Quarry in the Middle (14 page)

The eyes remained wide but the flesh around them was tightening. “End of…”

“I haven’t told Dickie about you, or anyway my theory about you.”

Now she frowned. The eyes finally narrowed, and fear was in them. “What are you
after
? What do you
want
from me?”

I lifted the CD. “This’ll do. This is plenty.”

“…You’re not telling Richard?”

“No. I did the job he hired me to do, and I’m out of here.”

“How do you know I won’t…won’t go to my ‘Chicago connections’ and somehow make this happen some
other
way?”

“I don’t. Do what you want. Fuck him. Kill him. Fuck him, then kill him. He’s
your
husband. But I don’t want a contract from either one of you. I’ve had my fill of Haydee’s Port.”

She had a clubbed baby seal expression, and just couldn’t find any words. Hard to sing torch songs over breakfast.

“I’ll enjoy this,” I said, gesturing with the CD, “I really will…I’ll get the check.”

I left her there to contemplate her future, and Dickie bird’s, and went to my room and showered and shaved and changed my clothes and got my things and got the hell out.

I did make one stop on my way—that little mobile home with the rusting Mustang out front. I had a paper bag in my left hand, held in a choke hold, like a trick-or-treater protecting his candy hoard.

I went up the handful of wooden steps and knocked. Nothing. It took prolonged and increasingly insistent knocking to get a response, and I finally got the little kid. He opened the door fearlessly and glared up at me.

“Mommy’s sleeping,” he said, and started to shut the door.

I pushed in, shut the thing behind me and looked down at the tow-headed boy in the
Star Wars
pajamas. “Listen, kid—I don’t care if your mom
is
home. Don’t go just opening the door ’cause somebody’s knocking. You don’t know who it might be.”

From the bedroom came her voice: “
Jack?
”

“Go watch TV, kid,” I said.

He gave me a dirty look but followed instructions, and I tiptoed around the wooden train set to where she was receding into the bedroom. She was in a t-shirt and cotton panties, had no makeup on and her natural blonde hair was ponytailed back and she looked fucking great.

“I didn’t think I’d see you again,” she said, her voice indicating she was glad she’d been wrong.

“Listen, Candace. I’m on my way out of town. When you left the Lucky, was there any fuss going down?”

“No.”

“What time did you walk home?”

“Around quarter to six.”

So she’d been gone when I dropped by to see Jerry G.

“Well, you need to know something,” I said. “There’s going to be a change of management. Some bad shit went down not long ago, but you don’t know anything about it.”

“I don’t?”

“No.” I handed her the paper bag.

“What’s this?”

“Fifteen grand.”

“What!”

“Yours.”

She held it in a choke hold just like I had. “Are you
kidding
…
Why
…?”

“Because you saved my life. That’s just some crumbs that got spilled, and maybe they’ll do you some good. Thing is, there was a robbery over there at the Lucky…this isn’t
that
money, you have to believe me, you have to
trust
me…”

Of course, it was that money.

“All right…I believe you, Jack. Are you saying this money is…mine?”

“Yours. Here’s the conditions. You run that over to River Bluff and put it in a safe deposit box—don’t open an account. A safe deposit box. Then you go back to dancing at the Lucky and keep your head down during the management change and maybe any kind of investigation…”

“Police?”

“Maybe. I doubt it, but maybe. Anyway, don’t throw any of that money around. Just do your job, shake your titties and booty and make some men happy. Live your little life, then in a month or two, if it’s quiet, you quit,
take your kid somewhere and put him in school and go to beauty college and get your life in gear.”

“Jack…oh, Jack.”

And she kissed me. There was sex in it, sure, and gratitude—you can get a hell of a kiss out of girl, when you give her a paper bag full of fifteen grand—but mostly it was sweet. Loving. A hint of maybe what my life could have been like if it hadn’t gone to hell a long time before I came to Haydee’s.

“I got to run,” I said, and gave her a peck of a kiss.

I moved carefully through the little train yard, and the kid kept his eyes on the tube—
Sesame Street
again—and I was halfway to the Firebird when she called out to me.

“
Jack!”

She was framed there in the door, t-shirt, white panties, all the pale creamy flesh a man could ever want, and blue eyes that hid no secrets except the new one.

“You’re an
angel
, Jack. When they made you, they broke the mold!”

Didn’t they just?

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A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

(HCC-061)

November 2009

Published by
Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

200 Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10016

in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

Copyright © 2009 by Max Allan Collins

Cover painting copyright © 2009 by Ron Lesser

www.ronlesser.com

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