Quarry's List

by Max Allan Collins

  “Enough to kill my own child, you mean?” He sighed, heavily, and the well-etched character lines in his browned face seemed to sag a little, for the first time. “Pay attention, Mr. Quarry, and I will do my best to once and for all satiate your seemingly unquenchable need to know. You may not be aware that my late wife was the only child of a rather wealthy industrialist, here in the area. That brown brick home you’ve been spending so much time watching of late is only one of several my wife’s parents maintained. You may be won­dering why my wife’s parents didn’t, uh, bail me out, when I had my gambling debts to settle. They could have, but refused. My wife felt similarly. She was obsessed with the idea I married her for her money, when actually, that was only part of it. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of money there, that for many years has been just beyond my reach. Now. Do you understand, finally? I know that I will never understand your need to know these things, seeing as God alone knows how many men died at your hands while you had no notion at all of why they were dying. No, I will never understand what has suddenly turned you into someone so curious no stone must be left unturned, for fear some bug or snake or other crawling thing might escape your sight.”

  He must have been something in front of a jury, pleading the life of some syndicate asshole. He could do things with words, pull them right out of his head and stick them in the goddamnedest sentences, without any apparent effort. I could see why the syndicate people had wanted him. He used logic and words as mindlessly, and effec­tively, as any gunman pulling a trigger.

  Just the same, I felt he’d told me the truth, just now. It made too much sense, felt too much like something somebody like him or the Broker would do, for it to be anything else but the truth. If his daughter died, everything would go to him: not only the list, if she’d had it—as, unwittingly, she had—but all of the Broker’s business inter­ests, the legal and extralegal alike, and all of his dead wife’s family’s wealth, and for the first time he’d have a financial life of his own; he could continue to repay his endless debt to the Family in Chicago, in court, but he’d no longer be a mon­etary prisoner; he could pursue the good life, whatever the hell his notion of a good life might be. Whatever it was, it sure didn’t include his daughter.

  “You want the list,” I said.

  “You know I do.”

  “Then I want you to do one thing more for me, and it’s yours.”

  “Name it.”

  “I have a phone number I want you to dial. You’ll be calling Carrie. It’s the phone in a motel room where she really is waiting. I want you to call her and say, ‘I’m sorry, for everything,’ and hang up. Make sure she knows it’s you.”

  “This won’t change anything about what I feel has to be done about her . . . there’s no way around that . . .”

  “That’s okay. Let’s just ease her mind.”

  “You amaze me. Sentiment?”

  “Just do it, if you want your fucking list.”

  He stared at me, but all he saw was a poker face, and he couldn’t read it; he just wasn’t a very good gambler and that’s all there was to it.

  I watched him dial. I had him hold the phone away from his ear a little so I could hear her.

  “Yes?” she said, answering.

  “Carrie, this is your father. I want you to know I’m sorry, for everything.”

  And he hung up.

  “Good,” I said. “Now, here’s your list.”

  I opened the manila envelope and dumped its contents on the desk.

  His eyes were very wide as he looked at the ashes heaped before him. You’d think somebody had tipped over an urn full of a favorite relative’s cremated remains, though in Brooks’s case, I doubted he had any favorite relatives, not unless you counted those he wanted to inherit money from. He touched the ashes with the fingers of one hand, sifting, searching, then slapped his hand against them, hard, and dark flakes floated in the path of the rays of dawn just peeking in the window behind him.

  “The list,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “All yours,” I said.

  He surprised me. I didn’t think he had it in him, but he lunged forward, sliding across the top of the desk, knocking the phone jangling to the floor, knocked me and the chair I was sitting in back and onto the floor, and he was on me, his hands on my throat, and I cuffed him on the ear with the .45 and pushed him off.

  “That . . . that call I made,” he said. “It was . . . a suicide note, wasn’t it?”

  “Don’t cause me any more trouble, and it’ll go easier for you.”

  “You want to know the funniest part? She wasn’t even my daughter, Quarry. She wasn’t even mine.”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about, and I didn’t want to know. He was defeated now, just a slack sack of humanity, of a sort, anyway. He didn’t cause any more trouble. I kept my word. I kicked him in the head, and he was unconscious when I took him over to the window, opened it, and threw him out.

  25

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  THE COZY REST Motel was everything its name promised, and less. The office was just one of a dozen and a half individual huts covered with sheets of pink pseudo-brick. In the office window was a Christmas tree, a little plastic one on a table, and a frowzy fat woman was decorating it with tinsel. A tinny speaker hanging from a nail over the door was spitting Christmas music, and it was still November, for Christsake. The rest of the cabins were in the wooded area behind, united by a gravel road that curved around like a drunken snake, through trees that had to look better than this during some season. It was cold again this morning, and the snow that hadn’t melted yester­day was clumped and misshapen and hard-crusted, looking like chunks of Styrofoam ran­domly scattered around the gray ground the cabins overlooked.

  Ash was in number two.

  I’d left him a note on the dresser saying, “I lied. Wait for me and I’ll tell you all about it. It’s too late for you to do anything else, anyway.”

  He was waiting. Sitting on the lumpy bed in the dreary little cabin, whose wallpaper walls were peeling to reveal other, even uglier wallpaper.

  “Oh, it’s you, Quarry,” he said. He gestured to the four tight walls around him. “I was expect­ing Bonnie and Clyde.”

  “Brooks is dead.”

  “Yeah, well, I figured. Where you got the broad hid?”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s all over.”

  “Not if you really got the list, it isn’t. We can go in together. I didn’t trust Brooks that much, anyway.”

  “That was smart. He tried to get me to kill you and take your place.”

  “That fuckin’ little pimp shyster. What’d you do to him?”

  “Tossed him out the window.”

  “Good for you. He wanted a fall guy, well, he got one. Hey, not a bad sensa humor on the kid, huh? So what about the list?”

  “I had it. I burned it.”

  “Burned it! Je-sus Christ! You got any idea what that mother was worth?”

  “I don’t care. I got no desire to play Broker.”

  “Well, fuck, I do!”

  “Anyway, I didn’t like all the stuff about me that was down in black and white. And about you, and a lot of guys like us.”

  “Quarry! That was like burning money.”

  “Well, it’s gone now.”

  “Jesus, Quarry.”

  “You should thank me. That list fell into the wrong hands, your ass and mine and a lot of people would’ve been in one fine sling.”

  “I suppose. But shit.”

  “You want your gun back?”

  “My .45, you mean? Please.”

  I gave it to him.

  “Bulky son of a bitch, ain’t it?” he said. “That federal fucker had one, you know, with a silencer too, even. Silencers are illegal as shit, what’s a federal fucker doing with one, I mean, what’s the goddamn country coming to. You know . . . you could’ve killed Brooks
with this, and set me up for it.”

  “I know. I didn’t.”

  “Well, while I’m not exactly thrilled you burned my future up for me, you bastard, I got to thank you for giving me an out.”

  “What are friends for.”

  “Right. Looks like I owe you another one.”

  “Let’s just say this one’s on me and leave it go at that.”

  “Anything you say. I suppose you made it look like suicide?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll let on like I figure that’s what it was, if the mob guys ask me, and they will. Well. Nothing to hang around this dump for. Shit. First thing, I’m going to have to unload that fuckin’ LTD on somebody and get something cheaper to drive.”

  “Got any other plans?”

  ‘‘No. I don’t know. What the hell. There’s other Brokers around, you know. I suppose I’ll find one and stay in the business. What about you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you sometime.”

  “Maybe.”

  I watched him walk out to his car. He waved before he got in. I waved as he left. Maybe I would see him again. I hadn’t burned the list, of course. Those ashes I dumped on Brooks’s desk were just some papers I burned in the wood-burning stove down at the cottage. But I wanted it to filter back to Chicago, through Ash, that the list was gone. I didn’t want anyone thinking I had it, because I had plans for it.

  And I knew why Ash and Curtis Brooks hadn’t been able to find the list. It wasn’t a list at all, really. Certain people on the payrolls of Broker’s businesses (the mail-order ones, like the lingerie company I “worked” for) were coded in a way that matched up with certain slides in little yellow boxes that otherwise contained memories of vari­ous vacations Broker had been on. There was a whole pine chest packed with these boxes of slides, and only by going through every one of thousands of slides would you be able to find the less than fifty that counted, which were not really slides at all, though mounted like the rest; they were a type of microfilm, a single panel of mi­crofilm with photographs and document- ary mate­rial on forty-eight individuals, of which I was one, and Ash another. On the cardboard-mounting material were the number/letter combi­nations that coincided with names on master payroll lists from the mail-order businesses. I’d been up almost all night, piecing this together. I wasn’t about to burn any of it, except for my own card.

  But I really didn’t want to be the Broker, and I wasn’t going to blackmail anybody, either . . . professional killers aren’t the best people to try to blackmail. What I had in mind was some­thing different. A one-man operation.

  Life is a precious commodity. People will pay a lot to have one taken. But they will pay even more to hang onto one . . . if it’s their own. This was the profit angle Ash hadn’t been able to see. All he could see (and Brooks, too) was the killers. I could see the victims. People like Carrie, who without help were going to die.

  As Ash pointed out, there were other Brokers. Most of the hit men (and women) named here would be working again, soon, if not already, for new Brokers. If I picked a name from the list, followed whoever it was to a job, found out who the potential victim was, I could go to that poten­tial victim and offer my services. If my offer was rejected, no skin off my ass; let the asshole die, it’s up to him. Some might prefer to go to the cops, though in most cases people lined up to be hit can’t go to the cops, because the hit usually has something to do with some less than legal activities the victim’s been mixed up in.

  But some would take me up on my offer, and be willing to pay my fee, in which case I’d prevent the hit, killing those sent to do it and doing my best in the process to find out who hired them, and possibly take care of whoever that was, too.

  At least it was something to think about. An idea, anyway, something to consider while I sat staring at the frozen lake in Wisconsin this winter, waiting to see if the federal snoopers would trace those Concort killings to me, which would cause me to have to start from scratch: new name, new residence, new face maybe, the works. That was a bridge I’d cross if I came to it.

  In the meantime, I’d consider this new idea, an idea I liked a lot better than that of working for somebody else. I’d had it with that scene. I didn’t want to work for anybody, and I didn’t want anybody working for me. Of course, I’d still be killing people, but for the most part it would just be other hitmen, like myself, and that seemed a step up, somehow.

  26

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  CARRIE WAS IN number 9.

  “Jack,” she said. “The strangest thing . . . my father called me . . . here!”

  “I know,” I said.

  I had her sit on the bed.

  “I went to see him,” I said, hands on her shoulders. “We had a long talk. Before I left, he asked me if I knew how he could get in touch with you. I gave him the number. What did he say to you?’’

  She told me.

  “I kind of thought it would be something like that,” I said. “Carrie, your father killed himself.”

  “Wh . . . what?”

  “I was barely out of the building. A small crowd was gathering on the sidewalk . . . it was just after dawn . . . he’d thrown himself out of his office window. I’m sorry.”

  “Why . . . why on earth would . . . ?”

  “He had connections to organized crime. You probably know that. So did your late husband. You know that, too. Your father found out that some syndicate people from Chicago were trying to have you killed.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “You inherited some business interests from your husband that the Chicago people wanted to see in your father’s hands. Killing you would have made that possible. Your father knew that, and must have figured the only way to stop it was to kill himself, and in so doing end the need for anyone wanting to kill you.”

  She was crying by now, of course.

  “This is going to be difficult for you, I know. There’ll be a lot of questions, from a lot of quar­ters. Just tell the truth, tell them what your father called and said, tell them about me, that we spent some time together, at the Concort, at the cottage. Don’t mention that I worked for your husband, though. Better say I was, you know, just a casual pickup. Better not show any knowledge of any of this mob stuff, either, that killers were after you, none of that. Otherwise you could cause problems for yourself and maybe me.”

  “Will you . . . stay with me . . . help me through this?”

  “I can’t. I think you can understand why.”

  She threw her arms around my waist and sobbed into my chest. This went on for some time.

  Finally, I got her out into the Buick and went over all of it again for her, several times, as I drove into town. She was still crying, but now and then she would ask a question about the story I’d told her and I’d give her as good an answer as I could. She seemed to buy it all.

  Then, as I glanced at her, turning down Brady toward downtown, I noticed something about her I’d never noticed before. She had just the slightest resemblance to somebody, somebody I used to know. And some things suddenly made a crazy kind of sense to me, or maybe I was crazy, but I thought about the two college guys who, back east some years ago, had loved the same woman; and then one of them evidently faded away for a time, for some reason or other, while the other married the girl, partially for money, partially perhaps because she was pregnant with Carrie, which according to Carrie’s age would have been about right; and then the mother had developed a drinking problem and sad, sad eyes and died; after which the father, Curtis Brooks, couldn’t stand the sight of his daughter, because she reminded him of his wife, the resemblance was that strik­ing, and yet Brooks had kept the wife’s portrait hanging in his office . . .

  He’d said something strange to me, before I killed him.

  “I wasn’t even her father . . .”

  Then who was?

&nbs
p; I never did see the inside of that brown brick castle. Just as I never would understand what had gone on in there. I didn’t know what the furniture was like, whether the colors were lively or somber; I didn’t know what the relationship was like, whose personality dominated, or did they share and share alike. I didn’t want to know, either.

  Maybe it was just my imagination that made me suddenly see a resemblance between the Broker and Carrie; anyway I kind of hope it was.

  But before I dropped her off at the Concort, where her car was still in the lot, she said, “Maybe . . . maybe in his own way, my father did love me.”

  Maybe she didn’t know how right she was.

  Afterword

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  QUARRY WAS AN accidental series character. He has been called the first hitman to helm a crime-fiction series, and I think he probably is, and of course I’m glad to be heralded as an innovator. But as with Quarry, my distinction is somewhat accidental.

  The first novel, Quarry, begun at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop around 1971, was designed to be a one-shot. A standalone. My protagonist was left at the conclusion in a fairly untenable position—it seemed clear that, sometime after the final page turned, he would be killed by people like himself.

  Earlier I had written a novel called Bait Money about a thief who died on the last page. I had also written a novel called No Cure for Death about a mystery writer who got himself entangled in a real murder case. Obviously Bait Money wasn’t conceived as a series, or I wouldn’t have killed Nolan; and had I wanted to do more novels about Mallory, I would have given him a better job description than, well, mystery writer.

  But I was lucky enough to have an editor request more books about both characters. Nolan had remained killed when the sixth or seventh editor to look at (and reject) Bait Money had spilled coffee on the manuscript. My then-agent Knox Burger, who had never liked the ending, said that since I had to retype “the goddamn thing” anyway, I might as well put a better ending on. So Nolan’s sidekick Jon swooped in to save him, in a Batman and Robin tradition that suited the book. Should I have typed “spoiler alert” before revealing that? Since seven more Nolan novels have appeared since, I think it’s safe to reveal he no longer dies at the end of Bait Money.