This had just been a stray piece of information that hadn’t been pertinent to the job at hand—which had been keeping Tree from getting killed—and it was a small miracle that this trivia occurred to me now.
I doubted this information had any current pertinence, either; but it troubled me that the synapses in my brain hadn’t sparked immediately. Christ, I was only in my mid-thirties. How could my memory let me down like that?
Physically, I felt up to whatever came along. I was no muscleman, but swam often, usually daily—it was the variety of physical exercise I preferred, and helped me relax, and allowed my thoughts to either fade or come into focus, as the case might be. Out here, on my back, staring at the stars and moon over Haydee’s Port, clarity was the result.
Maybe it was time to retire the Broker’s list. Maybe I was getting too casual about killing, or cocky or sloppy or whatever. After all, I had an investment opportunity back in Wisconsin, where I lived, and if I could make enough of a killing on this job—again, of the financial variety—it could be the last one.
Maybe a hired assassin has a natural working life, like an athlete or a rock star or a sex symbol…
For some time, I’d lived in an A-frame cottage on small, private Paradise Lake, which suffered few of the tourists that haunted the nearby Lake Geneva vacation center. The scattering of summer homes meant I had very few neighbors off-season, which was how I liked it, and even on-season was no problem.
One business did serve the year-round locals, and in summer attracted a small, tolerable number of tourists: Wilma’s Welcome Inn, a rambling two-story structure that had been a roadhouse back in Prohibition Days, converted in the only slightly-less-distant past to a restaurant, gas station, and hotel (a convenience store was a more recent touch, taking the place of a gift shop). Everything was under one rustic, slightly ramshackle roof.
Wilma had been a beautiful woman trapped in a tub of lard, and one of the few humans I ever really liked, in part because she made a great bowl of chili and also because she was pleasantly chatty without getting nosy. She was dead now, and her boyfriend/bartender Charley was trying to run the place, doing a fairly crap job of it. Her daughter was a curvy little babe in her late teens who wanted to sell the place before Charley ran it into the lake, so she could move to California and do drugs.
I apologize for all this extraneous shit, but the bottom line is, I had a chance to buy the place. As a kid back in Ohio, I’d tinkered with cars and worked in a garage, so the gas station part appealed to me. I’d be handy enough to whip the dump into shape with remedial repairs, plus I’d made the acquaintance of a woman in Lake Geneva who knew restaurants and hotels and was looking for a new position. The first new position I tried involved her getting fucked against a door, and screaming like she’d just won the lottery, so I thought she might make a reasonably interesting employee.
Maybe this was that crossroads moment you hear so much about. Maybe if I survived this job, and came out of it with a nice payday, I could go straight. After all, a lot about what I did had drawbacks—long travel hours, the endless surveillance, occasional shitty accommodations, inconsistent food. Sometimes the nine millimeter could jam.
I swam laps, once back and forth quickly, then just settled in at an easy lope. The pool was cool but not cold, heated but not too. If it’s like a bath, I get sleepy, and I never like to be that relaxed, unless I’m in my own home with the alarm system on. Back home, I swam in the lake, when weather allowed, and at the Lake Geneva YMCA, where I had a membership, staying clear of the steam room. On the road, the motel/hotel pools seemed evenly divided between indoor and outdoor. But on a warm night like this, with the water just a little crisp, nothing could beat the Great Out Of Doors.
I did some lazy laps on my back, so I could watch the stars and moon. For some reason, I thought about the Broker. Maybe it was because of the pool at the Concort Inn, a hotel in the Quad Cities the Broker worked out of, and while that pool was indoors, it had a skylight. Swimming indoors under the stars creates a dreamy sensation. Memorable one, too. I’d swum there a number of times, and again my memory was making odd connections.
When the Broker approached me, I’d been living in a fleabag hotel in Los Angeles. Drinking is not generally my thing, but it had been then. Still Coke, only with Bacardi. Lots of Bacardi—one Coke can to a bottle of rum, yo ho ho.
He was a handsome white-haired, white-mustached businessman who wore tailored suits and spoke in speeches, and he might have been forty or he might have been sixty—I never asked or bothered to find out. He thought I might be interested in doing for good money (for him) what I had previously done in Vietnam for shit change (for Uncle Sam)—namely, killing people.
I’d been good at it. I’d been a sniper most of the time in Nam, though I did make it through my share of firefights, and I probably caused a couple dozen yellow melons to splatter and send their bearers into whatever their idea of the afterlife was. In sniper work particularly, you find yourself picking off people like a game of Galaga, but with better effects.
None of that got me in trouble. In fact, it got me some medals. What got me in trouble was coming home, finding my wife in bed with a guy and killing the son of a bitch. Actually, that’s wrong—I didn’t kill him till the next day when I went over to the prick’s house to have it out with him, and he was under his car working on it, and said, “What the fuck do you want now, bunghole?”
And I kicked the jack out.
This made it look premeditated (if it had been premeditated, I’d have taken a gun) and made it harder for the unwritten law to kick in. But the papers took my side and I ended up not getting prosecuted, at which point the papers did not take my side. This is the only time I got any publicity for anybody I ever killed, incidentally, and it’s apparently what inspired the Broker to look me up.
I haven’t given you my name, and won’t, but Broker knew it all right (it was in his file), though he immediately gave me a one-name alias—Quarry—which he insisted on using. He had these kind of corny code names for all of us—Monahan was “Driver” in the file, I would later learn.
Anyway, I got comfortable with “Quarry,” and other people in the business called me that, too. Sometimes I even used it on the job with a first name stuck on. Right now, though, at the Wheelhouse, I was checked in as Jack Gibson.
I sensed someone had joined me, not in the pool but taking a deck chair alongside, and I stopped swimming except to stroke over and climb out and sit on the edge, water dripping off, catching my breath.
Across the pool, in the chair next to the one that had my towel draped over it (and my towel-wrapped gun under it), Monahan was sitting. Beyond him, just over his right shoulder, I could see the Sunbird.
“Lovely night,” I said.
He was smoking. On his left was a little glass table with his Chesterfields and room key on it and a folded towel. He was in a pair of navy swim trunks and a red t-shirt. His legs and arms were hairless, and he looked much younger than his forty or so years. He had dark eyes and pale skin and looked relaxed, head back, blowing smoke rings for his own amusement. He had the kind of nasty, smirky face that fraternity boys never grow out of.
“A little humid,” he said.
His voice echoed across the water.
“Could rain,” I admitted, mine echoing similarly. “But you can’t bitch about the temperature.”
“Sure I can.” He lowered his chin and grinned at me.
Was it just a dumb remark, or was there something in it?
I stretched, then walked around the pool—diving board was at the other end—and knelt to retrieve the two towels under my chair. One, of course, was rolled up like an ice cream cake with a nine millimeter center. I sat down, placed the bundle as inconspicuously as possible on the cement to my right—Monahan was seated at my left—and began toweling off casually.
“Looks like all the sweet pussy took a walk,” he said with a sneer.
I wasn’t sure I got that, but figuring
he meant the bikini girls, I tried this: “Lotta nice stuff gettin’ strutted this afternoon, all right. I guess they’re all over at the Paddlewheel.”
He nodded. Smoked some more. No more rings. “This motel’s the loneliest place in town, after dark.”
“Rough little burg,” I noted.
“Paddlewheel’s safe enough. Games are straight. Good food. Decent entertainment.” He shook his head. Blew dragon smoke out his nostrils. “But you can get your ass handed to you downtown, brother.”
“Yeah?”
“Joint called the Lucky Devil, especially.”
“Rough?”
“Rougher than a cob.” He extended a hand. “Sam Mason. Insurance game.”
I shook it. “Jack Gibson. Veterinary medicine.”
“Really? Pets or farm animals?”
“Know much about farms?”
“Was raised on one.”
I gave him half a grin. “Me? Wouldn’t know a heifer from a hog. My line of meds is strictly the pet trade.”
He laughed and smoke came out. “You want to make a buck in this hellhole? Try selling penicillin.”
“Not at the Paddlewheel, though…”
“No! No. I don’t even think any high-class ass works out of there. Bluff City is too smalltown for call girls, and the kind of girls you meet on the Haydee’s side, you don’t take home to mother…unless mother is a doctor specializing in the clap.”
I shook my head, did a little shiver. “Since AIDS came around, Mrs. Gibson’s little boy don’t go out in the rain without his rubbers.”
“Ha! Don’t blame you. I’m a happily married man with a beautiful wife. Two healthy kids. I wouldn’t risk all that, fooling around with some trashy little cunt.”
I grinned at him, recalling the carry-out cutie back home. “What about the little beauties who were sunning themselves this afternoon?”
“I’m married,” he said with a grin, “not dead.”
Yet.
“I still have a pulse myself,” I said.
“You’re not tied down?”
“Nope.” I nodded toward the memory of the bikini girls around the pool. “What do you think, they’re college girls?”
“The ones today? They’re secretaries and office workers from St. Louis, on holiday.”
“You talk to ’em?”
“Maybe a little.” He grinned again. “No charge for looking. But there are some college girls from Iowa City checked in, too. This is nice, young, sweet pussy, my friend. Looking to be naughty. It’d be a sin not to help ’em out. Downright fucking unkind.”
Not only had he already forgotten the beautiful wife, the Chinese chickie was yesterday’s carry-out, too.
“Well,” I said, and reached down for the rolled towel, then slipped my hand inside, around the nine millimeter’s grip, “nice meeting you.”
The silencer wasn’t attached, but the towel would muffle a shot, though the cloth would likely catch fire.
He grinned again. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” he said.
“I think I can keep that promise,” I said.
I didn’t see where he could have a gun on him, not in swim trunks and t-shirt, but I took no chances, walking at an angle to my room, keeping the seated man in my eyeline.
As I reached my door, I saw him get up and slip off the shirt, his body ghostly pale in the moonlight. He dove in. He was doing his own laps as I went inside.
The bed cut the room nearly in half, and I sat on its edge facing the door with the gun in my hand, trained there. I was still in my trunks, which were damp, and I wasn’t completely dry myself. Then it occurred to me that if he was brazen enough to shoot through the door, he might get me.
So I moved down the bed, near the headboard, and sat and waited.
Nothing.
That had just been talk, right? Friendly talk? Guy stuff? He was staying here, I was staying here, two fellas taking a swim and striking up a conversation. He had a job to do but wouldn’t necessarily head over to the Paddlewheel till near dawn, when the time came to execute his plan. It was not at all unnatural for him to relax by the pool, to swim, to chat amiably with another guest. He had time to kill.
Could he have discovered his partner was dead?
I had the body, of course, but I hadn’t cleaned up after myself except to remove fingerprints. Blood was still on the refrigerator, and on the floor, and even on the back steps and driveway gravel—crusty and dark by now, but unmistakably blood, especially to a pro like Monahan. A clean kill in that the guy went quickly, but otherwise sloppy.
Like me?
Was I too sloppy and stupid to survive?
I showered and sat up on the bed in my shorts with a gun in my hand watching an old movie on Turner Classics. Monahan did not come knocking, and for that matter did not come not knocking…
This was what I got for staying at the same goddamn motel as my target. Perhaps I should just get in the Sunbird, dump the blond kid’s body along the road somewhere, and head back to Wisconsin. This was feeling like too much risk, with too much exposure. Sure, I had invested some time and money and spent a couple of nine millimeter slugs on Mike Love. But why chance it?
On the other hand, I was still about twenty grand short of what I needed to buy Wilma’s Welcome Inn. I wasn’t in a position to get a bank loan. I needed cash.
So I put on my Don Johnson duds and headed over to the Paddlewheel.
Chapter Three
I pulled in about nine-thirty and found the big parking lot nearly full, the Paddlewheel doing remarkable busi-ness for a Wednesday night. At the far end, a brown-and-gold vehicle emblazoned SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT was parked by a fence, nose forward, with what I presumed was an off-duty deputy sitting there to provide security. His windows were down and he was smoking—the amber eye of his cigarette and his vague shape were all I could make out.
His presence didn’t alarm me—I’d have been surprised if some off-duty law enforcement rep hadn’t been so employed here—but neither did it mean the master of the Paddlewheel castle was safe from becoming the victim of a hit-and-run in his own parking lot. Only after its closing around dawn, with the target leaving the building to head for his own parked car in an otherwise empty lot, security deputy long gone, would Monahan practice his vehicular artistry.
I backed my Sunbird into a space in a row parallel to the river, leaving a little room to get around to the trunk, where the blond kid was sound asleep, the little angel. After folding it inside a road map, I tucked the nine millimeter in the glove compartment, having no intention of walking into the place armed. Holsters, shoulder or belt, weren’t my style, and I couldn’t risk that kind of lump under the lightweight white jacket.
Having parked fairly close, I felt loose and at ease—I’d willed myself to leave any misgivings behind, and anyway, the warm night and the cool breeze were battling in a gentle, soothing way. Nothing about Monahan’s poolside behavior gave me reason to believe he’d made me—actually, quite the opposite.
Still, he was a pro and not to be underestimated; he could easily have been playing me. And because this was a speculative project, I had the ability to bail at any time. True, I’d spent some money and had strained my lower back a little, stuffing that blond punk in the trunk. But I still could say fuck it and go home to my A-frame on the lake.
Nice to have options.
The big old brick building that housed the Paddle-wheel had been built into the small rise along the river so that its lower level was underground except on the Mississippi side (back when the structure had been a warehouse, that was where goods could be on-and off-loaded). That meant you entered from the parking lot onto the second floor.
I moved past a coat check area and restrooms to a hostess station, where a good-looking brunette in a white tuxedo blouse and long black skirt with high-heel boots was currently occupied with a quartet of couples who hadn’t bothered with a reservation. So I didn’t have to deal with her right away, and could get the lay of t
he land.
Down a few steps from this entryway was a long dining room, with tables covered in white cloth with glowing red candles, and a big mural of a paddlewheel boat along the left wall, a magnificent picture-window river view at the far end. There were a few empty tables but, for this time of night mid-week in the Midwest, the dining room was bustling.
A bar was at right, and it was crowded, too, possibly with diners waiting for a table. The smoky area had redcovered booths against a wall newer than the other sandblasted brick ones, indicating the floor had been halved to allow for kitchen and possibly offices. Tucked in the corner was a small stage with a pianist in a tux at a baby grand, noodling show tunes; a stool at a mike indicated a singer was part of the mix, but not right now.
The help’s attire was on the formal side—waitresses in white tuxedo blouses and black trousers—while the patrons ran the gamut: guys in everything from leather jackets and stonewashed jeans to suits and ties (though my Armani over a Ralph Lauren tee was about par) and the women sporting designer shit including plenty of shoulder pads and big earrings and miniskirts and feathered hair. But everybody seemed to be spruced up, at least their idea of it.
The group at the hostess station was getting irritable—they could see enough open seating to service them—and the brunette was patiently explaining that it would take a while to put some tables together, and if they’d just go to the bar, she’d call them.
I had no problem. I even got a table by the picture window, and all it had cost me was my charming smile. The river was reflecting the moon and a silverivory shimmer made it very romantic, except for the part where I was sitting at a table for two by myself.
The food wasn’t pricey—my assumption was, the casino was the money maker—and I took my time eating a fried scallops dinner, including their “signature” beer-battered baked potato. The thing was pretty good, even if it didn’t rise to the status of a Famous Bacon Cheeseburger.
This far down from the bar, the piano noodling was fairly distant, and didn’t cover up the lowend pounding of drums and bass guitar above. Couldn’t pick any tunes out, but you could tell it was rock and not country. Between whatever songs were going on up there, you could make out the muffled music of slots and poker machines below, playing their bells-and-whistles refrain.
Quarry in the Middle Page 3