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  QUARRY’s

  DEAL

  Books by Max Allan Collins

  QUARRY

  QUARRY’S LIST

  QUARRY’S DEAL

  QUARRY’S CUT

  QUARRY’S VOTE

  from Perfect Crime Books

  QUARRY’s

  DEAL

  MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  With an Afterword by the Author

  PERFECT CRIME BOOKS

  QUARRY’S DEAL. Copyright © 1976, 2010 by Max Allan Collins. This book was first published under the title THE DEALER. 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 Deal/Max Allan Collins

  Kindle Edition: November 2011

  This is for the cartoonist

  Ray Gotto

  whose “Ozark Ike” was a hitman, too.

  “They gotta be taught to respeck us wommenfolks!”

  Sagebrush Sal, 1948

  1

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  I WAITED FOR her to come, and when she did, so did I. I asked her to lift and she lifted and let me get my hands out from under her. Here I’d been cupping that ass of hers, enjoying that fine ass of hers, and then we both came and suddenly her ass weighs a ton and all I can think about is getting my hands out from under before they get the fuck crushed.

  I rolled off her.

  “Was it good for you?” she asked.

  “It was fine.”

  There was a moment of strained silence. She wanted me to ask, so I did: “How was it for you?”

  “Fine,” she said.

  That taken care of, I got off the bed, slipped into my swim trunks, trudged into her kitchen, and got myself a bottle of Coke.

  “Get some kleenex for me,” she called from the bedroom.

  I was still in the kitchen. I said, “You want something to drink?”

  “Please! Fix me a Seven and Seven, will you?”

  Jesus, I thought. I put some Seagram’s and Seven-Up and ice in a glass, got her some kleenex from the bathroom, and went into the bedroom, where she took both from me, setting the glass on the night-stand, stuffing the kleenex between her legs.

  There was a balcony off the bedroom, through French doors, and I went out and looked down on the swimming pool below. It was mid-evening, and cool. Florida days are warm year round, they say, but the nights are on the chilly side, particularly a March one like this.

  Not that the crowd of pleasure-seekers below seemed to mind. Or notice. Lean tan young bodies, of either sex, their privates covered by a slash or two of cloth, basked in the flickering glow of the torch lamps surrounding the pool. Some of them lounged on towels and sun chairs as if the full moon, which I could see reflected in the shimmery green water of the pool, was going to add to their already berry-brown complexions. Others romped, running around the pool’s edge or in the water splashing, perpetual twelve-year-olds seeking perpetual summer.

  I watched one well-endowed young woman tire of playing water baby with a boyfriend, climb out of the pool, tugging casually at her flimsy top which had slipped down to reveal dark half-circles of nipple. She was laughing, tossing back a headful of wet dark blond hair, shoving at the brawny chest of the guy who was climbing out of the pool after her. He pretended to be overpowered by her nudge and waved his arms and made a show of falling back in, but she no longer seemed amused.

  She wasn’t beautiful, exactly. The girl in the bedroom behind me was more classically beautiful, with a perfect, high-cheekboned fashion model face and a slim but well-proportioned figure. A lot of the girls at this place (which was an apartment complex for so-called “swinging singles”) were the model type; others were more All-American-style beauties, sun­ny-faced girls sung about in songs by the Beach Boys. She fit neither type.

  Her face was rather long, her nose long and nar­row, her eyes having an almost oriental slant to them. Her mouth was wide and when she smiled, gums showed. Her figure was wrong, too: she was tall, at least an inch taller than my five ten, with much too lanky a frame for those huge breasts. Put that all together and she should have been a goddamn freak.

  But she wasn’t. The big breasts rode firm and high; she carried them well. Her face was unique-looking. You might say haunting. The eyes espe­cially, which were dark blue with flecks of gold. Her voice was unusual, too—a rich baritone as deep as a man’s, as deep as mine, in fact—but for some reason it only made her seem all the more feminine.

  I didn’t know her, but I knew who she was. I was here because of her. I’d been here, watching her, for almost a week now. If she noticed me, she gave no indication. Not that it mattered. The beard and mus­tache, once shaved off, would make me someone else; when we met in another context, one day soon, she’d have little chance of recognizing me, even if she had managed to pick me out of this crowd (which incidentally included several other beards and plenty of mustaches, despite the unspoken rule that tenants were to be on the clean-cut side in appearance, if not in behavior).

  I hoped I wouldn’t have to kill her. I probably would. But I hoped not. I’d never killed a woman before, though I didn’t suppose it would be a prob­lem. Only I hadn’t counted on her looking like this. Her picture had made her look almost homely. I’d had no idea she radiated this aura of some goddamn thing or another, some damn thing that made me want to know her, made me uncomfortable at the thought of having to kill her.

  “Hey,” she said.

  I turned.

  This one’s name was Nancy. She was wearing a skimpy black bikini. She had short dark black hair and looked like a fashion model. Or did I mention that already?

  “You want to go down and swim?” she asked.

  “Later,” I said.

  “Is that Coke good?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “How come you don’t drink anything but Coke and that? Got something against liquor?”

  “No. I have a mixed drink sometimes.”

  “What d’you come out here for?”

  “It’s nice out here.”

  “Is it because you knew I’d smoke?”

  “I guess.”

  “Don’t you have a single fucking vice?”

  “Not one.”

  “Tell me something.”

  “Okay.”

  “You always this blue after you do it?”

  “Just sometimes.”

  “Every time. With me, anyway. You always get all, uh, what’s a good word for it?”

  “Quiet.”

  “No. Morose. That’s the word I want.”

  “Quiet is what I get. Don’t read anything into anything, Nancy.”

  “I knew a guy like you once. He always got . . . quiet . . . after doing it.”

  “Is that right.”

  “You know what he said once?”

  “No.”

  “He said, ‘Doing it is like Christmas: after all the presents are open, you can’t remember what the fuss was all about.’” And she laughed, but it got caught in her throat.


  “What are you depressed for?”

  “I’m not depressed. Don’t read anything into anything, Burt.”

  Burt is the name I was using here. I thought it sounded like a good swinging singles name.

  “My husband used to get sad, sometimes, after we did it.”

  Him again. She talked about him all the time, her ex. About what a son of a bitch he was, mostly. He was an English professor at some eastern university, with rich parents who underwrote him, He (or rather they) paid for Nancy’s apartment here in Florida. There was a kid, too, a daughter I think, living with Nancy’s parents in Michigan.

  “You know what he used to say?” she asked.

  “Something about Christmas?”

  “No. He used to say that in France coming is called the little death.”

  “That’s a little over my head, Nancy.”

  “Well, he was an intellectual. The lousy prick. But I think what it means is when you come, it’s like dying for a second, you’re going out of this life into some place different. You’re not thinking about money or your problems or anything. All you can think of is coming. And you aren’t thinking about that, either. You’re just coming.”

  Down by the pool, the girl I’d come here to watch was sitting along the edge, kicking at the water, while her blond boyfriend tried to kid her out of her mood.

  Nancy’s hand was on my shoulder. I looked at her and she was lifting her mouth up to me, which meant I was supposed to kiss her, and I did. I put my hand between her legs and nudged her with a finger.

  “Bang,” I said.

  She took my arm and pulled me into the bedroom.

  2

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  WE WENT DOWN for a swim afterwards. I let Nancy do the swimming. I like to swim, but I don’t like crowds. You can’t swim in a crowd. All you can do is wade around bumping into people. So Nancy swam and I watched.

  I didn’t watch Nancy, though. I just pretended to. What my eyes were really on was the young woman with the big breasts and oriental eyes and muscle-bound boyfriend. The boyfriend had the look of a Hollywood glamour boy gone slightly to seed. Thinning hair; puffy face; on the road to a paunch.

  She was bored with him. He’d given up trying to talk her out of her indifference to him and was sitting in a beach chair with a drink in his hands, watching a blonde in a yellow bikini who sat across the way looking as bored with her companion as the big-breasted oriental-eyed girl was bored with him.

  I was bored, too. I hadn’t been here a week and I was suffocating. I live in Wisconsin, near the Lake Geneva vacation center, and the summer months around those parts are cherished and enjoyed and, in the freezing cold winter months, looked forward to. I’d come here expecting a similar attitude. Instead I found the year-round summer was not so much taken for granted as squandered. Made meaningless.

  I never imagined yards of beautiful exposed flesh under sunny skies could get dull. I never thought cool evenings full of cool drinks and warm glances could grow monotonous. I never dreamed sex could become so tedious.

  Nancy wanted it every time I turned around. Three or four times a day, and the first couple days I was glad to accommodate. I’d gone for months without getting laid, and was more than ready. But after close to a week of it, I was just plain tired. The crazy part was what Nancy told me about the breakup of her marriage: “The son of a bitch was a sex maniac. . . . He didn’t respect me as a person at all.” She told me this while we were taking a shower together.

  All of this was new to me. I had never had to maintain a relationship with one woman while watching another woman I would most likely have to kill. I was used to keeping those two particular compartments of my life separate. I led a rela­tively normal social life in Wisconsin, including an occasional Nancy. But the life away from home was something else again. The business part of my life, I mean. The killing.

  Of course I was in a different business now; slightly different, anyway. A new, self-created busi­ness that would require an intermixing, now and then, of the social me and the other one.

  And I was finding out now, in my first time out, that playing both roles at once could prove to be a little disturbing.

  Or anyway, irritating.

  Though considering the boredom of this would-be paradise, a touch of irritation was maybe a good thing. At least I was awake. Aware, always, I was here on business. Perhaps I should’ve been thankful I hadn’t been seduced by the sex-and-sun, flesh-and-­fun atmosphere of the place.

  Only I was finding something else irritating. Or disturbing, anyway. I had developed a nagging fas­cination with the woman I was watching, that orien­tal-eyed woman with the big breasts, a woman who didn’t seem to quite fit in here, and that fascination was unhealthy as hell, especially since this was my first outing in my new (make that revised) line of work.

  How much longer was I going to have to watch her? Another week? A month? Longer? I never have liked stakeout work, and this swinging singles life­style, with its fringe “benefit” of constant sex, seemed likely to kill me before I had a chance to kill anybody myself.

  Maybe tonight would be different. After all, the afternoon had been different. The tall, busty woman I’d been watching these past few days had acted a little strange this afternoon. All week she’d been giddy, just another bubble-headed fun-seeker play­ing footsy and everything-elsey with her blond boy­friend. But this afternoon she’d gotten moody. Her face had taken on an almost grim look. Her efforts at having fun seemed just that: efforts. Efforts that had failed and lapsed into . . . what? Depression? No. More like seriousness. A serious mood, rather than a black or bitchy one.

  Something was up, maybe.

  Not me, certainly: I was wilted. Nancy was going to have to learn to respect me as a person—for the rest of the night, anyway.

  Meanwhile the crowd in and around the pool was beginning to thin. Nancy begged off around two-thirty and by that time there was only half a dozen of us left. My dragon lady was one. Her blond hunk of manhood was another, only now he was in the water with a blond hunk of womanhood whose own hunk she had managed to lose, along with the top of her bikini, and two small but perfectly shaped boobs bobbled in the water like apples, pink apples, if there is such a thing, or even if there isn’t. I didn’t much care either way. I was too wrung out to care. Not so the two blonds: they climbed out of the pool giggl­ing and one chased the other into the shadows.

  That left me alone with her.

  Which was not good. A harmless conversation, idly struck . . . and the ballgame was over. Of course there was a whole pool between us; better an ocean. I needed to stay just some anonymous bearded guy who she had never really looked at close, otherwise the entire deal was blown.

  But she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at the water. Staring at it, the surface rippling with the slight breeze, the torch lights shimmering eerily in reflection.

  And then she got up and went up the open stairway to the second level, where her apartment was.

  I stayed behind. I was, to say the least, relieved. And now that I had the pool to myself, I could have a nice, private swim, which is a daily ritual of mine, whenever possible, anyway.

  I dove in.

  I’d just swum my sixth easy lap when she came down wearing a dark, mannish pants suit, suitcase in either hand, and headed into the parking lot, from which, moments later, came the sound of squealing tires.

  3

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  I COULD HAVE followed her. I had my car keys in the pocket of my robe, which was with my towel, under the beach chair where I’d been sitting before I started my swim.

  But I might have looked just a shade conspicuous jumping into the Opel GT soaking wet, in nothing but a pair of swim trunks, and considering I was already afraid she might have taken some notice of me, f
ollowing her, at this moment, in my present condition, didn’t seem, well, prudent.

  The next best thing to following her was to find out where she was going.

  So that’s what I decided to do. Try to do, anyway.

  I hadn’t ever gotten in her apartment to look around, despite the number of days I’d been there. She hadn’t left the grounds of the place since I’d arrived: she sent her boyfriend out to do the grocery shopping, and with all the drinking and sex available on the premises, who needed to go out for anything except supplies?

  I maybe could have got in and searched her place while she was down by the pool with her blond plaything; she did spend a lot of time down there, after all, but who was to say when she or the play­thing might tire of the pool and come up for a nap or something. And, too, during all but a few of the nocturnal hours, I was playing plaything myself, for Nancy, so when the fuck was I supposed to get in that apartment for a look?

  Now.

  Now I could do it. The dragon lady was gone, packed and left in the middle of the night, as a matter of fact, and her boyfriend was apparently shacked up, at least temporarily, with a new mistress . . . and I don’t mean mistress in the modern sense, not exactly.

  I mean mistress in the dictionary sense, “woman in authority, in control.” Women ruled at that place. It should’ve been called-the Amazon Arms (and not Beach Shore Apartments, which is redundant as hell, I know, but then the owner/manager’s name was Bob Roberts, so you figure it). The Beach Shore rented exclusively to women. Divorced women, mostly, alimony-rich divorced women.