The last quarry q-6

by Max Allan Collins

  “Beautiful,” Green said, shaking his head admiringly. “Beautiful goddamn country, up here. I can see why you like it.”

  “I’ll be moving on soon,” I said. “You could probably buy this cottage from the guy who owns the lodge.”

  Green flicked his gaze my way.

  I continued: “Of course, if you do move in, for a summer home? Every time you look out at this lovely lake, you’ll be looking at those numbnuts who grabbed your kid.”

  He wasn’t studying the lake, anymore; his eyes were on me. “Why moving on?”

  “You know where I live, Mr. Green.” I shrugged and smiled. “Even if I do do this job, I’m out of here.”

  Eyes narrowed to slits, Green said, “You don’t need to do that, Mr. Quarry. I swear to you I was discreet about finding you. I used a number of people, and no single investigator was-”

  “Sure. Fine.”

  Green sighed. “ Will you do the job?”

  I nodded.

  Relief flooded his features. “How do I make my payment?”

  “I’ll give you the offshore banking info. When $125 K hits the account, I go to work. When I deliver, put the rest in.”

  Green frowned. “You trust me to do that?”

  “Sure.” I grinned at him. “I’m kinda my own collection agency.”

  He didn’t allow himself to be frightened by that; instead he again stared out at the hauntingly beautiful lake.

  For the first time, I heard a genuine melancholy in the mogul’s voice. “She’s…she’s already dead.”

  I nodded. “It just hasn’t made the obits yet… Coffee?”

  Six

  The Homewood Library seemed modern to me, but only because of my age-it dated to the ’70s and you walked into a big high-ceilinged area with wide steps leading up to a surrounding second floor that was like a landing that got out of hand.

  The place was all cheerful oranges and greens and yellows, dotted with oppressively cheerful posters encouraging reading and featuring lots of Asian and black faces, though everybody I saw in there was white. What had once been open and spacious was now a little cluttered, with an area obviously intended for seating given over to portable bookcases of NEW RELEASES and AUDIOS, and various computer stations.

  It didn’t remind me much of the austere churchlike libraries of my youth-hardwood floors and institutional green walls and endless shelves of anonymous dustjacket-less books overseen by cold-eyed old-maid librarians with their hair in gray buns and their bodies in gray dresses that a nun would’ve considered needlessly unflattering.

  And Janet Wright didn’t remind me of those old-maid librarians, either, though her white blouse and black skirt were a little stark, at that. Her dark blonde hair was pinned up (though not in a bun), attractive stray curls of it struggling free to give her heart-shaped face unbidden decorative touches. Her reading glasses were wireframe and merely serviceable, like the touches of lipstick and eyeliner that appeared to be her only makeup. She seemed to have a nice shape, too, though her wardrobe played it down.

  But there was no getting away from that nice, creamy complexion and eyes so brown they almost looked black from a distance, and she had a very nice smile that she flashed generously at the grade-school kids-third-graders? — who were sitting on the floor in the Children’s Section staring up adoringly at her, lost in the story she was reading…a book called The Glass Doorknob, something or other about a sock monkey.

  I was impressed-not one of these kids was fidgeting or squirming or looking to need their Ritalin dosage, even if their laughter did seem unnecessarily shrill. Of course, eight kids who were spending their Friday after-school time at the library probably weren’t the type to be fussy; plus, the six girls probably wanted to be Janet Wright when they grew up, and the two boys probably wanted to marry her when they did (although right now they had no idea why).

  As she sat in the chair, her audience gathered around like little Indians, it was obvious she related well to the tykes, stopping to ask them questions, involving them, really looking at them and even listening to their answers.

  Already I understood what Jonah Green had meant about this woman not deserving what I was here to do to her. Nobody looking at her would have guessed a contract kill would be her fate. On the other hand, nobody looking at me would have guessed I was stalking my prey-in jeans, running shoes, brown sweater, lighter brown shirt-with-collar, I might have been a teacher or writer, the kind of rumpled jerk who browses endlessly at Borders and never buys a goddamn thing, then complains that book sales are down because the world has gone illiterate.

  Right now I was fucking around in the War Section, flipping through books on Vietnam written by idiots who hadn’t been there. And, by the way, if you ever have a question about where any specific subjects can be found in the stacks of the Homewood Library, from gardening to the Holocaust, I’m your guy.

  She’d been easy enough to spot-from the handful of pictures Green had given me, plus when I came in she was sitting at the HELP DESK with her name on a nameplate in front of her. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple to make her.

  She also worked the front desk, during lunch hour, checking out books, pleasant, friendly, helpful to various library patrons, clearly good at what she did and happy doing it.

  I kept browsing, “reading” magazines and books while I kept up my surveillance, lately keeping track of Janet Wright interacting with these laughing children. It was the kind of thing that would give you a warm feeling if you weren’t here to kill her.

  After the kids scampered off to their suppers, Janet returned to the help desk where she was doing paperwork when a narrow-faced, conventionally handsome guy approached her, a thirty-something would-be Yuppie with a tan, perfect hair, a pale yellow shirt with an alligator on it and jeans that were too new-looking.

  I was nearby, pretty much directly behind my subject, going through old bound volumes of Life magazine from the ’40s and ’50s, stopping at the surprisingly frequent shots of starlets in bathing suits.

  A conversation started up between my librarian and the Yuppie, for which lip-reading would not have been a necessary step-in fact, the obnoxious Yuppie made it hard not to overhear. Apparently this whole quiet-it’s-a-library concept was foreign to him.

  He flicked the HELP DESK sign and said, with a grin that told me he appreciated his own wit, “ I could use some help.”

  The librarian I could barely make out, and her back was to me.

  But I think she said, “Rick-please. Not here.”

  He leaned a palm against the edge of the desk and his smile was a white slash in the too-tanned face.

  “Come on-you’re not still mad…”

  She said nothing, her head down. She was doing paperwork, or pretending to.

  The smile disappeared and he leaned in, his expression approximating humility. “Baby. Come on. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  On her response, I heard her just fine: she wasn’t talking any louder, but the words were crisp and clear.

  “Next time,” she said, looking right up at him, “I’ll call nine-one-one. I swear I will.”

  He drew back; shrugged. “Hey. You pissed me off. Deal with it.”

  She slammed a book shut.

  “I am dealing with it,” she said.

  “Baby…”

  “You had no right-no right.”

  And now she looked back down at her work.

  “It’s over, Rick,” she said. “Don’t make me call security.”

  He leaned in again, got another smile going, though it bordered on a sneer. “Why-you want another scene?” He laughed and it sounded forced. “Sometimes I think you like scenes.”

  She said nothing. Did not look up at him.

  He turned to go, but had only moved a step when he looked back and said, “Hey-pick you up. Usual time.”

  “No. No!”

  “Meet you, then.”

  He shot her a goodbye with a gun of thumb-and-forefinger, and
sauntered off, cocky as hell. She didn’t bother to reply.

  Pity-seems like nobody ever hires you to kill a prick like that.

  Another librarian, a busty, almost plump woman also in her early thirties, moved in and pulled up a chair-on-wheels from somewhere and sat behind the desk with Janet. The second librarian had on a bright pink blouse and darker pink slacks; her hair was very blonde and big and sprayed, and her makeup was loud. Fuckable, though.

  “Janet,” she was saying, making no attempt to keep her voice down, “you have got to do something about that creep! ”

  Janet shrugged. “I told him it’s over, Connie. I told him just now.”

  “Do you think he heard you? You think he ever really listens to anything you say? Listen to me, sweetie. He is going to really hurt you, next time.”

  Janet, who had swiveled on her own wheeled chair, to face her colleague, sighed and shook her head. “Maybe…maybe he’s right. Maybe it was my fault.”

  “ Your fault?”

  She was shaking her head. “I shouldn’t’ve made him mad. I mean, I knew about his temper. When you touch a hot stove and get burned, you can’t blame the-”

  Connie put her hand over Janet’s mouth and leaned in closer.

  “Talk like that,” she said, “and I’ll send you to the emergency room.”

  Then Connie withdrew her hand from Janet’s mouth and cupped her friend’s chin with that same hand and leaned in close. I had to lip-read now, but I got it. Probably I’d have got it just from the busty one’s compassionate expression and the other’s chagrined one.

  “Do you hear what I’m saying, Janet?”

  “I do. I do. I’m not seeing him anymore.”

  “And if he hurts you-the police?”

  A laugh that wasn’t a laugh. “What good would that do, in this town?”

  Connie’s features were stone. “They have to write it up. And you can see a lawyer if you need to. There are ways to deal with jerks like Rick.”

  She was right about that.

  Connie said, “Word to the wise,” and shook a mildly scolding finger, got up, and moved away, guiding the wheeled chair back to wherever the hell she got it.

  A few moments later, Janet left the help desk and I followed her, a half room of shelved books between us, me seeing her flickeringly as I moved along, strobe style. Or maybe I was just getting punchy spending all this time around so many books.

  Finally she stopped at a water fountain.

  Nervously, she put something in her mouth-a pill?

  She bent at the fountain and, when she pressed the handle to create an arc of water, her sleeve rode up a little, and revealed part of a purple bruise.

  I shook my head.

  Rick might have been somehow important or connected in this town (as the busty librarian had indicated), but that didn’t make him any less a brutal dunce. Takes a lot of awful people to make up this old world.

  From another conversation Janet and Connie had, I got the drift that my target’s work day was drawing to a close, so I gathered my jacket from a chair at a reading table and headed outside into the cold, clean-if thin-mountain air.

  Homewood reminded me a little of Boulder, Colorado, minus the heavy tourism. Thirty thousand or so had the privilege of living in this idyllic little burg, where mountains edged a sky so blue, clouds should’ve paid rent for the privilege. I felt lucky to have a contract take me to such pleasant if dull surroundings; it helped make up for having to kill somebody as harmless as Janet Wright seemed to be.

  Dusk was settling when Janet emerged from the library with her friend Connie and another librarian, whose name was Don, my surveillance had gathered. A nerd.

  From my rental vehicle-a blue Taurus (was that all these fucking rental agencies had these days?)-I watched as the librarians paused to chat and then go their separate ways.

  Janet’s vehicle was parked on the street-I’d observed her going out and feeding the meter every two hours, during the six I spent in the library. She got into the little yellow Geo, mid-’90s vintage, started it up and pulled away, moving right across my line of vision.

  Her rear bumper had stickers that I could have predicted-she was still advertising KERRY/EDWARDS 2004, among other lost leftist causes-and started my own car and took off after her, in slow pursuit.

  I followed her, usually with a few cars between us, through sleepy Homewood, from the downtown and on through a quietly affluent residential section; it was the kind of place Norman Rockwell could have painted, though had he spent much more than an afternoon here, he might have hanged himself out of boredom.

  Soon the town had disappeared, as had my cover traffic, and she was out into the countryside, making my job harder.

  Already my point was proven about the staleness of my client’s research: Janet Wright was not headed in the direction of her own apartment, the address for which was the first place I’d checked out getting to town. Nor was there anything in the written reports indicating that anything out this way was a regular stop of hers.

  When Janet Wright turned down a lane into a deeply wooded area, I almost missed it; then I caught the tail of her Geo between the trees, and drove on. Pulled into a driveway half a mile later, turned around, and followed.

  In five minutes, I caught sight of her pulling off the lane into a private drive. Cutting my speed to almost nothing, I waited until she was well out of view, then moved on by, and parked alongside the road, what there was of it. I walked back and slipped into the trees along the private drive; the snow on the ground was minimal, my shoes crunching on leaves and twigs underneath the dusting, and I was in no danger of earning my Inconspicuous Tracker Merit Badge. But I didn’t worry about that-I could see her getting out of her Geo, fiddling for her keys in her purse, clearly oblivious to my presence.

  Still, my hand was on the nine millimeter in my jacket pocket. You never knew.

  The Geo was parked in front of a secluded, expensive, sprawling home, not quite a mansion but oozing money, modern in the Frank Lloyd Wright manner, a story and a half with lots of wood and stone blending in nicely with the surrounding naturescape.

  At the front door, she stooped on the stoop to pick up a newspaper, then gathered mail from the mailbox.

  I was closer to the house now, and watched through a side window as she entered, mail and paper bundled in one arm, entering via a key in her other hand, pushing the door open-it was a little stubborn. A security tone kicked in, and a dog began to bark…from the sound of it, a small one, lapdog likely.

  Which was good. A pinscher or a pit bull can ruin your day.

  Janet went to a touchpad by the door and entered a code. I had an angle through the window that showed me her fingertips doing it, and I committed the numbers to memory, even if I did have to move my lips.

  At a table near the door, already piled with rolledup newspapers and stacked magazines and envelopes, the librarian stood and sorted through the mail, putting individual items into their respective piles. Throughout, two things were a constant: I watched; and the dog barked.

  She spoke to one of us, in a loud firm voice: “Just a sec, Poochie! Gimme a sec.”

  Housesitting, most likely.

  Through a kitchen window I watched as she unpenned the small dog-a little black-and-white rat terrier-who danced and yapped and danced and yapped for Janet. She knelt and petted it and it stood on its hind legs and lapped her face and whimpered orgiastically. About thirty seconds of good-girl-good-doggie talk followed. This I did not commit to memory.

  I’d missed it, but while she was down there, Janet had attached a small leash to the dog, and when she and the doggie headed toward the back door, near the window I was peeking through, I damn near blew it.

  But I got behind a tree in time, and then she was walking the terrier in the expansive, unfenced back yard, being careful not to walk in spots where the pooch had already made a deposit.

  Over the next fifteen minutes, I kept watch as the woman and dog returned inside, a
nd the woman put water and food down for the dog, re-penned it, then went around the house, watering plants.

  Housesitting, for sure.

  She was in the dining room when she finished the watering, and that’s where and when she began unbuttoning her blouse.

  I kept watching as the blouse came open and a pinkish excuse for a bra was revealed; then the blouse and bra came off and nice breasts were revealed. Though she was in her thirties, no sag at all was apparent, full almost-C cups with half-dollar-size areolae and nipples that extended perhaps a half inch, soft.

  She dropped the blouse and the bra to the floor, casually, and walked back into the kitchen, topless. There she stepped out of her skirt and revealed a half slip, which she also shed, letting me in on one of Victoria’s best secrets: lacy-edged pink panties cut high on the hip. Then she stepped out of those, as graceful as a dancer but so much more natural, moving on, leaving the clothes behind, littering lingerie. Her ass didn’t sag, either, her back beautifully dimpled above the firm roundness.

  I paused for a moment. Shadowing this woman to fill a contract was one thing; but watching her disrobe seemed wrong, somehow.

  Still, surveillance was surveillance…

  Taking to the trees again, I scurried around the house, tripping on a root but not quite falling, and found my way to the rear of the place, where glass doors looked in on a swimming pool room, fairly elaborate, about two-thirds the size of the similar area back at Sylvan Lodge, and similar faux-rustic.

  I positioned myself where I could see her as she entered-she was nude now, and wholly at ease, because how could she know some asshole was watching her, getting a hard-on?

  But who could blame my dick for getting stiff? This was a nice-looking woman. No shaved pussy for my librarian, this was a full, old-fashioned bush, maybe trimmed back just a little, dark blonde and a nice contrast to her pale, creamy flesh. She had a classic shape, five foot five with a rib cage providing a nice display area for the perky rack, waist wasping in, hips flaring out. Her legs were a little heavy by today’s standards, but fuck today’s standards.