Quarry in the Middle

by Max Allan Collins

  The eyes remained wide but the flesh around them was tightening. “End of…”

  “I haven’t told Dickie about you, or anyway my theory about you.”

  Now she frowned. The eyes finally narrowed, and fear was in them. “What are you after? What do you want from me?”

  I lifted the CD. “This’ll do. This is plenty.”

  “…You’re not telling Richard?”

  “No. I did the job he hired me to do, and I’m out of here.”

  “How do you know I won’t…won’t go to my ‘Chicago connections’ and somehow make this happen someother way?”

  “I don’t. Do what you want. Fuck him. Kill him. Fuck him, then kill him. He’s your husband. But I don’t want a contract from either one of you. I’ve had my fill of Haydee’s Port.”

  She had a clubbed baby seal expression, and just couldn’t find any words. Hard to sing torch songs over breakfast.

  “I’ll enjoy this,” I said, gesturing with the CD, “I really will…I’ll get the check.”

  I left her there to contemplate her future, and Dickie bird’s, and went to my room and showered and shaved and changed my clothes and got my things and got the hell out.

  I did make one stop on my way—that little mobile home with the rusting Mustang out front. I had a paper bag in my left hand, held in a choke hold, like a trick-or-treater protecting his candy hoard.

  I went up the handful of wooden steps and knocked. Nothing. It took prolonged and increasingly insistent knocking to get a response, and I finally got the little kid. He opened the door fearlessly and glared up at me.

  “Mommy’s sleeping,” he said, and started to shut the door.

  I pushed in, shut the thing behind me and looked down at the tow-headed boy in the Star Wars pajamas. “Listen, kid—I don’t care if your mom is home. Don’t go just opening the door ’cause somebody’s knocking. You don’t know who it might be.”

  From the bedroom came her voice: “Jack?”

  “Go watch TV, kid,” I said.

  He gave me a dirty look but followed instructions, and I tiptoed around the wooden train set to where she was receding into the bedroom. She was in a t-shirt and cotton panties, had no makeup on and her natural blonde hair was ponytailed back and she looked fucking great.

  “I didn’t think I’d see you again,” she said, her voice indicating she was glad she’d been wrong.

  “Listen, Candace. I’m on my way out of town. When you left the Lucky, was there any fuss going down?”

  “No.”

  “What time did you walk home?”

  “Around quarter to six.”

  So she’d been gone when I dropped by to see Jerry G.

  “Well, you need to know something,” I said. “There’s going to be a change of management. Some bad shit went down not long ago, but you don’t know anything about it.”

  “I don’t?”

  “No.” I handed her the paper bag.

  “What’s this?”

  “Fifteen grand.”

  “What!”

  “Yours.”

  She held it in a choke hold just like I had. “Are you kidding…Why…?”

  “Because you saved my life. That’s just some crumbs that got spilled, and maybe they’ll do you some good. Thing is, there was a robbery over there at the Lucky…this isn’t that money, you have to believe me, you have to trust me…”

  Of course, it was that money.

  “All right…I believe you, Jack. Are you saying this money is…mine?”

  “Yours. Here’s the conditions. You run that over to River Bluff and put it in a safe deposit box—don’t open an account. A safe deposit box. Then you go back to dancing at the Lucky and keep your head down during the management change and maybe any kind of investigation…”

  “Police?”

  “Maybe. I doubt it, but maybe. Anyway, don’t throw any of that money around. Just do your job, shake your titties and booty and make some men happy. Live your little life, then in a month or two, if it’s quiet, you quit, take your kid somewhere and put him in school and go to beauty college and get your life in gear.”

  “Jack…oh, Jack.”

  And she kissed me. There was sex in it, sure, and gratitude—you can get a hell of a kiss out of girl, when you give her a paper bag full of fifteen grand—but mostly it was sweet. Loving. A hint of maybe what my life could have been like if it hadn’t gone to hell a long time before I came to Haydee’s.

  “I got to run,” I said, and gave her a peck of a kiss.

  I moved carefully through the little train yard, and the kid kept his eyes on the tube—Sesame Street again—and I was halfway to the Firebird when she called out to me.

  “Jack!”

  She was framed there in the door, t-shirt, white panties, all the pale creamy flesh a man could ever want, and blue eyes that hid no secrets except the new one.

  “You’re an angel, Jack. When they made you, they broke the mold!”

  Didn’t they just?

  Praise

  Acclaim for the Work of Max Allan Collins!

  “Crime fiction aficionados are in for a treat…a neo-pulp noir classic.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “No one can twist you through a maze with as much intensity and suspense as Max Allan Collins.”

  —Clive Cussler

  “Collins never misses a beat…All the stand-up pleasures of dime-store pulp with a beguiling level of complexity.”

  —Booklist

  “Collins has an outwardly artless style that conceals a great deal of art.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Max Allan Collins is the closest thing we have to a 21st century Mickey Spillane and…will please any fan of old-school, hardboiled crime fiction.”

  —This Week

  “A suspenseful, wild night’s ride [from] one of the finest writers of crime fiction that the U.S. has produced.”

  —Book Reporter

  “This book is about as perfect a page turner as you’ll find.”

  —Library Journal

  “Bristling with suspense and sexuality, this book is a welcome addition to the Hard Case Crime library.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A total delight…fast, surprising, and well-told.”

  —Deadly Pleasures

  “Strong and compelling reading.”

  —Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

  “Max Allan Collins [is] like no other writer.”

  —Andrew Vachss

  “Collins breaks out a really good one, knocking over the hard-boiled competition (Parker and Leonard for sure, maybe even Puzo) with a one-two punch: a feisty story-line told bittersweet and wry…nice and taut…the book is unputdownable. Never done better.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Rippling with brutal violence and surprisingly sexuality…I savored every turn.”

  —Bookgasm

  “Masterful.”

  —Jeffery Deaver

  “Collins has a gift for creating low-life believable characters…a sharply focused action story that keeps the reader guessing till the slam-bang ending. A consummate thriller from one of the new masters of the genre.”

  —Atlanta Journal Constitution

  “For fans of the hardboiled crime novel…this is powerful and highly enjoyable reading, fast moving and very, very tough.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Entertaining…full of colorful characters…a stirring conclusion.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “Collins makes it sound as though it really happened.”

  —New York Daily News

  “An exceptional storyteller.”

  —San Diego Union Tribune

  “A gift for intricate plotting and cinematically effective action scenes.”

  —Jon L. Breen, Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers

  “Nobody does it better than Max Allan Collins.”

  —John Lutz

 
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  THE FIRST QUARRY by Max Allan Collins

  THE LAST QUARRY by Max Allan Collins

  TWO FOR THE MONEY by Max Allan Collins

  DEADLY BELOVED by Max Allan Collins

  DEAD STREET by Mickey Spillane

  A DIET OF TREACLE by Lawrence Block

  MONEY SHOT by Christa Faust

  ZERO COOL by John Lange

  SHOOTING STAR/SPIDERWEB by Robert Bloch

  THE MURDERER VINE by Shepard Rifkin

  SOMEBODY OWES ME MONEY by Donald E. Westlake

  NO HOUSE LIMIT by Steve Fisher

  BABY MOLL by John Farris

  THE MAX by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr

  GUN WORK by David J. Schow

  FIFTY-TO-ONE by Charles Ardai

  KILLING CASTRO by Lawrence Block

  THE DEAD MAN’S BROTHER by Roger Zelazny

  THE CUTIE by Donald E. Westlake

  HOUSE DICK by E. Howard Hunt

  CASINO MOON by Peter Blauner

  FAKE I.D. by Jason Starr

  PASSPORT TO PERIL by Robert B. Parker

  STOP THIS MAN! by Peter Rabe

  LOSERS LIVE LONGER by Russell Atwood

  HONEY IN HIS MOUTH by Lester Dent

  Copyright

  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-061)

  November 2009

  Published by

  Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  200 Madison Avenue

  New York, NY 10016

  in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

  Copyright © 2009 by Max Allan Collins

  Cover painting copyright © 2009 by Ron Lesser

  www.ronlesser.com

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  E-ISBN: 978-1-4285-0769-2

  Cover design by Cooley Design Lab

  The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

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