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  Quarry's Ex

  Quarry [9]

  Collins, Max Allan

  Hard Case Crime (2011)

  Tags: Quarry

  Quarryttt

  * * *

  * * *

  BECAUSE HOMICIDE BEGINS AT HOME…

  Even the enigmatic hit man called Quarry had to start somewhere. And for him that was the day he returned stateside from Nam to find his young wife cheating. He'd killed plenty overseas, so killing her lover was no big deal. And when he was recruited to use his skills as a contract killer, that transition was easy, too. He survived in this jungle as he had in that other one - by expecting trouble.

  What he didn't expect was ever running into his ex again…

  Max Allan Collins

  Quarry's Ex

  ***

  BECAUSE HOMICIDE BEGINS AT HOME…

  Even the enigmatic hit man called Quarry had to start somewhere. And for him that was the day he returned stateside from Nam to find his young wife cheating. He'd killed plenty overseas, so killing her lover was no big deal. And when he was recruited to use his skills as a contract killer, that transition was easy, too. He survived in this jungle as he had in that other one - by expecting trouble.

  What he didn't expect was ever running into his ex again…

  ***

  ONE

  I guess the best place to start is with me getting lucky in a casino.

  Which gets your attention, but is probably dishonest, since I am not really a gambler. Back in Wisconsin, at Paradise Lake, I played poker with a little group of locals once a month, young professionals in their thirties, two lawyers, a dentist, a doctor. I was a young professional, too, but of a different variety. We’d got to know each other at a health club in Lake Geneva, and started up our regular game maybe five years ago, but that’s not terribly relevant except to say that my idea of gambling was nickel/dime/quarter.

  What had brought me to the big noisy casino in the little thriving town of Boot Heel, Nevada, was business, though you’d take me for another tourist. I was in a yellow polo shirt and chinos and loafers, and had a nice tan going, picked up over the month I’d just spent in Las Vegas, sixty miles north, also not gambling.

  I was 32, five ten, one hundred sixty pounds, with shortish brown hair, a fairly anonymous sort, if passably presentable to the fairer sex. I based this on the many smiles I got from waitresses in little buckskin outfits, fringed vests over white blouses and fringed miniskirts; they were circulating, offering free drinks, as I threaded through the slots and poker machines and blackjack and roulette tables, heading back to the bar.

  Boot Heel had six casinos, but this one-at the Four Jacks Hotel-was by far the largest, sporting a showroom that hosted the likes of Jerry Vale (this week) and Vikki Carr (next week). The little town’s claim to fame as a sort of second-string Deadwood or Tombstone was based on Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday having lived here for a time. Holliday even killed somebody. Wild Bill Hickok gunned somebody down on Main Street, too, it was said.

  The town of ten thousand had one other claim to fame, an annual biker blow-out that attracted a lot of media every year, giving Boot Heel a certain modern-day outlaw reputation. The last such event had been three weeks ago, and currently no bikers were to be seen, at least within the Four Jacks casino.

  Which catered to strictly middle-class tourist trade that found Vegas either too expensive or crowded for their collective taste. Lots of people in their forties and fifties, with scads of Reagan For President buttons on display and not a single Carter, not that I saw, anyway. Who said Jerry Vale and Vikki Carr couldn’t draw anymore?

  Back to me getting lucky-while I was in Boot Heel for business, my presence at the Four Jacks casino was happenstance. I’d skipped lunch, due to following a guy here from Vegas, and having to shadow his every move. I had established the guy had checked in to a motel on the far side of Boot Heel, and he hadn’t come out after two hours, so now I was looking for some place to sit and eat a sandwich and maybe figure my next move. Someplace well away from that motel.

  An open parking space just down the street from the Four Jacks had called to me. I swung in-no meters in this friendly little burg-and was about to cross the street to check out the restaurant in the Golden Spike, the smaller casino/hotel opposite, whose marquee-not having Jerry Vale and Vikki Carr to brag about-promised a $5 steak sandwich with “all the trimmin’s.”

  But traffic was momentarily thick, so I’d strolled down my side of the street instead, up to the half dozen glass doors of the Four Jacks. One casino restaurant was as good as another. I asked one of the liveried doormen where to get the best food in his place of employment, and he recommended the bar at the rear of the main floor. I went on in, experiencing a vaguely irritating symphony of sounds that included country western music, chattering gamblers, and slots digesting coins. Whirring, dinging, ringing.

  Outside it had been as dry as unbuttered toast, but in here the air conditioning stopped just short of a meat locker. Closed off from the casino, the bar seemed a little less cold; it had its share of Dodge City trappings-rough wood paneling, reproductions of ancient wanted posters for Billy the Kid and John Wesley Hardin, bartenders in string ties, waitresses in those same buckskin outfits.

  At least the music piped in was not god-awful country western (with the exception of Patsy Cline, there is no other kind) and right now “One Way or Another” by Blondie was cranking. I smiled. I liked this New Wave music- reminded me of the ’60s stuff I grew up on back in Ohio.

  The bar was underpopulated. It was mid-afternoon and, even in a world without clocks, that meant tumbleweed was blowing through the old watering hole. You could get free drinks out on the casino floor, so who needed a bar? And nobody was hungry right now, except me.

  I settled into a rustic booth, which thankfully had padded seat and back; it was off to one side and nicely isolated. I ordered a cheeseburger and fries and Coke from the little redheaded waitress who smiled at me in a promising way.

  It wasn’t that I was irresistible to young women. I wasn’t even irresistible to old women. But I was one of the youngest males at the Four Jacks. It was a Jerry Vale crowd, remember.

  Still, this isn’t about me getting lucky with a barmaid. Just like it isn’t about me getting lucky at blackjack or even a poker machine. And at first it didn’t seem to be me getting lucky at all.

  “Quarry! Is that you?”

  The voice was midrange male and husky and just a little bit slurry.

  I looked up. I had just finished my food, already pushed the plate aside, and was sipping the last of my Coke through a straw like a high school kid. I’m sure my reaction seemed casual, just an upward glance, but in my brain, those submarine sirens, the aahhh-ooogah ones, were blaring.

  “Jerry?” I said. I didn’t use his last name, because I doubted he’d be using that name here, and anyway what I knew him by wasn’t his real one. Just like Quarry wasn’t mine.

  Quarry was a name very few people ever called me by-and then only occasionally, in business-related situations. Now and then I used it myself, as a last name, because I grew kind of used to it. It had been given to me by the Broker, over ten years ago now, more a code word than an alias; he’d laid it on me when I first went to work for him, taking on contracts he arranged. The Broker, who was a pretentious Brooks Brothers type, found the “appellation” amusing-a quarry was hollowed-out rock, he said.

  And maybe an irony was in there somewhere, since what I did was seek quarries myself-people I’d been hired to kill. That kind of contract.

  So, anyway, Jerry.

  He looked like an old hippie, and the Jerry fit him, since the first thing you thought of was Jerry Garcia, right down to the granny glasses. Not that his clothes were overtly
hippie-ish-he had on a green plaid button-down shirt, open at the throat, and nice blue jeans, his salt-and-pepper facial hair full but nicely trimmed. Gabby Hayes spruced up for the prom. Since I’d seen him, maybe nine years ago, he’d lost some hair up top and had a sidesaddle comb-over going.

  Without asking, he joined me, sliding in across the way in the booth. “Sorry,” he said, almost whispering, and made an “eek” face. “You aren’t on a job, are you?”

  I shook my head. “Just a tourist. How you been, Jerry?”

  He had very light blue eyes that would have looked great on a sixteen-year-old baby-doll blonde. This assumes the blonde wasn’t a heavy drinker and her baby blues hadn’t gone bleary and spidery red behind granny glasses. His face was pale and splotchy, like he had radiation poisoning, his nose a bulbous vein-shot affair.

  “Doin’ okay, Quarry. Hunky fuckin’ dory.” He frowned, apologetic again. “Okay I call you that? Prefer something else?”

  “Quarry’s fine. Is ‘Jerry’ okay, here? Are you on a job?”

  But I knew he was.

  He ignored the last question and answered the first: “Call me anything but late for lunch.” He laughed, pleased with his own wit. His teeth were white, and he had a nice smile, friendly as hell, but the best bet at the Four Jacks right now was that Jerry kept that smile in a glass overnight.

  “Speaking of lunch,” I said, “I just had a late one. You want to order something?”

  “I do,” he said, “but not lunch.”

  He waved the redhead over, and ordered a double Scotch, straight up. She nodded dutifully, and went off in a rustle of fringe.

  Jerry having ducked my question, I tried again: “Am I interrupting anything? Last thing I’d want to do is call attention, if you’re working.”

  “Naw,” he said, pawing the air with a thick-fingered hand. “It’s fine. My part’s done, anyway.”

  That was good to know. That meant Jerry was working the back-up position. When I’d worked for the Broker, the drill had been two-man teams-one of us went in and gathered intel, nailing the target’s pattern; a day or two before the hit was to go down, the other half of the team would come in, get filled in by the back-up guy, and do the deed. At that point, the first guy was just there for back-up, in case anything went south, and to make sure his partner got away clean.

  Passive and Active, the Broker called it. We all had a preference, and mine was Active-I preferred coming in for a day or two, and do the dirty work, rather than sit for a couple of weeks watching and taking notes. But the Broker insisted we trade off at least once every four contracts. Jerry here had been one of the first Passive specialists I’d worked with, and I had pretended to get along with him fine, but I hated his ass.

  Nothing personal-it’s just that he was a drunk. Or I guess the polite word is alcoholic. The Broker insisted Jerry was a “gentleman drinker,” which was his way of saying the boozing did not seem to have an impact on Jerry’s work. I didn’t like it. I have never cared for drunks, and never been a heavy drinker myself, and I didn’t like having my future in the hands of an alky.

  All Jerry knew, however, was that after a handful of successful jobs together, the Broker had split us up, and assigned us new partners. I’d gone on to work with a guy named Boyd, who had his own problems, but that’s another story. I had no idea who Jerry had teamed up with.

  Well, maybe not no idea…

  “Are you out of the business, Jerry?”

  “Not hardly,” he said, followed by a sigh. His Scotch had come. He sipped it. “I wish to hell I could get out. I mean, it’s been a long run. Hell of a ride. But someday it’s got to catch up with you.”

  “I hear that.”

  He made a sound that mingled a grunt with a chuckle. “Made a small fortune, these ten years or so. If I had invested instead of throwing it away on three fuckin’ wives, and six fuckin’ kids…shit. Child support’s a bitch.”

  “So you’re not going to take out your wallet, and show the family photos?”

  “Fuck them. Two of those brats I’m not even sure are mine.”

  “Shame. Long as you’ve been at it, you could have socked a lot away by now.”

  “Tell me about it.” The white smile flashed. “What the hell? Easy come, easy go. And anyway, my new wife isn’t like those other bitches. We got so much in common, it’s ridiculous.”

  So she was a drunk, too.

  “I always wondered,” I said, and summoned a nostalgic smile, “whatever happened to the guys I worked with, after the Broker bought it.”

  “Yeah. I wonder who killed the old bastard?”

  You’re looking at him.

  “I wonder. Without him, how did you stay in the business? I mean, Broker kept us cut off from clients. We were in limbo.”

  A laugh rumbled up out of his barrel chest. “I was fuckin’ lucky, Quarry. Did you ever work with Nick Varnos?”

  Nick Varnos was the guy I’d been shadowing in Vegas for the past month.

  “Never heard of him,” I said. “But then, how would I? Broker kept us away from the rest of his crew, unless you were working with somebody.”

  Jerry nodded his shaggy head. He sipped Scotch. “I been with Nick all these years. Great fuckin’ guy. He gets more tail than Sinatra, that boy, and none of them bitches have ever managed to tie his ass down. Lives like a king. He’s got a boat, and a timeshare in Aspen. You should see the kind of car he drives.”

  Varnos drove a 1976 Excalibur sports, modeled on the pre-war Mercedes Benz SSK, but with a Chevy Corvette engine under its old-fashioned hood. That was at home. Right now, on the job, Varnos was driving a ’78 Buick Century, a nothing two-door coupe. Light blue.

  There was something I’d been wondering about, and I took a chance and asked, “Where’s Nick live?”

  “Just over in Vegas.”

  I frowned. “And you’re doing a job here? Just sixty miles down the road?”

  Jerry shrugged. “It is close to home for Nick. Does break the don’t-shit-where-you-eat rule, I grant you. But Nick and me, we’ve done this our own way, for a lot of years. The Broker and his rules and ideas, lot of that went out the window a way long time ago for us two… So-are you still in the trade?”

  I shook my head. “After the Broker got himself killed, I took what I’d saved up and bought a little business.”

  “Yeah? What kinda business?”

  “Used books and records. In Illinois. Little college town -Dekalb?”

  None of that was true, of course. Well, Dekalb is a college town.

  “That’s the life,” Jerry said, shaking his shaggy head again, loosening a couple tendrils of comb-over, and flashing the expensive grin. “I bet you got yourself hot-and-cold runnin’ coeds.”

  “I not only get more tail than Sinatra,” I said, smiling back at him, “I get more than Nick Varnos.”

  That had more truth in it than the other stuff I’d told him, but only slightly.

  Nevertheless, it made Jerry roar with laughter. The redhead came over to give him a refill, and he frowned and started to raise a reluctant hand, to shoo her away.

  “Sorry, sweetie,” he said. “I’m drivin’.”

  The thought of him driving made her eyes widen.

  “I can take you to your hotel,” I said. “Go on and enjoy yourself…Another round, miss. Please.”

  She smiled at me-I think you got in good with her if you just didn’t call her “honey” or “sweetie.” Maybe I could have got lucky with her, but I was playing another game.

  As Jerry and I spoke, she brought several more rounds- and of course, my side of that was Coca Cola, one glass to every double Scotch Jerry downed. My sugar high was far outweighed by his alcoholic fog.

  “How did Nick keep you guys afloat,” I asked, “with the Broker out of the picture?”

  Jerry shrugged, and blinked blearily. “I’m not the business end. I stay out of that shit. What I don’t know can’t hurt me kinda deal. All I know is, Nick has some connections with
the goombahs-I mean, he’s lived in Vegas for over twenty years-and I figure that’s the, uh, you know… the con do it.”

  Conduit, in non-drunkese.

  “Jeez,” I said, and mock-shivered, “handling mob hits, that must make things kind of tense. I don’t scare easy, but any time I had to deal with those boys, it gave me pause.”

  Jerry flashed the choppers again. “I don’t know, Quarry. You always seemed like a pretty cool customer to me-I don’t see anything much ever giving you fuckin’ ‘pause.’ ”

  “Thanks. But I got out. You stayed in. You and Nick must be made of sturdier stuff. I just buy used books and records from college kids now. Not too many bullets flying.”

  His head moved side to side, kind of proud, or maybe it was just trying to stay on. “Well, you know how it is. I’m sure a lot of what the Broker gave us, all of us, came through those kinda channels. I can’t say more than half a dozen of the forty or so hits we’ve done over the years would be what I’d call, you know, mob hits. Mob related.”

  He’d had enough Scotch to be pretty loose with his mouth. Our booth was over to one side-like I said before, isolated. The place had filled up a little, which I didn’t love, but the music was loud-more New Wave, The Romantics, “What I Like About You.” At the bar, two guys were side by side playing poker machines embedded in the counter, a little drunk and somewhat loud. So we really could talk freely.

  Anyway, I knew what Jerry meant. The Broker himself had told me that superficially straight business types with even a tangential connection to the mob would go to somebody they knew in that left-handed domain and request help with a problem, and that problem would be shifted over to the Broker, and then to people like me. And Jerry and Varnos.

  That’s how business partners and business rivals and wives and boyfriends of wives and girlfriends and all sorts of folks in the straight world wound up dead in various puzzling ways, accidental deaths, home invasions gone tragically awry, and so on. It could get fairly exotic.