Quarry in the Black (13 page)

Four beer cans were beside the recliner Boyd pulled up to watch TV.

“You got yourself a back-door man,” I said. “He had lockpicks. How long was this going on, before I showed up?”

“Felt like hours. Probably ten minutes.”

“You got lucky on the timing. Is the gist that he spotted us keeping tabs on the Reverend?”

He nodded, getting to his feet, starting in with the tape around the guy’s chest. “I never said jack shit to the mother-fucker. He just kept hitting me. I’m surprised he didn’t bust his damn hand.”

“Does he figure us for cops?”

“Ask
him
.”

Boyd nodded to our guest, who was coming around in his chair, wincing, licking his lips, raising his eyebrows, like that’s what it would take to get his eyes open.

“You…you’re the
other
one,” he said, looking at me, his upper lip curled back.

“Am I?”

“Who the fuckin’ hell
are
you bastards, anyhow?”

“Well, I’m the guy with your gun.” I showed him the .22, which was in my right hand, the silenced nine mil in my left at my side.

He looked at the .22, almost crossing his eyes to do so, and I laughed a little and slapped him with it. A cut on his cheek opened, two inches or so, and blood dripped out. It was like he’d cut himself shaving. With a Bowie knife.

He gave me some more curled upper lip. “You think I’m afraid of you?”

“As long as I have the guns, I don’t care. As it sits…as
you
sit…your odds for survival are about one in ten. And that’s a generous estimate.”

“All right,” he said, and let air out of his big chest. “I admit it. You fellas got the upper hand at present.”

“Think so?”

His chin came up, his wound crying little ruby tears. “Let’s back ’er up a step. Who are you boys anyhow? You ain’t cops or feds or we wouldn’t be
havin’
this party.”

“Right. You’d be arrested. Nobody official would do this.”

I slapped him with his .22 again. Other cheek. Opened another cut. Really sloppy shaver, this boy.

His eyes, which were a dark blue, blazed. “You better hope I don’t make it outa this chair, you little punk-ass prick.”

“Yeah. Obviously. Let’s back ’er up a step. To where the guy with the guns gets to ask the questions. Oh, and my friend here, who you beat the piss out of earlier?
He’s
also got a gun now.”

Our captor flicked his eyes toward Boyd, off to the side, pointing the long-barrel .38 at him.

“So I see,” the lumberjack said. “What if I took that gun away from him and stuck it up his fuckin’ ass?”

“You’d have to ask him,” I said. “Now let’s start with a name.”

“Eat me,” he said, through a wide smile.

“For a guy who’s obviously been in his share of brawls, you have good teeth. Or did you pay for those? Either way, you probably wouldn’t want me to break them.”

He stopped smiling. “I ain’t gonna give you my name. Who cares what my teeth is like if I’m dead?”

That made more sense than I’d have guessed he was capable of.

“I don’t need a last name,” I said. “Just a first.”

“Bite me.”

“I’m Jack.”

He glanced at Boyd. “Jack, huh? And who’s he?”

“Not Jill. This conversation is just you and me. Never mind him. What’s your name, friend?”

“…Delmont.”

“I said first name.”

“That is my first name.”

“Okay. You’ll recognize these questions. They’re the ones you were asking when I came in.”

He frowned, not following.

“Who are you?” I asked. “I don’t mean your name. Why are you here? What’s your function?”

“Function? What the fuck—”

“Your job. You came here to do a job, right?”

He said nothing.

“Delmont, you came here to a job. Right?”

He sucked in breath. Let it out. Nodded.

I knew. Or anyway I thought I knew. At least one way that this, and some other things, would make anything close to sense had just occurred to me.

“Delmont, you don’t have to tell me why you came north. You don’t have to tell me what job you came to St. Louis to do.”

Boyd was frowning at me, not getting it.

I said, “You came to town to kill the nigger across the street. You’re here to whack the Reverend Raymond Wesley Lloyd.”

His bloody-cheeked astonishment was priceless. He had the same expression as a magician’s volunteer from the audience hearing, “Is this your card?”

Boyd was just slightly astonished himself. He said, “Jack…what the hell?” At least he’d had the presence of mind not to call me Quarry.

I gave him a look that said stay out of it.

Then I said to Delmont, “You know, some pretty strange coincidences happen from time to time.”

“Huh?” Now he was squinting at me. The blood from where I’d whacked him had dried and gone black and looked like a lace cap on his head. A lace cap sewn by a blind, brain-damaged seamstress. The blood on his cheeks wasn’t flowing anymore but the scarlet streaks that had been left still glistened.

“You see,” I said, “my friend and I are watching Reverend Lloyd because we’ve been hired to kill him.”

“What? But I…uh…uh….” Then he clammed up. His brain was overloading. In a cartoon, steam whistle sounds and engine gears grinding would have accompanied smoke coming out his ears.

“Jack!” Boyd said, and he came over and took me by the arm. Walked me to the doorway to his bedroom, and then pulled me in there. Delmont, tied to his chair, was trying very hard to think.

“What the hell’s the idea?” Boyd whispered. “Now we have to kill this guy.”

“
Before
we had to,” I said. “Now, maybe not. Look, it’ll be my responsibility either way. Just go along with me.”

Boyd swallowed hard. His face looked like he’d stuck his head in a beehive and it hadn’t gone well. But he nodded.

Back in front of our guest, his gun in my right hand, mine in my left, I said, “We were hired to kill the black bastard. Now I want to hear why you’re here.”

“I…I…I…”

Aye yai yai.

I said, “You were hired to kill him, too.”

“I was hired to kill him, too!”

Boyd’s eyebrows went up. His puffy eyes otherwise stayed put. They had no choice.

“Delmont,” I said, “my friend and I handle contracts. Is that what you do? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Delmont swallowed thickly. “Maybe so. Maybe so.”

This was not one of Broker’s people. Not by a long shot. But there were other Brokers around, some not so sophisticated. Like Delmont wasn’t quite as sophisticated as Boyd and me.

“Popular guy, the Reverend Lloyd,” I said. “Looks like two people with money want him dead. Two separate contracts.”

Delmont was trying to make that work in his head. “That’s…that’s….”

“A coincidence, yeah, I said that before. It’s also possible that we were hired by the same party, and this is some kind of half-assed attempt to make sure the hit really goes down. Like we fail, you step in. Or vice versa.”

“But that don’t work,” Delmont said, goggling at me. “Not without us knowin’ about each other. Without us knowin’ about each other, somethin’ really
bad
could go down.”

“Right. Like you stumbling in on us and taking us for cops or feds or interlopers.”

“Right,” Delmont said, nodding, then he winced, because that hurt. “So…so what happens now?”

“Chances are,” I said, “though we’re not likely working for the same party, that those parties are aligned.”

“A what?”

“Well, allies. On the same side. Delmont, you’ve heard that expression, the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing?”

“I heard it.”

“That’s what happened here. I’m almost sure of it.”

He squinted in apparent thought. “I’m workin’ for one hand and you for the other.”

“That’s it. You got it.”

His eyes widened. “Well…where do we go from here? If we’re on the same job…sort of…could you maybe let me out of this here chair?”

“I like the way you think, Delmont. And there’s a good chance you’ll be getting out of that there chair. A good chance you’ll live through this and wind up in the black.”

“In what black? If you mean pussy, I ain’t interested, ’less maybe she’s high yellar or somethin’.”

“No, no, Delmont. I mean, you wind up with what
you’re
supposed to get paid, and we wind up with what
we’re
supposed to get paid.”

“But that nigger can only die once.”

“Nothing wrong with your math skills, Delmont. But the right hand, who hired you, and the left hand, who hired us, won’t know that. All our employers will know is that the hit went down successfully. Everybody wins. Except Reverend Lloyd.”

Smoke was threatening to come out his ears again. “Okay…but…”

“Delmont, what I’m saying is…I suggest we partner up.”

Boyd sighed. Applied the homemade ice pack to his face.

Delmont shrugged, as much as he could, duct-taped up like that, and said, “I’m willin’. How ’bout I kill his black ass, and we all get paid, and we all go our separate ways?”

“Close. I’m going to suggest much the same thing. I suggest that my partner and I do the hit. We get paid for doing it, and you get paid for doing nothing.”

He was starting to smile.

“And if we screw up,” I went on, “and wind up dead or something, with Reverend Lloyd still aboveground? Well, then you can come in and finish the job. And get paid.”

“Will you still get paid?”

“No, Delmont, we won’t—we’ll be dead.”

“You’ll be what?”

“Dead or in stir. This happens if we screw the job up, and you have to come in and do it after all. But right now you just sit back and wait to see how we do.”

“Not in
this
chair I won’t.”

“Just a figure of speech, Delmont.”

“Not to me it’s not. And anyway, this’ll all go tits up if I don’t get out of this chair and out of here, lickety damn split.”

“Why is that?”

He looked at me like I was really, really dumb. “The money drop is tonight. I pick up my share. That’s the way it works where I come from. Night or two before I do the job, they got to pay me. But I don’t have no direct contact. Everything’s done through a middleman.”

This all sounded a little too familiar.

I asked, hoping I wanted to hear the answer, “What do you call your middleman, Delmont?”

“Well, I call him Fred. That’s his name.”

That was a relief.

I said, “So the drop is tonight?”

“Right. I’m gettin’ payment straight from the guy who hired the job.”

“So, uh, you work alone?”

“Right. I come in and do recon, then bang bang, I shoot ’em down.”

Boyd was groaning softly.

I said, “Delmont, I’m confused. First you said no direct contact, then you said the guy who hired the job is paying you in person. Tonight.”

“Yeah, it’s at this meeting. If you saw, you’d understand.”

“Well, Delmont, I am going to see. Because you’re taking me.”

“I am?”

And Boyd cut him out of the chair, looking not at all happy about it. About as unhappy, in fact, as Delmont was pleased to get his Charger keys back.

The moon crawled above the horizon, huge, full and blood-red, what we called a Hunter’s Moon back in Ohio. With Delmont at the muscle-car wheel, we were heading southwest on US 50 through rolling countryside, with idyllic rural Middle America gliding by, from forested ridges and well-tilled valleys to antebellum brick mansions and fenced modern farmhouses. Along the way, the moon floated higher, its face now a glowing Halloween orange.

I was the navigator, reading typewritten directions off a small piece of paper to the driver. Traffic was light. Delmont had switched the radio on to a country station and I looked for rock and failed, nothing but more steel guitar and nasal singing, and lots of Sunday fire-and-brimstone preachers who wanted you to send them money. I switched the radio off.

On stretches we’d talk, snippets of conversation initiated by the blond, square-jawed lumberjack behind the wheel. Before we left him behind, Boyd had bandaged his hunky former captor, who now really did look like he’d cut himself shaving. The paucity of cars sharing the concrete strip made for a dream-like ride.

Delmont flashed a vaguely nasty grin over at me. “You know, a car like this is a weapon all by itself.”

“That right.”

“Oh yeah. You can run people down with it. Go fast enough, hit ’em just right, they go flyin’.”

“That a fact.”

His eyebrows flicked up and down. “Really, that gun you got there don’t stack up at all to the weapon I got control of.”

“I’m not pointing it at you, Delmont.” The nine mil in my right hand was draped across my lap.

“I know, I know you’re not. I’m just sayin’—what if I was to swerve and just crash into a telephone pole or some other car, or maybe…in of these little towns? Just punch the pedal and slam into a building or somethin’?”

“What if you did, Delmont?”

“Well, my point is, I’m at the wheel of a car that weighs, oh shit, I don’t know…four-thousand pounds?”

“You’re probably guessing a little high, but yeah, right. And?”

“And all you’ve got is that gun. That little ol’ gun.”

With the extension of the noise suppressor, it didn’t look all that little. But compared to the car it was.

“So you’re saying,” I said, “that you have the more dangerous weapon. Of the two.”

“That’s what I’m sayin’. I could wreck this here car with you in it, and then where would you be? And if you was to shoot me, ’cause you saw I was steerin’ toward somethin’? Well, we’d just crash anyway and you’d be up shit crick.”

“What order do you want me to take those in, Delmont?”

“Huh? Any order, I guess.”

“Okay. If you crash the car with me in it, you’re
also
in it. So what happens to me probably happens to you.”

He was frowning. “Like getting killed.”

“Like getting killed. Or maimed or fucked-up, and should one or both of us survive to wake up in a hospital, guess who would be there?”

“…Family?”

“Cops. Or possibly somebody else who handles contracts for your middleman, Fred—to take
you
out. So the cops can’t ask you about him.”