The Wrong Quarry (7 page)

Jenny Stockwell—a coincidence? Small town. Possible. Or had I been made? Was she meeting Mateski here? Had she hired the hit on Vale, and was going to confab with both Mateski and his partner? Maybe hired them herself, independently, no middleman. Did she have a gun in that big black purse? I had one in my fleece-lined jacket....

And yet I still had a raging hard-on.

We necked for a frantic while, then my hands went up under that t-shirt and the breasts were large and perfect and a little hard, probably implants, but I did not give a flying fuck. The nipples were hard as bullets and I didn’t care who saw, I tugged that Harley shirt up and transferred the lipstick she left on my face to those big firm globes and the hard tips begged for suckling and I didn’t disappoint. She was on her knees then, and unzipped me and unbuttoned me and tugged my shorts down to let the brains of the organization out for some air. It bobbed and pulsed and stared at her like a creature in a Ray Harryhausen movie. She grinned at it, happy as a kid with a brand-new toy, though I was pretty sure she’d seen plenty of previous models; she flicked at it with a forefinger and school-girl giggled as it bobbed up and down.

Then, surprisingly, she said, “Listen, sweetie, I’m a spitter, okay? Just so we got the ground rules.”

“Yeah. Sure. Okay.”

“I got wet naps in my purse if you want to finish on my face.”

“Spitting’s fine. I don’t offend easily.”

Then she was gobbling the thing, taking it deep, a messy, slurpy, saliva-heavy, nasty fucking process that had me drunker than anybody inside. I almost missed it when a car came in the wrong way and I recognized the guy behind the wheel, who disappeared from view pulling into the lot to park.

“Honey,” she said, her hand working me, “you’re losing it. Concentrate.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

I didn’t know him. I’d never worked with him. But I remembered him from the Broker’s file. I had studied that face long and hard because it was a face I never wanted to see in the flesh. It was one name on the list that I would never, under any circumstances, pursue.

She was working me with her hand. “Hmmm, good boy. You’re doing fine, sugar. Just fine.”

Then she took me back into her mouth and worked her magic till I was shivering and shuddering like a guy in his fucking death throes and when she went over to discreetly spit me out, behind the garbage cans, I felt she conducted herself with considerable dignity.

I’d put myself back together by the time she returned. She was using a little breath-freshener spray, which she then slipped into her purse. Her lipstick was gone but otherwise her makeup looked fine. Industrial strength mascara.

“That was fun,” she said. “You have a good time, honey?”

“Sure did.”

“You wanna see me again while you’re town, I’m in the book. Jenny Stockwell.”

We shook hands.

“Keep in touch,” she said. “I got somewhere else you might like to stick that thing.” And grabbed my crotch in a friendly way.

“No problem,” I said.

We held hands as she walked me back in. Our bar stools were waiting. Mary Ann brought me a fresh Coke and Jenny another Jack and Ginger.

Mateski had been joined in the bar by a man I knew as Reed Farrell. He was a very well-dressed man for this down-home a venue—a sharp charcoal suit and thin emerald tie, a cadaverous undertaker of a man, with a long narrow face that was baby’s-butt smooth, as if it had never experienced an emotion. His hair was cut very short, his eyebrows thick but trimmed back, his complexion blister pale, with slitted eyes that blinked in slow motion. He sat with his hands folded, a mixed drink before him as Mateski leaned across the booth’s table, quietly filling him in.

Remember how I said there was one guy in my business who specialized in torture?

Or were you ahead of me?

When I say torture, I don’t mean anything psychological and not even using increasing degrees of discomfort and violence to make somebody talk. Sure, I’ve put a bullet in a kneecap to pry loose information, but I don’t consider that torture. Just expedience.

The kind of torture Reed Farrell administered was not designed to make you talk—more like scream. My late, longtime back-up guy, Boyd, had worked with Farrell once and swore he never would again. Boyd hadn’t witnessed any of the rough stuff, but later got freaked out to learn that the hit he’d set up resulted in some middle-echelon Cincinnati mob guy having his fingers, toes and dick cut off systematically with garden shears, then dumped to die, bleeding out of those various new orifices.

Seemed Farrell had been a field medic in Vietnam and picked up tricks from the Cong—he could make punishment of that kind last without the victim passing out or going into the kind of shock that robbed the client of the satisfaction of the target’s suffering.

Mob hits were something I had occasionally done, and that was true for everybody who worked through the Broker, but those jobs were the minority. Mostly we disposed of crooked business partners, pesky business rivals, cheating wives, cheating husbands, and other civilians who had displeased some important somebody.

Imagine mob guys feeling they needed to bring in a guy like Farrell—that their own in-house expertise for mayhem just wasn’t up to the task of making some asshole suffer sufficiently. Kind of says it all.

This wasn’t just a guy skilled with a gun and/or a knife, or an expert in staging believable accidents; this was (as the Broker’s file detailed) an individual skilled in such arts as bone-breaking, freezing, live burial, castration, toe/fingernail removal, flaying, limb-sawing, burning, and scalping; a specialist able to prolong a victim’s misery before death for many hours and even days, skilled with such esoteric devices as cattle prods, thumbscrews, cat o’ nine tails, branding iron, Tucker Telephone (don’t ask), and Picana (ditto).

“You men,” Jenny was saying, lighting up another Camel.

“Huh?” I said, shifting my eyes to her in the barroom mirror from watching the back-booth meeting between the torturer and the antiques dealer.

“You shoot your wad,” she said, curling her crimson-lipsticked upper lip (she had redone her makeup in the Spike ladies’ room), “and then get all quiet. All morose.”

“Maybe I’m just satisfied.”

I hadn’t seen any documents passed between them. Maybe I’d missed that, since Farrell was already in that booth when I’d returned. But there was no manila envelope or folder or notebook on the table, and almost always the surveillance guy turned over extensive notes to the hitter. Maybe it was beside Farrell on the booth seat, blocked from view.

Jenny said, “You intrigue me.”

“I’m an intriguing sort of guy.”

“You wouldn’t want to come see
my
etchings, would you? I got a nice house. Nice bed. No kids. No husbands.”

“Sounds lonely.”

“Just
terrible
lonely. I could use some company.”

Was she part of this? Had I just been invited to my own murder?
Silly as that might sound, keep in mind: I was sitting there looking in the barroom mirror at a guy whose definition of Iron Maiden wasn’t a heavy metal band.

I turned my gaze to her and smiled, gently. I touched the red-nailed hand that didn’t have a cigarette in it. “Sugar, you drained the company right out of me. But I’m hanging around town all week. I
do
want to get together.”

“If that’s the brush-off, you have nice technique.”

I shook my head. “Not the brush-off. You intrigue me, too.”

The gypsy hair and the dark tan and the wide scarlet mouth and the green translucence of her eyes really did intrigue me. So did the sadness behind her flip slutty manner, and the intelligence in that beautiful, time-and-cigarette-ravaged face. If she didn’t want to kill me, marrying her might be an option. She had money and she could suck the chrome off a ’57 Chevy fender. Who could ask for more in a female?

She got into her purse and took out a black felt-tip pen. “Give me your hand,” she said.

I complied.

She wrote a series of numbers across my wrist. “That’s my phone number. Don’t call before eleven
A.M.
”

I glanced at the black numbers on my skin. “That was unnecessary. You said you were in the book.”

“Well, that will remind you.” She tossed a five on the bar and gathered her things.

She’d had four of those Jack and Gingers. I knew I should drive her home, but I needed to keep an eye on Farrell and Mateski, who were still deep in conversation, former listening, latter chattering.

“Listen,” I said, “I can run you home, but I can’t come in. I’m meeting somebody here later and have to get right back.”

She slid off the stool. “Another woman, already?” She nodded toward the barmaid, down serving somebody. “Hate to break your heart, but Mary Ann has a boyfriend.”

“I’m not surprised, and it’s not another woman. It’s an interview for my story. Really.”

She shrugged elaborately. She was a little drunk. “You don’t owe me anything, Jack. You can go home and wash my number off and no big deal. Of course, late at night, every now and then, you’ll remember that hummer out by those garbage cans, and you’ll wonder what you missed out on. I’ll give you a hint— they call me Snapper Jenny. Wouldn’t you like to know why?”

“I think I might know.”

She grinned. Those teeth were yellowish but it was a hell of a smile. “I bet you do, Jack. I just bet you do.”

She leaned in and kissed me on the cheek, leaving lipstick behind. I swiveled on the stool to watch her go. Long limbs, bony kind of frame, but such a nice round ass.

Then she was out the door in a blast of cold air.

Mary Ann in her purple tank-top materialized, rubbed the lipstick off my cheek with a drink napkin, and asked, “Another Coke?”

“Just freshen this one, would you?”

She nodded, and when she came back with it, gave me the cleavage lean-in, saying, “You and Jenny have a good time outside, Pastor?”

“I ministered to her needs.”

“I’ll just bet you did. I bet she got down on her knees and prayed.”

“You’re half-right.”

She didn’t try topping that, just threw me a smirk and wandered down to needle some other customer.

Farrell was sliding out of the booth. He paused to smooth his sharp suit and shake hands with Mateski, then strode in my direction; but his eyes weren’t on me, or anything specifically. They were cold hard unblinking orbs, small black buttons sewn on a ragdoll’s face.

That nicely tailored suit did not allow for any document to be tucked away in a side pocket, and he wasn’t carrying anything. Had Mateski given him chapter-and-verse out loud, in that back booth? With no need for sharing his surveillance notes, and for Farrell just to remember? That seemed very damn doubtful.

The slender hitman let in some more brisk air in as he went out—the temperature was falling—and through the Spike’s front window I saw him stroll to a nondescript gray vehicle. When I’d seen him pull into the Spike’s lot, I hadn’t discerned the make, but now I did: a Chevy Cavalier, four-door, an ’80 or ’81. Nothing special, which made sense, because Farrell probably bought it for cash at some shady used lot like I had the Pinto. Like Mateski probably did the Bonneville.

Should I follow him?

Very unlikely that Farrell would try anything tonight. He would want to get settled in, do some minor surveillance of Vale on his own, get comfortable with the information Mateski had shared, tool around town a little and get the lay of the land. And I didn’t mean Snapper Jenny.

I felt confident I’d be easily able to track Farrell down. He’d be at one of Stockwell’s half a dozen active motels—there were two resorts and another half dozen motels shuttered for the season—and I should be able to do that yet tonight. Then I would stake him out, watch for my opportunity, and if necessary follow him to Vale’s studio and intervene there. That Farrell would not have a quick kill in mind was helpful, as he’d probably be grabbing the dance instructor and transporting him somewhere for a road company show of
The Marquis De Sade Follies.
Too bad there wasn’t a poster for Vale to frame.

Farrell could wait.

Right now I needed to handle Mateski. I glanced at him in the mirror, still seated back there in his booth. He wouldn’t leave immediately after Farrell, that was a lock. At the moment he was talking to his waitress. She was a cute blonde, a little broad in the beam, thirties, probably a single working mom. Was he ordering more food? No. He was hitting on her!

He had just asked her out. I knew this because I had rudimentary lip-reading skills developed on surveillance stints over the years. These skills hadn’t helped with Farrell because he’d said very little, just sitting listening to Mateski, whose back had been to me. But now Mateski was turned toward the waitress, which aimed his face toward the barroom mirror.
What time do you get off work, beautiful?
Ah, Mateski, you smooth son of a bitch....

She let him down gently—my view of her was a sideways one, which is tricky to read, but I think she said,
Sorry, honey, I have an early morning tomorrow.
Maybe the truth. Working mom.

Sunday night was lousy for scoring a pick-up at the Spike. This I knew despite my own luck outside by the garbage cans. Friday and Saturday, and even some weeknights, it wouldn’t be that tough. This was the kind of almost upscale shitkicker bar that doubled as a meat market.

But I didn’t figure the chunky redheaded antiques dealer would get anywhere, though striking out with the waitress hadn’t been enough to dissuade him. Two foxy-looking twenty-something gals down the bar, in jeans and bandana halter tops and lots of permed hair, were deep in a conversation that Mateski, climbing onto a stool next to one of them, tried to enter casually. They weren’t having any, and he wasn’t getting any.

Those two might have been up for it with the right couple of guys, particularly in their own age group. But Mateski was no John Travolta, and the girls weren’t into antiques.

His eyes caught mine in the mirror, and I thought this might turn into a bad moment, but he just gave me a fraternal shrug, and I shrugged back at him, as if to say,
You’re right
—
can’t blame a guy for tryin’.