The first quarry q-7

by Max Allan Collins

  Something in his eyes relaxed.

  “No problem,” he said. “Just take my money and split. Everybody got to make a living.”

  “I like your new attitude. Stay with that.”

  He was in the stall now.

  “Turn around,” I told him.

  “Don’t do that, man. Don’t knock me out! You don’t need to do that shit.”

  “I won’t. Turn around.”

  With a sigh of defeat and a disgusted sneer, he did.

  “You can put your hands down,” I said.

  He did, and that relaxed him.

  When I cut his throat with the razor, the arterial spray got on the wall and maybe a little on him, but not a drop on me. I hate razors and knives, but they do have their uses, if you take a little care.

  I arranged him on the floor so that he knelt over the bowl, where he did the rest of his bleeding into the water. That gave him the look of a guy throwing up, though the scarlet Rorschach test dripping on the wall was a dead giveaway.

  I shut him in there.

  The razor I threw in the sink. I wouldn’t be needing it. His leather coat I stuffed in the trash receptacle. Finally I glanced at myself in the mirror, checking for blood spatter I may have missed: nothing. My horrific greased-back hair was still in place.

  In the outer area of the rest stop, through those smoky glass doors, I could see that no other cars had pulled in. I went over and grabbed that yellow plastic V saying CLOSED FOR CLEANING and placed it out in front of the MEN’S, but not blocking the path.

  Quickly I went out to the Eldorado and knocked on the driver’s side window.

  Charlie’s mustached face glowered at me; he didn’t have his red hat on now, and his head was shaved. Behind his window, he said, “What the fuck?”

  I made a “roll the window down” motion, and he powered down the glass and said, “Do I know you?”

  Hope not.

  “Listen, your friend is in the restroom and he’s very sick. He asked me to come and get you.”

  “Aw, shit, what is it now?”

  That was to himself, or to the absent Leon; but I answered, anyway. “I don’t know, but he’s puking his head off. He said he was throwing up blood!”

  Now some alarm came into Charlie’s face, and I stood back as he shut off the Caddy engine and shoved the keys in his pocket and threw open the door and rushed into the rest stop and on into the bathroom, past the yellow inverted-V CLOSED floor sign, with me on his heels.

  He opened the stall door and said, “Charlie, what the fuck?”

  I shoved the nine millimeter against the small of his back, right up against the leather of his coat, which muffled the blast, not as good as a silencer, but not bad under the circumstances. His spine must have been severed, because he dropped like a bag of laundry on top of the kneeling Leon. Just to make sure, I put one through his head, and red and white and gray and green splatter daubed the porcelain and steel fixtures, glistening and shimmering like spilled liquid mercury.

  Somebody else could pull into the rest stop any time, and I had no desire to rack up collateral damage. So I worked fast, searching Charlie’s coat pockets, coming up with a big shiny. 357 magnum and the Caddy keys. In hopes of robbery being the initial motive the local cops came up with (eventually the mob connection would surface), I performed the distasteful task of checking Charlie’s pants pockets, too. And, listen, it had already smelled bad in there, thanks to Leon’s chicken attack. With Charlie vacating in his trousers after I blew his spine apart, this was turning into a real hellhole.

  But Charlie had his own fat money clip, and between Charlie’s and Leon’s cash, I gave it a quick count of three thousand and change. Not a bad perk, and the diamonds on Leon’s clip were real. I left the razor behind, still down in the sink. Not my style.

  I did stay long enough to clean up one mess: I ran some water and got that Brylcreem out of my hair, then stuck my head under the electric hand drier for a few seconds. When I got that girl out of the trunk, I didn’t want to look like a total fucking nerd.

  NINE

  When I opened the Caddy trunk, its light clicked on and the girl gazed up at me with those big brown eyes, and a wide range of human emotion-fear, surprise, relief, hope, confusion-flashed one at a time through them, each punctuated by a blink. Under the duct tape gag, she made an unnnngggh that, while not as impressive as what her eyes had done, was fairly communicative at that.

  “No questions,” I said, as I peeled off the tape. “We have to get out of here, right now.”

  She complied as I helped her up and out of the compartment. That those long lovely legs had been somehow compressed into that space seemed as impossible as the old one-thousand clowns and one car gag. Her white leather coat with the white fur collar and a green pants suit with ruffle-neck blouse looked remarkably fresh, but her hair was every which way. The innocuous brick structure of the rest stop was our backdrop, nothing to hint at the horrors within the men’s room. She was stiff and I had to walk her over to the Maverick as gently as if this tall young woman were a little old lady. I guided her into the front seat passenger side, and came around and got in behind the wheel.

  Luck was kind: nobody had pulled in here off I-80 to take a break or a dump or piss or any combination thereof in the vital seven minutes or so it had all taken. I had passed a larger rest stop perhaps twenty miles back where many trucks were parked, their drivers snoozing, but this stop was too small to accommodate more than a handful of semis, and we didn’t have even one at the moment. Nice to catch a break.

  I had to keep going east, needing an exit that would allow me to get off and come around to head back west to Iowa City, although I wasn’t sure, frankly, if returning was such a good idea. Of course, I wasn’t sure of much at all, right now.

  The heat was going in the car, just at a comfortable warm setting, but Annette was shivering, even though she was bundled in that lined leather coat with its fur at the neck, long brown hair spilled over her shoulders. She had her seat belt on, but was hugging the door, leaning in on herself as if trying to assume a fetal position while sitting down.

  “You want more heat?” I asked.

  She shook her head. Her fists clenched each side of her coat, holding it to her by the lapels as if she were freezing, but she shook her head. That shivering didn’t have much to do with the cold, I didn’t think.

  “I’m going to turn around as soon as I can,” I said. “I’ll head us back.”

  She nodded.

  “Did they hurt you?”

  She shook her head.

  I just drove for a while. Maybe ten miles later I came to an exit, used it and then we were going west again. I still had the radio on, that easy listening station, but down so low you could barely make Dino out doing “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime.”

  After a while, I glanced over at her and she wasn’t shivering any more. Her askew hair nonetheless framed in a striking fashion the olive oval that held her beautiful features. She looked more relaxed, even a little sleepy.

  I said, “I was coming out of the restaurant when I saw those two grab you.”

  She turned her head and gazed at me, almost as if noticing I was there. “What happened to them?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. This was the daughter of one of the top mob bosses in Chicago, so the notion of killing shouldn’t shock her; but then she’d just spent an hour or so stuffed into a car trunk, waiting to be raped and killed herself, so I thought I should err on the gentle side.

  “I took care of them.”

  Her eyes tightened.

  I returned my gaze to the road and the moonlit highway and the surrounding snow-patched landscape.

  She asked, “Who are you?”

  “I’m Jack, remember?” I glanced at her. “Are you okay? Did you take a blow to the head or something? Don’t you recognize me?”

  “Who are you really?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You work for my father, don�
�t you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “What happened to those men? Did you…kill them?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Did you, Jack?”

  “…Yes.”

  She swivelled her gaze toward the road. “Good.”

  I was thinking fast, or anyway trying to. This had all been on the fly, and there’d been no time to waste cooking up a story for the girl, if I somehow managed to rescue her. Now that I’d pulled off that unlikelihood, I had no option but to improvise.

  “I do work for your father,” I said, “but I’m not one of his…whatever you call it.”

  “Soldiers?”

  “Yeah. I’m not a mob guy.”

  “What are you, Jack?”

  “I’m a PI out of Des Moines. I mostly do divorce work.”

  “Aren’t you a little young for that?”

  “I’m not the boss. I’m just an employee of the agency.”

  She was studying me. “Just an employee, for some private eye agency in Des Moines. Not a soldier, for my father back in Chicago.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you killed those two? Those big black fucking sons of fucking bitches?”

  “I, uh…I was in Vietnam. Thought I mentioned that.”

  “Oh. Yes.” Her eyes were on the highway now. “You did say something about that, to K.J. Sorry. I…I forgot.”

  “Under the circumstances, understandable.”

  We rode in silence for maybe a minute.

  Then she asked: “You were watching me for my father? Why would he do that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe he had the wild idea you needed protection.”

  You’d think that would have stopped her for a second, but instead she came right back: “Then you were watching me.”

  I thought for a moment. The closer I could get my story to the truth, the better it would play and the easier it’d be to maintain.

  “No,” I said. “I was watching Professor Byron.”

  Her face jerked toward mine, eyes and nostrils flaring. “Why?”

  “I don’t know for sure. I’m just doing a job.”

  “Tell me what you do know, Jack.”

  “Well…this is reading between the lines. I’m just a grunt in this war. But I think your father wanted me to gather evidence showing what a louse your prize professor is.”

  “ What?”

  “I gathered photos of Professor Byron with another coed. And he’s married.”

  She was sitting forward, shaking her head, which sent her long hair tumbling back into more or less its normal down-her-back configuration. “Are you kidding? I told you before, at Sambo’s-I know all about K.J. He’s a free spirit. I don’t love him, not that way.”

  I could have been a stickler for accuracy and reminded her that she’d been blowing the dude in his study the first time I saw them together. But she was running short enough a fuse already.

  “Yeah, I get that,” I said. “I understand. But your father, and I’ve never met him, but knowing what generation he’s from, my guess is, he assumes you would be shocked and appalled by the professor’s lecherous activities. I mean, these guys from the Depression and World War Two, they have a whole different way of looking at the world. Sex and love are interchangeable to them. The idea that a nice girl like you could admire your professor and want to collaborate with him and also go to bed with him without being in love with him, without wanting to spend your life with him, and not caring how much action he’s getting on the side…well, that just doesn’t fly with that crowd.”

  “And yet my father has fucked more showgirls than Sinatra.”

  That would be a lot of showgirls.

  She was saying, “My father is completely immoral, no make that amoral, where sex is concerned, but he’s got that same goddamn double-standard as the rest of the men of his generation. Madonnas and whores, that’s women to him.”

  “Not to make too fine a point of it, but I doubt he thinks of you as a woman at all.”

  “What?”

  “You’re a girl. His little girl. And this professor is betraying a teacher’s trust and abusing daddy’s precious dainty child.”

  She laughed and something harsh was in it, surprisingly so. “If you only knew what you were saying…”

  Well, I didn’t. I was just filling the emptiness in the car, and trying to convince her I was on her side.

  We drove silently again, maybe for five minutes. Then I noticed her sitting up, her brow furrowing.

  “My God,” she said. Her brain was starting to work. “There are dead men back there at that rest stop.”

  “That’s right.”

  Wide eyes fixed on me. “What are you going to do about it? What am I going to do about it?”

  “Well, we can’t go to the police.”

  “Why not-wasn’t I kidnapped?”

  “You were, but the way I handled it was not…strictly kosher.”

  “You…what did you do?”

  “I’m not going to give you the details.”

  “You mean you…pretty much murdered them.”

  “Pretty much.”

  She sighed. Leaned against the door again. “I don’t know if I believe you…”

  “Oh, I murdered them.”

  “Not that.” She shrugged. “I buy that easy enough. What I doubt is you’re just some PI from Des Moines, not one of my father’s soldiers.”

  “Do I look like one of your father’s soldiers?”

  “No. You…you look like a soldier, though.”

  “Did I mention Vietnam?”

  “You mentioned it. Are you taking me to my apartment?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. How shaken up are you?”

  “How shaken up would you be?”

  “Fairly shaken up. You said you weren’t hurt, but they grabbed you, treated you rough, taped you up and threw you in that trunk-you must have aches and pains.”

  “You could say I have aches and pains.”

  I watched the road. We were coming up on the Quad Cities. “I think we should get a room somewhere and let you rest up and kind of heal up.”

  “Why? What’s wrong with my apartment?”

  “Your apartment, across from the Sambo’s where two black thugs kidnapped you, couple hours ago? That the apartment you mean?”

  She said nothing, but she was holding onto her coat lapels again, and despite her dark complexion looked very pale, though some of that was moonlight and dashboard glow.

  I said, “I would like to talk to your father. Tell him what happened.”

  She turned sharply toward me. “I don’t want to have anything to do with my father!”

  “I can understand that. But those two dead guys from the South Side, they do have something to do with your father. He’s in the middle of some kind of war with them and their black brothers. I want to ask him what to do with you, strictly for your protection.”

  “I don’t want his protection.”

  “Would you rather I hadn’t been here tonight? Do I have to paint you a picture of what kind of fun and games would’ve been starting about now?”

  She said nothing, but then shook her head. “You’re…you’re probably right. In a case like this, my father is the person to talk to.”

  “You want to talk to him yourself?”

  “No. He and I don’t talk.”

  “Would it be all right if I protected your interests?”

  She nodded, once, still clutching her lapels.

  We crossed the Mississippi and before long I took the Highway 61 exit and drove down through Davenport all the way to the riverfront, crossing under the government bridge and pulling into the Concort Inn parking lot.

  I was able to park near the entrance. “Look,” I said, turning to Annette and resting a hand on the seat behind her. “Just so you know. We’ll go in, I’ll register us as husband and wife, Jack and Annette some-shit, and ask for twin beds. You have some fairly liberal notion
s about sex, but in case you’re wondering, I have no intentions of asking for a reward or anything.”

  “I didn’t think you were.”

  “Good. This is about not getting killed. You not getting killed, me not getting killed. Those are the goals.”

  “I can get behind those goals.”

  “Fine. Let’s go in. If we get a twitchy desk clerk, I’ll say the airline lost our luggage.”

  But the desk clerk didn’t give a shit whether we had luggage or not. He was a little put off by me paying in cash since the hotel really did prefer credit cards, but that was all.

  The room was not as nice as the suite the Broker had arranged for my last visit, but it was anonymously modern and clean and had a view on the river. Also, the twin beds I’d requested. I set my nine millimeter on the nightstand between us, to emphasize the seriousness of the situation, and also because I might need the fucking thing.

  Then I realized I was still in that stupid jacket I’d bought at the truck stop, and took it off and threw it on a chair. I also got out of the black Isotoner gloves.

  She sat on the edge of her twin bed facing mine almost primly, hands folded in her lap. She looked beautiful in that fashion model way of hers, dark hair stopping at the white leather shoulders on its way down her back, eyes as big and brown as ever, mouth as fully lush if sans lipstick; but with an edge of controlled hysteria about her.

  “Jack…Do you mind if I take a shower?”

  “No. Let me in there for a couple minutes, first, would you? I neglected to use the bathroom at that rest stop, having other business to attend to.”

  That actually made her smile.

  So I went into the bathroom and I took a fairly major shit and emptied my bladder while I was at it; afterward, I turned on the ceiling fan, gentleman that I am, and splashed water in my face until I felt slightly alive. I mention all this not to share the fascinating details of my toilet activities but to demonstrate that I was giving Annette every opportunity to bail. She was alone out there, with my gun on the nightstand, with fan noise going behind the closed bathroom door, and I was doing my best to display trust. And to give her an opportunity to do the same.

  When I emerged lighter and renewed, she was hanging up her coat in the closet. She smiled at me. She seemed calm enough.