That got a nice round of applause, too, and Mrs. Lloyd gave her own little speech about being proud to join her husband in the fight.
“My children are grown,” she said, “but the world they live in could still use some work. And Raymond and I are both ready to roll up our sleeves.”
A little more applause, and then everyone went about emptying their desks and filling boxes that had thoughtfully been provided.
My desk didn’t have anything in it, so I helped Ruth. She was in the same maroon vest, matching pants and navy blouse as the first day. Same hoop earrings, too.
She gave me a glum smile and said, “So what do you think, John? Will I be offered a position on the Reverend’s new scaled-down staff?”
“No. But you weren’t going to stay on anyway. You’re just pouting.”
Her smile lost its glumness. “They say the truth hurts, but when it comes out of your mouth, it just makes me smile.”
“I was put here to spread joy. You know, we really should celebrate.”
“Celebrate? Celebrate what?”
“Not having to go to a dull rally this Saturday.”
Of course, she had no idea how un-dull it might have been.
“Okay,” she said, “so we celebrate. Any ideas?”
Within two hours, we had piled into the Impala SS and headed for the Lake of the Ozarks and a resort where I’d stayed last year after a job.
That evening, in bed, after making love in the glow of a fire, she snuggled up and said, “They’re going to blow up my building.”
“What?”
“Our building, Mother’s and my sisters’ and mine. At Pruitt-Igoe. The whole dangerous, rat-ridden place is coming down, which is for the best. But some of it stayed nice. It was home. And now I need someplace else for my mother and me and the girls.”
“Your mom is welcome here at the lodge. In her own room.”
Ruth grinned. “And my sisters?”
“How old were they again?”
She batted my chest playfully and said, “Thanks for your concern, Jack, but we’ll find something. I’ve applied at several law firms and, with any luck, we’ll be able to afford someplace really nice.”
“You deserve it.”
The last evening of our stay, McGovern lost. It hadn’t taken long. We’d been watching in our room and she switched off the set with the remote, saying she had no stomach for any network post-mortems.
We were back in bed when she said, “Now another four years of Nixon. Doesn’t that suck.”
I said I supposed it did.
But I wasn’t thinking about the next four years. I was enjoying the right now of sharing a bed with a beautiful woman, getting daily rubdowns, plenty of swims, taking long walks in the woods. Scarfing down delicious food, too. Life sucked less suddenly.
Hadn’t I managed not to kill the Reverend Raymond Wesley Lloyd and still get paid for it?
Felt good doing something nice for a change. Or maybe felt nice doing something good for a change.
You tell me.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I wish to thank my son and daughter-in-law, Nathan and Abby Collins of St. Louis, Missouri, for answering my location questions and pointing me toward research materials. That said, the St. Louis of this novel is one of my imagination and any blame for geographical blundering is my own, with no apologies forthcoming.
I would like to cite the book The Days and Nights of the Central West End (1991), Suzanne Goell, editor; Richard Rothstein’s American Prospect article, “The Making of Ferguson” (2014); and Mark Groth’s blog, St. Louis City Talk, for information on the Ville.
Quarry was created in 1971 at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop in Iowa City, and first appeared in print in 1976. An odd and oddly satisfying aspect of writing new Quarry novels for Hard Case Crime has been continuing a series that began as contemporary but is now a period piece. I don’t consider these new books, with their ’70s and ’80s settings, to be historical novels exactly—more like my autobiography published in installments with more sex and violence. Well, more violence.
One autobiographical aspect of Quarry in the Black is the Leonard Nimoy rally for McGovern in October of 1972, which my wife Barb and I attended at NIU in DeKalb, Illinois, as supporters of both McGovern and Star Trek. In the ’90s, I was thrilled to meet Mr. Nimoy when we were both developing comic books for the same company.
Half a dozen years ago, I saw George McGovern standing in the lobby of a hotel in St. Paul, Minneapolis, and was able to chat with him briefly and shake his hand. I introduced him to Barb and said we’d both voted for him. His smile was bitter-sweet as he said, “I wish there’d been more of you.”
“So do we, Senator,” I said.
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QUARRY’S CHOICE!
ONE
I had been killing people for money for over a year now, and it had been going fine. You have these occasional unexpected things crop up, but that’s life.
Really, to be more exact about it, I’d been killing people for good money for over a year. Before that, in the Nam soup, I had been killing people for chump change, but then the Broker came along and showed me how to turn the skills Uncle Sugar had honed in me into a decent living.
I’ll get to the Broker shortly, but you have to understand something: if you are a sick fuck who wants to read a book about some lunatic who gets off on murder, you are in the wrong place. I take no joy in killing. Pride, yes, but not to a degree that’s obnoxious or anything.
As the Broker explained to me from right out of the gate, the people I’d be killing were essentially already dead: somebody had decided somebody else needed to die, and was going to have it done, which was where I came in. After the decision had been made. I’m not guilty of murder any more than my Browning nine millimeter is.
Guns don’t kill people, some smart idiot said, people kill people—or in my case, people have some other person kill people.
There’s a step here I’ve skipped and I better get to it. When I came home from overseas, I found my wife in bed with a guy. I didn’t kill him, which I thought showed a certain restraint on my part, and when I went to talk to him about our “situation” the next day, I hadn’t gone there to kill him, either. If I had, I’d have brought a fucking gun.
But he was working under this fancy little sports car, which like my wife had a body way too nice for this prick, and when he saw me, he looked up at me all sneery and said, “I got nothing to say to you, bunghole.” And I took umbrage. Kicked the fucking jack out.
Ever hear the joke about the ice cream parlor? The cutie behind the counter asks, “Crushed nuts, sir?” “No,” the customer replies, “rheumatism.” Well, in my wife’s boyfriend’s case it was crushed nuts.
They didn’t prosecute me. They were going to at first, but then there was some support for me in the papers, and when the DA asked me if I might have accidently jostled the jack, I said, “Sure, why not?” I had enough medals to make it messy in an election year. So I walked.
; This was on the west coast, but I came from the Midwest, where I was no longer welcome. My father’s second wife did not want a murderer around—whether she was talking about the multiple yellow ones or the single-o white guy never came up. My father’s first wife, my mother, had no opinion, being dead.
The Broker found me in a shit pad in L.A. on a rare bender—I’m not by nature a booze hound, nor a smoker, not even a damn coffee drinker—and recruited me. I would come to find out he recruited a lot of ex-military for his network of contract killers. Vietnam had left a lot of guys fucked-up and confused and full of rage, not necessarily in that order, and he could sort of…channel it.
The contracts came from what I guess you’d call underworld sources. Some kills were clearly mob-related; others were civilians who were probably dirty enough to make contacts with the kind of organized crime types who did business with the Broker—a referral kind of deal. Thing was, a guy like me never knew who had taken the contract. That was the reason for a Broker—he was our agent and the client’s buffer.
Right now, maybe eighteen months since he’d tapped me on the shoulder, the Broker was sitting next to me in a red-button-tufted booth at the rear of an underpopulated restaurant and lounge on a Tuesday evening.
He was wearing that white hair a little longer now, sprayed in place, with some sideburns, and the mustache was plumper now, wider too, but nicely trimmed. I never knew where that deep tan came from—Florida vacations? A tanning salon? Surely not the very cold winter that Davenport, Iowa, had just gone through, and that’s where we were—at the hotel the Broker owned a piece of, the Concort Inn near the government bridge over the Mississippi River, connecting Davenport and Rock Island, Illinois.
Specifically, we were in the Gay ’90s Lounge, one of the better restaurants in the Iowa/Illinois Quad Cities, a study in San Francisco-whorehouse red and black. The place seemed to cater to two crowds—well-off diners in the restaurant area and a singles-scene “meat market” in the bar area. A small combo—piano, bass and guitar—was playing jazzy lounge music, very quietly. A couple couples were upright and groping on the postage-stamp dance floor, while maybe four tables were dining, money men with trophy wives. Or were those mistresses?
The Broker sat with his back to the wall and I was on the curve of the booth next to him. Not right next to him. We weren’t cozy or anything. Often he had a bodyguard with him, another of his ex-military recruits—the Rock Island Arsenal was just across the government bridge and that may have been a source.
But tonight it was just the two of us, a real father-and-son duo. We’d both had the surf and turf (surf being shrimp, not lobster—my host didn’t throw his dough around) and the Broker was sipping coffee. I had a Coke—actually, I was on my second. One of my few vices.
The Broker was in a double-knit navy two-button blazer with wide lapels, a wide light-blue tie and a very light-blue shirt, collars in. His trousers were canary yellow, but fortunately you couldn’t see that with him sitting. A big man, six two with a slender but solid build, with the handsome features of a sophisticated guy in a high-end booze ad in Playboy. Eyes light gray. Face grooved for smile and frown lines but otherwise smooth. Mid-forties, though with the bearing of an even older man.
I was in a tan leisure suit with a light brown shirt. Five ten, one-hundred and sixty pounds, brown hair worn a little on the long side but not enough to get heckled by a truck driver. Sideburns but nothing radical. Just the guy sitting next to you on the bus or plane who you forgot about the instant you got where you were going. Average, but not so average that I couldn’t get laid now and then.
“How do you like working with Boyd?” he asked. He had a mellow baritone and a liquid manner.
I had recently done a job with Boyd. Before that was a solo job and then five with a guy named Turner who I wound up bitching about to Broker.
Contracts were carried out by teams, in most cases, two-man ones—a passive and an active member. The passive guy went in ahead of time, sometimes as much as a month but at the very least two weeks, to get the pattern down, taking notes and running the whole surveillance gambit. The active guy came in a week or even less before the actual hit, utilizing the passive player’s intel. Sometimes the passive half split town shortly after the active guy showed; sometimes the surveillance guy hung around if the getaway was tricky or backup might be needed.
“Well,” I said, “you do know he’s a fag.”
The Broker’s white eyebrows rose. It was like two caterpillars getting up on their hind legs. “No! Tough little fella like that? That hardly seems credible. Could you have misread the signs? You must be wrong, Quarry.”
That wasn’t my name. My name is none of your business. Quarry is the alias or code moniker that the Broker hung on me. All of us working for him on active/passive teams went by single names. Like Charo or Liberace.
“Look, Broker,” I said, after a sip of Coke from a tall cocktail glass, “I don’t give a shit.”
“Pardon?”
“I said I don’t care who Boyd fucks as long as doesn’t fuck up the job.”
Surprise twinkled in the gray eyes and one corner of his mouth turned up slightly. “Well, that’s a very broad-minded attitude, Quarry.”
“A broad-minded attitude is exactly what Boyd doesn’t have.”
The Broker frowned at me. He had the sense of humor of a tuna. “If you wish, Quarry, I can team you with another of my boys—”
I stopped that with a raised hand. “I think Boyd is ideal for my purposes. He prefers passive and I prefer active. You’re well aware that sitting stakeout bores the shit out of me, whereas Boyd has a streak of voyeur in him.”
“Well, that’s hardly enough to recommend him as your permanent partner.”
“I’m not marrying him, Broker. Just working with him. And anyway, I like his style—he’s a regular guy, a beer-drinking, ball-team-following Joe. Fits in, blends in, does not the fuck stand out.”
Understand, Boyd was no queen—he was on the small side but sturdy, with a flat scarred face that had seen its share of brawls; his hair was curly and thick and brown, with bushy eyebrows and mustache, like so many were wearing. Also he had the kind of hard black eyes you see on a shark. Good eyes for this business.
With a what-the-hell wave, I said, “Let’s go with Boyd.”
Broker smiled, lifting his coffee cup. “Boyd it shall be.”
You probably noticed that the Broker talked like a guy who’d read Shakespeare when to the rest of us English literature meant Ian Fleming.
“So,” I said, “four jobs last year, and the one last month. That par for the course?”
He nodded. “Your advance should be paid in full by the end of this year. With that off the books, you’ll have a very tidy income for a relative handful of jobs per annum.”
“Jobs that carry with them a high degree of risk.”
“Nothing in life is free, Quarry.”
“Hey, I didn’t just fall off a turnip truck.”
A smile twitched below the mustache. “So, they have turnip trucks in Ohio, do they?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been on a farm in my life. Strictly a townie.” I leaned in. “Listen, Broker, I appreciate the free meal…keeping in mind nothing is free, like you said…but if you have no objection, I’m going to head home now.”
He gestured like a Price Is Right model to a curtain opening onto a grand prize. “You’re welcome to stay another night, my young friend. Several nights, if you like. You’ve earned a rest and a…bonus, perhaps? Possibly by way of a working girl? Something young and clean? Check out the redhead and the brunette, there at the end of the bar….”
“No thanks, Broker.” He seemed unusually generous tonight. “I just want to head back.”
“But it’s eight o’clock, and so many miles before you sleep.”
I shrugged. “I like to drive at night. Why, is there something else you want to go over?”
It had felt throughout the meal that somethi
ng more was hanging in the air than the question of Boyd as my official passive partner.
He lowered his head while raising his eyes to me. There was something careful, even cautious about it. Very quietly, though no one was seated anywhere near us, he asked, “How do you feel about a contract involving…a woman?”
With a shrug, I said, “I don’t care who hires me. Hell, I don’t even know who hires me, thanks to you.”
“Not what I mean, Quarry.”
I grinned at him. “Yeah, I knew that. Just rattling your chain, Broker.”
He sighed, weight-of-the-world. “You know, I really should resent your insolence. Your impertinence. Your insubordination.”
“Is that all? Can’t you think of anything else that starts with an ‘I’?”
That made him smile. Maybe a little sense of humor at that. “Such a rascal.”
“Not to mention scamp.”
Now he raised his head and lowered his eyes to me. Still very quiet, as if hunting wabbits. “I mean, if the…person you were dispatched to dislodge were of the female persuasion. Would that trouble you?”
That was arch even for the Broker.
I said, “I don’t think it’s possible to persuade anybody to be a female. Maybe you should check with Boyd on that one.”
“Quarry…a straight answer please.”
“You won’t get one of those out of Boyd.”
He frowned, very disapproving now.
I pawed the air. “Okay, okay. No clowning. No, I have no problem with ‘dislodging’ the fairer sex. It’s been my experience that women are human beings, and human beings are miserable creatures, so what the heck. Sure.”
He nodded like a priest who’d just heard a confessor agree to a dozen Hail Mary’s. “Good to know. Good to know. Now, Quarry, there may be upon occasion jobs in the offing…so to speak…that might require a willingness to perform as you’ve indicated.”
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