Quarry in the Black

by Max Allan Collins

  I had seen Deon stumble into the TV room, yawning, half an hour before. Now, after a good healthy piss, I checked on him, and found him sacked out on his belly on a sofa that was barely as big as he was. It looked like he’d been dropped there from a plane.

  I peeked in the study, where even more crumpled-up pages surrounded the wastebasket, and found Reverend Lloyd also asleep on a sofa, a brown leather one; he was on his back, like a guy in a coffin, only breathing. How easy it would have been to pop him.

  Terrell was still in the dining room, leaned forward with his big head on his big arms like a kid resting in class, snoring more softly than you’d expect. On the TV, Mantan Moreland was driving his boss around (“Mr. Chan! Mr. Chan!”), and one of the not-as-smart-as-Mantan sons. Must be showing those late every night.

  I slipped out the back, leaving the door unlocked, which was not exactly stellar bodyguard work but I wanted to be able to return. With luck nobody would notice I’d been gone, and if they did, I’d come up with some kind of story. Like I’d heard somebody out back and followed them somewhere or maybe went for a wee-hours breakfast or some bull.

  The first phone booth I spotted, I pulled the Impala over and made the call to the Broker. No flunky this time—the man himself picked up on the first ring. He gave me the drop location and the payoff instructions. They were simple enough.

  Now I was tucked behind a tree, smelling pine needles, with my Impala parked along one of the smaller curving roadways about a quarter mile away. Of course I’d checked the bench the money was supposed to be left under, not expecting to find anything and I didn’t. Though it varied, what typically went down was the client arrived with the cash no more than an hour (and often as little as ten or fifteen minutes) before I was to pick it up. Make the drop and get the hell out.

  The point was for the client not to come in contact with me or somebody like me. Such drops were routinely middle-of-the-night, nobody-likely-to-be-around affairs, so the risk of leaving a box or a bag of money unattended for a short while was minimal.

  What the client didn’t know, and what the Broker surely must have, was that a guy like me wasn’t going to accept a risk like that, minimal or not. Either I or my partner would always go early, find a vantage point and watch, picking up the package as soon as the client had cleared the scene.

  The night was cool and just a little breezy. Still in the windbreaker, I was comfortable enough, but with all these trees and bushes around for the wind to ruffle, I got to thinking, every whipstitch, that I heard something suspicious.

  I didn’t have long to wait. About three-thirty, he showed up, wearing a black raincoat and a black fedora, looking about as subtle as a bad guy in one of those Charlie Chan movies. He was carrying a black bag like doctors used to when they made house calls—Gladstone bag? Whatever, he was half-kneeling and tucking it under the bench when I came up behind him and said, “Starting to feel like fall, Mr. Jackson. Perfect football weather, don’t you think?”

  He rose, still clutching the bag in his gloved fist, whirling toward me, eyes wide, brow knit. “What the hell is—”

  “Nothing to be worried about,” I said, left hand raised like a traffic cop about to blow a whistle. “We’re just going to sit down here and have a nice little chat.”

  My words didn’t diminish his alarm. He could easily see the nine millimeter in my right hand, which had to be troubling for him even though I held it down at my side, the extended noise-suppressor snout touching my jeans well below my knee.

  He did not sit down. He swallowed, forced his expression to smooth out, and said easily, “Mr. Blake, I can’t believe you’re here.”

  Yet here I was.

  “This,” he continued, “is a major breach. You know goddamn well I was guaranteed not to have any direct contact with…with you.”

  He was choosing his words carefully. Despite the silenced weapon at my side, I could be an undercover cop wearing a wire, as far as he knew.

  “The reason I insist we talk,” I said, “is I suspect you committed a breach of contract yourself. If you can satisfy me that you haven’t, I’ll just fade away. If I’m not satisfied, I will contact my middleman and he will decide where we go from here.”

  Alarm had been replaced with confusion. “And what then? Will the contract be carried out or not?”

  “Let’s sit and talk.”

  He frowned, gestured around us. “Out here in the open like this? Are you out of your mind?”

  I hate two-part questions.

  “It’s after three-thirty A.M.,” I said. “No security walks these grounds. Maybe a cop car will go by at some point. So what? We’re not easily visible from the street, and as long as one of us isn’t on his knees in front of the other one, we don’t look like we’re breaking any laws. Can we please sit?”

  We sat.

  “You put me in a bad position, Mr. Jackson.”

  He was not looking at me, staring straight ahead, across the floral clock and into the trees. “How is that?”

  “Things have been going on that I didn’t know about. That I should have known about. You took out a second contract, didn’t you? That must have required a few steps, and fancy ones, because I don’t think the people you hired would have taken something on directly from a nigger…”

  Now he looked at me, eyes blazing.

  “…as they would crudely put it. Funny, thinking of you doing business with Nazi types, KKK clowns. Because I think, and this is just my reading of it and I’m no expert, that you’re sincere about your activism.”

  He looked away again, across the trees, his jaw firm. “Of course I’m sincere.”

  I shook my head, smiled a little. “You’ve had to play second-fiddle to Reverend Raymond Wesley Lloyd for a lot of years. You, a skilled public speaker yourself. You, who are not naive like the Reverend is. You know that sometimes corners have to be cut. That the ends have to justify the means—like raising money by trafficking in the same illegal drugs that the Reverend has worked so hard to fight. I mean, it’s not like dope is going away—not until a lot of things change in this country. And that’s a gradual thing, right?”

  He sighed. Then he turned the dark eyes on me, and very quietly he said, “The Coalition is going broke. We face bankruptcy. Donations and speaking fees and those modest book advances and royalties—we can’t function on that paltry income. Something had to be done. Something has to be done.”

  I nodded. “Oh, I get it. I see it. Utilize the Reverend’s prison pal, André, who on his own had slid back into old bad habits, let’s say…and use him to do some sub rosa fund-raising. Just a temporary thing, till the coffers get filled. But that isn’t enough, is it? As long as Reverend Lloyd is around, with his pesky morality and his annoying Christianity, you simply cannot keep the Coalition funded.”

  He stroked his mustache with a thumb and middle finger. “I don’t see why this is any of your concern.”

  “Here’s a hint: it’s my ass on the line. You have the skills and the vision and lack of ethics needed to take the Coalition into solvency and on to the next level. You’ve got the perfect plan—transform Reverend Raymond Wesley Lloyd from a pain in your ass into a superstar martyr. Everybody says he’s the next Martin Luther King. You mean to finish the job.”

  His upper lip curled. “Am I being lectured by a fucking assassin?”

  I held up the traffic cop palm again. “I know, I know. I seem out of line. And I understand why you acted so desperately…yes, desperately. You knew or strongly suspected that the Reverend was on to you. And I spoke to him earlier tonight, when I was doing bodyguard duty in the Ville—and found you were right. Lloyd was planning to sack both you and André after the big speech Saturday—still plans to oust you. But he doesn’t want any bad publicity to harm the good he hopes to do with that speech. He thinks, he really thinks…and I guess this proves you’re right, thinking the Reverend has his head up his ass…that George McGovern is gonna be our next president. I have the political savvy
of a hedgehog, and I can see it’s ridiculous.”

  He swallowed. His eyes were hooded now. “When did you know…that I…?”

  “That you’re our client? Not as soon as you picked me out as the probable hitter. After which, you made it all too easy for me. You paved the way for me to join the team, really rolled out the welcome wagon. You made sure I was along on the weekend campus trip, even got me a room by myself so I wouldn’t be hampered if I decided that DeKalb was the place where the Reverend needed to die. And when you said you wouldn’t put up with dope smoking on the campus trip, you sounded a little too knowledgeable—‘mowing grass,’ ‘blasting a joint.’ Oh, and you being the guy who makes all those arrangements, the campus bookings and so on…plus the ranking guy riding on the bus…that made me think you just about had to be arranging the drug deals that André was carrying out.”

  His eyebrows went up. “And from that you knew I was the client?”

  “Any doubt that you were went the fuck away when you arranged for me to ‘guard’ the Reverend at his house tonight. And let me tell you, it would’ve been an easy hit. And it’d be easy tomorrow night, too.”

  He looked confused again. “What do you want…more money?”

  I shrugged. “My middleman may demand more—you may get penalized for your breach. Speaking of which…let’s deal with that. Deal with how you got on my bad side and turned me into this windy prick you’re having to listen to.”

  “Why don’t we,” he muttered.

  “You had a deadline coming up, remember? After the Saturday speech, you were getting shitcanned. Your way around that was to have the Reverend killed running up to the speech, so you could take his place and eulogize him. You had a dream—and it was assassinating the Reverend. You know, I have to hand it to you. I’ve killed my share, more than my share, of bastards for other bastards…but never one who planned to cry crocodile tears over the body, and make a dead hero out of it so that a whole movement could be built up around the deceased.”

  He was breathing hard, the rage difficult to keep in. “Take your money, and do your job. I don’t want to hear any more of your opinions. Your disapproval is laughable. I did not breach shit, Mr. Blake. The money is right here.”

  He patted the bag between us.

  I unsnapped the thing, opened it up, and found packets of crisp, fresh bills with five-hundred-dollar bank wrappers. I counted fifty of them. I took one random packet and thumbed it—twenty-five twenty-dollar bills.

  “Right on the money,” I said.

  “Are we done here?”

  “One last thing. That breach.”

  “What fucking breach?”

  “Hiring a second contract, remember? You have everything riding on not getting fired by the Reverend until after the rally speech Saturday. So you decide that you need a back-up. If for some reason Lloyd doesn’t go down before the rally, he will have to die during the rally, while he’s speaking. Think of the drama, with you holding him in your arms, and getting his blood all over you. That would be an image that would become goddamn historic. And the hillbilly hitman would likely be killed or captured, and you’ve arranged it so that it would impossible to trace back to you. Anyone who suggested such a thing would just be another silly conspiracy freak.”

  The eyes were so hooded now, they were almost shut. “Suppose that’s true, Mr. Blake. How does it impact you?”

  “It impacts me because the hillbilly, in the course of doing his job, noticed us and took us for interlopers. He was ready to kill me, and my partner, and that kind of thing just rubs me the fuck the wrong way.”

  “I…I never anticipated that.”

  “Oh I know. But did you anticipate this?”

  I raised the nine millimeter and its endless silenced snout angled up at him, and his eyes were huge as he looked into its tiny mouth.

  He spoke quickly: “Listen to me, Blake—it was just a fallback. Had you successfully removed Raymond, I would have called off the second contract.”

  “Here’s my fallback. I take the money, I kill you, and with the client dead, the hit becomes a moot point, and I don’t have to shoot a man who’s better than either one of us.”

  His arms went up, as if he were a ref calling a play, and out of the trees they came, his two white gangster pals, the ones I’d seen in the alley with André. Their hats flew off and their topcoats flapped as they ran right at me, the big guy with the pasta-fat face and his slender superior, mustached and looking like he was playing Nathan Detroit in a Muny production of Guys and Dolls. They were absurdly old-fashioned gangsters, yet not laughable at all, not with those big automatics that were firing at me, breaking the silence of the night into loud little pieces.

  I hit the deck, hard, the cement scraping my elbow right through the windbreaker, and the running men were shifting their aim when Boyd came out from behind his tree and shot them both down into tumbling piles of dead.

  On my feet now, I looked over at Jackson, whose small mouth was forming the kind of big hole you scream out of, only he remained silent. He had lowered his hands to chest level and his eyes begged for the mercy he himself was incapable of granting.

  Boyd was out there, long-barreled revolver in hand, checking the bodies.

  “Hey!” I called.

  “You’re welcome,” he said. He was in a black sweatshirt and black jeans.

  “Now him,” I said, pointing at Jackson. “With one of their guns!”

  Jackson flew to his feet, as I stepped away from the bench with the bag in hand. Boyd shot four times and only one of the shots hit, but it was in the forehead, so that did the trick. Jackson sat back down on the bench in that effortless way only a corpse has.

  Bringing Boyd in meant I’d have to split my twenty grand with him, and come up with some half-assed reason why there was extra in the bag. But people are never hard to convince when they’re getting more money than they thought.

  Anyway, after last night, I was happy just to wind up without blood all over me.

  SIXTEEN

  As expected, the Broker called off the job.

  He did so immediately after I gave him the news of our client’s death. Of course, the story I told him wasn’t the one you’ve just heard—what he got was that two white accomplices of Jackson’s had tried to steal the payoff loot, and everybody got shot for their trouble.

  Everybody, that is, but Boyd and me, who had helped ourselves to the bag of cash the client had brought.

  “How did it happen,” the Broker asked me on the phone, “that you and Boyd were there when the money was delivered?”

  “Too much crazy shit had gone down for us not to be,” I said, nestled in one of the phone booths at Duff’s. “Like that hick who dropped in on us…” Delmont. “…and that drug dealer who got killed in that alley.” André.

  “You felt,” he said, “the need to exert some caution.”

  “Yup. And I’m exerting some more by sticking for a few days—to keep John Blake from attracting undue official attention.”

  “Probably wise. But, Quarry—stay alert.”

  “Will do. Listen, should it come up, I split the payoff with Boyd.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I just felt like he earned it as much as I did. Since the job never really came off.”

  “Ah. A man with a conscience.”

  “Let’s not get carried away, Broker.”

  To this day, I’m not sure the Broker really believed what I told him about what happened at the Korean War Memorial near the Jewel Box; but he pretended to, and it never came up again.

  And I did return to the Lloyd house in the Ville, after the Forest Park payoff drop. Nobody had noticed I was gone. I returned with breakfast rolls and coffee, carrying in the built-in alibi I hadn’t needed. I was still there when the Reverend got the call about his “friend” Jackson’s body being discovered near the floral memorial.

  As for Boyd, he was able to fly out that morning. I dropped him at the airport but he was already fl
ying high.

  “Boy,” he said, “that job couldn’t have gone smoother.”

  “Really?”

  “Great surveillance pad, we don’t even have to go through with the job, and wind up way in the black.”

  I didn’t have the heart to remind him of certain little bumps in the road—like two Nazi country boys jumping me, Delmont beating him senseless, a KKK Klavern chasing me across an open field. Then there was me getting splashed with blood—more like in the red than the black—and him shooting it out with St. Louis hoodlums before assuming the active role and finishing Jackson off.

  Funny how we only remember the good things.

  I wound up staying on at Coalition HQ only for two more days. The first was mostly taken up by a replay of those same two cops coming around and asking all the staffers, myself included, minor variations on the questions they’d asked after André’s killing. The second day was really only a morning, because right away the Reverend gathered everybody back by his office and, essentially, said goodbye.

  Standing beside him was his somber but ever-radiant wife, in a black-trimmed white dress with a white corsage. She might have been going to a funeral. Or the prom.

  “We have been forced to prematurely shut down our get-out-the-youth-vote campaign,” the Reverend said, the resonant voice lacking its usual fire. “The organizers of Saturday’s rally have asked me not to speak, in light of the various tragedies, as well as what has come out about Harold Jackson and André Freeman, and…well, I don’t have to go over the embarrassing, disheartening details that you’ve all read and heard in the media.”

  Then with obvious sincerity and a good deal of warmth, he thanked them for their dedication and hard work, adding, “I will be regrouping in the near future, with a smaller staff. Our mission of non-violence, education, and brotherhood…and sisterhood…continues.”

  They all applauded, wildly at first, but rather quickly ran out of steam.

  Smiling, he took his wife’s white-gloved hand and said, “In the light of so much tragedy and disappointment, I am pleased to give you some happy news. My new chief administrative assistant will be Mrs. Marianne Lloyd.”