“The wall,” I said.
He nodded and slowly turned to the side wall, leaned against it in the space between the closet and the door, hands behind his head, legs spread.
I patted him-down. I felt a hard narrow shaft as my hand traveled over his left trouser pocket, which either meant he was horny or he had a knife in there. I ripped the pocket open and a stiletto hit the floor.
“Cute,” I said.
“Some people don’t like knives,” he said pleasantly, glancing back over his shoulder at me. “Me, I don’t mind ’em. I’m not squeamish.”
His voice was medium-pitched, well-modulated. It went well with his friendly bartender face.
I kicked his knife over toward the corner, and it bounced off the wall and ended up under the bed. “Okay,” I said. “Stand away.”
He released his hands from their behind-thehead clasp, turned around, and looked over toward his dead partner. We were in close, because the room was very small, sort of a closet with aspirations. I didn’t like the closeness, because this guy was obviously stronger than me, and his carrying a knife indicated he was less wary of physical struggle than I am. Also, anyone who carries a knife-that is, anyone who carries a knife expressly to kill people-has psychotic tendencies, if you ask me. At the very least, such a person reveals a disturbing willingness to make a mess.
So I tried to keep a few feet between us, which was a challenge in that tiny room.
“You mind if I take a look?” he asked, gesturing toward the bed.
“Go right ahead.”
He lifted the sheet back and looked at his partner. I looked at him. I figured he was hoping I’d look at his partner, but I’m afraid I disappointed him. He let the sheet drop, shook his head, said, “Just had the little bastard broke in.”
“That’s a shame.”
“I guess I should’ve taught him a little better. Shit. He must’ve come in like the fourth of fuckin’ July.”
“That’s right.”
“I told him this was a special case. Little bastard’s been getting cocky lately, and just wouldn’t listen. Guess this’ll teach him.”
“I guess.”
“You know, this here was very good, exchanging clothes with my boy Beatty here, you fooled me good.”
“Maybe you been getting cocky lately.”
“Yeah!” the guy laughed. “Maybe I have at that. Look, Quarry… you mind I call you Quarry?”
“Be my guest.”
“I’m Lynch. I’d offer you a hand to shake, but…”
“I understand.”
“Well, anyway. Looks like we got a situation here, don’t we?”
“Looks like it.”
“Could we get out of this cramped bedroom? I just know you’re not going to be comfortable talking to me till we do.”
I nodded. “The living room. You know the way. You came in through there.”
“I did at that. It was a tricky fucker, too. You want me to turn on the hall switch?”
“Know where it is, do you?”
“Fuck, yes. I been in here three times.”
“Really? I’d have thought you were good enough to get by on once.”
He laughed. “We better stop tryin’ to impress each other and go in the other room and talk like civilized people.”
“Good idea,” I said, and we did.
I kept the nine-millimeter on him, but I didn’t make a big thing of it. He had decided to try and talk his way out this, and I wanted to encourage that view. But I watched him. Close.
“You mind if I smoke?” he asked, sitting on the couch beneath the open stairway to the loft.
I had pulled the kitchen stool around and was sitting on that. I liked being up a shade higher than him.
“I don’t mind,” I said.
“You got any cigarettes around this joint, then? I didn’t bring mine in with me.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I don’t smoke myself, and I don’t keep cigarettes in my house.”
“Why not, for Christsake?”
“They’re bad for you.”
He thought that was funny, or pretended to. He laughed and shook his head for thirty seconds and said, “You got anything to drink?”
“Coke, Dr Pepper, Seven-Up.”
“And what else?”
“I got some wine, but I’m saving that for New Year’s Eve.”
That tickled him, too, or anyway he laughed about it. “Shit, man, you live like a fuckin’ nun.”
“Monk.”
“Whatever. But that’s how you live. If you call this living.”
“It beats what your partner’s doing.”
That stopped him, for just a moment, and he said, “You been waiting for this, haven’t you? You were ready for us.”
“Either that,” I said, “or you weren’t ready for me.”
“Ain’t that the truth, pal. Ain’t it the truth. But you ought to be crazy by now. How long has it been like this? No booze, no friends, no women, just cooped up here.”
“I get out once a day.”
“Sure, You go swimming over at the Y at Lake Geneva. Some fun.”
“Be grateful. If I didn’t go swimming every day, you wouldn’t ever have got in here to look around.”
“Yeah, and fuck of a lot of good it did us.”
“You’re still alive.”
“For how long?”
“That’s up to you.”
“Is it? I’d like to think so, but you seem to have a gun in your hand, and my boy Beatty seems to be shot to shit in the other room.”
“But you aren’t.”
“Yeah, well, not yet, but maybe pretty soon, huh?”
“Maybe.”
“So it boils down to this, Quarry, right? I got something you want
… a name. And you got something I want… my life. So. Can we work a trade?”
“Why not?”
“Why not, he asks. You’re holding ‘why not’ in your fuckin’ hand, and you know it. I can give you the name you want, but there’s no guarantee you’ll give me my life, if I do. Not that I don’t trust you, but there just isn’t any guarantee.”
“There’s no guarantee you’ll give me the right name, either, so we just have to trust each other, I guess.”
“You could look at it that way. I don’t. I think we got what you call your typical Mexican standoff here, and seems to me we ought to look for some alternate route around this, what you call, impasse we’re at.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’m glad… ’cause I just happen to have an alternate route in mind.”
“I’m still listening.”
“I’m still glad. I’m glad we’re getting along so good, too, ’cause my alternate route is this: throw in together.”
“And do what?”
“Hey, you’re supposed to be listening. Just keep listening, and when you hear what I got to say, you’ll understand what I mean. And, Quarry, I’m going to prove to you just how sincere I really am, man. I’m going to give you your fuckin’ name. That’s the main thing you’re after, right? I’ll give you the fucker, no strings attached, and then I’ll explain how we’re going to throw in together and make us a pile. Interested?”
This time I laughed.
“Okay,” I said. “So what’s the name?”
4
Vietnam taught me a lot of things, but coming home taught me more. The beginning of my education was finding my wife in bed with a guy named Williams. The only reason I didn’t shoot Williams on the spot was I didn’t have a gun on me, and he was too big to slug it out with, so I ended up backing out of there, feeling embarrassed, somehow, for having interrupted.
The next morning, after I’d cooled down and thought the situation over in the rational light of day, I went out to Williams’s bungalow in La Mirada, where I found him on his back in his driveway, working on the rear end of his little sportscar, which was jacked up with the back wheels off. He looked up at me an
d said, “I got nothing to say to you, bunghole,” and I said fine and kicked out the jack.
I didn’t kill my wife. Had she been under the car at the time, I would have dropped it on her just as fast as Williams. But she wasn’t, and any feeling I had for her died with her boyfriend. She divorced me, of course. I couldn’t have cared less.
They gave it a lot of play in the papers, but there was no trial. No district attorney in his right mind would bother trying a case like that. Even in an unpopular war, the returning warrior has the right to get upset when he finds his wife fucking somebody. In fact, those two situations seem to be the socially sanctioned situations for killing people: war, and when you find your wife fucking somebody.
On the other hand, I couldn’t find work. Everybody sympathized with me, didn’t blame me a bit for what I’d done, and told me so in no uncertain terms. I got more sympathy than a terminal cancer patient. And about as many job offers.
Before I went in the service, I worked in a garage, but everywhere I went I was told there were no openings for a mechanic, which I knew wasn’t entirely accurate, as Williams had been a mechanic, too, so the job market was short at least one. The publicity about my homecoming was obviously working against me, but there was also a general negative attitude toward hiring Vietnam veterans, since a lot of employers assumed we were all dope addicts.
I spent a lonely month in L.A., feeling sorry for myself, drinking, and trying to catch V.D. California itself was enough to bring me down. The place was full of bad memories, or rather good memories that had gone bad, as this was where I’d been stationed before going over, where I’d met my California girl, my bride with the sun-bleached brown hair and golden tan and lush figure just made for a bikini, an image in my memory that had turned dark and brittle, like newspaper left out in the sun.
The first week my old man came out to see me and tell me not to come home. Home was Ohio, and a stepmother who thought me strange even before I started dropping cars on people. My old man hadn’t needed bother to come tell me not to go home, but his doing so didn’t particularly help my mental state.
Neither did his insistence that my “murder” of Williams didn’t bother him, because it was offset by all the good things I’d done in the service of my country. By good things he meant all those yellow people I killed.
After a while I began getting tired of counting the cockroaches on the walls of my “apartment,” two rooms, one of which was the toilet. Besides, I was broke. I knew I’d have to get off my butt and find something to keep myself going. And while I had learned in Vietnam about the meaninglessness of life and death-a view that had only been reinforced since my return to the states-I’d also had instilled in me the importance of survival. Those two views should be incompatible, I suppose, but they aren’t. Anyone who’s been in a war can tell you it’s quite possible to believe in survival while placing no value in life and death.
I never asked the Broker how he got my name, although it seems obvious enough to me now that he’d seen about me in the papers, and saw some potential in me, perhaps even was able to anticipate my weeks of unsuccessful job-hunting, and my month of cheap booze and cheaper hookers. Anyway, he knew where to find me. He came right to my two-room suite at the Fleabag Hilton and made his pitch.
Funny thing, I can’t remember the conversation. I can remember my surprise, answering the knock at the door, expecting the landlord come to bitch about next week’s rent, and finding instead the dignified-looking, white- haired gentleman, with the neatly trimmed mustache, conservative but well-cut gray suit, and general demeanor of a successful lawyer or politician. He also had that ambiguity of age his type often has: he appeared to be around forty, though I later learned he was nearer fifty than forty; as long as I knew him, he looked a good ten years younger than he really was despite the stark white hair. I think it was the lack of lines in that long face of his.
I remember my surprise at seeing this distinguished apparition at the door of the trash can I was living in, but the conversation that followed I can’t summon up. I remember it in substance, but not detail.
I know he didn’t come right out and ask me if I wanted to kill people for money. He was much more subtle than that. He did it all with implication, in that eloquently long- winded politician’s way of his, telling me without really saying it that I could make a lot of money doing what I had done overseas for very little money. I had already shown, in the case of the late Mr. Williams, my willingness to kill for free. Now I was being tested to find if I had any aversion to doing the same for a fee.
I was at a point in my life where I could have gone in any direction; all I needed was a push. If somebody religious had got hold of me, he could’ve made a missionary out of me.
But somebody religious didn’t come around.
The Broker did.
5
“Ash,” he said.
“What?”
“That’s the name. Mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“Good. Because I just happen to have an address that goes with it. That, you can have later on.”
“Later on.”
“Right. Soon as we get some trust built up in each other. You can understand that, can’t you?”
“I can understand that. You want to tell me about Ash?”
“He worked through the Broker. Like you. Like me. Like that dead kid in bed in the other room.”
“So he worked through the Broker. So what?”
“So three and a half months ago, the Broker was killed. Or, should I say, hit.”
“No kidding.”
“And I think we both know who hit him.”
“Do we?”
“Come on, Quarry. You killed the Broker. Don’t fuck around.”
“What if I didn’t?”
“Kill the Broker, you mean? Wouldn’t matter. Ash thinks you did.”
“Don’t stop now. You’re rolling.”
“I kind of thought you’d find this interesting. Anyway, Ash, or somebody behind him, wants to take over where the Broker left off. And figures doing away with the guy that killed the broker is a necessary safety precaution for anybody planning to step in the Broker’s shoes.”
“When do you get to the part where you and me make a pile?”
“I’m there already. All we got to do, Quarry, is ease Ash out. Or, Ash and whoever’s behind him, if there is somebody behind him. That part I’m not sure about, but it’s no problem.”
“Then what?”
“Then we, Quarry, we take over for the Broker. We play the middleman role and get some of the safe money, for a change. Shit! Who in fuck is better qualified than us?”
I nodded. Sat staring thoughtfully at him.
“I know, I know,” he said. “There’s more to it than just what I’ve said. I’m just sketching it in, broad strokes, broad strokes. But it’s not hard to see that there’s more here than just one man can handle. Two men… if they’re men like you and me, Quarry, the sky’s the fuckin’ limit, man. What do you say?”
“How about ‘this is so sudden’?”
“Take your time. Think it over. Nobody’s rushing you.”
“You keep talking. I’ll be thinking it over.’’
“Okay. First move is, hit Ash. Got to question him first, of course, find out if this was his idea, and if not, whose it was. We got to find out about the mechanical side, too, you know, find out just how exactly taking over Broker’s old setup could be put into effect. I mean, I assume there’s a list or something of the people like you and me who worked through the Broker, and we’ll need that; that’ll be the key. Questioning Ash won’t be any big deal. I, uh, know how to get people to talk to me, if I have to. Even somebody like Ash.”
I remembered the stiletto in the other room and knew what he meant.
“All right. I gave you the name, like I said, But it’s meaningless without the address. I can take you there. We can go see Ash together, we could go tonight.”
“It�
��s within driving distance, then?”
“That’s right. You’ll excuse me for not being exact about how far, or how long it’ll take us, you understand. But if we left now, we could be there in… a reasonable amount of time, yes.”
“You do realize there’s a body in the other room that needs getting rid of.”
“Oh, well, sure. No problem. We could do that on the way.”
We wrapped the body in the bedclothing; the plastic cover I’d put on the bed was dark green, and not only held in the mess, but made for a nice dark bundle that would look relatively inconspicuous, should we happen to be seen depositing it in the back of his station wagon. The wagon was parked beyond the bushes that separated my property from the road. I am on the outskirts of a town of less than one hundred population, so the road is lit, but not particularly well traveled, especially in winter, in the early predawn hours.
There are a lot of sand and gravel pits along the Wisconsin and Illinois border. The greatest number are near Woodstock, which is thirty or so miles from my cottage. The abandoned pits fill with water, and there was one of those, a large one, a mile and a half from me. In the summer the tree-encircled, water-filled pit is used by kids of various ages for skinny dipping. In the winter it isn’t used for much of anything.
Around a year ago August some teen-agers were swimming there and some kid with good lungs went tooling way down underwater to see what he could see. What he saw was a car with three bodies in it. The bodies were floating around inside, bloated, decomposing, full of bullet holes.
The authorities called it a gangland killing, which it probably was.
I didn’t have to mention any of this, of course. We both knew that we were close enough to Chicago to be able to dump a shot-up corpse about anywhere and have it called a gangland killing.
He was still talking, but I wasn’t listening. I had him drive, just to keep his hands busy, and interrupted him with instructions when necessary, which he followed cheerfully. We were on a gravel side road, now.
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