Midnight Haul

by Max Allan Collins

  NOVELS BY MAX ALLAN COLLINS:

  Midnight Haul

  The Million-Dollar Wound

  A Shroud for Aquarius

  True Crime

  Kill Your Darlings

  True Detective

  No Cure for Death

  The Baby Blue Rip-Off

  Scratch Fever

  Hard Cash

  Hush Money

  Fly Paper

  Quarry’s Cut

  (formerly: The Slasher)

  Quarry’s Deal

  (formerly: The Dealer)

  Quarry’s List

  (formerly: The Broker’s Wife)

  Quarry (formerly: The Broker)

  Blood Money

  Bait Money

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 1986 by Max Allan Collins

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612185286

  ISBN-10: 1612185282

  The firms “Kemco” and “Chemical Disposal Works” in this novel are fictional. Should any real firms have the same or similar names, it is coincidental, and the practices attributed to the fictional firms herein apply only to those fictional firms; no reflection on any specific real firm or its owners or employees is intended. Nonetheless, the background material in this novel has—unfortunately—a basis in fact.

  M.A.C.

  for Barb and Nate

  “I know it don’t thrill you, I hope it don’t kill you: welcome to the working week.”

  —ELVIS COSTELLO

  Contents

  Part One: FOREWARNING

  Chapter One

  Part Two: MARY BETH

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Three: BOONE

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Part Four: CRANE

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Part Five: AFTERMATH

  Chapter Thirty

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Part One:

  FOREWARNING

  Chapter One

  Neighbors on either side heard the shots. They called the police, but Ray Turner, who was one-fourth of Greenwood, New Jersey’s P.D., had heard the shots too and was running across the grade-school playground, barren in the moonlight, his gun drawn.

  It was just after midnight. Turner, tall, thin, twenty-six, was walking around the school, checking doors, poking in windows with his longbeam flash. He was moving a little slow tonight; the day had been hot and humid and the night was no better: moving through air like this was like walking underwater.

  So he was a little behind schedule tonight, not that it mattered. Things in Greenwood didn’t move fast. No pressure, here. That’s what he liked about it. That’s why he’d come home to Greenwood, after an unpleasant few years as a Newark cop.

  Only now he was running across the playground, the thick air grabbing at his lungs, goddamn cigarettes, gun in one hand, flash in the other, and what the fuck was that? Another shot?

  He slowed as he reached the wire mesh fence separating the playground from the row of tract homes; the one directly in front of him, the one he was heading for, belonged to Jack Brock, a man Turner knew, to speak to. A truck driver out at the Kemco plant.

  The fence was only waist high, but it seemed to take forever to scale. He was sweating. Drenched in it. Ahead of him the Brock house was dark. Not a light on in the place. Of course the neighbors’ lights were on, but nobody was standing around outside: gunshots make people curious, not crazy. Their lights, and the moonlight, helped him dodge the toys littered around the Brocks’ backyard: a wagon, a trike, a wading pool.

  Two shots, there’d been. Spaced perhaps thirty seconds apart. Then, maybe a minute later, a minute Turner had spent making his way here, there’d been another. Three shots.

  The foundation was built up from the ground, with a back door entering onto a lower, basement floor. He flattened himself to the cement wall, the door to his left. He was shaking. Breathing hard.

  His back to the foundation, he reached over, flash tucked in his armpit, and tried the screen door. Unlocked. He opened it a hair, slid his foot in to keep it open. Then, using his foot, he eased it all the way open until he was facing the inside door, which he tried.

  Locked.

  “Shit,” he said, very softly, and kicked it in.

  He went in low, fanning the gun around like goddamn Clint Eastwood, and the flashlight, too, revealing nothing but a damp basement with washer and dryer and, in one dry area, some more scattered toys. The air smelled sickly sweet, from a room deodorizer, probably. An open wooden stairway was right across from him, waiting for him. Daring him to come up.

  He stood and listened for a minute, then, hearing nothing, took the dare.

  He made very little noise, going up; the hum of the air-conditioning upstairs covered him. But he felt uneasy following the beam of light up the steps. He was starting to wish he’d stayed in Newark.

  There was a landing, and a jog to the left, then five more steps and a door. He opened it, quickly, and only the bottom half opened—a damn Dutch door—the upper half catching him and he fell backwards, tumbling down the steps.

  The landing saved him. He wasn’t hurt, but he was disoriented; after a few seconds, he pushed up and went back up the five steps, in a crouch, looking up through the open bottom half of the door, probing with the flash. He ducked under the closed upper door and was in the kitchen, modest, modern, empty.

  It was cold in here, air-conditioner doing overtime, but that didn’t make it any easier to breathe: fear had hold of Turner’s chest, and as he moved into the living room, the beam of the flash betrayed his shaking hand. He tried to guide the light steadily, quickly around the room, but the effect was more like a strobe. The strobe effect picked up early American furniture, a family portrait over a spinet, a shape on the floor by the front door.

  Turner pointed the gun and the light at the shape and saw blood.

  He choked back vomit. Moved closer, but did so keeping his back to the shape, in case whoever had done this was still in the house: the flash lit up a hallway, off to the left, an empty hallway, and he saw no one.

  No one except the dead woman on the floor, on her side. A woman about thirty, in curlers and a pink robe. Her face was all there, and rather pretty, turned as if to look at him, one empty eye looking across blood at him; it was a face he’d glimpsed in that family portrait. Most of the back of her head was gone. Some of it was on the door.

  He turned back toward that hallway, wishing to Christ he’d stayed
in Newark. Wishing it wasn’t so cold, so fucking cold in here. He walked down the hallway. Slow.

  On the right, an open door: bathroom. Stool, sink, tub with shower curtain open; nobody in there.

  Another open door: sewing room. Small. Empty.

  And another: a kid’s room; Star Wars wallpaper. He pointed gun and flash in there.

  And quickly pulled the flash away, hoping he would be able someday to forget what he’d seen: a boy, about ten, with a bloody face, head spilled open like a broken melon on the red-sodden pillow. Bloody matter on the wall behind him, on Luke Skywalker and Chewbacca, and Christ, it took a big gun to do that. Jesus.

  Across the hall, in a room wallpapered with blue flowers, a girl, perhaps seven, dead.

  He stood in the hall, gun and flash pointed down, and felt anger rise in him like heat, pushing the nausea out. He could feel himself breathing hard. His teeth were clenched so tight they hurt. But he couldn’t unclench them. He didn’t want to.

  At the end of the hall, one last door.

  Closed.

  He kicked it open.

  The gun and the flash pointed right at the man sitting on the edge of the double bed. About thirty-five, balding, a little heavy. He was wearing boxer shorts. There was a gun in his lap. A .357 Magnum.

  The man was Jack Brock. There was some blood spattered on him.

  “Did you do this, Jack?” Turner heard himself say.

  Brock didn’t say anything; his face looked slack, flesh hanging like dough.

  “Why, Jack?”

  Brock put his hand on the gun in his lap.

  “Don’t, Jack!”

  Brock left his hand on the gun. He looked up at Turner and said, “They killed my wife.”

  “What?”

  “They killed my wife. My kids. I tried to save my kids.”

  “Take your hand off the gun, Jack.”

  “They’d kill me next, if I let them.”

  “Put it down, Jack. Down!”

  Brock raised the gun.

  “Jack. I don’t want to shoot you, Jack. Jack!”

  Brock looked down the barrel of the gun and squeezed the trigger and there was a red explosion.

  Part Two:

  MARY BETH

  Chapter Two

  It didn’t make any sense to Crane. He was the serious one; he was the one who got occasionally depressed. Mary Beth had always kidded him out of his moods. “Hey asshole,” she’d say. “Don’t take life so serious.” And now, suicide? Mary Beth? Didn’t make sense.

  His friend Roger Beatty had driven him from Iowa City to Cedar Rapids, where he could catch the plane that would take him to New Jersey; he’d have to take a bus from there to Greenwood, Mary Beth’s hometown, the East Coast equivalent of his own small hometown in Iowa, Wilton Junction. Or at least that’s how Mary Beth had described it to him: “That’s why we have so much in common, Crane: we grew up in the same town—only where you come from they sound like Henry Fonda, and where I come from it’s strictly Rodney Dangerfield.”

  He smiled at the sound of her voice as it drifted through his head; it didn’t sound anything like Rodney Dangerfield. Then he felt his smile fade and wondered why he hadn’t wept yet. He looked out the window of the plane and a large chemical plant far below was making its own clouds beneath the others.

  “Suicide happens,” Roger had told him in the car. Roger was Crane’s age, twenty-two, a slightly overweight, dark-haired guy, with thick glasses and the absent-mindedly sloppy appearance of somebody scientific, which he was, sort of: Roger was majoring in sociology. He’d apparently had some psych, too, because he had, in a well-meaning but irritating way, given Crane a mini-lecture on the subject of suicide.

  “You don’t have to be depressed your whole life to commit suicide,” Roger said. “Just one day. Or night, or afternoon. But it only takes once.”

  “Roger,” Crane said. “I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

  “You got to, sooner or later.”

  “Make it later.”

  Now it was later, on the plane, and he still didn’t want to talk—or think—about it. But there it was: Mary Beth, twenty, dead. Mary Beth, long brown hair, wide brown eyes, wry little smile, supple little body, gone.

  He pressed the heels of his hands against his forehead and sat forward in his seat.

  “You okay, man?”

  Crane turned and looked at the passenger in the next seat. Actually, there was an empty seat between them, here in second class, and that was okay with Crane: he didn’t care to make conversation, particularly not with another college student, this one a bearded longhaired throwback to the’60s, in jeans and gray T-shirt, some jerk who thought Kent State happened last week.

  “Need an aspirin or something?” the guy was saying. “I can go get the flight attendant for you.”

  “No. That’s okay.” Why was he thinking this guy was a jerk? He was nice enough. The jerk.

  “My name’s Phil Stanley,” the guy said, and held out his hand.

  After just a moment, Crane took the hand, got caught in a sideways “soul” shake, and said, “My name’s Crane.”

  “You a student, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Headed back to school, huh? Where d’you go?”

  “Actually, no. I go to Iowa. Graduate student—fall semester starts in a few weeks and I’m, uh…”

  “Taking advantage of your last few weeks’ vacation. For sure. Don’t blame ya.”

  “Right.”

  “What you taking?”

  “I’m a journalism major.”

  “No shit? Me too. Or anyway, sort of—I’m into broadcast journalism.”

  The guy would have to clean up his image if he wanted to go on camera, Crane thought, then, noticing the guy was expecting him to report back, said, “I’m in print media.”

  “Oh, yeah? What’s your specialty?”

  “I don’t know yet. Maybe investigative.”

  “One thing this country’ll never run out of,” the guy said, shaking his mangy head, “is Watergates.”

  Crane hated it when people invoked Watergate after he told them he was interested in investigative reporting. Maybe he could remember to quit telling people that. Maybe he should say he was interested in writing sports or something.

  “That’s the ticket,” the guy was saying. “Keep the fuckin’ government on its toes.”

  “And big business,” Crane said. “Don’t forget big business.”

  “Right on,” the guy said.

  Right on? Did that guy really say “right on”? Why do people like this always assume you’re liberal? And if you tell them you believe in the system, that you don’t see anything wrong with capitalism, why do they make you out as some sort of right-wing lunatic?

  “Because,” Mary Beth used to say, “you are one. You think you’re middle-of-the road, mainstream America. A political moderate. Sure you are. Compared to the Ku Klux Klan. How many black folks you got in Wilton Junction? You never called anybody nigger ’cause you never saw one, except on TV. You’re just a reactionary hick, Crane, and I’m gonna educate you if I have to spend the rest of my life doing it…”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” the bearded guy was asking.

  “Maybe I will take that aspirin,” Crane said.

  The guy rose to go find a flight attendant.

  Crane sat back in his seat and thought about the fight he and Mary Beth had had their first night together. He was living in an apartment that was actually half a house, a duplex, sharing it with three other guys who were gone for the weekend. He’d only known Mary Beth for a few weeks; he was a senior and she was a sophomore, and both had been at the University for over a year, Crane having transferred from Port City Community College just as she was enrolling as a freshman. But it was a big campus with a lot of students, and until some mutual friends introduced them they’d never even seen each other. He liked her sense of humor, and (one of the mutual friends told him) she liked his sandy brown
hair and freckles; thought he had a nice, innocent look.

  Which was what the fight was about, really.

  He’d planned to seduce her, and that was a major step for him, requiring a lot of strategy, and making him very nervous, because he was less experienced than he supposed most other twenty-year-old males in this country to be. So he had cooked an Italian dinner for her (her favorite, and his), bought a Phoebe Snow album (her favorite—hardly his), dimmed the lights prior to her arrival, and found himself naked on the couch with her before the first course of the meal and without even taking the plastic wrapper off the goddamn Phoebe Snow album.

  He was proud of himself, though—he didn’t come right away, like he thought he would; after all, it was his first time, and most people, on their first time, come right away. Not him. Which was something, anyway.

  Of course it clearly wasn’t her first time, and that was part of what the fight was about, too.

  “It was your first time, wasn’t it?” she said later, nibbling her lasagna.

  “You weren’t supposed to know that,” he said, smiling a little.

  “Hey, you did fine. Most guys come right away, their first time. You didn’t.”

  “Neither did you.”

  “Well I did in the long run, and that’s something, anyway.”

  And they’d both smiled and finished their lasagna and wine and listened to Phoebe Snow (which he even sort of liked, at this point) and made love another time. Finally they watched a late movie about vampires—one of those sexy British ones from the ’60s—and that’s when the fight started.

  “It sure wasn’t your first time,” he said. Out of nowhere. Surprised by the petulance in his own voice.

  “I never said it was,” she said, still smiling, but on the edge of not.

  “No big deal.”

  “I’m glad you see it that way.”

  “I do. It’s no big fucking deal.”

  “Hey, ain’t we profane all of a sudden. ‘Farm boy says fuck.’ Stop the presses!”

  “Don’t you make fun of me.”

  “Then don’t you insult me.”

  “All I said was—”