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  QUARRY’s

  CUT

  Books by Max Allan Collins

  QUARRY

  QUARRY’S LIST

  QUARRY’S DEAL

  QUARRY’S CUT

  QUARRY’S VOTE

  from Perfect Crime Books

  QUARRY’s

  CUT

  MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  With an Afterword by the Author

  PERFECT CRIME BOOKS

  QUARRY’S CUT. Copyright © 1977, 2010 by Max Allan Collins. This book was first published under the title THE SLASHER. Afterword © 2010 by Max Allan Collins. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored by any means without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Dominick Abel Literary Agency Inc., 146 West 82nd Street 1A, New York, NY 10024.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Perfect Crime Books is a registered Trademark.

  Cover Design and Illustration © 2010 by Terry Beatty.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters and institutions are products of the Author’s imagination and do not refer to actual persons or institutions.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Collins, Max Allan

  Quarry’s Cut/Max Allan Collins

  Kindle Edition: November 2011

  This is for

  Jay Lynch—

  who advised against it

  “I have a perfect cure for a sore throat—cut it.”

  Alfred Hitchcock

  “. . . [this is] one throat that deserves to be cut . . .”

  Judge Joel E. Tyler

  on finding Deep Throat obscene

  “I never did see one stag film

  where anybody got killed . . .”

  Lenny Bruce

  1

  _______________________________________________

  _______________________________________________

  IF IT WAS Turner, I’d have to kill him.

  Maybe it wasn’t. I couldn’t see the guy all that well, through the circle I made by rubbing my fist against the frosted-over window pane. He was having gas put in his car, or rather was putting it in himself, at the self-service puMP. A lanky, nar­row-shouldered man with dark glasses and dark shaggy hair, wearing a green and brown plaid hunting jacket. Bending over, putting in gas . . . if he turns and I get a better look . . .

  Only now the window was frosting up again. It was cold out there.

  But warm enough in here, particularly if you’d had several bowls of Wilma’s chili, which I had. Wilma was an enormously fat woman who liked her own cooking even better than those who made regular pilgrimages to her rambling two-story es­tablishment, an oddball affair left over from some other decade, filling station, restaurant, grocery store and hotel all sharing the same slightly ram­shackle roof.

  Wilma came over and sat across from me in the booth, and I turned away from the window and marveled at her ability to squeeze her three or four hundred pounds in like that. She had curly brown hair and wore a red tent with yellow flow­ers on it. She was extraordinarily pretty, for a lady with half a dozen chins. She had the bluest eyes I ever saw on anybody who wasn’t Paul Newman, including Robert Redford.

  Business was good, for a couple weeks into April, with skiing season over and warm weather still a month away, easy. I took a lot of meals here, living only a quarter mile down the road, in an A-frame cottage on Paradise Lake; and during this past week I’d had Wilma’s cooking pretty much to myself. But this was Friday and the weekend, and people drove over from Lake Gene­va and everywhere else in the area to have a bowl of Wilma’s chili, or some of her beer batter shrimp, or barbeque ribs, or any one of a dozen other items that were specialties of hers.

  The room we were in was the tavern part, with a dining room off the rear. The room next door was the grocery store, among other things, all of the rooms having the same low ceiling and rough, gray wooden walls. It was one of those places that made no attempt to create an atmosphere and in so doing did.

  “You’re making money tonight, Wilma.”

  “Ain’t shittin’,” she said. She took some ciga­rettes out from somewhere in the flowered tent and didn’t bother to offer me. She knew I didn’t use them. She lit herself up and said, “See those crazy asses over there?”

  She was pointing to a young couple in their early twenties, sitting in a booth across the room. I said I saw them.

  “They drove down from Chicago for my chili. Can you beat it?”

  I admitted I couldn’t. “Who’s helping you in the kitchen?”

  “My niece. You saw her in here yesterday, didn’t you? Little dark-haired girl with the titties?”

  “That does sound familiar.”

  I rubbed the window again. Looked out. He wasn’t there. Car was, though, a recent model Chevy, medium price range, blue-gray. He was probably paying for his gas.

  “My father owned this place,” she said.

  Out of nowhere. She was like that, but this was some- thing new, in subject matter. We’d become friends, over the several years I’d been living nearby, and spoke of many things, but never this.

  “I never met your father,” I said.

  “I should hope to shout. He died in 1948.”

  “How old were you then?”

  “None of your goddamn business. Twenty something. I did the cooking since I was thirteen.”

  “Who ran the place, after your father died?”

  “I did. Who do you think? Took his name down and put mine up.”

  The painted sign outside said Wilma’s Welcome Inn.

  “What about your mother?”

  “She ran away with a vacuum cleaner man during the war.”

  “Which war?”

  “I forget. You know, it’s slow season and I got lots of empty rooms upstairs. Want to go up?”

  “Not tonight. One of these days.”

  “Shit. I don’t think you’re ever gonna come across.”

  “It’ll happen, Wilma. You can’t rush love.”

  She liked that. She laughed about it. Her chins especially.

  “Who’s that guy out there, Wilma?”

  “Who?”

  I rubbed the frost off the window.

  “The guy getting in his car,” I said “The guy getting in the Chevy. Ever seen him before, or is he just a tourist?”

  “I seen him. Funny you should ask.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He’s got a room with me. Had it a week, now.”

  “So?”

  “I think he banged my niece last night. I don’t like that. She might’ve, but I don’t. She’s just sixteen and that fucker’s forty.”

  “You want me to have a talk with him?”

  “I could have Charley do that.”

  Charley was her bartender, a tough old bird in his early sixties.

  “Let me,” I said.

  “You really want to?”

  “I’d like to.”

  “Okay. He’s in room twelve. But he’s prob­ably gone for the evening. He’s gone most eve­nings till midnight.”

  “I’ll just wait in his room and surprise him.”

  “You sure . . .”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay, then. There’s a master key on my office wall, on a nail.”

  I rubbed the window glass once again. Turner and his Chevy were gone.

  I got up.

  2

  _______________________________________________

  _______________________________________________

  THE LAST TIME I saw Turner was five years ago, and he was on the floor, where I put him, and he was telling me he’d fix me someday.

/>   Childish, the way he put it really: “I’ll fix you, fucker. I’ll fix you.”

  And an hour or so earlier, we’d murdered a man. Or rather I had, with Turner giving me support, supposedly.

  But it’s necessary to go back before I first met Turner, before the Broker, even, if you’re to understand any of this. It’s necessary to go back as far as Vietnam, or at least to when I came home from Vietnam.

  I found my wife in bed with a guy. It happens. It happens to a lot of people. Some of them maybe even take it well. I didn’t. Not that I did anything rash. I just backed out of the room, apologizing, and returned the next day to the cozy clapboard in La Mirada where the guy, whose name was Wil­liams, was in the driveway, under his sporty little car, the rear wheels jacked up, and he was so busy fixing the car he didn’t have time for me, except to call me a bunghole, so I kicked the jack out.

  It killed him. Not immediately, but soon. And my wife divorced me, and I couldn’t have cared less, and lots of people were sympathetic—I wasn’t even brought to trial over it—but a fuck of a lot of good it did me. My life was at a standstill—no wife, nobody else to speak of, no home, no work either. I was qualified to work as a garage mechanic, a skill I picked up as a kid, and also had a two year degree from a junior college that should’ve paved the way for some kind of office work.

  But the story had got some play in the papers, and adding that to the bad publicity Vietnam vete­rans were getting at the time anyway (we were all wild-eyed dopers, in case you forgot) prospective employers weren’t exactly lining up to hire me.

  Except for the Broker. He had work for me. He looked me up, a month or more after my marital difficulty hit the papers, found me in a hotel in L.A., a fleabag with hot and cold running whores, one of whom gave me a dose of something worse than anything you could catch in Nam, excluding a bullet of course. Earlier my old man had looked me up, came from Ohio to tell me not, to come home. Said my stepmother had been uncomfort­able around me even before I started killing people. I never did ask the old man which killing he meant: the one for revenge, or the dozen for democracy.

  Which was part of what the Broker said to me that made so much sense, that night in my dreary paint-peeling hotel room, the glow of neon from outside providing the only light and giving every­thing a surreal look, including the Broker and his unlined face that could have belonged to a man of thirty, and his white hair/white mustache that could have belonged to a man of sixty. But even in the surreal glow he looked like the successful businessman he was, in his conservative yet styl­ish suit, and he talked like a politician, slick and eloquent and even seductive, and when he suggested I do in civilian life what I had done not so long ago as a soldier—that is, kill people—it seemed reasonable.

  After all, I had killed people overseas for little money, and killed somebody since coming home for no money . . . why not do it for real money, for a change? And Broker was talking very real money—two thousand and up for a simple hit.

  All of which stands as a gross simplification of what the Broker said to me. I have tried on several occasions to record the scene, but have always failed. I have good, almost uncanny recall; I’ve proven that, I think, in the three accounts I wrote previous to this one. But that first meeting with the Broker stays a blur in my mind; the sensations of it, the gist of what was said, that much I can tell you.

  And I can tell you also I was an easy sale. Not that I was bloodthirsty or anything: I wasn’t. I’m still not.

  But he approached me at a time in my life when I could have gone in about any direction. I had nothing left but the contradictory notion that while life and death are meaningless, survival remains essential. It doesn’t seem to make sense, I know, but it seemed to make sense in Vietnam, which is where I learned it. And it has stayed with me till this day.

  The Broker was the middleman between client and killer. He used to describe himself as “sort of an agent,” and it’s a good description of his role. A client would come to him with a problem, and the Broker would come to somebody like me to see to it a means was provided for solving that problem.

  Actually, I was part of a team, a two-man team breaking down to active (hitman) and passive (back-up man). I usually played the former role, but not always. For most of the five years I worked through the Broker, I was teamed with a guy named Boyd, who has since been killed. But then so has the Broker.

  The first year and a half or so, I filled in here and there, never working with a steady partner. Until Broker teamed me with Turner.

  3

  _______________________________________________

  _______________________________________________

  WE DID FIVE jobs in six months, Turner and I, which is probably at least one too many. And maybe that had something to do with why Turner fucked up on number five. You can get sloppy, working too many jobs too close together. You can get careless. You can also get dead.

  Which is why I resented what happened in Twin Cities, at the carnival.

  It was the second week in June, cool, overcast, getting toward dusk; the carnival was on the fair grounds, which lay somewhat uneasily between Minneapolis and St. Paul, in the midst of residen­tial and business areas. A big show, with a score of crazy rides: their bizarre, oversize metallic shapes—the Yo-Yo, the Loop, Zipper, Octopus, Tilt-a-Whirl, Doubledecker Ferris, Death-Wish Roller Coaster—rose out of the city of tents like lunatic skyscrapers. Along the wide, occasionally puke-strewn sawdust streets of this city, people strolled, particularly young people, sometimes couples, often-times packs of three or more of a single sex, middle-class kids in tight jeans and fresh faces, while skinny men with smoldering cigarettes behind ears and dark tee-shirts on and dark complexions or perhaps just in need of baths stood on platforms and spoke into loud, muffled mikes, extolling the desirability of viewing In Person the Fattest Boy In The World, the Smallest Living Man In The World, the Strangest Teenage Women In The World (one of whom had no face, thanks to the radiation color TVs emit) and a woman who before your very eyes turned into a gorilla, and no doubt was the only one of her kind In The World, and other men, not all of them skinny in black tee-shirts but many of them need­ing baths, coaxed passersby into throwing balls and throwing money away (sometimes literally, in the dime/quarter/dollar toss) in pursuit of prizes of no discernible worth, including stuffed animals of indeterminate species and cigarette lighters with the American flag on them.

  The mark was a guy running a game tent, a red canvas cubby-hole where you threw baseballs at milk bottles. You could win anything from a tiny stuffed skunk to a pink stuffed dog the size of a Volkswagen. Odds are you’d win the skunk.

  The guy was short, fat and dark, Jewish maybe, or Italian. Could be either one, if he was a mob guy hiding out, which I figured him to be.

  Understand, I was never told why this or any mark was getting hit, other than somebody wanted them hit bad enough to pay good money. Much of what I did for Broker was tied to the mob but only in that clients were often referred through mob sources; relatively little of what I or any of us did for Broker was directly Family-related. They had their own people to do that kind of thing, and only in special instances would it prove useful to them to bring in somebody outside, like me . . .

  However sometimes it was pretty obvious a hit was a Family contract, and this time was one of them: the way the guy looked, not just his ethnic look but his vaguely urban speech and his almost polished manner—none of it fit the carny image. Not that everybody connected with the carnival was some kind of lowlife or deadbeat: not at all. But the professional carny men have a look to them, as does the summer help, the kids (includ­ing pretty college girls, some of whom work game tents, others of whom work as strippers) who do the carny number as a money-making lark. A guy like our short, fat, dark, somewhat well-bred mark sticks out like a nun at a nightclub.

  I went over to his tent and threw some balls.

  “Cool day,” I said.

  “Cool,” he agreed. His voice was hi
gh-pitched, like it hadn’t changed yet.

  I seemed to be his first customer in some time, but he wasn’t particularly excited about the prospect.

  “How much?” I said, pointing to the pile of baseballs on the counter.

  He pointed to the sign that said “3 Balls - 35¢, Everybody Wins.” His features were bulges in his puffy face. His thinning gray-brown hair was cut short and neatly combed to the side. He was in his early fifties. He wore a Hawaiian print shirt and white pressed slacks. He looked like the host at a country club luau.

  I threw three balls and won a skunk.

  I threw three more and won another.

  “What do I win,” I asked, “if I play again and keep missing?”

  “A skunk,” he said.

  “I figured. Well. Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  I walked away, passing several other game tents where the pitchmen did everything but reach out and grab me to pull me in for a game.

  Shriners were standing around in their fezzes like foreign cops. Some of them were ticket-takers; others just stood and in so doing reminded anyone who cared, that the Shrine was sponsoring all this family entertainment. One of the Shriners was Turner.

  He was standing in a small open area between the House of Mirrors and the tent where the Bon­nie and Clyde Death Car was being exhibited, and he was watching the pretty young girls in tight jeans go by He was tall, a good three inches taller than my five ten, and while neither of us was overweight, he was leaner looking. His hair was dark brown and shaggy, his complexion pale, almost pasty, with heavy five o’clock shadow; his eyes were dark as his hair and so close set they crowded his nose.