“Death isn’t.” I sipped Coke. “It’s just a switch that gets turned off.”
A white eyebrow lifted in the tan face. “You are correct, Quarry. Unarguably correct. Each death, each killing, is inherently simple, a mere stoppage…but you will not be not dead, Quarry, after you’ve done your fatal work: you must live to kill another day, even though you are caught up in the complexities of the life that you’ve just taken, complexities that continue on after death-and I speak not of the decay of the flesh, rather the remnants of human relationships.”
Did I mention he was a pompous motherfucker?
He was saying, “A switch you turn off, you say, that’s what death is. Fine. Let’s accept that premise. So you turn off a switch on the second floor of a house with which you’re unfamiliar-what do you do? You stumble in the dark. Perhaps you fall down a flight of stairs to your own death.”
“You’re saying this is not about blundering in, pulling a trigger, and blundering out.”
“Correct.”
“Well, I know that.” I shrugged and poured some more Coke. “I learned this particular skill taking part in missions that were well-thought-out.”
“Really? How is that war going?”
Well, he had a point.
He exhaled smoke. Then he sipped coffee. And smiled. How could that fucking smile be so white with all the cigarettes and coffee he sucked down? Too complex for me.
“Quarry,” he said, damn near purring, “the act itself may indeed be simple-a trigger is pulled, a heart is ripped apart, a skull is shattered and the brain within turned to useless sludge. But what leads up to the act does indeed take care and precision and information. Not unlike a military operation, as you indicated.”
“Okay,” I said.
The blue eyes gave me a laser look. “In the future, you will be paired with another member of my little army.”
I shook my head. “Not what we talked about. I work alone.”
He turned a hand over. “Actually, this time you will work alone. You may do several jobs alone before I team you with another. That is, in part, a precaution on my part.”
“I don’t need protecting.”
“Perhaps not, but I do.” He sipped coffee, then gazed at me coldly. “I am not risking an employee into whom I’ve invested time and money and effort and energy on a…new recruit, shall we say. You will have to prove yourself in the field before I pair you up with a partner, a partner of my choice.”
I was frowning. None of this had come up in his sales pitch. “Why the hell would I need a partner?”
His eyebrows lifted in a facial shrug; we might have been discussing a sales campaign for this year’s model whatever-the-fuck. “The way our contracts are carried out is a time-proven technique and a painstaking approach that I am pleased to say has never yet resulted in either an arrest or death for any of my associates.”
Later I would come to question this assertion, but at that moment, I felt reassured by it, and I stopped fighting the notion of working with somebody else, at least long enough to let him explain himself.
Which he did: “Each contract initiates a two-pronged effort. First, a man goes in and quietly gathers information, primarily through established surveillance techniques. We will spend as much as a month getting down the pattern of a target, and never less than a week. We are preparing for a surgical strike, and we need to know when the time is right for getting in and getting out without any collateral damage.”
“That I like,” I admitted. “I don’t want to go around killing innocent people. I’m not some sick fuck.”
A smile twitched under the mustache, which itself stayed steady. “Good. You seem already to understand the basic tenet of this business, and of your craft- these individuals we target are…well, let me back up: we do not target them. Others target them, and once these individuals have been targeted, they are already dead. They are obituaries waiting to be written. We have nothing to do with their deaths, other than the trivial detail of how those deaths are carried out.”
“Because these are inevitable deaths,” I said.
A crisp nod. “Correct. These are terminal cases before we ever get on the scene. You’re a surgeon removing a tumor.”
“I just won’t have much of a recovery rate.”
That made him smile a little. “Not true-those whose lives our targets afflicted will be free from their misery. Our clients are the patients in this medical metaphor, not the targets, who would in this case be the tumors.”
“I get it,” I said. “I did okay in English.”
Did I mention he was a pretentious windbag?
“Normally, you would go in for the last few days of surveillance, and be briefed in person and in detail by your partner, who would remain to provide back-up in the event something might go less than smoothly.”
“By goes less than smoothly, you mean, gets fucked up.”
“Yes. But as I say, we have a flawless record.”
I sipped Coke. Studied him. “Only on this job, this first job, I go in alone?”
He nodded. “We’ve had a man on the scene for over a month-he’ll have left by the time you get there. You don’t have any plans for Christmas, do you?”
“Just singing carols at orphanages and old folks homes, why?”
As if I hadn’t been kidding, he said, “But you’ll be free on the day after?”
“Yeah. I should have all my good works polished off by then.”
His eyes seemed sleepy suddenly, half-lidded, though his tone was crisp, the mellow baritone taking on an edge: “You’ll go in on the twenty-sixth. Don’t drive your own vehicle. Never drive your own vehicle, always rent. You’ll fly out of Chicago.”
I was pouring myself more Coca-Cola. “You said this was complex. What’s complex about it?”
A jaw muscle twitched. “You have to do more than just eliminate the target.”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“Normally. But in this instance, the target has made a real nuisance of himself. You’ll need to find some documents.”
“And deliver them to you?”
“No, destroy them. You can burn them in the fireplace of the cottage where your target lives.”
“Good thing it’s the day after Christmas, then.”
“Oh?”
I grinned at him. “Would hate to singe Santa.”
He just looked at me. Then he smiled, big, taking the mustache along for the ride this time. “Very droll, Quarry,” he said. “Very droll.”
“That’s what it said in my high school yearbook, Broker-Most Likely to Be Droll. Now, who do I have to kill?”
THREE
That first night camped out in the split-level turned into morning-three in the morning, actually-before I decided that my non-Mouseketeer Annette would be spending the night in the cobblestone cottage with her favorite professor, tuckered out after her oral exams.
I admit that I had considered several scenarios designed to bring this assignment to its desired conclusion and right away. None of these, however, suited the Broker’s mandate of care and caution, and mostly included me going over there and somehow dealing non-violently (or anyway non-fatally) with the brunette, and then snuffing the prof, finding the manuscript pages Broker wanted destroyed, destroying them, and heading back to the lake and my A-frame to wait for money and praise to arrive from the Broker.
Some of these scenarios were pretty fanciful, involving chloroforming the girl (where would I get that stuff, exactly-a heist at the University hospital?) or knocking her out gently, like they do on TV, only in real-life that kind of blow kills you half the time. Pretty much all of these idiot plans had me shooting the prof multiple times, watching him shake, rattle and roll in Wild Bunch slow motion while I grinned maniacally. Somehow this didn’t seem in line with the Broker’s low-key wishes.
What was my problem, anyway?
What was the philandering Byron to me? Why did I care how many coeds blew and/or boffed him? I was gen
erally in favor of girls blowing and boffing guys, although old farts like the prof (fucker was pushing forty) getting blown and boffed by young girls made me a little queasy, admittedly. I mean, there are limits.
So part of why I threw in the towel at three a.m. on my first stakeout was a sense that I needed rest and refreshment of my faculties, and anyway I did not want to fall asleep in this cold house where my pants could catch fire being too close to the space heater while the rest of me froze its nuts off.
By three-thirty I was in my Holiday Inn Room all snuggled up in my wee little bed. I didn’t need a lot of sleep and woke up around eight-thirty a.m. The window view told me that snow had fallen during my slumber and the world was a winter wonderland out there, thick fluffy stuff and evergreen trees plump with white, but the plows had been out, so you could go and enjoy Jack Frost’s handiwork without winding up dead in a ditch.
I showered, threw on a sweater and jeans and went down for breakfast. The motel was pretty dead-this was the Sunday after Christmas and the usual businessman clientele were not on the road and the other guests seemed to be made up of family members who were overflow from the homes of relatives who’d run out of spare rooms.
That meant that later, around ten, when I went down for a swim, I had to share the chlorine-scented echo chamber with squealing, splashing kids, whose shrill glee would have sent a guy with a hangover looking for a drill press to squash his head in. But I didn’t have a hangover, or a drill press for that matter, and anyway didn’t hate children any more than the next guy, so I settled into the whirlpool bath and let the hot, churning water soothe me.
A woman who presumably was the mother of at least one or two of the eight or nine turning the swimming pool room into a combination day care center and horror show padded over in a bright orange one-piece swimsuit. She’d put on a little weight having kiddies, but there was no doubt why somebody had wanted to have kiddies with her in the first place-she was a redhead with an Afro-ish tower of permed but tousled hair and a roundish pleasant face and displayed the kind of curvy frame that makes you really lenient about cellulite.
She settled in across from me. In ten years, she wouldn’t rate a second look. But right now the way her full breasts hit the top of the water and the crinkles around her dark blue eyes as she smiled at the pleasure the water jet at her back was giving her was giving me a hard on. The hard on was safely beneath the water, not causing anybody any trouble, not even me, but I wondered what the hell was wrong with my ass. A woman almost ten years older than me, tending her kiddies at a pool, had my dick throbbing.
I was supposed to be in control. Last night, or early this morning I guess would be more accurate, I had considered wild scenarios that had me behaving like a lunatic in carrying out a job that required cautious planning and detached professionalism. What the fuck was wrong with me?
The bubbling water and the kiddie shrieks played like dissonant modern music as I sat there with my arms winged on the concrete lip of the whirlpool, smiling at the redheaded mom, whose posture mirrored mine.
“Have a nice Christmas?” she asked.
“You bet.”
“Get everything you wanted?”
She couldn’t see my erection, could she? I had boxer-type trunks on that billowed with the water, so I should be safe, though when the bubbles turned off, I could be sitting here with a tent in my lap.
I said, “I guess no kid gets everything he wants.”
“Oh, so you’re a kid, huh?”
“Overgrown.”
“Like all men,” she said, and she grinned, nice white teeth, kind of big, a very real smile that wasn’t at all practiced.
“Which of these kids are yours?”
“What? None of them.”
“Oh.” Actually, more like: “Oh!” Not out of surprise (though everything I’d assumed about her had just gone poof), but the need to talk above the frothing hot tub and the screaming brats. Pretty much everything we were saying rated an exclamation point, only you’ll have to fill that in yourself.
She said, “So aren’t you going to ask me what a nice girl like me is doing in a place like this?”
“I didn’t want to pry.”
She slid around and sat next to me. Not right next to me, but a more intimate arrangement for sure, though still requiring shouted conversation.
“My name’s Dorrie,” she said, and she offered a hand with red-painted nails.
I froze for a second, wondering if I was supposed to kiss it; not being a fucking Frenchman, I just shook it. I was really nervous, because my erection had grown a heartbeat of its own by now and here she was right next to me, her considerable cleavage on display above the orange wet cloth at which her nipples were poking not helping any, either.
“Jack,” I said, with a nod. “I’m here on business.”
She arched an eyebrow, a dark, plucked thing that already had an arch. “Funny time of year to do business.”
“I won’t dig in till next week,” I said. I didn’t feel like going into my lingerie salesman routine.
“What do you sell?”
Shit.
“Things you’d look good in,” I said.
“Such as?”
“Lingerie.”
“Really? You don’t mean that Frederick’s of Hollywood type jazz?”
“Not that obvious. But sexy enough to get your husband’s attention.”
She looked toward the pool and the kids who weren’t hers. “What makes you think I have a husband?”
“The diamond ring.”
She turned to me sharply and her laugh was sharp, too. “I guess that is a dead giveaway…You’ll be around all this coming week, then?”
“Some of it.”
“Maybe we’ll run into each other. I’m sometimes in the bar in the evenings.”
“You’ll be here a while, too?”
“Maybe. It’s kind of…open-ended. Trying to work something out.”
That was when I noticed that though her eyes were smiling, they had a sadness. No, that wasn’t it: weariness. I’d seen that look before, just not on a good-looking woman. Guys who’d been in the jungle on one too many a tour, they got that kind of weariness in their eyes.
For a moment there, I thought maybe she’d slip her hand under the water and inside my trunks and help me out. Instead I had to wait for her to go and then do my best to get up and out of the whirlpool with my back to the other guests and those impressionable kiddies and wrap a towel around my waist and disguise my condition until I could get back to my motel room and do something about it.
About time I got a grip on myself.
Pretty soon I was climbing back into my long underwear (a real turn-on for dolls like Dorrie you picked up at a bar) and wondered how stupid it would be to indulge with this sad-eyed curvy older woman. I was on a job. Relieving tension was a good thing, when you had a job to do. But what if she somehow figured out who I was, or why I was here?
That was stupid. Nothing wrong with picking up some chick (was a thirty-five-year-old woman still a chick, I wondered?) and getting your rocks off. Might help me not go around getting raging erections in public, which is the kind of attention grabber a guy trying to stay invisible generally tries to avoid.
As I reflected on the little whirlpool mini-encounter, I realized the redhead probably hadn’t been hitting on me or anything, just indulging in some gentle flirting, maybe checking to make sure she still had what it takes to get a younger guy’s attention.
And how had I reacted? I’d gone off on another wild-ass mental scenario, this time involving some housewife from Who-the-Fuck-Cares Junction, probably because the professor was getting some and I wasn’t.
Shit, I should cut the old boy some slack. Why shouldn’t he enjoy himself a little in his last days? I was young. I had plenty of time ahead of me to get my ashes hauled. Give the dead guy a break.
Before long I was back at my window in the split-level, in my corduroy jacket over my clothes and long johns
under them, with the space heater making its electrical whine. I had another thermos of hot chocolate, and a six-pack of canned Cokes and a gourmet selection of beef jerky and Slim Jims and a package of those yellow Hostess Cupcakes with the orange frosting that they don’t sell year-round.
The overcast day threw soft blue shadows on the wintry landscape. The cottage looked homey and quaint; the Corvette parked out front, already white, took on a lumpy, surrealistic look with the layering of snow. After two and a half hours, I was starting to wonder if Annette had moved in with the prof for the rest of winter break, which would make my job much harder. I would have to wait for her to leave on some errand of shopping or a doctor’s appointment or whatever-the-fuck, and run across the street and get the job done with no notion of when she might be back.
Also, the lack of activity over there was numbing. I began to think I was looking at a photograph, and would squint until I could see some movement from the light wind, branches rustling, snow blowing, anything to convince me otherwise. The radio station I was listening to was on its second pass through its play list-“Spill the Wine” had come around again and, if memory served, would be followed by “War,” which apparently was worth absolutely nothing, as if I needed a fucking song to tell me.
That was when the dark green Pontiac GTO rolled up in front of my split-level and I ducked down, even though from where I was sitting I probably couldn’t be seen, anyway. Like a kid peeking over a fence, checking if the coast was clear before sneaking into a ball game, I edged my eyes up to where I could see who the hell my visitor was.
Nobody was getting out of the GTO, which was a nice set of wheels, by the way. I could make out a figure with brown hair (Beatles ‘64 length), mutton chops and a trim mustache behind the wheel, just sitting there with the motor going and the windows up. No snow was on the car, either, so he’d either cleaned it off or had just arrived from enough of a drive to completely melt it off.
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