The last quarry
( Quarry - 6 )
Max Allan Collins
Max Allan Collins
The last quarry
One
It had been a long time since I’d had any trouble sleeping.
Not since the fucking shelling was keeping me awake, a lifetime or two ago. I’m not by nature an insomniac. You might think killing people for a living would give you some bad nights. Truth is, guys in the killing biz? Just aren’t the type to be bothered.
I was no exception. I hadn’t gone into retirement because my conscience was bothering me. I retired because I had enough money put away to live comfortably without working, so I did. And for a while that retirement had gone well. I’d invested a little and was living off the gravy; I’d even been married for a while, which had worked out fine.
For a while.
Currently I was deposited in an A-frame cottage with a deck onto the frozen expanse of Sylvan Lake, somewhere in Minnesota, only it’s not called Sylvan Lake and maybe it’s not Minnesota, either. I was staying at the only resort on this side of the lake, Sylvan Lodge, but I was not a guest-I ran the place. Or, anyway, did when it wasn’t off-season.
Once upon a time I had owned a resort in Wisconsin not unlike this-not near the acreage, of course, and not near the occupancy; but I had owned the place, whereas here I was just the manager.
Of course I didn’t have anything to complain about. I was lucky to have the job. When I ran into Gary Petersen in Milwaukee, where he was attending a convention and I was making a one-night stopover to remove some emergency funds from several bank deposit boxes, I was at the loosest of loose ends. The name I’d lived under for over a decade was unusable; my past had caught up with me, back at Paradise Lake, where everything went to hell in an instant: my straight business yanked from under me, my wife (who’d had not a clue of my prior existence) murdered in her sleep.
Gary, however, had recognized me in the hotel bar and called out a name I hadn’t used since the early ’70s: my real one.
“Jack!” he said, only that wasn’t the name. For the purposes of this narrative, however, we’ll say my real name is Jack Keller.
“Gary,” I said, surprised by the warmth creeping into my voice. “You son of a bitch…you’re still alive.”
Gary was a huge man-six six, weighing in at somewhere between three hundred pounds and a ton; his face was masked in a bristly brown beard, his skull exposed by hair loss, his dark eyes bright, his smile friendly, in a goofy, almost child-like way.
“Thanks to you, asshole,” he said.
We’d been in Vietnam together.
“What the hell have you been doing all these years, Jack?”
“Mostly killing people.”
He boomed a laugh. “Yeah, right!”
“Don’t believe me, then.”
I was, incidentally, pretty drunk. I don’t drink often, but I’d been through the mill lately.
“Are you crying, Jack?”
“Fuck no,” I said.
But I was.
Gary slipped his arm around my shoulder; it was like getting cuddled by God. “Bro-what’s the deal? What shit have you been through?”
“They killed my wife,” I said, and blubbered drunkenly into his shoulder.
“Jesus, Jack-who…?”
“Fucking assholes…fucking assholes…”
We went to his suite. He was supposed to play poker with some buddies but he called it off.
I was very drunk and very morose and Gary was, at one time anyway, my closest friend, and during the most desperate of days.
I told him everything.
I told him how after I got back from Nam, I found my wife-my first wife-shacked up with some guy, some fucking auto mechanic, who was working under a car when I kicked the jack out. The jury let me off, but I was finished in my hometown, and I drifted until the Broker found me. The Broker, who gave me the name Quarry, was the conduit through whom the murder-for-hire contracts came, and, what? Ten years later the Broker was dead, by my hand, and I was out of the killing business and took my savings and went to Paradise Lake in Wisconsin, where eventually I met a pleasant, attractive, not terribly bright woman and she and I were in the lodge business until the past came looking for me, and suddenly she was dead, and I was without a life or even identity. I had managed to kill the fuckers responsible for my wife’s killing-political assholes, not wiseguys-but otherwise I had nothing. Nothing left but some money stashed away, that I was now retrieving.
I told Gary all this, through the night, in considerably more detail though probably even less coherently, although coherently enough that when I woke up the next morning, where Gary had laid me out on the extra bed, I knew I’d told him too much.
He was still asleep. Like me, he was in the same clothes we’d worn to that bar; like me, he smelled of booze, only he also reeked of cigarette smoke. I reeked a little, too, but it was Gary’s smoke: I never picked up the habit. Bad for you.
He looked like a big dead animal, except for his barrel-like chest heaving with breath. I looked at this man-like me, he was somewhere near or past fifty, not the kids we’d been before the war made us worse than just men.
I still had liquor in me, but I was sober now. Too deadly fucking sober. I studied my best-friend-of-long-ago and wondered if I had to kill him.
I was standing over him, staring down at him, mulling that over, when his eyes opened suddenly, like a timer turning on the lights in a house to fend off burglars. He smiled a little, then it faded, his eyes narrowed, and he said, “Morning, Jack.”
“Morning, Gary.”
“You’ve got that look.”
“What look is that?”
“The cold one. The one I first saw a long time ago.”
I swallowed and took my eyes off him. Sat on the edge of the bed across from him and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands.
He plopped down across from me with those big paws on his big knees and said, “How the hell d’you manage it?”
“What?”
“Hauling my fat ass onto that Medivac.”
I grunted a laugh. “The same way a little mother lifts a Buick off her big baby.”
“In my case, you lifted the Buick onto the baby. Let me buy you breakfast.”
“Okay.”
In the hotel coffee shop, he said, “Funny…what you told me last night…about the business you used to be in?”
I sipped my coffee; I didn’t look at him-didn’t show him my eyes. “Yeah?”
“I’m in the same game.”
Now I looked at him; I winced with disbelief. “What…?”
He corrected my initial thought. “The tourist game, I mean. I run a lodge near Brainerd.”
“No kidding.”
“That’s what this convention is. Northern Resort Owners Association.”
“I heard of it,” I said, nodding. “Never bothered to join, myself.”
Not by nature much of a joiner.
“I’m a past president,” he said, obviously proud of that. “Anyway, I run a place called Sylvan Lodge. My third and current, and I swear to God everlasting wife, Ruth Ann? Maybe I mentioned her last night? Anyway, Ruthie inherited it from her late parents, God rest their hardworking Republican souls.”
None of this came as a surprise to me. Grizzly bear Gary had always drawn women like a great big magnet-usually good-looking little women who wanted a father figure, Papa Bear variety. Even in Bangkok on R amp; R, Gary never had to pay for pussy, as we used to delicately phrase it.
“I’m happy for you,” I said. “I always figured you’d manage to marry for money.”
“My ass! I really love Ruth Ann. You should see the knockers on the child.”
“A touching testimonial if I ever heard one. Listen… about that bullshit I was spouting last night…”
His dark eyes became slits, the smile in his brushy face disappeared. “We’ll never speak of that again. Understood? Never.”
He reached out and squeezed my forearm.
I sighed and smiled tightly and nodded, relieved. Killing Gary would have been no fun at all.
He continued, though. “My sorry fat ass wouldn’t even be on this planet, if it wasn’t for you. I owe you big time.”
“Bullshit,” I said, but not very convincingly.
“I’ve had a good life, at least the last ten years or so, since I met Ruthie. You’ve been swimming in Shit River long enough. Let me help you out.”
“Gary, I…”
“Actually, I want you to help me.”
“Help you?”
Gary’s business was such a thriving one that he had recently invested in a second lodge, one across the way from his Gull Lake resort. He had quickly discovered he couldn’t run both places himself, at least not “without running my fat ass off.” He offered me the job of managing Sylvan.
“We’ll start you at 5OK, with free housing. You can make a tidy buck with damn near no overhead, and you can tap into at least one of your marketable skills, and at the same time be out of the way. Keep as low a profile as you like. You don’t even have to deal with the tourists, to speak of-we have a social director for that. You just keep the boat afloat. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, and we shook hands.
Goddamn I was glad I hadn’t killed him…
Two
Now, here I was a little more than six months into the job, and a month into the first winter-off-season, settled in. My quarters, despite the rustic trappings of the cabin-like exterior, were modern-pine paneling skirting the room with pale yellow pastel walls rising to a high pointed ceiling. Just one A-frame room with bath and kitchenette, but a big room, facing the lake, which was a mere hundred yards from the deck that was my back porch. Couch, Dish TV, plenty of closet space, a comfortable bed. I didn’t need anything more.
During off-season like this, I could’ve moved into more spacious digs if I liked, but I hadn’t bothered. My first summer and fall at Sylvan Lodge had been a real pleasure. Just a short jog across the way was an indoor swimming pool with hot tub and sauna, plus a tennis court; a golf course, shared with Gary’s other lodge, was an easy drive. My duties were constant, but mostly consisted of delegating authority, and the gay chef of our gourmet restaurant made sure I ate well and free, and I’d been banging Nikki, the college girl who had the social director position for the summer, so my staff relations were solid.
But the cold months had come, and in this part of the world that was fucking cold indeed. Everyone except a maintenance guy, Jose, was gone, and even he didn’t live on site; Nikki was back blowing frat boys and probably posing for a Playboy college-girl spread, and I didn’t even want to know what my gay chef was up to. Gary was off with Ruth Ann down in Florida, where his “winter” home was, and I was up here, keeping an eye on things-like making sure a moose didn’t get inside the restaurant and take a dump or something.
In short, I had nothing to do. The only managerial instruction I’d given Jose since we closed for the season was to keep the pool and hot tub and sauna going, for my personal use.
So for the past month, boredom had started to itch at me…and for the past few nights I’d had trouble sleeping. I sat up all night watching satellite TV and reading paperback westerns; then I’d drag around the next day, maybe drifting to sleep in the afternoon just long enough to fuck up my sleep cycle again that night.
It was getting irritating.
At about three-thirty in the morning on the fourth night of this shit, I decided eating might do the trick. Fill my gut with junk food and the blood could rush down from my head and warm my belly and I’d get the fuck sleepy, finally. I hadn’t tried this before because I’d been getting a trifle paunchy, with this easy job, even more so since winter kicked in.
In the summer, at least, I could swim in the lake every day and get some exercise and keep the fucking spare tire off. But with winter here, I’d just let my beard go and belt size, too. I tried to make myself do laps in the pool across the way, but mostly I sat in the hot tub and drank Coca Cola and thought about my past. I wasn’t sure why-it wasn’t the kind of past you got anywhere with by thinking about it. The only thing I knew for sure was, this winter was making me fat and lazy and, now, fucking sleepless.
The cupboard was bare so I threw on my thermal jacket and-since I was alone on my stretch of Sylvan Lake-took the ten-mile ride to the nearest junk food. At this time of night a shabby little convenience store, Ray’s Mart, with its one self-service gas pump, was the only thing open fifteen miles in either direction.
The clerk was a heavy-set brunette named Cindy from Brainerd. She was maybe twenty years old and a little surly, but she worked all night, so who could blame her.
“Mr. Ryan,” she said, flatly, as I came in, the bell over the door jingling. She was engrossed in a telephone conversation and this effusive greeting had been both an effort and a concession to a regular customer.
“Cindy,” I said, with a nod, and I began prowling the place, three narrow aisles parallel to the front of the building. None of the snacks appealed to me-chips and crackers and Twinkies and other preservative-packed delights-and the frozen food case ran mostly to ice-cream sandwiches and popsicles. In this weather, that was a joke.
I was giving a box of Chef Boyardee lasagna an intent once-over, like it was a car I was considering buying, when the bell over the door jingled again. I glanced up and saw a well-dressed, heavy-set man-heavy-set enough to make Cindy look svelte-with a pockmarked, Uncle Fester-ish face and black-rimmed glasses that fogged up as soon as he stepped in.
He wore an expensive topcoat-a tan Burberry number with a red-and-black plaid scarf, the sort of pricey ensemble that required a small mortgage-and his shoes had a bright black city shine, barely flecked with ice and snow. His name was Harry Something-the-fuck, and he was from Chicago. I knew him, in my former life.
I turned my back.
If he saw me, I’d have to kill him-I was bored, but not that bored.
Predictably, Harry Something went straight for the potato chips; he also rustled around the area where cookies were shelved. I risked a glimpse and saw him, not two minutes after he entered, with his arms full of junk food, heading for the front counter.
“Excuse me, miss,” Harry Something said, depositing his groceries before Cindy like an offering on an altar. His voice was nasal and high-pitched; a funny, childish voice for a man his size-it went well with the Uncle Fester face. “Could you direct me to the sanitary napkins?”
Cindy winced, phone in hand, annoyed by this intrusion. Harry was not a regular customer.
She said, “You mean Tampax?”
“Whatever.”
“Toiletries is just over there.”
Now this was curious, and I’ll tell you why. I had met Harry Something around ten years before, when I was doing a job for the Outfit boys in Chicago. I was never a mob guy, mind you, strictly a freelancer, but their money was as good as anybody’s. What that job was isn’t important, but Harry and his partner Louis were the locals who had fucked up, making my outsider’s presence necessary. Harry and Louis had not been friendly toward me. They had threatened me, in fact. They had beaten the hell out of me in my hotel room, when the job was over, for making them look bad.
I had never taken any sort of revenge out on them. I occasionally do take revenge, but at my convenience, and only when a score strikes me as worth settling. Harry and Louis had really just pushed me around a little, bloodied my nose, tried to earn back a little self-respect. So I didn’t hold a grudge. Not a major grudge. Fuck it.
As to why Harry Something purchasing Tampax in the middle of the night at some backwoods convenience store was curious, well, Harry and Louis were g
ay. Like my old man used to say, queer as a three-dollar bill. Mob muscle who worked as a pair, and played as a pair.
And I don’t mean to be critical. To each his own. I’d rather cut off my dick than insert it in any orifice of a repulsive fat slob like Harry Something. But, hey, that’s just me.
Now while I’m as naturally curious as the next guy, I’m sure as hell not nosy, not even inquisitive, really. But when a faggot buys Tampax, you have to wonder why.
“Excuse me,” Harry Something said, brushing by me.
He hadn’t seen my face (had he?)-and he might not recognize me, in any case. Ten years and a beard and twenty pounds later, I wasn’t as easy to peg as Harry was, who had changed goddamn little.
Harry, having stocked up on cookies and chips and Tampax, was now buying milk and packaged macaroni and cheese and provisions in general. He was shopping.
Stocking up.
And now I was starting to get a handle on what he might be up to…
I nodded to surly Cindy, who bid me goodbye by flickering her eyelids in casual contempt, and went out to my car, a steel-gray Jag I’d purchased recently. I wished I’d had the Lodge’s four-wheel drive, or anything less conspicuous, but I didn’t. I sat in the car, scooched down low; I did not turn on the engine. I just sat in the cold car in the cold night and waited.
Harry Something came out with two armloads of groceries-Tampax included, I presumed-and he put them in the front seat of a brown rental Ford Taurus. Louis was not waiting in the car for him.
Harry was alone.
Which further confirmed my suspicions…
I waited for him to pull out onto the road, hung back till he took the road’s curve, then started up my Jag and glided out after him. He had turned left, toward Brainerd. That made sense, only I figured he wouldn’t wind up there-he’d likely light out for the boonies somewhere.
I knew what Harry was up to, vaguely at least. He sure as shit wasn’t here to ski-that lardass couldn’t stand up on a pair of skis. And he wasn’t here to go ice-fishing, either. A city boy like Harry Something had no business in a touristy area like this, in the off-season…
The last quarry q-6 Page 1