Quarry's Choice Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Acclaim For the Work of Max Allan Collins!

  Also by Max Allan Collins

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  April 1972

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Author’s Note

  Free Sample of The Wrong Quarry by Max Allan Collins

  Also Available from Titan Books

  Acclaim For the Work of MAX ALLAN COLLINS!

  “Crime fiction aficionados are in for a treat. . .a neo-pulp noir classic.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “No one can twist you through a maze with as much intensity and suspense as Max Allan Collins.”

  —Clive Cussler

  “Collins never misses a beat. . .All the stand-up pleasures of dime-store pulp with a beguiling level of complexity.”

  —Booklist

  “Collins has an outwardly artless style that conceals a great deal of art.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Max Allan Collins is the closest thing we have to a 21st century Mickey Spillane and. . .will please any fan of old-school, hardboiled crime fiction.”

  —This Week

  “A suspenseful, wild night’s ride [from] one of the finest writers of crime fiction that the U.S. has produced.”

  —Book Reporter

  “This book is about as perfect a page turner as you’ll find.”

  —Library Journal

  “Bristling with suspense and sexuality, this book is a welcome addition to the Hard Case Crime library.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A total delight. . .fast, surprising, and well-told.”

  —Deadly Pleasures

  “Strong and compelling reading.”

  —Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

  “Max Allan Collins [is] like no other writer.”

  —Andrew Vachss

  “Collins breaks out a really good one, knocking over the hard-boiled competition (Parker and Leonard for sure, maybe even Puzo) with a one-two punch: a feisty storyline told bittersweet and wry. . .nice and taut. . .the book is unputdownable. Never done better.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “One supremely satisfying example of a classic, twisty hard-boiled tale.”

  —Criminal Element

  “Masterful.”

  —Jeffery Deaver

  “Collins has a gift for creating low-life believable characters. . . a sharply focused action story that keeps the reader guessing till the slam-bang ending. A consummate thriller from one of the new masters of the genre.”

  —Atlanta Journal Constitution

  “For fans of the hardboiled crime novel. . .this is powerful and highly enjoyable reading, fast moving and very, very tough.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Entertaining. . .full of colorful characters. . .a stirring conclusion.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “An exceptional storyteller.”

  —San Diego Union Tribune

  “Collins makes it sound as though it really happened.”

  —New York Daily News

  “Quarry is among the most fascinating and complex anti-heroes on the scene today. And that’s why having him back again is cause for celebration.”

  —Bookgasm

  “Collins, a superb storyteller with several series under his gunbelt, is never better then when narrating a new Quarry story.”

  —Pulp Fiction Reviews

  “Mr. Collins does his always superb job of building his story and surprising the reader. . .most excellent.”

  —Big Daddy’s Place

  “An engaging read that you can’t put down. . .gritty, hard-boiled.”

  —Geek Hard

  “Collins is the reigning master of this genre and he creates such entertaining and interesting characters that it is a pleasure to read his novels.”

  —Mystery Maven

  “A great slice of pulp fiction.”

  —The Bookbag

  “Nobody does it better than Max Allan Collins.”

  —John Lutz

  The slice of moon was painting the overgrown area behind the buildings a deceptively peaceful ivory. Forming a semicircle, they were in the ankle-high grass, but a thicket of weeds and kudzu and God knew what else was waiting like an all too penetrable wall just a few yards away.

  So pale he almost glowed, Dix was smoking, grinning, his mustache riding his sneer like a surfboard does a wave. He had a gun in one hand, a snubby .38. He stood near Dixie, who faced the bouncer and his prisoner. The captor had a roundish head, a stupid face, long brown stringy hair with sideburns, and was beefy verging on fat. His chin sat on another one and his little eyes peeked out from piggy pouches. For a big guy, he didn’t look like much trouble to me.

  But he was plenty of trouble for the salesman, whose arms he held pinned back. . .

  . . .if not as much trouble as the big-boobed beehive redhead in the black waitress uniform and the white apron, which was already splashed with blood.

  The three places where she had hit him in his bald skull with the hammer were easily visible, ribbons of red trailing from each. The little guy was woozy from pain but the mercy of unconsciousness hadn’t come his way yet.

  She snarled, “What do you think, Dix? Has our guest learned his lesson. . .?”

  OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS FROM MAX ALLAN COLLINS:

  THE FIRST QUARRY

  THE LAST QUARRY

  QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE

  QUARRY’S EX

  THE WRONG QUARRY

  DEADLY BELOVED

  SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT

  TWO FOR THE MONEY

  THE CONSUMMATA (with Mickey Spillane)

  SOME OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY:

  MEMORY by Donald E. Westlake

  NOBODY’S ANGEL by Jack Clark

  MURDER IS MY BUSINESS by Brett Halliday

  GETTING OFF by Lawrence Block

  CHOKE HOLD by Christa Faust

  THE COMEDY IS FINISHED by Donald E. Westlake

  BLOOD ON THE MINK by Robert Silverberg

  FALSE NEGATIVE by Joseph Koenig

  THE TWENTY-YEAR DEATH by Ariel S. Winter

  THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS by James M. Cain

  WEB OF THE CITY by Harlan Ellison

  JOYLAND by Stephen King

  THE SECRET LIVES OF MARRIED WOMEN by Elissa Wald

  ODDS ON by Michael Crichton writing as John Lange

  BORDERLINE by Lawrence Block

  BRAINQUAKE by Samuel Fuller

  EASY DEATH by Daniel Boyd

  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-118)

  First Hard Case Crime edition: January 2015

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street

  London SE1 0UP

  in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

  Copyright © 2015 by Max Allan Collins

  Cover painting copyright © 2015 by Robert McGinnis

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, chara
cters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Print Edition ISBN 978-1-78329-084-0

  E-book ISBN 978-1-78329-085-7

  Design direction by Max Phillips

  www.maxphillips.net

  The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

  Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

  For my old musical comrade

  Joe McClean—

  like Quarry, a road warrior.

  “Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled ‘enemy?’ ”

  SYLVIA PLATH

  “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”

  JOHNNY CASH

  APRIL 1972

  ONE

  I had been killing people for money for over a year now, and it had been going fine. You have these occasional unexpected things crop up, but that’s life.

  Really, to be more exact about it, I’d been killing people for good money for over a year. Before that, in the Nam soup, I had been killing people for chump change, but then the Broker came along and showed me how to turn the skills Uncle Sugar had honed in me into a decent living.

  I’ll get to the Broker shortly, but you have to understand something: if you are a sick fuck who wants to read a book about some lunatic who gets off on murder, you are in the wrong place. I take no joy in killing. Pride, yes, but not to a degree that’s obnoxious or anything.

  As the Broker explained to me from right out of the gate, the people I’d be killing were essentially already dead: somebody had decided somebody else needed to die, and was going to have it done, which was where I came in. After the decision had been made. I’m not guilty of murder any more than my Browning nine millimeter is.

  Guns don’t kill people, some smart idiot said, people kill people—or in my case, people have some other person kill people.

  There’s a step here I’ve skipped and I better get to it. When I came home from overseas, I found my wife in bed with a guy. I didn’t kill him, which I thought showed a certain restraint on my part, and when I went to talk to him about our “situation” the next day, I hadn’t gone there to kill him, either. If I had, I’d have brought a fucking gun.

  But he was working under this fancy little sports car, which like my wife had a body way too nice for this prick, and when he saw me, he looked up at me all sneery and said, “I got nothing to say to you, bunghole.” And I took umbrage. Kicked the fucking jack out.

  Ever hear the joke about the ice cream parlor? The cutie behind the counter asks, “Crushed nuts, sir?” “No,” the customer replies, “rheumatism.” Well, in my wife’s boyfriend’s case it was crushed nuts.

  They didn’t prosecute me. They were going to at first, but then there was some support for me in the papers, and when the DA asked me if I might have accidently jostled the jack, I said, “Sure, why not?” I had enough medals to make it messy in an election year. So I walked.

  This was on the west coast, but I came from the Midwest, where I was no longer welcome. My father’s second wife did not want a murderer around—whether she was talking about the multiple yellow ones or the single-o white guy never came up. My father’s first wife, my mother, had no opinion, being dead.

  The Broker found me in a shit pad in L.A. on a rare bender—I’m not by nature a booze hound, nor a smoker, not even a damn coffee drinker—and recruited me. I would come to find out he recruited a lot of ex-military for his network of contract killers. Vietnam had left a lot of guys fucked-up and confused and full of rage, not necessarily in that order, and he could sort of. . . channel it.

  The contracts came from what I guess you’d call underworld sources. Some kills were clearly mob-related; others were civilians who were probably dirty enough to make contacts with the kind of organized crime types who did business with the Broker—a referral kind of deal. Thing was, a guy like me never knew who had taken the contract. That was the reason for a Broker—he was our agent and the client’s buffer.

  Right now, maybe eighteen months since he’d tapped me on the shoulder, the Broker was sitting next to me in a red-button-tufted booth at the rear of an underpopulated restaurant and lounge on a Tuesday evening.

  He was wearing that white hair a little longer now, sprayed in place, with some sideburns, and the mustache was plumper now, wider too, but nicely trimmed. I never knew where that deep tan came from—Florida vacations? A tanning salon? Surely not the very cold winter that Davenport, Iowa, had just gone through, and that’s where we were—at the hotel the Broker owned a piece of, the Concort Inn near the government bridge over the Mississippi River, connecting Davenport and Rock Island, Illinois.

  Specifically, we were in the Gay ’90s Lounge, one of the better restaurants in the Iowa/Illinois Quad Cities, a study in San Francisco-whorehouse red and black. The place seemed to cater to two crowds—well-off diners in the restaurant area and a singles-scene “meat market” in the bar area. A small combo—piano, bass and guitar—was playing jazzy lounge music, very quietly. A couple couples were upright and groping on the postage-stamp dance floor, while maybe four tables were dining, money men with trophy wives. Or were those mistresses?

  The Broker sat with his back to the wall and I was on the curve of the booth next to him. Not right next to him. We weren’t cozy or anything. Often he had a bodyguard with him, another of his ex-military recruits—the Rock Island Arsenal was just across the government bridge and that may have been a source. But tonight it was just the two of us, a real father-and-son duo. We’d both had the surf and turf (surf being shrimp, not lobster—my host didn’t throw his dough around) and the Broker was sipping coffee. I had a Coke—actually, I was on my second. One of my few vices.

  The Broker was in a double-knit navy two-button blazer with wide lapels, a wide light-blue tie and a very light-blue shirt, collars in. His trousers were canary yellow, but fortunately you couldn’t see that with him sitting. A big man, six two with a slender but solid build, with the handsome features of a sophisticated guy in a high-end booze ad in Playboy. Eyes light gray. Face grooved for smile and frown lines but otherwise smooth. Mid-forties, though with the bearing of an even older man.

  I was in a tan leisure suit with a light brown shirt. Five ten, one-hundred and sixty pounds, brown hair worn a little on the long side but not enough to get heckled by a truck driver. Sideburns but nothing radical. Just the guy sitting next to you on the bus or plane who you forgot about the instant you got where you were going. Average, but not so average that I couldn’t get laid now and then.

  “How do you like working with Boyd?” he asked. He had a mellow baritone and a liquid manner.

  I had recently done a job with Boyd. Before that was a solo job and then five with a guy named Turner who I wound up bitching about to Broker.

  Contracts were carried out by teams, in most cases, two-man ones—a passive and an active member. The passive guy went in ahead of time, sometimes as much as a month but at the very least two weeks, to get the pattern down, taking notes and running the whole surveillance gambit. The active guy came in a week or even less before the actual hit, utilizing the passive player’s intel. Sometimes the passive half split town shortly after the active guy showed; sometimes the surveillance guy hung around if the getaway was tricky or backup might be needed.

  “Well,” I said, “you do know he’s a fag.”

  The Broker’s white eyebrows rose. It was like two caterpillars getting up on their hind legs. “No! Tough little fella like that? That hardly seems credible. Could you have misread the signs? You must be wrong, Quarry.”

  That wasn’t my name. My name is none of your business. Quarry is the alias or code moniker that the Broker hung on me. All of us working for
him on active/passive teams went by single names. Like Charo or Liberace.

  “Look, Broker,” I said, after a sip of Coke from a tall cocktail glass, “I don’t give a shit.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I said I don’t care who Boyd fucks as long as doesn’t fuck up the job.”

  Surprise twinkled in the gray eyes and one corner of his mouth turned up slightly. “Well, that’s a very broad-minded attitude, Quarry.”

  “A broad-minded attitude is exactly what Boyd doesn’t have.”

  The Broker frowned at me. He had the sense of humor of a tuna. “If you wish, Quarry, I can team you with another of my boys—”

  I stopped that with a raised hand. “I think Boyd is ideal for my purposes. He prefers passive and I prefer active. You’re well aware that sitting stakeout bores the shit out of me, whereas Boyd has a streak of voyeur in him.”

  “Well, that’s hardly enough to recommend him as your permanent partner.”

  “I’m not marrying him, Broker. Just working with him. And anyway, I like his style—he’s a regular guy, a beer-drinking, ball-team-following Joe. Fits in, blends in, does not the fuck stand out.”

  Understand, Boyd was no queen—he was on the small side but sturdy, with a flat scarred face that had seen its share of brawls; his hair was curly and thick and brown, with bushy eyebrows and mustache, like so many were wearing. Also he had the kind of hard black eyes you see on a shark. Good eyes for this business.

  With a what-the-hell wave, I said, “Let’s go with Boyd.”

  Broker smiled, lifting his coffee cup. “Boyd it shall be.”

  You probably noticed that the Broker talked like a guy who’d read Shakespeare when to the rest of us English literature meant Ian Fleming.

  “So,” I said, “four jobs last year, and the one last month. That par for the course?”

  He nodded. “Your advance should be paid in full by the end of this year. With that off the books, you’ll have a very tidy income for a relative handful of jobs per annum.”

  “Jobs that carry with them a high degree of risk.”

  “Nothing in life is free, Quarry.”