“What about my mother?”
“You said she died. You didn’t say how.”
“She was an alcoholic.”
“That doesn’t have to kill you.”
“It did her. I was a little girl when it happened. She killed herself in a car.”
“An accident.”
“Or something. Look, I really don’t want to talk about any of this anymore, if you don’t mind. I mean, it’s not really… relevant to anything, after all, is it? And, I… well, I have certain… wounds that never really healed over, in my life, you know? So don’t ask me to go picking at them.’’
“Okay.”
She dropped the blanket to the floor in a woolen puddle and sat on my lap and put her arms around my neck. “Why don’t we go sit by the fire. It’s going to die out if you don’t tend to it.”
“Let me ask you something first.”
She sighed. Stiffened.
“I won’t pick at any wounds,” I said. “I promise.”
“Go ahead and ask, then.”
“Your husband… did he do much work down here, at the cottage? You said he was down here a lot.”
“He was, and he did do some work down here, sometimes, but nothing important, I don’t think. Just fiddled.”
“What do you mean?”
“He just worked on minor stuff down here. Like his mail-order businesses. Checking the books and like that. He liked checking his own books. He had a streak of accountant in him. Now, are you going to keep that fire going or not?” She nuzzled my neck.
Earlier, after making love, she’d got me to take a shower with her, in this same coaxing way.
“You win,” I said, and dumped her onto the blanket on the floor.
“Ouch! You’re a bully.”
I picked her up, blanket and all, and deposited her in front of the dwindling fire. It didn’t take long to get the fire going again, and she put her head on my lap, supposedly to go to sleep, but since my lap was her pillow she began smoothing it like one, and then pretty soon her head was in my lap, and then later, finally, she did fall asleep, curling into a fetal position, cuddling in against me, the blanket around her. I sat with her an hour watching the fire, not feeding it any more wood, letting it sputter and die, since the fog might lift and chimney smoke betray us.
She was sleeping soundly, now, and wouldn’t be doing much complaining about me letting the fire go out, so I again lifted her in my arms, a heavy little bundle in her blanket, and took her over to the double bed and tucked her in.
Then I went back to the desk and started going through drawers.
22
A noise woke me, and for a moment I thought I was home, back in Wisconsin, and then I remembered where I was, in a cottage all right, but a different one, and on a river, not a lake. The circle had come around and this was ending as it began, with me waking up in the middle of the night, hearing somebody who was coming in to try and kill me.
Me and someone else, this time.
I was on the bed with Carrie, but not under the covers with her, just stretched out on my back, with all my clothes on, on top of the blankets, the silenced Ruger on my stomach, the. 38 snug in my waistband. I hadn’t really intended to fall asleep, but hadn’t fought it either, despite the fact I was expecting a caller.
After all, I knew who my caller would be, and how he’d come in. Right now, for instance, he was working a key in the front door, just as I’d known he would. That wasn’t the noise that woke me, though.. it was the sound of him creeping up the outside steps; soundlessly, I suppose he thought. If so, he thought wrong. I’d heard him, and was awake, and by the time that key was slipping in the lock on the door, I was almost smiling.
I leaned over and put a hand across Carrie’s mouth and nudged her awake with my other hand, put my lips to her ear, and whispered, “We have company… be quiet, and don’t panic.”
The beam of a big heavy flashlight was probing the porch area, the door between the rooms having a window through which we could see our intruder and his light, though in the total darkness of the place he didn’t see us yet. But he would soon.
Very soon, as now he was opening that door between rooms, that door with the window we’d been observing him through, and he stepped inside, into the room where we were on the bed in the far right corner, and I shoved Carrie off onto the floor, so she’d be between bed and wall and not in any line of fire, and took a couple of silenced shots with the Ruger at the source of the beam beginning to poke around the room.
By source I mean the flashlight itself, not the man carrying it, but I wasn’t used to the Ruger and it was dark in there and I nicked his arm with one shot and I don’t know where the other shot went, but the flashlight tumbled to the ground and some other metal thing did, too, as the guy slammed back against the door he’d just opened, then got the hell out and was clomping down those outside steps he’d come up so carefully minutes ago, before I was even off the bed.
Not that I was in a great hurry. I did get off the bed and turn to the window, which was right above where Carrie was on the floor, cowering, and I threw the lock and forced the window up and saw the guy running out there in the fog, which had thinned a bit, running off the gravel and splashing into the marshy area, an instinctive move I guess, an attempt to find a shortcut maybe, or lose himself as a target in the snarl of brush and branches and bog. All it served to do, of course, was slow him down, and he was hardly off the road, only a dozen feet from the house, when I yelled, “Ash!”
He froze a second, then trudged on a step.
He was well within range, and knew it, and I hardly had to yell at all when I leaned out the window and said, “Ash! You can stop, or I can stop you. Choose.”
He chose to stop. He turned. Shrugged and grinned up at me, though as he shrugged the pain in his left arm where I’d nicked him made his grin turn into a wince. He walked back up onto the gravel of the drive and called up to me, “I’ll wait here for you.”
“You’ll be covered from the window,” I said, “so stay put while I come to you.”
I tugged the. 38 out of my belt and gave the gun to Carrie, who was still wide-eyed and quivering on the floor, back to the wall. She took it, but the gun lay in her palm like a stone, and she looked at it like she didn’t know what the hell it was.
“Hey,” I said. “Snap out of it.”
She cupped the gun in both hands, pushed it toward me, her eyes pleading.
“You won’t have to shoot at anybody,” I said. “Just aim it at that guy out there till I can get to him. It’ll take me a couple minutes to get there, because I don’t know for sure he came alone, and I have to be careful and do it kind of slow. Okay? Now if he starts to run or anything, anything that seems wrong to you, fire the gun, but you don’t have to aim it at him. The sound will stop him. I know him, and believe me, the sound will stop him just fine.”
She sighed.
And I watched while she slowly, reluctantly, made her hand conform to the contours of the gun, and I lifted her off the floor by the waist, and she took the post at the window. Well, she was the prettiest backup man I’d ever had, anyway. Had to give her that much.
I went over and picked up the flashlight he’d dropped, and found that the other thing he’d dropped was a gun, the big. 45 that went with the silencer I’d seen back at his motel room a couple days ago, and the silencer was on, and I wasn’t surprised that this was the other thing he’d dropped. I put the flashlight on the desk and stuck the Ruger in my belt, in back, where it would be covered by the jacket I slipped on. I didn’t want Ash to see the Ruger; he might recognize it. His. 45 I kept in hand.
He had taken off the black thermal jacket he was wearing and was looking at where my slug caught him, as I approached.
“Bad?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Just a graze, but fuck, you could’ve killed me, Quarry, you know that?”
“Not could’ve. Should’ve.”
“Aw, Christ, but you hold a gru
dge.”
“Ash, I got no intention of standing out here in the cold listening to you explain how every time you try to kill me it’s nothing personal.”
“Well, it isn’t, and I never tried to kill you in my life, Quarry, that’s a fact.”
“You sent people to do it last time, I know, so that one doesn’t count. But what the hell do you call tonight?”
“Tonight?”
“You remember. A couple minutes ago. Think back.”
“Yeah? Who shot at who? I didn’t know you was in there. Shit. I thought it was crazy even to look down here, but I was told look, so I the fuck looked, is all. I didn’t see a car, and there were no lights on, and I was…”
“Stupid?”
“That wasn’t the word I was looking for but, yeah, I was stupid. And you’re real smart. Now that that’s settled, tell me… you got the broad in there, or not? She the one with the gun on me. Up in the window? Can she hear us talking?”
“Yes on all counts, except if you keep your voice down, she can’t hear us.”
“She wouldn’t use that gun, would she?”
“Let me put it this way. She knows you were going to kill her last night, that you would have if you and your boy hadn’t fucked up. And she knows you still want to kill her, if you can ever stop fucking up.”
“I don’t want to kill anybody, Quarry. I just got to make a living like everybody else.”
“Fine. Sometime you really must tell me all about your personal philosophy. But right now I got something else in mind for you. I want you to go wake up Brooks and tell him I have something he’s looking for.”
“The broad, you mean?”
“Not exactly. Oh, I have her, and she’s still for sale, but she’s part of a package deal. A twenty-thousand-dollar package.”
“So what else is in the package?”
“A list.”
“You know about that, huh? Well let me tell you something you don’t know. My backup got himself killed tonight, and killed somebody himself while he was at it… some federal guy who was snooping in your hotel room, yes, your hotel room, some federal fucker who evidently was watching the broad, too, only we didn’t know it before.”
“Where do I send the sympathy card?”
“Chicago.”
“Come again.”
“That’s who Brooks works for, in case you didn’t know. The Family out of Chicago.”
“You mean he represents them in court.”
“I mean they own the son of a bitch.”
“What’s their interest in this? If Brooks is the new Broker, they wouldn’t figure in. The Broker’s operation isn’t a Mafia thing.”
“What you don’t know, Quarry, would fill a book.”
“Yeah, well so would what I know. Tell Brooks that. Tell him about the list, too. And the twenty thousand.”
“Anything else, while I’m writing this down?”
“Tell him be in his office at six-thirty, with the twenty thousand. I’ll let him know where he can take it and pay me and get his merchandise.”
“Six-thirty. This afternoon.”
“Six-thirty. This morning.”
“That’s a couple hours from now, Quarry! Where the fuck’s he supposed to get twenty thousand by then?”
“Probably out of a wall safe.”
Ash grinned. “Probably. I suppose you want me to go, now, right?”
“Right. Don’t come back, or bother sending anybody back. We’ll be gone. Anyway, before you make any move you’re going to have to talk this over with Brooks, aren’t you? And there isn’t a public phone for miles, and besides, maybe he wouldn’t want to hear about this on a phone, what with everything crawling with federal people, and…”
“All right, all right. You make your point. No funny stuff. Can I go?”
“Go.”
He went.
And I went back and told Carried to get her clothes on.
“First take this,” she insisted, handing me back the. 38, shuddering, like somebody squeamish who’d been made to handle a snake.
I took the gun, put it back in my belt, and said, “I got to get you to a motel, somewhere out of the way, till this is over.”
“When?”
“When what?”
“Will this be over?”
“Oh. Soon. It’ll be over soon.”
That seemed to ease her mind, and she got herself moving again. Which was the desired effect, of course.
Not that I’d been lying, when I said it would be over soon. It would be.
I just hoped she wasn’t expecting a happy ending.
23
The fog had lifted. Dawn was maybe an hour away, so the streetlights were still on, reflecting off pavement made slick by eight or nine hours of misting. I left the Buick in the parking ramp, which at this hour was all but empty, across from the Conklin Building in downtown Davenport. I was alone. Under my arm was a large manila envelope, which I’d found in the scarred-topped desk at the cottage. My corduroy jacket was slung over my right forearm, covering the hand with Ash’s silenced. 45 in it. I crossed the street.
The bottom floor of the Conklin Building was taken up, primarily, by a motion picture theater, the last surviving such theater in the business district, not counting various porno houses on the fringes. The theater was not at all rundown, in fact had obviously had its face lifted not long ago; but the rest of the Conklin Building was no great shakes. It was a white stone building that had long since turned dingy gray, whose only distinction was twelve stories, ranking it among the tallest of buildings in this modest Midwestern downtown.
Not that it was shabby, but neither was it what I expected of a building where Curtis Brooks, nationally prominent attorney, would keep his office. Surprising, too, was the absence of any junior or other partners; Brooks, despite his fame (or infamy) in his profession, was alone in his practice. This I discovered as I studied the registry in the cubbyhole that served as a lobby for the Conklin Building, just an entryway leading to an elevator, which I stepped into, punching the button marked 12, Brooks’s floor.
When the elevator door opened, Ash was waiting for me.
We didn’t say anything to each other, even though I had said (or implied) I’d contact Brooks by phone rather than come in person. Ash wasn’t surprised to see me, and I wasn’t surprised by his lack of surprise. He walked me down an echoing corridor, lined with flat colorless, plaster walls, wood doors with steamy pebbled glass panes with black lettering, doctors, insurance agents, lawyers. I wondered how many teen-age girls had walked the corridors of this building, on their way to have a quiet little illicit abortion.
At the dead-end of the corridor the pebbled translucent glass read: “Curtis Brooks, Attorney at Law.”
Ash opened the door, but I waited for him to go in first. The reception room was dark, small, unpopulated, reasonably well-appointed but nothing fancy. To the rear of the room, behind the receptionist’s desk, were two doors, one of them standing open to reveal a small law library, four walls of books, room enough to walk around but that’s all. The other door was closed, and I waited for Ash to open it and go in, and then followed.
This room was barely larger than the outer office. It too was well-appointed: dark paneling, green shag carpet, leather couch against one wall, several chairs, big, imposing mahogany desk. The most interesting thing in the room was the oil painting on the wall over the couch. It was a painting of a beautiful middle-aged woman.
The second most interesting thing was Brooks himself, sitting in the high-backed swivel chair, half-turned and looking out the sheer-curtained window behind his desk, not blinking, let alone speaking at our entrance. He still seemed smaller than he should, but I had to admit he had a certain presence, like a movie star who can’t act but somehow commands your attention, anyway. The deep tan, the character lines in all the right places, the wavy brown hair with white around the ears, the intense brown eyes, the expensive suit he wore even for a six-thirty in the morning a
ppointment with the likes of me, all conspired to make him as imposing a figure as the desk he loomed behind.
On that desk, which was otherwise empty but for a phone, was a briefcase. Not turning toward us, Brooks reached a hand over and flicked the latches on the briefcase and it yawned open, revealing neatly stacked and tightly packed rows of green, banded packets of cash.
“There,” Brooks said, “is your money.” His baritone was almost bored; no courtroom flair at all.
I reached in my pocket and took out a key. Brooks turned, finally, his chair turning with him; he wanted to see what I was doing.
I was handing the key to Ash.
“Cozy Rest Motel,” I said. “Highway 6, past the city limits a few miles.”
Brooks waved a finger at Ash. “Go,” he said. Ash hesitated.
“Well?” Brooks said.
Ash said, “You… want me to leave you here?”
“We aren’t going with you,” Brooks said. Sarcastic. Impatient.
“Well… okay. But what do I do with…?”
“Do what you should have done two nights ago.”
Ash made a whatever-you-say face and left. I pulled a chair around in front of the desk, closed the lid on the briefcase.
“Is there twenty thousand here?” I asked.
“Frankly,” Brooks said, “no. There isn’t. More like ten.”
“Well. I only gave you half of your package, anyway.”
“When I see your… list,” he said, “you can have the rest.”
“You don’t believe I have it.”
“No.”
“Then why are you sitting here with me in your office, at six-thirty Saturday morning, your day off… pushing a briefcase of money at me.”
“For that motel room key you gave Ash. Nothing more.”
“You’re not pretending there’s no list, are you?”
Polite laugh. “I’m not even sure I know just what sort of a list you’re talking about, Mr. Quarry.”
“Oh. You want to know how much I know, before committing yourself further. You want to know how much I’ve figured out.”
He shrugged with his eyebrows, and as I looked at his eyes I saw that this casual manner was a pose. The eyes looking out of the shell that pretended to be relaxed and even disinterested spoke instead of urgency and even desperation. And something else. A flicker of something else.
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