“Did my husband introduce us?”
“No. I spoke to him, but not in front of you.”
“How’d you manage that?”
“Wasn’t hard. We met in the toilet We talked in toilets a lot, your husband and me. It was that kind of relationship.”
“Jack, I . . . I’d rather you didn’t go into any of that. I . . . there are some things I’d really rather not know, Jack. I don’t think I could handle knowing some things, you know?”
“Sure. Forget it. I didn’t mean to bring any of that up, anyway.”
“Listen, why . . . why don’t I get us something to drink?” She was standing there in bra and panties with a plaid woolen blanket she’d got from somewhere shrugged around her shoulders.
Her eyes were big and clear and blue, and she looked like a kid. Funny, in that restaurant that time, I’d thought she was in her mid-thirties, thought she looked cold, the frigid bitch type, figured her for a wealthy, worldly, well-educated pain in the ass. Now, I knew she was in her late twenties and young for that, and anything but cold or a bitch, and no matter how many times she may have been to Europe or the Bahamas, worldly she wasn’t, and no matter how many private schools for girls she’d suffered through, there was a lot this girl had yet to learn.
“I have bourbon in the cabinet,” she said.
“Just put some Coke in a glass,” I said. “Nothing hard for me.”
She touched my leg and grinned in a way I hadn’t seen since last night. “Maybe I’m in the mood for something hard.”
“Maybe you better let me catch my breath,” I grinned back. “For now, just some Coke and ice, okay?”
She went over to the kitchen area, dragging her blanket, and I flashed the little lamp across a few more pictures. Many of them were of the Broker and Carrie in shots similar to that one I’d lingered over, some of the photos taken here at the cottage and on the river, others sunny vacation pictures, the Bahamas, Florida, what-have-you. I skimmed right over one picture, thinking it was the Broker and Carrie with some unknown fellow vacationer, then something clicked in my head and I went back to it, lifted it in its frame off the wall, and gave it a close look.
The picture was of three people dressed in white tennis garb, rackets in hand, leaning against the wire-mesh fence of a court somewhere. One of them was the Broker, all right, but years ago. His face had never been lined, but it had gotten fleshy over the years, and in this picture his face was firm and lean, and his hair dark brown, with a few streaks of the premature white that would eventually take over. Next to him was a beautiful woman, who looked remarkably like Carrie, but was someone else, someone obviously related to her, an older sister perhaps. The woman was, in the picture, perhaps eighteen or twenty, and she had the same naturally white-blond hair as Carrie, only worn in the pageboy style of the times. It wasn’t a color picture, but her eyes were light and clear and probably as blue as Carrie’s, and only something slightly different around the nose and mouth made the woman less than a dead ringer for Carrie.
“My mother,” she said, looking over my shoulder. She set the glass of Coke on the desk.
“Who’s this next to her?” I asked, pointing at the guy on the woman’s left. Broker was on her right.
“That’s my father,” she said.
“I see. Is there a story here?”
“I guess so. Sort of. Both of them loved her. They all three went to school together—college, I mean—back east someplace. My father ended up marrying her.”
“And the other guy in the picture waited around a few years and then settled for you, is that it?”
“You make it sound sick or something . . .”
“Sorry.”
“Maybe I can make you understand . . .”
“Please.”
She didn’t have the whole story, having just heard pieces of it, over the years. She gathered that her father and the Broker had been close friends before her mother came between them, and it wasn’t until some few years later, with her mother’s early death, that the two men resumed their friendship, perhaps out of a need to console each other. At any rate, she’d grown up having two fathers around, in a way, though the real one paid little attention to her (“He was busy, out of town on business a lot, still is . . . his firm handles cases all over the place”), though doting on her younger sister who didn’t bear such a painfully close resemblance to their dead mother. Her surrogate father, however, the kindly old Broker, didn’t shun Carrie for looking like her mother, rather his reaction was to worship the child for it. And she liked the attention of a doting father figure; she had settled for that, in lieu of the real thing. “I always told him I was going to marry him, when I grew up,” she said, “and I did. And if you want to make something sick out of that, that’s your problem.”
She’d been frank with me, but there was one thing she’d sluffed over, and I had to go back to it, even at the risk of upsetting her further.
“Your mother,” I said.
“What about my mother?”
“You said she died. You didn’t say how.”
“She was an alcoholic.”
“That doesn’t have to kill you.”
“It did her. I was a little girl when it happened. She killed herself in a car.”
“An accident.”
“Or something. Look, I really don’t want to talk about any of this anymore, if you don’t mind. I mean, it’s not really . . . relevant to anything, after all, is it? And, I . . . well, I have certain . . . wounds that never really healed over, in my life, you know? So don’t ask me to go picking at them.’’
“Okay.”
She dropped the blanket to the floor in a woolen puddle and sat on my lap and put her arms around my neck. “Why don’t we go sit by the fire. It’s going to die out if you don’t tend to it.”
“Let me ask you something first.”
She sighed. Stiffened.
“I won’t pick at any wounds,” I said. “I promise.”
“Go ahead and ask, then.”
“Your husband . . . did he do much work down here, at the cottage? You said he was down here a lot.”
“He was, and he did do some work down here, sometimes, but nothing important, I don’t think. Just fiddled.”
“What do you mean?”
“He just worked on minor stuff down here. Like his mail-order businesses. Checking the books and like that. He liked checking his own books. He had a streak of accountant in him. Now, are you going to keep that fire going or not?” She nuzzled my neck.
Earlier, after making love, she’d got me to take a shower with her, in this same coaxing way.
“You win,” I said, and dumped her onto the blanket on the floor.
“Ouch! You’re a bully.”
I picked her up, blanket and all, and deposited her in front of the dwindling fire. It didn’t take long to get the fire going again, and she put her head on my lap, supposedly to go to sleep, but since my lap was her pillow she began smoothing it like one, and then pretty soon her head was in my lap, and then later, finally, she did fall asleep, curling into a fetal position, cuddling in against me, the blanket around her. I sat with her an hour watching the fire, not feeding it any more wood, letting it sputter and die, since the fog might lift and chimney smoke betray us.
She was sleeping soundly, now, and wouldn’t be doing much complaining about me letting the fire go out, so I again lifted her in my arms, a heavy little bundle in her blanket, and took her over to the double bed and tucked her in.
Then I went back to the desk and started going through drawers.
22
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A NOISE WOKE me, and for a moment I thought I was home, back in Wisconsin, and then I remembered where I was, in a cottage all right, but a different one, and on a river, not a lake. The circle had come around and this was ending as it began, with me waking up in the middle o
f the night, hearing somebody who was coming in to try and kill me.
Me and someone else, this time.
I was on the bed with Carrie, but not under the covers with her, just stretched out on my back, with all my clothes on, on top of the blankets, the silenced Ruger on my stomach, the .38 snug in my waistband. I hadn’t really intended to fall asleep, but hadn’t fought it either, despite the fact I was expecting a caller.
After all, I knew who my caller would be, and how he’d come in. Right now, for instance, he was working a key in the front door, just as I’d known he would. That wasn’t the noise that woke me, though . . . it was the sound of him creeping up the outside steps; soundlessly, I suppose he thought. If so, he thought wrong. I’d heard him, and was awake, and by the time that key was slipping in the lock on the door, I was almost smiling.
I leaned over and put a hand across Carrie’s mouth and nudged her awake with my other hand, put my lips to her ear, and whispered, “We have company . . . be quiet, and don’t panic.”
The beam of a big heavy flashlight was probing the porch area, the door between the rooms having a window through which we could see our intruder and his light, though in the total darkness of the place he didn’t see us yet. But he would soon.
Very soon, as now he was opening that door between rooms, that door with the window we’d been observing him through, and he stepped inside, into the room where we were on the bed in the far right corner, and I shoved Carrie off onto the floor, so she’d be between bed and wall and not in any line of fire, and took a couple of silenced shots with the Ruger at the source of the beam beginning to poke around the room.
By source I mean the flashlight itself, not the man carrying it, but I wasn’t used to the Ruger and it was dark in there and I nicked his arm with one shot and I don’t know where the other shot went, but the flashlight tumbled to the ground and some other metal thing did, too, as the guy slammed back against the door he’d just opened, then got the hell out and was clomping down those outside steps he’d come up so carefully minutes ago, before I was even off the bed.
Not that I was in a great hurry. I did get off the bed and turn to the window, which was right above where Carrie was on the floor, cowering, and I threw the lock and forced the window up and saw the guy running out there in the fog, which had thinned a bit, running off the gravel and splashing into the marshy area, an instinctive move I guess, an attempt to find a shortcut maybe, or lose himself as a target in the snarl of brush and branches and bog. All it served to do, of course, was slow him down, and he was hardly off the road, only a dozen feet from the house, when I yelled, “Ash!”
He froze a second, then trudged on a step.
He was well within range, and knew it, and I hardly had to yell at all when I leaned out the window and said, “Ash! You can stop, or I can stop you. Choose.”
He chose to stop. He turned. Shrugged and grinned up at me, though as he shrugged the pain in his left arm where I’d nicked him made his grin turn into a wince. He walked back up onto the gravel of the drive and called up to me, “I’ll wait here for you.”
“You’ll be covered from the window,” I said, “so stay put while I come to you.”
I tugged the .38 out of my belt and gave the gun to Carrie, who was still wide-eyed and quivering on the floor, back to the wall. She took it, but the gun lay in her palm like a stone, and she looked at it like she didn’t know what the hell it was.
“Hey,” I said. “Snap out of it.”
She cupped the gun in both hands, pushed it toward me, her eyes pleading.
“You won’t have to shoot at anybody,” I said. “Just aim it at that guy out there till I can get to him. It’ll take me a couple minutes to get there, because I don’t know for sure he came alone, and I have to be careful and do it kind of slow. Okay? Now if he starts to run or anything, anything that seems wrong to you, fire the gun, but you don’t have to aim it at him. The sound will stop him. I know him, and believe me, the sound will stop him just fine.”
She sighed.
And I watched while she slowly, reluctantly, made her hand conform to the contours of the gun, and I lifted her off the floor by the waist, and she took the post at the window. Well, she was the prettiest backup man I’d ever had, anyway. Had to give her that much.
I went over and picked up the flashlight he’d dropped, and found that the other thing he’d dropped was a gun, the big .45 that went with the silencer I’d seen back at his motel room a couple days ago, and the silencer was on, and I wasn’t surprised that this was the other thing he’d dropped. I put the flashlight on the desk and stuck the Ruger in my belt, in back, where it would be covered by the jacket I slipped on. I didn’t want Ash to see the Ruger; he might recognize it. His .45 I kept in hand.
He had taken off the black thermal jacket he was wearing and was looking at where my slug caught him, as I approached.
“Bad?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Just a graze, but fuck, you could’ve killed me, Quarry, you know that?”
“Not could’ve. Should’ve.”
“Aw, Christ, but you hold a grudge.”
“Ash, I got no intention of standing out here in the cold listening to you explain how every time you try to kill me it’s nothing personal.”
“Well, it isn’t, and I never tried to kill you in my life, Quarry, that’s a fact.”
“You sent people to do it last time, I know, so that one doesn’t count. But what the hell do you call tonight?”
“Tonight?”
“You remember. A couple minutes ago. Think back.”
“Yeah? Who shot at who? I didn’t know you was in there. Shit. I thought it was crazy even to look down here, but I was told look, so I the fuck looked, is all. I didn’t see a car, and there were no lights on, and I was . . .”
“Stupid?”
“That wasn’t the word I was looking for but, yeah, I was stupid. And you’re real smart. Now that that’s settled, tell me . . . you got the broad in there, or not? She the one with the gun on me. Up in the window? Can she hear us talking?”
“Yes on all counts, except if you keep your voice down, she can’t hear us.”
“She wouldn’t use that gun, would she?”
“Let me put it this way. She knows you were going to kill her last night, that you would have if you and your boy hadn’t fucked up. And she knows you still want to kill her, if you can ever stop fucking up.”
“I don’t want to kill anybody, Quarry. I just got to make a living like everybody else.”
“Fine. Sometime you really must tell me all about your personal philosophy. But right now I got something else in mind for you. I want you to go wake up Brooks and tell him I have something he’s looking for.”
“The broad, you mean?”
“Not exactly. Oh, I have her, and she’s still for sale, but she’s part of a package deal. A twenty-thousand-dollar package.”
“So what else is in the package?”
“A list.”
“You know about that, huh? Well let me tell you something you don’t know. My backup got himself killed tonight, and killed somebody himself while he was at it . . . some federal guy who was snooping in your hotel room, yes, your hotel room, some federal fucker who evidently was watching the broad, too, only we didn’t know it before.”
“Where do I send the sympathy card?”
“Chicago.”
“Come again.”
“That’s who Brooks works for, in case you didn’t know. The Family out of Chicago.”
“You mean he represents them in court.”
“I mean they own the son of a bitch.”
“What’s their interest in this? If Brooks is the new Broker, they wouldn’t figure in. The Broker’s operation isn’t a Mafia thing.”
“What you don’t know, Quarry, would fill a book.”
“Yeah, well so would what I know. Tell Brooks that. Tell him about the list, too. And the twenty thousand.”
�
��Anything else, while I’m writing this down?”
“Tell him be in his office at six-thirty, with the twenty thousand. I’ll let him know where he can take it and pay me and get his merchandise.”
“Six-thirty. This afternoon.”
“Six-thirty. This morning.”
“That’s a couple hours from now, Quarry! Where the fuck’s he supposed to get twenty thousand by then?”
“Probably out of a wall safe.”
Ash grinned. “Probably. I suppose you want me to go, now, right?”
“Right. Don’t come back, or bother sending anybody back. We’ll be gone. Anyway, before you make any move you’re going to have to talk this over with Brooks, aren’t you? And there isn’t a public phone for miles, and besides, maybe he wouldn’t want to hear about this on a phone, what with everything crawling with federal people, and . . .”
“All right, all right. You make your point. No funny stuff. Can I go?”
“Go.”
He went.
And I went back and told Carried to get her clothes on.
“First take this,” she insisted, handing me back the .38, shuddering, like somebody squeamish who’d been made to handle a snake.
I took the gun, put it back in my belt, and said, “I got to get you to a motel, somewhere out of the way, till this is over.”
“When?”
“When what?”
“Will this be over?”
“Oh. Soon. It’ll be over soon.”
That seemed to ease her mind, and she got herself moving again. Which was the desired effect, of course.
Not that I’d been lying, when I said it would be over soon. It would be.
I just hoped she wasn’t expecting a happy ending.
23
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THE FOG HAD lifted. Dawn was maybe an hour away, so the streetlights were still on, reflecting off pavement made slick by eight or nine hours of misting. I left the Buick in the parking ramp, which at this hour was all but empty, across from the Conklin Building in downtown Davenport. I was alone. Under my arm was a large manila envelope, which I’d found in the scarred-topped desk at the cottage. My corduroy jacket was slung over my right forearm, covering the hand with Ash’s silenced .45 in it. I crossed the street.
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