“I’m impressed you found me. Trouble is, now I have to move.”
I raised the gun.
Finally he got it, or maybe my raising the nine just let out the nervousness that had been inside him all along. His hands flew up, as if this were a stick-up.
He was half a second away from dead when he blurted, “I want you to do a job for me! Another job!”
My finger froze on the trigger.
This was a lot of money seated near me, begging me to let him give me some. I’m not a greedy man; but I’m not a monk, either.
I said, “I’m retired.”
He knew he’d made a dent and something lively came into the green eyes. “That would’ve been just before the stock market went to shit, wouldn’t it? How are your investments doing, Mr. Quarry? Did you get out before the dotcom bust?”
“I’m comfortable,” I said, which was funny in a way, because I was naked in a hot tub, so of course I was comfortable. On the other hand, I was holding a nine millimeter, thinking about killing this prick; so that part wasn’t so comfortable.
“So comfortable,” he said, unintentionally mirroring my thoughts in an openly Faustian manner, “that you wouldn’t come out of retirement for a quarter of a million dollars?”
Again I lowered the gun a hair. “...It’s not a political job, is it?”
“No! No, no, no.”
I sighed again, this time for my own benefit. “One last job is always a bad idea. Guys die trying to retire on one last job all the time.”
“But you are not just any guy, are you, Mr. Quarry?” He smiled; he had the same white feral teeth as his daughter, only his might have been false. The teeth part. The feral was real.
“No,” I admitted, “I’m not. What makes it worth a quarter mil?”
He answered with another question: “Do you have any reservations about taking out a woman?”
“I take women out all the time.”
“Not the way I mean.”
I smiled just a little. “Are you sure?”
We sat in my kitchen.
Jonah Green already knew the lay of my land, so there was no harm in taking him across the road to the A-frame cottage...no further harm, anyway. Plus, I was tired of negotiating with my dick hanging out. Water’s a bad place to hold a serious conversation, at least your half of it; the other guy can always make his point by kicking something electrical in—I know, because I’ve been that guy.
So now we were both dressed. The Mr. Coffee was on, and we were exploring the job. The only step remaining was me deciding to do the thing or not—the money required no further discussion.
A captain of industry through and through, Jonah Green had a folder of information, including half a dozen photos. The woman in the photos—all candid, surveillance-type—was in her early thirties, attractive but not making the most of it, her hair up, with reading glasses on in some of the shots.
She did not look like a likely contract-murder victim, but you never know. Karen Silkwood didn’t look like much, either (no, I didn’t do that one).
He was handing me across several information-crammed sheets. “Here’s everything you need to know about the woman—work and home addresses, personal habits and friends, everything.”
I glanced up at him. “Time frame?”
Green blinked. “Say again? I don’t follow.”
“You need her dead—I get that. When do you need her dead?”
He sat forward; for the first time the talk took on a truly conspiratorial feel. “In two months, her being alive is...a bad thing for me.” He sighed, and something that might have been regret, real or feigned, came into his expression and his voice. “Understand, Mr. Quarry, she didn’t do anything to deserve—”
I cut him off with a traffic-cop palm. “Mr. Green...you’re a powerful guy. You’ve decided you need her dead. That means she’s already dead.”
His forehead and eyes tightened. “I...now I really don’t follow....”
Tossing the pictures on the table, I said, “She’s already dead—she just doesn’t know it yet. My doing the job is...a detail.”
That made the millionaire slightly ill at ease, and he said, maybe for his own peace of mind, “Well, it’s strictly a matter of business—nothing personal. She’s a nice woman, I’m sure—”
“Nice women,” I interrupted, “don’t make themselves the targets of men like you, who aren’t nice.”
Blood drained from his face, but he said nothing. Hard to get indignant when the guy you’re hiring to kill somebody points out that you’re not Mr. Wonderful.
I gestured with the information sheets.
“This stuff is fine,” I said. “But understand, Mr. Green, I have to watch her a while, anyway. A few days, at least.”
He frowned, shaking his head, pointing to the info sheets. “But...I’ve got all her patterns recorded, already...library...apartment....”
“How old is the information? A P.I. gathered this. When?”
The frown deepened into irritation, as if I had questioned his professionalism. “I tell you, it’s fresh!”
“How fresh?”
Now he sounded defensive, and did a Rodney Dangerfield tug of his jogging-suit collar. “A month, six weeks at the outside.”
I shook my head. “I have to watch her a while. Patterns change. Shift.” I sat forward. “Mr. Green, the elimination side is only part of the process—it starts with surveillance. Otherwise the cops find me. And if they find me, they find you.”
In the old days, the guy hiring me wouldn’t have been sitting across from me; it would have been the Broker or someone like him.
Jonah Green let out a sigh worthy of a Christian martyr. “Fine.” His eyebrows rose and he shook a finger. “But two months, and she’s a problem, Mr. Quarry.”
“I heard that the first time.”
He tasted the inside of his mouth and didn’t seem to like it much. “There’s, uh...one other thing. It’s a part of why your fee is so generous.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“It’s...well, it’s got to be an accident.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “Say again?”
He gestured with both hands, obviously finding it distasteful to have to discuss this. “You know...slip and fall in the tub, brakes go out, hell, I don’t know... that’s your department!”
I looked at him for a while.
He was getting uneasy by the time I said, “I don’t usually do ‘accidents.’ž”
Irritably, he said, “For a quarter mil, make an exception—you mind if I smoke?”
“Take it outside.”
Dusk had settled on us as we stood on the deck, looking out on Sylvan Lake’s still frozen expanse; you couldn’t see Harry and Louis’s hole at all from here.
The millionaire leaned on the deck rail, gazing out at the stark, serene landscape, his plumes of breath alternating with exhales of tobacco smoke. I was standing there, arms folded, looking at my prospective employer, wondering if I should take the job or go out there and drop another one in that hole.
“Beautiful,” Green said, shaking his head admiringly. “Beautiful goddamn country, up here. I can see why you like it.”
“I’ll be moving on soon,” I said. “You could probably buy this cottage from the guy who owns the lodge.”
Green flicked his gaze my way.
I continued: “Of course, if you do move in, for a summer home? Every time you look out at this lovely lake, you’ll be looking at those numbnuts who grabbed your kid.”
He wasn’t studying the lake, anymore; his eyes were on me. “Why moving on?”
“You know where I live, Mr. Green.” I shrugged and smiled. “Even if I do do this job, I’m out of here.”
Eyes narrowed to slits, Green said, “You don’t need to do that, Mr. Quarry. I swear to you I was discreet about finding you. I used a number of people, and no single investigator was—”
“Sure. Fine.”
Green sighed. “Will yo
u do the job?”
I nodded.
Relief flooded his features. “How do I make my payment?”
“I’ll give you the offshore banking info. When $125K hits the account, I go to work. When I deliver, put the rest in.”
Green frowned. “You trust me to do that?”
“Sure.” I grinned at him. “I’m kinda my own collection agency.”
He didn’t allow himself to be frightened by that; instead he again stared out at the hauntingly beautiful lake.
For the first time, I heard a genuine melancholy in the mogul’s voice. “She’s...she’s already dead.”
I nodded. “It just hasn’t made the obits yet.... Coffee?”
Six
The Homewood Library seemed modern to me, but only because of my age—it dated to the ’70s and you walked into a big high-ceilinged area with wide steps leading up to a surrounding second floor that was like a landing that got out of hand.
The place was all cheerful oranges and greens and yellows, dotted with oppressively cheerful posters encouraging reading and featuring lots of Asian and black faces, though everybody I saw in there was white. What had once been open and spacious was now a little cluttered, with an area obviously intended for seating given over to portable bookcases of NEW RELEASES and AUDIOS, and various computer stations.
It didn’t remind me much of the austere churchlike libraries of my youth—hardwood floors and institutional green walls and endless shelves of anonymous dustjacket-less books overseen by cold-eyed old-maid librarians with their hair in gray buns and their bodies in gray dresses that a nun would’ve considered needlessly unflattering.
And Janet Wright didn’t remind me of those old-maid librarians, either, though her white blouse and black skirt were a little stark, at that. Her dark blonde hair was pinned up (though not in a bun), attractive stray curls of it struggling free to give her heart-shaped face unbidden decorative touches. Her reading glasses were wireframe and merely serviceable, like the touches of lipstick and eyeliner that appeared to be her only makeup. She seemed to have a nice shape, too, though her wardrobe played it down.
But there was no getting away from that nice, creamy complexion and eyes so brown they almost looked black from a distance, and she had a very nice smile that she flashed generously at the grade-school kids—third-graders?—who were sitting on the floor in the Children’s Section staring up adoringly at her, lost in the story she was reading...a book called The Glass Doorknob, something or other about a sock monkey.
I was impressed—not one of these kids was fidgeting or squirming or looking to need their Ritalin dosage, even if their laughter did seem unnecessarily shrill. Of course, eight kids who were spending their Friday after-school time at the library probably weren’t the type to be fussy; plus, the six girls probably wanted to be Janet Wright when they grew up, and the two boys probably wanted to marry her when they did (although right now they had no idea why).
As she sat in the chair, her audience gathered around like little Indians, it was obvious she related well to the tykes, stopping to ask them questions, involving them, really looking at them and even listening to their answers.
Already I understood what Jonah Green had meant about this woman not deserving what I was here to do to her. Nobody looking at her would have guessed a contract kill would be her fate. On the other hand, nobody looking at me would have guessed I was stalking my prey—in jeans, running shoes, brown sweater, lighter brown shirt-with-collar, I might have been a teacher or writer, the kind of rumpled jerk who browses endlessly at Borders and never buys a goddamn thing, then complains that book sales are down because the world has gone illiterate.
Right now I was fucking around in the War Section, flipping through books on Vietnam written by idiots who hadn’t been there. And, by the way, if you ever have a question about where any specific subjects can be found in the stacks of the Homewood Library, from gardening to the Holocaust, I’m your guy.
She’d been easy enough to spot—from the handful of pictures Green had given me, plus when I came in she was sitting at the HELP DESK with her name on a nameplate in front of her. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple to make her.
She also worked the front desk, during lunch hour, checking out books, pleasant, friendly, helpful to various library patrons, clearly good at what she did and happy doing it.
I kept browsing, “reading” magazines and books while I kept up my surveillance, lately keeping track of Janet Wright interacting with these laughing children. It was the kind of thing that would give you a warm feeling if you weren’t here to kill her.
After the kids scampered off to their suppers, Janet returned to the help desk where she was doing paperwork when a narrow-faced, conventionally handsome guy approached her, a thirty-something would-be Yuppie with a tan, perfect hair, a pale yellow shirt with an alligator on it and jeans that were too new-looking.
I was nearby, pretty much directly behind my subject, going through old bound volumes of Life magazine from the ’40s and ’50s, stopping at the surprisingly frequent shots of starlets in bathing suits.
A conversation started up between my librarian and the Yuppie, for which lip-reading would not have been a necessary step—in fact, the obnoxious Yuppie made it hard not to overhear. Apparently this whole quiet-it’s-a-library concept was foreign to him.
He flicked the HELP DESK sign and said, with a grin that told me he appreciated his own wit, “I could use some help.”
The librarian I could barely make out, and her back was to me.
But I think she said, “Rick—please. Not here.”
He leaned a palm against the edge of the desk and his smile was a white slash in the too-tanned face.
“Come on—you’re not still mad....”
She said nothing, her head down. She was doing paperwork, or pretending to.
The smile disappeared and he leaned in, his expression approximating humility. “Baby. Come on. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
On her response, I heard her just fine: she wasn’t talking any louder, but the words were crisp and clear.
“Next time,” she said, looking right up at him, “I’ll call nine-one-one. I swear I will.”
He drew back; shrugged. “Hey. You pissed me off. Deal with it.”
She slammed a book shut.
“I am dealing with it,” she said.
“Baby...”
“You had no right—no right.”
And now she looked back down at her work.
“It’s over, Rick,” she said. “Don’t make me call security.”
He leaned in again, got another smile going, though it bordered on a sneer. “Why—you want another scene?” He laughed and it sounded forced. “Sometimes I think you like scenes.”
She said nothing. Did not look up at him.
He turned to go, but had only moved a step when he looked back and said, “Hey—pick you up. Usual time.”
“No. No!”
“Meet you, then.”
He shot her a goodbye with a gun of thumb-and-forefinger, and sauntered off, cocky as hell. She didn’t bother to reply.
Pity—seems like nobody ever hires you to kill a prick like that.
Another librarian, a busty, almost plump woman also in her early thirties, moved in and pulled up a chair-on-wheels from somewhere and sat behind the desk with Janet. The second librarian had on a bright pink blouse and darker pink slacks; her hair was very blonde and big and sprayed, and her makeup was loud. Fuckable, though.
“Janet,” she was saying, making no attempt to keep her voice down, “you have got to do something about that creep!”
Janet shrugged. “I told him it’s over, Connie. I told him just now.”
“Do you think he heard you? You think he ever really listens to anything you say? Listen to me, sweetie. He is going to really hurt you, next time.”
Janet, who had swiveled on her own wheeled chair, to face her colleague, sighed and shook her head. “M
aybe....maybe he’s right. Maybe it was my fault.”
“Your fault?”
She was shaking her head. “I shouldn’t’ve made him mad. I mean, I knew about his temper. When you touch a hot stove and get burned, you can’t blame the—”
Connie put her hand over Janet’s mouth and leaned in closer.
“Talk like that,” she said, “and I’ll send you to the emergency room.”
Then Connie withdrew her hand from Janet’s mouth and cupped her friend’s chin with that same hand and leaned in close. I had to lip-read now, but I got it. Probably I’d have got it just from the busty one’s compassionate expression and the other’s chagrined one.
“Do you hear what I’m saying, Janet?”
“I do. I do. I’m not seeing him anymore.”
“And if he hurts you—the police?”
A laugh that wasn’t a laugh. “What good would that do, in this town?”
Connie’s features were stone. “They have to write it up. And you can see a lawyer if you need to. There are ways to deal with jerks like Rick.”
She was right about that.
Connie said, “Word to the wise,” and shook a mildly scolding finger, got up, and moved away, guiding the wheeled chair back to wherever the hell she got it.
A few moments later, Janet left the help desk and I followed her, a half room of shelved books between us, me seeing her flickeringly as I moved along, strobe style. Or maybe I was just getting punchy spending all this time around so many books.
Finally she stopped at a water fountain.
Nervously, she put something in her mouth—a pill?
She bent at the fountain and, when she pressed the handle to create an arc of water, her sleeve rode up a little, and revealed part of a purple bruise.
I shook my head.
Rick might have been somehow important or connected in this town (as the busty librarian had indicated), but that didn’t make him any less a brutal dunce. Takes a lot of awful people to make up this old world.
From another conversation Janet and Connie had, I got the drift that my target’s work day was drawing to a close, so I gathered my jacket from a chair at a reading table and headed outside into the cold, clean—if thin—mountain air.
The Last Quarry Page 5