Quarry's Deal (4 page)

6

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I BROUGHT THE
razor up to my throat and stroked. A final patch of beard disappeared and the face looking back at me in the mirror was vaguely familiar.

And not a little strange. The upper part of my face was Florida tan, but the lower, newly bare half was pale as baby powder. I had grown the beard to change my appearance temporarily, assuming once the thing was off that my rather ordinary features would keep me a face in the crowd. Only not many faces in the crowd have two-tone complexions.

I shrugged at my familiar, strange reflection, thinking what the hell, I’ll just have to take time out and do something about it.

I splashed some water on my face, a little sting of shave lotion, and walked naked out into the bedroom part of the motel room, where the television was going, a morning game show on, a woman dressed as a head of cabbage standing next to a man, presumably her husband, wearing a sort of perforated tin skirt. The host was asking him what he was supposed to be, and the guy was saying, “I grate.” I couldn’t have agreed more. I turned it off, got into my swim trunks, and went out to the pool.

It was eleven-thirty and the sun was almost to the middle of
the sky, a nice hot sun that would take care of my facial prob-
lem no trouble. I found a beach chair near poolside, adjusted it to make sure I would get full benefit of the sun’s rays, and
leaned back, covering the top of my face with a towel.

I suppose I looked a little weird, but it didn’t matter much, as there wasn’t a soul around. It was a terrific place to spend a morning and afternoon. Finally, around three, a mother and her couple of kids took a quick dip, and then a bit later another mother and her teenage daughter came out for some sun. The teenage daughter was a sweet little thing, very slim but very pretty, and she smiled at me. I didn’t smile back. I didn’t want to encourage her. One thing I didn’t need right now was sexual activity. That’s what I was recovering from. I also didn’t need an indignant mother, which can happen when you screw a teenage daughter, as it irks a middle-aged mother to discover her offspring is the more sexually attractive of the two.

I had left the Beach Shore early this morning, waking Nancy to tell her goodbye, as I didn’t want to seem to be sneaking out. I had no idea when the body in the shower would be found, didn’t expect it to be for several days at least, but at any rate I didn’t want to make a suspicious exit. Nancy wasn’t surprised to see me go. She was a little sad; she even managed a tear. Ours, apparently, had been one of her longer-lasting recent relationships.

I had made no attempt to make good time; in fact I had stopped mid-morning while still in Florida (barely) at this motel to get some rest, shave off my beard, do some thinking, and swim in a pool that wasn’t populated with water bunnies of various sexes. Now that I had found out about the pale beneath my beard, I was especially glad I’d stopped while still in the sunny south. I tan easily, or rather burn easily, the burn turning to tan literally overnight. So by tomorrow I’d be a new man.

I knew where she was headed. Glenna Cole or Ivy or whatever you want to call her. All it had taken was a few minutes on the phone with a helpful operator. I merely said a message had been left for me, a request that I call this certain number and I wanted to find out the source of the number before returning the call. The operator had said it was against company policy to do that, and I said I didn’t need a name or a street address, just the town would do fine. She gave me the town and I thanked her and when I hung up I had to laugh.

The name of the town the operator had given me was West Lake, Iowa.

I had picked Glenna Cole from my list because her permanent address was the Beach Shore in Florida. I had wanted to escape the Midwest, a Midwest which was still cold as hell though this was supposed to be spring, and break the rule and mix business with pleasure, get some sun, swim in the ocean, maybe get laid. In my desire to ease the boredom of working stakeout, I had chosen Florida, where I had not once been able to swim in the ocean, and where I got laid till I wanted to check into a monastery, and where I got so much sun half my face got tan.

And now I was heading back to the Midwest, back to Iowa, for Christ’s sake, where I’d just a few months ago been involved in a messy business that had put me in hiding until just a week and a half ago.

The messy business was this federal guy I shot. I didn’t know
he was federal at the time. I didn’t know he was anything ex- cept a guy searching my hotel room, and he had a gun, which
he started using when he saw me come in, so I used mine.

I never killed a federal agent before, or any kind of cop for that matter, at least that I know of. Finding out the guy was federal gave me a bad moment: I wondered if maybe it might not be hard to get away with.

But I was more worried about mob people, in whose affairs I’d been fiddling when I accidentally shot the federal guy. In fact that’s who I thought I was shooting at the time, a mob guy. So I’d covered my tracks (pretty well, considering it was spur of the moment) and retreated, burrowed in, waited to see what happened next.

Nothing happened next. I just sat around all winter, in my A-frame cottage on Paradise Lake in Wisconsin, drinking Coke and watching television and listening to music and reading paperback novels and swimming once a day (at the YMCA at nearby Lake Geneva) and growing a beard.

And thinking. Thinking about the new role I was preparing to play, assuming some federal guys didn’t come around to kill me. Or mob guys. Neither of which I intended to let happen, but in either case a change of plan would be called for.

By spring nobody had come around, so I figured I was okay. I picked a name off the Broker’s list and got in my Opel GT and went to Florida.

And now I was on my way back to the Midwest. Or would be tomorrow.

Today I had to get half my face sunburned.

7

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THE RED BARN
Club was five miles out of West Lake, Iowa, on a blacktop road, or so I’d been told. So far all I’d seen were farms and farmland, the latter still patched with snow, the fields flat except for an occasional stubborn corn stalk hanging crookedly against the pale orange sky like a crutch in search of a cripple.

This was the end of my second day since leaving Florida. I’d done six hundred miles (give or take a hundred) both days, and had staggered into Des Moines earlier this afternoon, checking into a Holiday Inn which had a breathtaking view of the local freeway. The first thing I’d done after getting in my room was call the number I’d found in Glenna Cole’s apartment at the Beach Shore. It didn’t even take a long distance call: West Lake was one of a number of smaller towns in the surrounding area included in the Des Moines phone system.

The voice on the other end of the line was female, pleasantly so, and answered this way: “Red Barn Club, Lucille.”

I bluffed. “Excuse me . . . I was calling the Red Barn restaurant.”

“We are a restaurant, sir.”

“Oh, well, I’m from out of town, in Des Moines for the night, and they tell me the Red Barn’s a good place to eat, so . . .”

“Where are you calling from, sir?”

And I told her, and she gave me directions, which I followed, and now I was driving along a gently rolling black-
top road, looking idly at farms and farmland, wondering where the hell this place was, anyway, and saw it.

And almost missed it.

The Red Barn was, of all things, a barn, a reconverted one to be sure, but driving by you could miss it easily, take it for just a freshly painted building where cows lived and hay was kept.

After the pleasant female voice on the phone, eagerly dispensing directions to the place, I hardly expected such a painstakingly anonymous establishment: The wide side of the barn facing the road had no identifying marks, no sign
decorating that expanse of red-painted, white-trimmed wood: No lighting called attention to the structure, and there
weren’t any cars around. The only tip-off was the white picket fence gate, which was open and did have a small sign saying RED BARN CLUB. Why the low profile? I wondered. What was this a place where rich guys came to pay to fuck sheep?

Whatever the case, I was joining the fun. I eased the Opel GT down a wide paved drive beyond the gate, followed around to a large parking lot in back, large enough for several hundred cars, and presently about half full, and on a week night, no less. I parked as close to the door as I could, pulling in between a Ford LTD and a Cadillac. Mine was one of the few cars in the lot without a vinyl top. This place had something, apparently, that attracted a money crowd. Good-looking sheep, maybe.

There was some lighting back here, subdued, but lighting; and over the door, which was in the middle of the barn side, was a small sign, red neon letters on a white-painted wood field, just the initials: R B C. That was either class or snobbery, I wasn’t sure which. I wasn’t sure there was a difference.

The interior was a surprise. The lighting was low-key, as I’d expected, but it was a soft-focus sort of thing, gold-hued, glowing, not unlike the sunset I’d just witnessed.

The girl who greeted me at the door was glowing, too. A honey-haired young woman with a bustline you could balance drinks on. She was wearing a sleeveless clinging red sweater and high-waisted denim slacks and a beaming smile. The smile was phony, but she was good at it. And the bustline was real, so who cared?

“Are you a club member, sir?”

I said I wasn’t. I said I was from out of town. Which was a little moronic, since the Red Barn Club wasn’t in a town.

“Will you just be dining with us, then, sir?”

“I guess so,” I said.

And was led up some stairs into the dining room. I hadn’t had time to absorb the entryway I’d been standing in, having been confronted with all that honey-colored hair and teeth and tits, but I did have time to notice a closed door at the bottom of a short flight of steps off on the right from the entry landing.

But I was going upstairs, not down, and I was in a dining room, a surprisingly folksy one, at that. The decor was western and about as authentic as a Roy Rogers movie. Like the exterior, the walls were painted red with white trim. The dining room was separated into four rows of booths, a row against each wall, two rows side by side down the middle of the room, each booth made out of bare rough wood, picket-fence sides, crosshatched beams for roofs. The rustic effect was offset by plastic flowers on plastic vines twined around the front roof beam of each booth.

I was in one of the side booths, next to a window, which had shutters below and ruffled, red-and-white checked curtains above. The curtains matched the tablecloths. I was wondering if I could see the parking lot from where I sat, but the shutters proved to be permanently closed.

I wanted to look out over the cars in the lot and see if I could spot a certain one.

Glenna Cole, or Ivy (as my late friend the Broker had called her), drove a light blue Stingray. Of course she might have changed cars en route, but not necessarily. It was worth checking, anyway.

I was standing up in the booth, peeking out through the ruffled curtains, when the waitress came, a girl less busty but equally as attractive as the honey-haired greeter at the door. She too was wearing the red sweater and denim slacks combination, which proved to be the uniform of all the young women working at the Red Barn Club.

I ordered, spent some time trying to look out the window at the lot, to no avail, and the food came, and was nothing special. The specialty was nothing special, in fact: barbeque ribs that were okay but that’s all. Salad, hash browns, bread, all of it okay. Nothing more.

Outside of whoever hired the waitresses being a good judge of pulchritude, the Red Barn didn’t seem to me to have what it took to attract a hundred or so cars on a Thursday night. But that’s how many cars were out there.

Only how many people were in here?

A few couples, some foursomes, everyone dressed casually (I was the only person in the room with a coat and tie on). Twenty-four people, maybe. Figure ten cars, at the most.

I had the waitress bring me a Coke from the bar and I sat and drank it.

Then I went down to find out what was behind that closed door.