Quarry's Climax Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Acclaim For the Work of Max Allan Collins!

  Hard Case Crime Books from Max Allan Collins:

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  October 1975

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Author’s Note

  Want More Quarry?

  One

  Two

  The Consummata

  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

  “Rippling with brutal violence and surprising sexuality…I savored every turn.”

  —Bookgasm

  “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

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

  —New York Daily News

  “An exceptional storyteller.”

  —San Diego Union Tribune

  “Nobody does it better than Max Allan Collins.”

  —John Lutz

  Up a narrow flight I was suddenly in a space the size of the club below, illuminated only by a few security lights, but instead of a strip club, this was indeed a place where a magazine might be assembled. The sprawling office area had no cubicles and no sectioned-off smaller offices for managers. This was just a big, formerly empty area where a bunch of people who never put a magazine together before assembled to do so. Untidy desks with typewriters were at skewed angles everywhere, as were light tables and artist work stations. Brick walls wore bulletin boards thick with tacked-up photos and photo proof sheets, and book-filled board-and-block shelving straight out of a dorm room huddled under windows with blinds, not pink curtains—a sea of clutter that spoke of hard, energetic, even desperate work.

  The hand on my shoulder made me jump.

  I slipped my hand into my right windbreaker pocket, gripped the little gun and spun, ready to use it…

  …and there stood Brandi Wyne in her curvy little blue-bikini glory, looking up at me with her big brown eyes and their big black pupils.

  “I Know what you’re up to,” she said…

  HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS

  FROM MAX ALLAN COLLINS:

  QUARRY

  QUARRY’S LIST

  QUARRY’S DEAL

  QUARRY’S CUT

  QUARRY’S VOTE

  THE LAST QUARRY

  THE FIRST QUARRY

  QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE

  QUARRY’S EX

  THE WRONG QUARRY

  QUARRY’S CHOICE

  QUARRY IN THE BLACK

  QUARRY’S CLIMAX

  DEADLY BELOVED

  SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT

  TWO FOR THE MONEY

  DEAD STREET (with Mickey Spillane)

  THE CONSUMMATA (with Mickey Spillane)

  QUARRY’S

  CLIMAX

  by Max Allan Collins

  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-130)

  First Hard Case Crime edition: October 2017

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street

  London SE1 0UP

  in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

  Copyright © 2017 by Max Allan Collins.

  One chapter from this novel appeared in

  The Strand in somewhat different form.

  Cover painting copyright © 2017 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, characters, 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 978-1-78565-180-9

  E-book ISBN 978-1-78565-181-6

  Design direction by Max Phillips

  www.maxphillips.net

  Typeset by Swordsmith Productions

  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 Brian Van Winkle—

  Quarry’s brother-in-arms

  “There is nothing that will change

  a person’s moral outlook faster

  than money in large amounts.”

  LARRY FLYNT

  “I shall know the murderer

  when I know the victim well.”

  GEORGES SIMENON’S MAIGRET

  OCTOBER 1975

  ONE

  I’d been doing murder for hire for five years now—well, seven and change, if you include the two tours in Vietnam. But in all that time, I’d never had a real, honest-to-God vacation. Unless you counted China Beach.

  But this wasn’t twenty miles of white sand in Da Nang perfect for sunning, surfing and suckee-fuckee. The war was over and this was Las Vegas, and you could get plenty of sun and suck-and-fuck h
ere, but surfing in the Flamingo pool was probably not possible, even if you were a high roller who got comped.

  Which I wasn’t.

  Not comped by the casino/hotel, that is. A pompous gent who called himself the Broker had paid for my room and anything I cared to charge to it, from meals to massage. So as vacations went, this was a winner. And it wasn’t always easy to be a winner in Vegas.

  But then this wasn’t really a vacation, was it?

  Next to the pool, on the sandstone apron, on a deck chair lapping up sun and letting his Ray-Ban-hidden eyes travel from one well-stuffed bikini to another was a slenderly muscular young man in his late twenties, nursing a tan with sunblock. He was good-looking in the kind of bland way that makes you forget his face almost immediately. His brown hair was short, but not military short; five ten, one-hundred-sixty pounds. He wore boxer trunks, dark blue, and he was me.

  Oh, and in a nearby towel was wrapped a nine millimeter Browning. Just in case.

  Someone settled into the deck chair to my left. Without looking, smelling the Brut aftershave, I knew who it was—my partner, and I don’t mean romantically.

  Boyd was small, no more than five six, but broad-shouldered enough to seem bigger—burly with a modest pot belly, curly brown hair infesting his head with the bushy eyebrows to go with it and an optional mustache and muttonchops. The rest of him was hairy, too, with only the black Speedo for relief. He also was wearing Ray-Bans.

  “If they could only all be like this,” he said.

  He meant the job.

  “Too many people,” I said.

  “You can get lost in a sea of people, Quarry.”

  “You can drown, too.”

  But at least he was in a good mood. The last job, Boyd had been glum as hell, after breaking up with his hairdresser boyfriend where he lived back east, though I didn’t know exactly where that was. That was part of the Broker’s arrangement—the two of us, teamed up for four years now, didn’t even know each other’s real names.

  Like you’re not going to know mine.

  “My advice?” Boyd said, giving me a sideways glance, lifting and lowering the bushy brows like a bad Groucho imitation. “Let’s milk it.”

  “You’ve already been here a week.”

  “This is your first day. Why not relax on the Broker’s dime?”

  Sun was lapping my face like a big friendly dog with a really warm tongue. “I don’t relax on the job. That can get you killed.”

  “You’re such a bummer sometimes.”

  That word, of course, was way out of date, and not used exactly right. But that was Boyd—a good half decade behind the curve. For a gay guy he could really be out of it sometimes.

  “So, then…” He was looking at me with the bushy brows squinched together like fuzzy caterpillars mating. “…when do you want to go?”

  The blonde I was looking at had lovely ass dimples rising above where her skimpy bikini cut across. She was almost plump, that wonderful way Playboy seemed to love.

  “By ‘go,’ ” I said, after taking a sip from the glass of Coke that was resting on a little marble-top table between us, “I assume you mean do the job. After which we will go. Promptly go.”

  The sigh came deep out of him, like a volcano letting out steam before erupting. “You are no fun, Quarry. No fucking fun

  at all.”

  “Never have been. Haven’t you been paying attention?”

  Instead of erupting, Boyd leaned toward me, his expression promising delight, like pudding bubbling on a stove.

  “This is no ordinary job, my friend,” he said. “We are in vacationland. Sin City. We are here under unusual circumstances, and should take advantage. How many times have we sat in rat-hole vacant apartments and lived like street bums?”

  “If you’re on the street, you’re not in an apartment.”

  “You know what I mean! We’re lucky when we wind up in a stakeout pad with Goodwill furniture, figure we’re livin’ like kings. This is the fucking Flamingo! Can’t you just enjoy yourself for once?”

  “It’s work. It’s a job. We’re not supposed to enjoy it.”

  He patted the air, showing me palms that were among the few non-hairy areas of his flesh. Which put the lie to the old notion about what you got from jacking off.

  “So, then, Quarry, what if we don’t split right after the job? Why would we have to? In this case, who’d know the difference? It might even make a better cover for why we’re here! Be less suspicious.”

  I just looked at him.

  He made a sullen brat face and turned away and did some erupting inside himself.

  The curvy brunette my eyes secretly followed seemed a party-pooper at first, because she was in a one-piece. But it clung to her so tight you could see every facet of her areolae and practically count the pubic hairs. The hair on her head was a gypsy tangle and the suit rode up over where her ass stopped being ass and became thighs. A few days in Vegas would be nice. Colorful beach umbrellas. Palm trees.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  “Good! Great! Terrific! Why just think?”

  “Well, thinking has worked out pretty well for me in the past.”

  “No, I mean, go with your gut for once!”

  This was one of Boyd’s problems, or anyway it was when he was between boyfriends, after a bad break-up. He thought with his gut, not his head. And of course his little head had its own ideas, which I really discouraged on the job. Pursuing his particular proclivities had risks. Of course, if he got himself killed off the job or something, that was up to him.

  “We should clear it with the Broker,” I said.

  One beauty after another. You could spend all afternoon trying to spot cellulite and come up empty. And the sun! The damn sun. It felt yellow, turning your sweat to melted butter.

  “Aw, Quarry—were you the kind of kid who asked Daddy’s permission to take the car? Didn’t you ever learn that it’s less risky to apologize later than to ask up front?”

  I didn’t answer that one. He knew damn well I was a risk taker—granted, a calculated risk taker—but this conversation had gone on long enough.

  Still, I understood his frustration. When he babbled on and on about the shitholes that we sometimes got stuck with for surveillance, he had a right to bitch. He almost always worked the passive side of a job, going in ahead a week or two or more to establish the target’s pattern of behavior, and to generally assess the lay of the land. Me, I was the active guy, who came in a day or two before the job, got filled in, did some minimal stakeout myself to get comfortable, then took out the target, quick and clean and painless as possible. I was not some sadistic schmuck.

  We were both ex-military, former Vietnam, though Boyd had been there much earlier than me. That’s who the Broker recruited for his network of professional killers…contract killers, if you insist, or—if you watch too much TV—hitmen.

  I’d been a sniper and in that capacity took out thirty VC and at least that many more in firefights. I don’t say “confirmed” kills because that’s a bullshit term. Snipers filled out after-action reports that included kills “confirmed” by a second witness. But there’s no official or unofficial “confirmed kill” record kept by the Marines, which was my branch.

  Snipers worked with spotters (often the second witness mentioned above) and it was the same with the Broker’s people. We worked in two-man teams, passive and active, and Boyd preferred the former and me the latter, which is why the stakeout conditions mattered to him.

  And why Vegas was such a nice change of fucking pace.

  I got that, but to me all these distractions were liable to, you know…distract.

  I had moved in with Boyd in a two-bedroom suite that overlooked the pool and, beyond that, faced the rambling pastel-green building whose central section was four stories and whose wings were variously two-and three-stories—a mission-style castle built by that long-deposed king, Bugsy Siegel.

  After flying from Mitchell airport in Mil
waukee to McCarran here in Vegas, I took a cab to the nearest used-car lot to buy wheels for cash. Buying a piece of shit car to use on the job was my usual practice; I’d sell it back on the way out of town or dump it.

  I’d had a busy enough day to crash for a few hours on a nice comfy double bed. The suite had light pink walls and darker pink everything else, and furnishings that were modern, if modern was twenty years ago.

  I shat, showered and shaved, then joined Boyd in the living room. Sporting a salmon sports jacket, green turtleneck, green-and-black-and-white flared trousers and white loafers, my partner was seated on an Atom-age couch that looked a little less comfortable than the crate it was likely delivered in. Happy Days was on, having nothing to do with my youth. It was dark outside, a condition neon could only enhance, not defeat. I checked my watch—eight-fifteen. I’d slept a good long while.

  Boyd filled me in on what he’d learned about our target. The timetable lacked the usual inconsistencies of behavior, because a schedule for our guy was built in. We were all set. Putting any more days between now and carrying out my end could not be justified, beyond the simple desire to live the good life in Vegas for a while.

  And, like I said, this was not a vacation.

  Of course, that didn’t mean we had to live like monks. I got into the new shiny gray sharkskin suit, a black turtleneck and Italian loafers with no socks. We found our way to the Skyroom Restaurant with its westward view of the Caesars Palace fountains and various pulsing signage, the La Madre Mountains unable to compete without electricity. We took our time with a couple of filets, then let the casino have a shot at us, Boyd playing blackjack while I got to know one of these new video poker machines. I wound up five bucks ahead, playing quarters, while Boyd was down a couple hundred, at two bucks a pop. Finally we repaired to the Speakeasy Lounge.

  The gangster-themed lounge boasted Joe-sent-me trappings, from flapper waitresses and bow-tie bartenders to fake brick walls with mounted machine guns and framed wanted posters. A friendly little place for fifty or sixty people to hang out—no cover and buck-twenty-five drinks, fifty-cent brews, free soda. We picked a table in back.