. Unless you don’t consider it a little unusual for your average real estate agent to be constantly accompanied by bodyguards.
Not that they looked like bodyguards, those two guys that were always at his side. They looked like real estate agents. They were not particularly big: one of them was a sandy-haired man in his thirties who was five-eight, solidlooking but no bruiser; and the other was of similar age and height, only with brown hair, a round face, and a paunch. Neither man looked especially sinister.
But they were bodyguards, all right. No mistaking that. For instance, both of them chose to wear their suit coats at all times, even when standing out in the sun while their employer spent three hot hours one afternoon showing some of his outlying land holdings.
In the mornings they drove him to work in his yellow Cadillac. At lunch they ate at a table close by him in the restaurant on the bottom floor of his office building; they even went in with him when he used a public toilet. And in the late afternoon they drove him back to his house in the country, where their employer provided them quarters over the four-car garage. The weekends had them playing golf with him, among other things, but never mind.
The point is, they accompanied him constantly.
Except for his long lunch hours, Tuesdays and Thursdays, when he spent 12:30 to 2:30 P.M. in a sleazy little room at the Tuck-a-Way Motel, in the company of a sleazy little blonde, while the bodyguards went across the street to have lunch at a sleazy little diner.
And that, of course, was the perfect, easy way of hitting him.
The girl would be no trouble. Just shove her out of the way before the shooting started, knock her out if she got physical or vocal or anything. It would mean Ash had to pull on a stocking mask or something before going in the back window of the room and doing his thing, and he’d have to take the time to tie the girl up and gag her before cutting out, but that was a small price to pay. We certainly had no intention of killing the girl, and if that surprises you, think about it a minute.
In the first place, I was no homicidal maniac and I assumed Ash wasn’t, either. The Broker didn’t take on people who took pleasure in killing; he took on people who could kill dispassionately, and well.
Furthermore, kill one guy and it’s a killing; kill two or more and all of a sudden it’s a mass murder. The papers and TV start hollering psychopath on the loose, or in this instance splashing “Love Nest Slaying” all over the place, and pretty soon an unnatural interest has been stirred up in what otherwise would have been considered a routine occurrence, buried in the back pages of the papers, unworthy of more than a mention on the tube.
So when I was hired, as part of a team, to kill somebody, that one somebody got it, and nobody else. Period. Anything else is just plain bad business.
If I thought life was cheap, I wouldn’t charge so much to take one.
Anyway, the stakeout had been uneventful. Working backup is always boring, and for that reason I avoided it whenever possible; but this guy was especially boring. A goddamn robot. No variety whatsoever, every day the same clockwork run-through.
But thank God for Tuesday and Thursday, and those long lunches at the Tuck-a-Way Motel. Seeing him duck into that motel room, a few minutes after that cheap little blonde had done the same, and catching a glimpse of an awkward but impassioned embrace, made him seem almost human.
We took a week and a half, a full week of stakeout, just me alone, checking out what we’d been told about the mark’s habit pattern, and another half a week with Ash, joining me on stakeout, even spelling me one evening so I could catch a movie and relax a little, and just generally getting filled in from me on the mark’s pattern and the overall lay of the land.
Came Thursday of that second week, an uncharacter- istically cool and overcast day for the middle of July in the Southwest, and we were ready to go. I’d taken a room directly opposite theirs (or as directly opposite as possible, considering the motel was L-shape) and from the window we watched the two bodyguards deposit the mark at the door of the room, saw a flash of blond hair as the couple embraced, watched the two bodyguards exchange weary grins, shake their heads, and walk across the street to the greasy spoon, leaving their car behind in a stall by the room.
We waited five minutes, and Ash took off. He was going in through that back window, which we’d already broken the lock on this morning, having been in the motel room for a look around and to prepare. We’d considered having Ash simply wait inside, just hide in the room, but we figured there was always the outside chance the bodyguards would step inside and check the room over first. They hadn’t ever done that, but we couldn’t be sure. The stakeout had lasted only a week and a half, and I’d witnessed the ritual at the Tuck-a-Way a mere three times.
I have no idea why the bodyguards came back. They didn’t come back in a hurry, so they apparently hadn’t got wind of what we were up to. They could hardly have received a phone message for their boss over at the greasy spoon, unless they were in the habit of letting it be known they could be reached there Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, which was possible, I guessed. The nearest I could figure was the mark had forgotten to take his heart medicine (did I mention he had a bad heart?) but that’s just a guess.
At any rate, as I watched from the window, I suddenly realized the two guys who had strolled calmly into my line of vision were heading for the door of the same room I was watching, and shit! Fuck, if it wasn’t the fucking bodyguards!
Somehow I got there at the same time they did. I don’t really remember how. I ran, but had the presence of mind not to wave my gun around as I did; I was carrying it under a folded raincoat, which I had over my arm, and I didn’t even drop the raincoat as I sprinted across the motel court and went through that motel room door right as they were opening it, right behind them, knocking both of them to the floor, kicking the door shut behind me, slapping first one, then the other on the back of the head with my automatic, then slapping each of them on the back of the head again, to make sure they were out, and when I looked up I saw Ash standing there, smoke coming out of his silenced nine-millimeter, the mark sitting up in bed, naked, top of his head gone, toupee and all, the girl in a naked, unconscious lump on the floor by the bed, and Ash said, “Jesus, Quarry. I guess I owe you one.”
I said I guessed he did, and suggested we get the fuck out of there.
But that was four years ago, and people have a way of forgetting. And if Ash hadn’t forgotten, he had a funny way of paying me back, sending people round to kill me and all.
Anyway, the situation had changed somewhat.
Now I owed him one.
8
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I LOOKED UP and saw Ash.
It was midafternoon, and I was in a phone booth. The booth was in the lobby of the Holiday Inn who’d sent “Raymond Drake” a room confirmation. The Holiday Inn was on the out- skirts of Davenport, Iowa, which is part of the Quad Cities, a half-million-plus metropolitan area straddling the Mississippi River; last time I was here I’d been on the Illinois side, at a
Howard Johnson’s in Rock Island, meeting the Broker.
I was calling Ash’s room to see if he was in or not. And if not, planned to go find a maid to bribe, so I could get in the room and poke around. While I was sitting there letting it ring, he walked right by me.
He didn’t see me. He was walking toward the coffee shop, glancing at a newspaper, and he didn’t see me.
I slid out of the wandered over to the check-in desk, and leafed absently through free-take-one brochures detailing fun things to do in the Cities. Ash was hanging his overcoat on a rack just inside the coffee shop. The doors were spread open and I could see him clearly. He took a stool at the counter, ordered from the menu, returned to reading his paper.
Something was different about him. What was it? He was wearing a more expensive-looking suit than he used to, and that fur-trimmed brown leather overcoat alone must’ve cost an arm and a leg, or at least an arm. But that wasn’t it, nor was it the slight gut he’d put on that on anybody but a slender type like him would be nothing.
It was the hair.
His curly red hair. He’d had it straightened. And styled, covering up his little bald spot. Ash had come up in the world, it seemed, and it had gone to his head. Straight to his head.
Having the overcoat with him meant one of two things: either he was on his way out, and stopping off at the coffee shop for something before he left; or he was just getting back from somewhere, and stopping off at the coffee shop for something before going back to his room.
Either way, his room would be empty for a while.
So I went into the coffee shop myself, head lowered, scratching my forehead, keeping my face obscured. I went straight to the coatrack. It was not a busy time of day, and the nearby register was, for the moment, unattended. Ash was drinking coffee, reading the paper; his back was to me.
I pretended to be looking above the coats, where hats were stowed, as if I’d lost something, keeping a low but aboveboard profile as my left hand dug into the right-hand pocket of Ash’s expensive overcoat, from which I took his room key, gave up my search for the imaginary item I’d lost among the hats, and left.
I did glance back, well out into the lobby, but Ash hadn’t noticed me, and neither had any of the coffee shop help, apparently.
I’m not going to waste time describing what Ash’s room looked like. If you’ve never seen a room in a Holiday Inn, you’re either from another planet or lucky. I looked in the closet, found four suits hanging, all of the same well-tailored, costly nature as the one I’d seen him wearing. Also a raincoat, several pair of shoes, several empty suitcases. His shaving gear was in the john. I poked through the bureau drawers, found nothing. Nothing that told me anything special, that is: shirts, shoes, ties, underwear, box of ammo. The ammo was no great surprise. After all, I didn’t figure he was here on vacation.
But then, I didn’t figure he was here to kill anybody, either. He had sent others to do that, in my case; and he was now supposedly in the process of moving into the bloodless end of the killing business, into the role of assigning jobs, not carrying them out. Still, Ash was in the habit of carrying a gun, and why should he be expected to change? The Broker never carried one, but Ash wasn’t the Broker; Ash had come up through the ranks. So the box of ammo was nothing special, probably. I covered it back up with some of his jockey shorts and closed the drawer.
I shook the room down pretty good, considering I didn’t want to leave a mess. Went through the pockets of any piece of clothing that had pockets, got nowhere. Found a note pad by the phone, the top sheet of which had some doodles on, but nothing decipherable. I did find another sheet, crumpled up in the wastebasket by the desk; I unwadded it and for my trouble got “apt 6.” In the John I dug through his shaving bag and found deodorant spray, toothpaste, toothbrush, shave cream, aftershave, an electric razor, and a bunch of other stuff that normally would’ve been unpacked by now. He’d been here overnight, and he wasn’t packing to leave, so why was all this stuff stuffed in the shaving bag? Ash was not exactly compulsively neat, you know.
Under the false bottom I found two spare .45 barrels, a spare silencer, a can of 3-in-1 oil, cleaning tools, and rag.
A box of ammo was one thing; this was something else again.
When I got back to the coffee shop, Ash was just finishing a plate of something. I dropped his key back in his overcoat pocket, and went out in the lobby. I was looking at the free brochures again, when Ash came out and headed for his room.
I’d had a good two minutes to spare.
9
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IT WAS COLD, sitting in the car, and after a while I turned the engine on and got the heat going. I had no idea how long a wait I’d have. Possibly Ash would stay in his room the rest of the day, on into evening; if he was coordinating the activities of others, subordinates might be coming directly to his motel room for instructions and to make reports, in which case he might not be coming out of there for days, or even weeks.
Of course, he’d already been out once today, which seemed to discredit the notion of his working strictly out of the Holiday Inn; but since he hadn’t been in town long, he might have gone out to set some things in motion, which only now enabled him to settle down in his room for a long winter’s nap.
And then I stopped worrying about it. It was warn in the car now, and I was comfortable, and as long as Ash didn’t stay in there forever, I was going to see him leave. The only way out of the parking lot, which separated the motel from the highway, was around front. And that’s where I was parked, sitting, waiting.
Dusk set in and it got hard to see the faces in the cars pulling out of the lot. I had the Buick parked toward the middle, so I could keep track of both exits, one on either side; but I doubted Ash would be heading out of town, which is the way the exit on the left would take him, so when dusk began turning to dark I moved the car to a free stall next to the exit on the right, assuming when Ash left the motel he’d be heading toward the Cities. At the same time I tried to keep tabs on the cars that were turning out that left way, toward the Interstate, but that was damn near impossible. There were a few streetlights and some light from the motel itself, but that wasn’t enough, and I soon gave up trying to monitor both exits, which is the reason why by midevening I was getting worried again, and bored and hungry, and I glanced at the driver in the car easing up alongside me, and it was Ash.
Again, he didn’t spot me. He was behind the wheel of a Ford LTD, and was looking both ways, checking traffic, and pulled out and drove toward Davenport.
So did I.
I followed him down Brady Street, with its four lanes and constant flow of cars to cover me, followed him down into a neon and plastic canyon of franchise restaurants, auto dealerships, and discount stores, which briefly leveled off exits into an improbably sedate middle-class neighborhood that might well have been offended by having all this traffic running through the middle of it. The intersection up ahead gave off the glare of another commercial district, but before we got there, Brady became a one-way going the other way, and Ash and I and the other cars were guided by directional signs onto a side street that skirted a peaceful-looking, snow-covered park right off a Christmas card, and then around onto another major street, Harrison, a one-way running downhill toward the river, running downhill in more ways than one, cutting through another commercial area that soon degenerated into what might be charitably called a lower middle-class neighborhood, and this is where Ash turned off, taking a right, plunging into the city’s unacknowledged black ghetto, a poorly lit, rundown area where sagging old double-story houses sat so close to each other the curls of peeling paint all but touched.
Up till now, there’d been plenty of traffic to hide behind, but not here. Ash was driving slow. The blocks were short, streets crisscrossing irregularly and often. It was a neighborhood you want to drive through quickly, but can’t. Ash,
in his new clothes and expensive car, was out of place, and so was I; I was bound to be spotted by him, before long. I laid back as much as possible, wondering what possessed Ash to cut through this part of town, and assumed he was on his way elsewhere, and then he pulled over.
Pulled over and parked, and I coasted by him moments later, face turned away, acting like a stranger lost and looking for a street address.
I figured he made me, made me a long time ago and sucked me in here and pulled over just to flush me out, and when I circled back around the block expected him to be long gone. He wasn’t. He was just sitting there, motor running, parked. I turned off a side street, to avoid passing right by him again, and came around from the other direction, and pulled in along the curb a block up from him, behind an old Volkswagen, which provided some cover for me but didn’t entirely block my view.
And so I sat. This time I didn’t dare leave my motor on, so I had to sit in the cold. I wondered if this was a Mexican stand-off of some kind. Wondered if Ash had in fact spotted me, perhaps even spotted me pulling in behind the Volks, and was waiting me out. If so, we might both have a long wait. I settled down in the seat, arms folded, hands tucked in my armpits to keep warm; in my right hand, of course, was the silenced nine-millimeter, providing its own sort of warmth.
I saw the kid immediately, rounding the corner just beyond the Volks I was parked behind. A white kid, long straight hair, full-face beard, old Navy surplus overcoat. Looked like a college kid, or perhaps college dropout or hanger-on. Hands in his pockets, strolling along, nice and easy. Maybe he was stoned; anyway, he moved that way.
Heading toward Ash’s parked car.
The kid—if that’s what he was—got in on the rider’s side and soon I could see smoke curling and collecting in there, as he and Ash sat in the car smoking as they talked. And they talked a long time. A solid half-hour.
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