Quarry in the Black (8 page)

“Uh-huh.”

“Can you drive me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you believe I’ll shoot you if you try anything smart?”

“…Uh-huh.”

“Even try anything dumb, Becky, I’ll shoot you. I’ll be sorry. I’ll feel terrible about it in the morning. But you’ll be fucking dead, understood?”

“Uh-huh.”

“No tears! I like you. I know our relationship will probably not recover from this hiccup, but I do not want to hurt your pretty ass, even if I’ve lost access to it. Ready?”

“Uh-huh.”

We went out the back onto the shallow wooden deck with stairs down to where several cars were parked on the gravel inset. One was my cobalt Chevy Impala, and we could have taken that, but I preferred arriving in a vehicle that was expected.

What Becky led me to was a piece of shit tan mid-’60s Ford Falcon. The best you could say for it was that it was recently washed and not beat up. I unlocked it, opened the driver’s door and she climbed in, then I got in on the other side and handed her the keys. The gun was in my front waistband now, windbreaker unzipped.

“Take me where we’re going,” I said.

She tried nothing smart or dumb on the half-hour ride. For fifteen minutes, we didn’t speak.

Finally I asked her, “Why did you call your friends in? Besides seeing me go in the apartment downstairs from you.”

“You know why,” she said, poutily, driving carefully. Traffic was light but it was a drunk time of night.

“Maybe I do. Give me a hint, though.”

“…Way you handled them numbnuts last night.”

“Yeah?”

“I mean,” she said, shrugging behind the wheel, “you really hurt ’em. Bigger than you, and you left ’em there…bleedin’ and shit.”

“I didn’t like the way they put their hands on you.”

“Thanks for that much.” She gave me a little smile, though her expression remained hurt, like she hadn’t forgiven me yet for not trusting her.

I said, “You figured I wasn’t just anybody.”

“Right. It took
somebody
to handle them two like that.”

“So who did you report it to?”

“You’ll see.”

No need to try to pry it out of her. She was right—I soon would see.

In a suburb called Ferguson, on a four-lane main drag mixing residential and commercial, she stopped at a light as we approached a little chapel-like church on the corner.

Out front was an old-fashioned black-with-white-letters message board:

SUNDAY SCRIPTURE:
“The Lord Defeated the Ethiopians.”
2: Chronicles 14:12.

Catercorner was a used-car lot and directly across an all-night Deep Rock station, then residential, houses built in the twenties and thirties that had seen better days. The light changed and then we were pulling into a little paved drive between the church and a slumbering Dairy Queen.

Behind the church she slowed to a stop in a gravel lot. Only one other car was parked back here, a white recent-model Lincoln with a Confederate flag decal in the back window and a
WALLACE FOR PRESIDENT
bumper sticker.

I said to her, “A fucking church?”

She nodded. “You shouldn’t say it that way. It’s sacrilegious.”

“Sorry. I meant to say goddamn church. This explains the two choir boys you brought to see me.”

She glared at me. “You
said
bring you here. And he
is
a Christian leader.”

The only thing remotely Christian about this girl was that I’d screwed her in the missionary position.

I came around and opened her door, collected the keys from her, and walked her by the arm to the church’s back door, which was unlocked. Then we were in a little entry area lighted by a small bare bulb with a pull chain. A few uncarpeted stairs led up into a dark sanctuary, some street light entering through stained-glass windows, revealing empty pews. Down to our right were more uncarpeted stairs, a flight of them. She nodded that way.

Hell, not heaven, then.

We went down together, squeezed a bit as we shared the steps, which emptied into a linoleum-floored basement with folding banquet tables that had no doubt seen more than its share of potluck suppers. The fluorescent-light panels in the drop ceiling were off, but small rectangular windows let in enough street-level light to make things out.

At the far end, a wood-paneled wall had various framed Sunday school-type prints and also two doors; under the one at right, light seeped out.

She pointed to that door.

Someone behind it was waiting for me to be brought to him. But no other bully boys in tan work shirts and chinos were waiting here for me, unless they were back there with my would-be host. Or were a bunch of them sitting in the dark upstairs, crouched down in the pews where I hadn’t seen them?

I led her down the central aisle between banquet tables and when we stood at the light-seeping door, I whispered, “Knock.”

She gave it three short raps. “Mr. Starkweather? It’s Becky. I have him right here, sir.”

“Bring him!” came a radio announcer baritone. “Bring him right in.”

She reached for the knob, her eyes querying me and I nodded for her to go ahead. She did and we went in.

It was a decent-sized office, with more rec-room-type paneling and the same drop ceiling and fluorescent panels, though the latter were dark. The only illumination came from a steel flying-saucer-shade lamp with a grooved steel base on the wood-topped, military-green metal desk it rested upon. Many neat stacks of papers were on the desktop as well, beside a blotter and two phones.

Behind the oversize desk sat a medium-sized man in his craggy forties smoking a General MacArthur-style corncob pipe, harsh tobacco smoke hanging in the air like a filthy curtain. As had his minions, he wore a tan shirt but also a black tie, his black hair short-cropped, his complexion pale. A rectangular face bore carved features—cheekbones, slash of black eyebrows, sockets with lamb-dropping eyes, hawk nose, thin wide mouth, prominent jaw—an Indian-chief courtesy of a mediocre wood-carver.

In two seconds, I took it all in. On the wall behind him was an enormous sideways red flag with a swastika in a white circle—doesn’t every good church need a cross?—and left of that a framed print of the famous Sunday school Caucasian Jesus; at right was a framed original portrait in a smeary paint-by-numbers style of Adolph Hitler. A bookcase on the left side wall displayed German war souvenirs, helmets, knives, Lugers next to snazzy holsters; above was a display on blue velvet of Nazi medals.

Consuming the right side wall was an enormous framed black-and-white Korea-era photograph of the man at the desk in a Marine colonel’s dress uniform with a number of medals. A great American soldier who just happened to be president of the Hitler fan club.

His chin came up, and so did his pipe, as he said, “Rebecca—where are Sam and Dave?”

I felt like telling him “Muscle Shoals,” but doubted he’d get it.

“A friend of mine is babysitting them,” I said, answering for her. With the nine millimeter, I gestured to the two metal folding chairs opposite him. “Do you mind?”

His head bobbed curtly, pipe in his teeth. “Not at all.”

I directed Becky to sit, which she did. She was as nervous as on a trip to the principal’s office.

“My friend will kill both Sam and Dave,” I said, “and dump them, on a dusty road…” Another gag lost on him. “…if I’m not back safe and sound in about ninety minutes.”

“Understood,” he said.

Her eyes white all around, Becky leaned forward and said, “I’m
so
sorry, sir. Dave and Sam did their best, but he…he had a
gun
.”

“So I see,” our host said with a nod to my nine-millimeter-in-hand.

Pleasantly, I asked, “What was it you wanted to see me about?”

“I would like to know your intentions.”

“Well, Rebecca and I’ve only been out on one date, but I think it’s going really well, so you can rest assured my intentions are honorable.”

Becky winced at that. My host didn’t react at all. Humor was either something he did not understand or at most something had learned to tolerate.

“Earlier today,” he said, “Rebecca saw you enter an apartment below hers.”

She turned to me and said, “I was coming down the stairs. You didn’t see me.”

“And this was after,” the man with the corncob pipe said, “you had gone out of your way to make her acquaintance the night before. More than that, to impress her with your manhood.”

Was he referring to me pistol-whipping those creeps, or to my impressive Rebecca-banging manhood? I didn’t seek clarification.

Instead I asked, “What are you looking for me to say?”

He removed the pipe and looked at it, confirmed it had gone out and re-lit it with a kitchen match.

Puffing it, getting it going, he said, “I have stayed alive, Mr. Blake…that
is
your name, isn’t it, or at least the name you’re using? I have stayed alive lo these many years—where others with a similar courage of their beliefs have gone down in a hail of bullets—by exerting what may seem to some an excess of caution. Are you an interloper, sir? Or did you innocently stumble into something of which you knew nothing?”

I thought about killing him, but that meant killing Becky and Sam and Dave, too, for chump change.

“You know
my
name,” I said. “Who are you?”

That surprised him. “You don’t recognize me?”

“I don’t get out that much.”

“Or perhaps you have survived through caution, as well. The name is Starkweather—Commander Zachary Taylor Starkweather. You’ve heard of the White Christian Freedom Party? I’m its proud founder, as well as the Grand Dragon of the Missouri Ku Klux Klan.”

I hadn’t heard of him, but I knew about these screwball American Nazis. And I was fairly sure I had this thing figured out. Since I was the one with a gun, why not take a flier?

“I didn’t stumble into anything,” I said. “And neither did you.”

His mouth smiled around the pipe. “Is that right?”

“I was hired to do a job,” I said. “And when I work, there’s insulation. No direct contact with my employer. That’s designed not so much for my protection as for the one who hired me. Anyone on the hiring end, trying to lend support, is…misguided. Anyone on that end checking up on me is a damn nuisance. The wrong parties could get killed. Do I make myself clear?”

He drew in some of that foul smoke, then shared it with us. “You do, sir.”

“Delightful as her company is, I would like Becky here to vacate the apartment above where my partner and I are working. She can keep her job—jobs are tough to find—but she should stay with friends till she has somewhere else to live. And if I see either Sam or Dave, I will kill them and leave town. With the job unfinished.”

He nodded sagely. “Understood, sir. There was severe misjudgment on our end. Do forgive us.”

“Leave the forgiveness to Jesus. And the job to me.”

He nodded again, so low, it was almost a bow. Then he stood behind the desk—he was about my size—and extended a thick paw for me to shake. He was surrounded by the red of the Nazi flag.

I switched the nine mil to my left hand and stood and shook with him. His grip was cold and clammy but firm.

I said, “Come on, Becky. Let’s go get your friends out of hock.”

She and I were at the door when Starkweather said, “May I ask you one thing, Mr. Blake?”

“Okay.”

“In taking on this assignment, are you strictly, as they say, in it for the money? Or are you too a good Christian, who hates the niggers and kikes as much as we do?”

I gave him half a smile. “You left out the fags, Commander.”

“So I did! So I did.”

He was chuckling as I left.

I stuffed my nine millimeter in my waistband and slipped an arm around Becky’s shoulder and walked her out of the church and into the parking lot. Then I wiped off my hand where the madman had shook it and shuddered.

“Jesus Fucking Christ,” I said to myself.

“Please, not here,” she scolded.

“Amen,” I said.

And we got the hell out.

The next morning Boyd and I again got breakfast together, this time at a funky restaurant called Duff’s in an old house with mismatched furniture, bizarre paintings, a purple ceiling, and waitresses in headbands. We found a quiet corner and had scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, coffee and further discussion about whether to bail.

“If this racist goon is our employer,” I said, “he’s about as stable as a two-legged table, and a prime candidate for a straitjacket.”

“Ours not to reason why,” Boyd said, but the frown lines under that curly dark fright wig of his said he was troubled, too.

“Complete that thought and get back to me,” I said, chewing bacon. “If these morons figured that watching us, for whatever reason, was a good idea, it’s at the very least a breach of protocol.”

“But such good money,” he whined.

He didn’t know the half of it. Literally, since his ten grand was less than half of my twenty-five.

I said, “I’m calling the Broker.”

He shrugged, bit off a corner of toast slathered with organic marmalade, and admitted, “Probably a good idea.”

A couple of old-fashioned wooden phone booths were off the restaurant’s bar area, which was hours away from being open. I closed myself inside one, sent a dime down the slot and told the operator the number and that it was a collect call. I expected I’d have to camp out since surely I’d get a flunky, with the return call from the man himself taking up to half an hour to happen.

But the Broker actually answered.

I told him I was in a hippie joint, so unless the feds were tapping the phones to find dissidents or drug dealers, it should be cool to talk. Of course an avalanche of euphemisms followed anyway.

“The guy who hired the job had people watching us,” I said. “Whether to back us up should we need help or to double-cross us at the end, or just make sure we were earning our pay…I got no fucking idea.”

“A shameful breach. My apologies. I’ll talk to the party in question.”

“I already have.”

“
What?
You know this breaks the cardinal rule! Contact with the client is strictly out of bounds.”