Quarry in the Black (12 page)

When I finally eased off her, she got up and moved gracefully back into the bathroom. With considerably less grace, I used the Kleenex box on the nightstand. She returned in sheer panties and got her cigarettes out of her purse. She stood at the window, where the drapes were as sheer as her panties, and she smoked, looking out.

“Help yourself,” she said softly, meaning the Cools that she had left on the nightstand.

“I never got the habit.”

Her lovely long back was still to me. “Oh? Any bad habits at all, Jack?”

“Nope. I rarely drink to excess. I don’t overeat, despite what you witnessed at the Pizza Villa. And I especially don’t engage in unprotected sex with strange women.”

Now she glanced over her shoulder and gave me that saucy smile again, minus the sauce this time. Then she returned to looking out through the sheer curtains, at nothing, or at least that was what I sensed.

“Jack, tonight when we were telling each other about ourselves,” she said, and of course mostly it had been about her, by my design, “there’s something I didn’t mention.”

“Oh?”

“I was married once.”

“Oh.”

“No kids. Didn’t last long. Didn’t know him well, though I wished I could have. I met him one weekend at a church dance and he was going overseas in a few weeks. Back to Vietnam. We saw a lot of each other while he was on leave. Then on impulse we flew to Vegas and got married and had two days of honeymoon and he was gone.”

He died over there.

“He died over there, Jack. I’ve never quite been the same. That’s why I’m so against the war, Jack. That’s why I want McGovern to win so bad.”

She came to bed after a while and turned her back to me again. Lights were off.

I said, “I was married. Wartime thing. Similar conditions. But I didn’t die over there, not so’s you’d notice. Whirlwind romance, like yours. But then I came home and found her in bed with a guy…and the marriage died, even if I didn’t.”

And the next day I went around to talk to the bastard, found him working under his little sports car and I kicked out the jack. Well, he’d called me a bunghole. Now he was deader than my marriage.

She turned over onto her side and looked at me with pity, which I didn’t mind actually, because understanding was in there, too.

But they wound up letting me walk, and the Broker saw the story in the papers and came looking me up….

“Jack…I guess we both have our war wounds, don’t we?”

She went to sleep in my arms. Of course, before long we were facing the other way from each other. That was okay. She snored a little.

Sunday evening, around six, the blue-and-silver bus that had been born the same year as me let us all out at Coalition Headquarters on East Euclid. Staffers and their overnight bags headed in all directions for cars that had been parked on side streets where parking meters weren’t an issue. Neon signs for bars and restaurants had that nice glow you only get at dusk and I asked Ruth if she’d like to grab a bite.

“Love to,” she said, suitcase in one hand and train case in the other.

We’d spent a long day, mostly on the bus, with a non-Nimoy event at the state teacher’s college in Kirksville. Light attendance compared to yesterday and a disappointment, though the Reverend’s rousing speech got great response. If you’re wondering, André had done no business this afternoon, at least not that I caught him at.

“I’ve eaten breakfast at Duff’s,” I said to her. “I wonder if it’s as good at night? Or if they’re even open.”

She was smiling and nodding, and now I realized some of the Afro bounce was due to its being a wig. “They’re open and very good—such a cool funky place. The Croque Monsieur is to
die
for.”

“What’s that?”

“A kind of grilled cheese and ham sandwich.”

“I’ll try it, but I won’t give my life for it. What about this luggage? We don’t want to lug it there.”

“I have a key,” she said, nodding toward the HQ entry. “I can leave mine inside. Yours, too, if you like.”

“No,” I said, “I’m parked a couple blocks down,” nodding across the street. I didn’t want her to know I was living so nearby, not at the YMCA, which was the address I’d supplied the Coalition. “You slip yours inside and I’ll walk down and put mine in my car trunk.”

That seemed an acceptable plan to her, and she was letting herself in as I walked across the street with my suitcase. Around the corner, I went down the alley, where my Impala SS was parked. For several seconds, I just stood there like a guy on a railway platform who missed his train.

A yellow late ’60s Dodge Charger—well-maintained, nice and clean—was next to the Impala on the graveled, slightly sloping parking area behind our building. Far as I knew, now that my little redheaded waitress had moved on, the third-floor apartment was vacant. So this did not seem to be a new neighbor.

Whoever he or she was—no,
he
…that Dodge Charger was a guy’s ride—the vehicle told me something about the owner. Well, not the vehicle so much as the mint-green “Heart of Dixie” Alabama license plates and the Confederate flag decal on the back window.

I unlocked the Impala trunk and shut the suitcase in there.

Ruth was waiting patiently in the recess of the HQ doorway. The bus was gone and so were any other staffers.

“Honey,” I said, “I’m sorry. I just remembered I promised somebody I’d do something tonight.”

“Oh…well, sure.” She seemed justifiably hurt by that lame excuse, but I didn’t dare be any more specific.

I asked her, “Do you have a car?”

“Sure.”

“Rain check?”

“You bet.” But the sticky-red smile was strained.

I gave her a kiss on the cheek, said I was sorry, and hustled across the street.

At the Impala, I opened the trunk back up and got in my suitcase, taking out the nine millimeter, which I’d folded up in some sportshirts. The noise suppressor, a black tube a little longer than the gun itself, had gotten an undignified wrapping up in my dirty underwear; I screwed it onto the Browning barrel.

Above the weathered wood of the second-floor deck, the kitchen lights were off. Nothing suspicious about that. Nothing suspicious except that Charger, which I wished was away down south in Dixie. Away, away.

I transferred the silenced weapon to my left hand and held it to my side. Went up the back stairs as quietly as I could—the boards had creaked since the day they were hammered together and tonight was no exception—and crossed the deck to the back door. The key I worked as gently as possible, but of course it made its little click.

I paused, as I dropped the key in my windbreaker pocket, looking through the door’s double glass panes across the darkened kitchen, to see if anyone would emerge. Emerge as in charge the fuck in there with a gun blasting or anyway raised to do so.

The door stuck some, so I had to put some shoulder into it, but I tried to do that gently too—the nine mil with its endless silenced barrel was in my right hand now—and the door gave and I stepped in. I left it ajar, which I didn’t love doing, but making a sound was the greater risk.

I could hear a voice echoing down the boxcar rooms. All the doors were open. That might or might not be a good thing.

“Now, li’l man,” somebody drawled, the Charger owner no doubt, “you best loosen up your lip ’fore I wipe it the hell off your ugly puss.”

I toed off my sneakers, oh so carefully. In my stocking feet I crept to the open door to my bedroom, where the lights were also off. Peering around I could see all the way down to the living room, where a big guy in a green-and-black plaid shirt and jeans and clodhoppers paced an area of four or five feet slowly in front of Boyd, who was in a chair with his hands tied behind him. Probably duct-taped, because that was how his ankles were bound to the kitchen chair he was in. I was two rooms away, and they were in the middle of the living room, but I could easily see that Boyd’s face was a battered bloody mess.

Boyd, knowing our target was out of town, had probably been loafing today, watching TV, in a white t-shirt and pajama bottoms and bare feet. Well, it
had
been a white-shirt. It was splotched scarlet now, like a tie-dye job that never really got off the ground.

“What in the fuckin’ name of our lord and savior Jesus H. Christ are you
doin’
here, Jewboy? Best open that piehole now. Or you rather
die
in that chair?”

Boyd wasn’t Jewish, at least as far as I knew, but he didn’t correct the guy. He seemed barely awake, his eyelids swollen till only slits were left, his mouth puffy, welts and abrasions at odd angles on his cheeks, like war paint applied by a drunken Indian.

The big man—a good six-three, broad shoulders, narrow waist, muscular legs, a regular lumberjack in that plaid shirt—backhanded Boyd with a left. His right had a Smith and Wesson .22 auto in it. Not a small weapon, yet it looked like a purse gun in that massive fist.

I was in Boyd’s room now. By the door. Or anyway by the nightstand where his latest fairy porn paperback was folded open. Funny, the lumberjack sported a thatch of blond hair, like he’d walked off the cover of one of Boyd’s books—a dream man, giving him a nightmare time of it.

“You been watchin’ them niggers across the street, ain’tcha?
Why?
What the fuck you
up to
, you kike sumbitch?”

Boyd’s surveillance set-up was over by the window, the pillows, the radio, the binoculars, the notebook.

Boyd licked his puffed-up lips and said, “I’m not Jewish, you big steaming pile of shit.”

That cleared that up.

He backhanded Boyd again. “Don’t get mouthy with me, you little cocksucker!”

“You’re…you’re getting warmer, asshole,” Boyd said. He was smiling a little. Not defiance in the face of fear and pain, no—he saw me in the doorway.

But our guest didn’t.

Not wanting to fuck up the suppressor—it had taken a long damn time to find one worth a damn—I shifted the gun so that I held it by its barrel, tubing angled down, and swung the nine-mil butt like I was pounding a stake into the ground, making a satisfying mushy crunch. Still, he was so big I had to reach up to do it, and I wondered if he’d just say, “
Owww!
” and turn and look at me with one eye squinting.

But instead he went down like a felled tree, only less dignified, shaking the floor and the furniture. The .22 auto seemed to jump from his hand of its own accord, landing over by the couch.

Now he was down on the carpet on his left side, mouth open like a big slumbering baby, and I cautiously moved him onto his back with a foot on his shoulder. Should he be faking, and make a grab for my leg, the nine mil was turned around in my hand again and he’d be fucking dead.

If he wasn’t already.

Through the thick lips, Boyd managed, “Is it alive?”

Blows to the back of the head like the one I’d delivered killed you often as not. Wasn’t like on TV where Mannix got clocked on a weekly basis.

The lumberjack had a peaceful look, the kind they pay morticians to achieve. But he was breathing, all right, and quite a specimen. His hair was a golden yellow many a female would covet and his jaw was strong and firm in a way some men might envy. His eyes, however, were close-set, his nose flat above and lumpy below, broken so often that the point was moot.

Boyd’s fat lips flapped. “Duct tape…he brought…on the couch.”

Got to admire a pro attitude like that. Tied to a chair, beat to shit, he doesn’t yell for me to untie him or help him or any such nonsense. First make sure the intruder is out of commission.

I used the duct tape to tie the lumberjack’s wrists behind him, then wrapped it around his ankles, and finally wound more of the stuff around his legs under the knees. Then I checked for a wallet and found none. A couple hundreds in fives, tens and twenties were in one pocket, and went into mine. In the other was a small pouch of lockpicks, not unlike the one I carry in my wallet. Also the keys to his Dodge Charger. Nothing else. Certainly no I.D.

Only then did I use a pocket knife I’d found in a denim jacket our guest had tossed on a chair. I cut Boyd loose and got him to his feet.

“Go clean yourself up,” I told him. “Take half a dozen aspirin, why don’t you?”

He nodded like that was a fine prescription and trundled off.

I sat in the now-vacated kitchen chair, some Boyd blood spattered at my feet. Several yards away, Boyd’s slumbering questioner breathed hard, scarlet dripping through his longish hair like somebody had cracked a bloody egg on his skull.

Who was he?

My first thought was that this was somehow a result of the other night. That Becky and her Nazi boyfriends had called in help to settle the score. But I felt I’d had a meeting of the minds with Commander Starkweather—he certainly wouldn’t have sanctioned this. And, anyway, the questions the blond good-old-boy had been asking Boyd, in a decidedly pointed way, indicated he wanted to know who
we
were. What
we
were up to.

Hell, Starkweather already knew. He’d hired us, hadn’t he?

Hadn’t he?

But the Broker hadn’t really confirmed that. And something was glimmering in the back of my head.

Before long Boyd came back in. He’d spruced up for our caller—the bloody t-shirt replaced by a blue sportshirt, pajama bottoms by navy slacks, bare feet shod now in navy sneakers. I wondered if I’d tidy up like that, if somebody rescued me from a Mamie Van Doren blonde who was torturing my ass, and I wanted to look good when I questioned her. Maybe.

Of course, my partner’s face was a puffy horror, his eyes slitted and swollen, like the ref should have stopped the fight a lot of rounds ago. But the blood was washed off, and his left hand held some ice wrapped in a washcloth that he moved around to sore places on his face.

Without a word, we pitched in and lifted the lumberjack up by the arms and flopped him into the chair. It wasn’t any harder than moving a roadkill buck off the highway. I left the additional duct-taping to Boyd—we wanted him secured to the chair—and, without my asking, Boyd filled me in.

“He was just suddenly in the room with me,” Boyd said. “I was watching the game, and it was pretty dull and I fell asleep. And then there the son of a bitch was, big as a redwood.”