Quarry in the Black (16 page)

“It’s a secure line, Broker. You needn’t be coy.”

“I do, if I’m to maintain the role that I play in our relationship, which is as a buffer, as insulation, as a middleman.”

As a redundant prick.

“Your role,” he was saying, “is fairly well defined. I won’t insult your intelligence by reminding you what the boundaries are.”

“Well, I’d be glad to insult yours. Where should I start?”

“Now, Quarry, I understand you’ve had a very full and taxing evening. I can tell you, with utter sincerity, that I am very pleased that you survived the unpleasant circumstances you happened upon this evening.”

“Circumstances like getting attacked by a KKK Klavern, you mean?”

He chuckled. “You do have a knack for getting yourself into the most outlandish jams.”

I held the receiver out and looked at it. Shook my head. I wasn’t going to win with this guy. Or maybe I was just too beat to try.

I said we’d talk tomorrow and he said that was a good idea, and we exchanged goodbyes and hung up.

* * *

I tried to sleep but couldn’t. I tossed, I turned, back, sides, belly, and still my brain refused to stop buzzing, the sheets getting more and more tangled. I kept turning things over in my mind, getting nowhere, but always coming back to the same conclusion.

Boyd and I should not hang around.

Tonight I’d killed two people who were not on my dance card. Yes, I picked up ten grand for my trouble, five after splitting with Boyd, but this job had really gone off the rails.

I turned on the nightstand light and read. Half an hour later, I finished the Louis L’Amour paperback and climbed out of bed, in my underwear. Light edged under the door between my bedroom and Boyd’s, so he was probably awake, too. I knocked lightly and announced myself. He said come on in.

He was reading a paperback called
Gay Safari
. Both his hands were showing, which was a relief.

“Just passing through,” I said. “Too wired to sleep.”

“No problem,” he said, still looking like the victim of a beekeeping accident, and returned to bettering his mind through literature.

I shut the door to his bedroom and crossed to the recliner that faced the television. It was after two
A.M.
, and not much was on, but I found an old Charlie Chan movie. It was terrible, and just what I was looking for—something that would put me to sleep. Thing was, Mantan Moreland was so damn funny, I never did get drowsy, though I was well aware that my Coalition friends across the street probably wouldn’t find this wonderful black comedian at all amusing. Their loss.

Every time Mantan said something that made me laugh (“Murder’s okay, Mr. Chan, but you
wholesale
it!”), I would look over at the nearby window toward the Coalition HQ, sort of reflexively. I was finally just getting drowsy when Mantan said, “Move over troubles, here we come again!” and I glanced over and there were lights on over there.

I got up and went to the windows. Knelt and looked out and lights were on in the rear of the place. At close to three
A.M.
on a Sunday night or anyway Monday morning, lights going. I used the binoculars but saw no one moving inside, though a storeroom door seemed to be partway open at the rear by the restrooms, between the two glassed-in offices. The light was coming from back there.

I knocked at Boyd’s bedroom door and said, “Me,” and found him still reading.

I said, “Something’s going on across the street.”

He blinked swollen eyes at me. He looked like a fish you’d throw back. “At Lloyd’s headquarters?”

“Yeah.”

“What the hell for?”

“Well, that’s what I’m going to check out. Do you have anything I could take that isn’t that .38 of yours? It’s louder than an elephant fart.”

“What’s wrong with your Browning?”

“I’d need to switch out barrels and I don’t want to take the time.”

He nodded and got into a drawer of his nightstand and handed me a six-inch item with an ebony handle and metal trim.

“A switchblade? What are you, Boyd—James fucking Dean?”

“Do you want it or not?”

“I want it.”

“Just be careful with it—cutting edge is razor sharp. Don’t hurt yourself. Try the switch.”

The stiletto blade popped out with a snap. Like a robot erection.

“Okay, thanks. Can I ask you one thing, Boyd?”

“Sure.”

“Are you a Shark or a Jet?”

I quickly climbed into a dark sweatshirt and black jeans and black sneakers and went out the back way, coming around the building. The street was dead. No traffic at all, stoplights in flashing mode; pavement was wet and shiny from street cleaning, reflecting the now lower-hanging Hunter’s Moon.

I crossed to the HQ side of the street, but didn’t bother trying the front door, going around to the alley instead. Parked back there along the building was a late-model Oldsmobile Toronado, army-green with a black vinyl top. Powerful ride, not inexpensive.

Nobody behind the wheel.

Nobody in the alley, either. With the unopened switchblade tight in my fist, I moved down to and around the parked Olds. Near the rear door to Coalition HQ, I paused. The door was closed, but its edges were bleeding light. I could hear muffled male voices. I drew closer and plastered my ear to the wood, but the door was thick and heavy and all I got for my effort was louder muffled talk.

But then the talk got even louder, and closer, and I darted away, slipping into the recess of a doorway behind the adjacent building.

Peeking carefully around the corner of my hiding place, I saw two white men emerge, one big in width and height both, the other slender and not tall but not small either. They wore topcoats and hats like it was 1952 but had a timeless gangster look—the big man had a face plump from pasta and hard from hurting people; and the slender one was mustached with a narrow face that was intelligent in a racetrack tout way. They might have looked corny to me if I couldn’t read how fucking dangerous they were. The slender one was counting money in an envelope, quickly, just giving it a second check, having no doubt already done so inside. The bigger guy was just watching. He liked money. Well, we had that in common.

The big guy opened the driver’s door and climbed behind the wheel, the slender one got in on the rider’s side, and the Toronado started up with a powerful engine throb and rolled by me. I had plastered myself against the door within my recess, enveloping myself in darkness. Or anyway I hoped I had. That big guy could take my switchblade away and hand it to the slender guy, who would pick his teeth with it while the big guy beat me to fucking death with an arm he tore off me.

I wasn’t unhappy to see them go.

Then I heard something that sounded like a key chain rattling, which is exactly what it was. André was locking up Coalition HQ’s rear door after his wee-hours meeting with business associates. He was in a black sharp-collared jumpsuit with red trim and no jacket, but his sleeves were long, so he should be okay in the chill.

Tucked under an arm—right out in the open—was a paper bag, its top folded over, just about the right size for a couple loaves of bread. Of course that wasn’t bread he was carrying away.

He was heading out of the alley when I called out, “André! Wait up.”

He swiveled and I was right there, a few yards from him, the switchblade hidden in my fist, blade still sleeping. If he ran or tried anything, it would wake up.

“Hey, it’s me. Jack. From work. We haven’t had a chance to rap yet.” Sarcastic but lightly so.

“White boy,” he said, voice like sandpaper, eyes diamond hard and rhinestone glittery, “what you wanna do is, walk away now. You wanna jus’ forget what you think you see. Those men? They nasty-ass men. You be very goddamn dead without tryin’.”

“The Reverend himself couldn’t have made a better speech, André. Stay cool. This is no hijacking. I’m not after whatever’s in that paper bag. Coke? Horse? Just don’t care.”

Nostrils flared in the pockmarked, sunken-cheeked puss. “Then why the fuck you standin’ there starin’ at me with that stupid face in the middle of the night?”

“Doesn’t matter what time of day it is, André, you got the same face. Like your face is always there, telling people like me that you’re still using.”

His eyes narrowed, losing none of their hardness. He was sorting through his options. I had no idea whether he had a weapon or not, but chances were he did.

“All I want to know is,” I said, “are you the top of the food chain? Are you cracking the whip or just another mule?”

Why did I want to know? I guessed there must be some part of me that wanted Reverend Lloyd not to be dirty. Some part of me that wanted to walk away from a job that didn’t suit my requirements. I wasn’t soft. Just fussy.

“Why, you think your white ass gettin’ a
cut
? Ain’t no way.”

“Did I say I wanted a cut of your end? Just tell me. Do you answer to somebody, or is this campus distribution scheme your own brainchild?”

He must not have had a weapon after all, because he flung the paper bag at me and its hard-packed contents hit me in the chest, startling me. That freed his hands, gave him the half-second he needed to rush me, putting a spiky shoulder into my belly and he took me down, hard, on my back.

Now I was looking up at him and damned if
he
didn’t have a knife, not a switchblade but a fucking combat knife, held in his fist in time-honored stabbing position.

I popped the blade and slashed across his throat, like a stock boy using a box-cutter, and his eyes opened wide, combat knife clattering to the alley floor, and the gash in his throat sprayed my face red, like a horrible spigot had been turned on all the way, and the warm coppery stuff was in my hair and all over my shirt and fucking everywhere, even in my eyes. At least it didn’t burn.

I shoved him off of me and he lay on his side with vacant eyes, the blood oozing from the gash but not really flowing anymore because his heart wasn’t pumping. I was a mess. A bloody mess. How the fuck had Jack the Ripper managed it, anyway?

My shirt and shoes I took off immediately, wrapping the latter in the former, so I wouldn’t leave bloody footprints. Then with all the care I could muster, I left the alley, bare-chested, in stocking feet, making sure as best I could that no cars were coming and nobody was on the sidewalk or in a window. I was shivering and some of it was the chill air. The loaves of dope I dumped down a sewer, the switchblade too, once I’d rubbed any fingerprints off.

Then I moved quickly, though not running, back to the apartment, the alley way. Up the back stairs and getting out of all of my clothes, underwear too, off of me and into the garbage bag with the clothing from the earlier fun and games. Then I took my third or was it fourth shower of the day, and leaned against the shower wall with both hands, my head under the spray and watched the blood go
Psycho
-ing down the drain.

Afterward, smudgy red was on the towel here and there, and I was bent over bare-ass adding it to the garbage bag of clothing-turned-evidence when Boyd came in. In his undies, finding me stark naked stuffing a bloody towel into the bag. His eyes opened as wide as their puffy pouches would allow.

“I’ll have to reimburse you for the switchblade,” I said.

The water in the YMCA pool was exactly the way I liked it, comfortable once you’d been in for a while, and not so immediately warm that you felt you’d fallen into a great big bath. Just enough snap to the temperature to let you think, and I could stand some of that. Thinking, I mean, although swimming would fill the blank just as well.

As the Broker had suggested, I’d gone to the YMCA on Locust Street in downtown St. Louis, where a room had been booked and paid for, to be seen and to have a look at the cubicle where I’d supposedly been staying. The setup was that you always asked for your key at the desk and handed it in when you left. So between the various clerks, mostly part-timers, kids and the underemployed, it would be assumed I’d already been here.

At the pool, I had an “open swim” time to myself, just me and that echoey
lap-lap-lap
ambiance that I knew so well and the strangely soothing scent of chlorine in that world of reflecting water that helped me reflect.

Right now I was swimming freestyle with a stroke smooth enough to be envied by a high school champ, like the one I’d once been. At the same time, my mind was finding nothing smooth about how I’d been handling things lately. If you’re somebody who yells at the TV when the hero does something stupid, I can only remind you that this was not TV and I am not a hero.

A hero wouldn’t have impulsively broken ranks at that KKK meeting and caused fiery chaos to erupt. A hero wouldn’t have blundered into the aftermath of a drug deal and slit some bastard’s throat and gotten drenched in warm sticky red. I would have to do better.

Of course, doing better meant leaving St. Looie right now, and if the Broker advised that, I would not argue. What I would learn from this lively debacle was not to let myself be talked into coming out of the shadows where my gun and I belonged to get involved up-close-and-personal in the target’s life and his sphere of influence.

In the pre-dawn hours—after I was showered with blood and then showered blood off me—I’d told Boyd what had happened, more or less, in the alley behind Coalition HQ. The “less” part was that I left out that I’d confronted André, saying instead that he’d caught me eavesdropping.

“Well now,” Boyd said, “we
have
to scrap the job.”

We were in our underwear at the kitchen table again.

“Probably,” I admitted.

“No probably about it, Quarry.”

He was right, of course, if for no other reason than a staffer with his throat slit in the alley behind Coalition HQ unquestionably meant cops.

I said, “The thought of walking into that office and having to weather a bunch of questions from some St. Louis Columbo does not give me a warm fuzzy feeling. I admit it. But what if I don’t show up today? Suddenly I’m a suspect. In a day or two, my background story blows up. They bring in sketch artists. My face is on the news. Think of it this way, Boyd—
your partner’s
face is on the news.”