Quarry in the Black Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Acclaim for the Work of Max Allan Collins!

  Also by Max Allan Collins

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Author’s Note

  Want More Quarry?

  Also Available from Hard Case Crime Book

  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

  “Would you have done it, Boyd?”

  “Not for the kind of money we usually get. Not even for ten grand.”

  “But if the money were right?”

  “…I think so. Retirement money, yeah, you bet.”

  “Martin Luther King. How about Bobby Kennedy? Or Jack?”

  He thought for a few moments. “High six figures. Political hits are high risk in lots of ways, but sure, I’d take a flier.”

  I finished my Coke.

  “What about you, Quarry?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  That seemed to annoy him. “Why not? Yeah, yeah, I get you, they’re good people, decent men, maybe great men. But they’re like anybody else we take out—they put themselves there. They made enemies. If somebody’s gonna get rich, why shouldn’t it be us? You? Me?”

  Rich like Oswald? Or Sirhan Sirhan? Or James Earl Ray?

  Boyd said, “What makes you so holier than thou, all of a sudden?”

  Going down the stairs, I thought, Sure you’d have taken on King or the Kennedys. All you’d have to do is surveil the fuckers…

  HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS BY 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

  DEADLY BELOVED

  SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT

  TWO FOR THE MONEY

  DEAD STREET (with Mickey Spillane)

  THE CONSUMMATA (with Mickey Spillane)

  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-125)

  First Hard Case Crime edition: October 2016

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street

  London SE1 0UP

  in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

  Copyright © 2016 by Max Allan Collins

  Cover painting copyright © 2016

  by Laurel Blechman with Glen Orbik

  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 978-1-78329-814-3

  E-book ISBN 978-1-78329-815-0

  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 Quarry’s friends

  Graham Gordy

  & Michael D. Fuller

  “Man was born into barbarism, when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence.”

  MARTIN LUTHER KING

  “Look who’s protesting! Shoot first is my motto.”

  FEARLESS FOSDICK

  OCTOBER 1972

  ONE

  You may think, reading this one, that I’ve gone soft. Let me assure you that the only time I go soft is after fucking. Then I suffer an understandable physical reaction as well as a sleepy emotional affection for the female, whoever she might be, that lasts a good thirty seconds.

  Now soft in the head, that’s another matter altogether. For me to take on a contract like the one the Broker proposed to me at my A-frame on Paradise Lake that crisp fall evening, I had to be stupid or half-nuts or maybe completely greedy since it did, after all, involve a lot of dough.

  In my defense, I was fairly new to the game. I had been killing people for money for less than two years, so maybe my relative inexperienc
e played a role. Of course, really I’d been killing people for money a number of years longer than that, if you counted Vietnam; but the targets were “gooks,” as we used to inelegantly put it, and the employer was Uncle Whiskers, not the Broker, who paid better—much better, in this instance.

  With his rich man’s tan and perfectly coiffed white hair with matching mustache—and his blue-plaid sportcoat, white pointed-collar sportshirt, navy slacks, and blue-toed white loafers—the Broker might have been a bank president or the dean of a small college on his day off. But he wasn’t. Not a banker or a dean or on his day off, either.

  This was a business call. And this distinguished-looking man’s business was brokering contract killings, serving as the buffer between the respectable people who wanted someone dead and the disreputable types who made them that way. For money.

  I might have been a college kid—grad student maybe—in my gray long-sleeve WISCONSIN sweatshirt, blue jeans and sneakers, though I’d never been to college (including the University of Wisconsin). What I really was was one of those disreputable types I mentioned above.

  The Broker’s age I could only guess at—forty? Fifty? As for me, I was in my twenties with thirty still seeming abstract, a fairly average-looking guy at five ten and one-hundred-sixty pounds, fit from frequent swims at the Lake Geneva YMCA, with brown hair longer than it used to be. But that was true of Broker’s generation, too, wasn’t it? Parents were wearing hair that they’d abhorred on their kids just a few years ago.

  Having the Broker inside my A-frame home was unusual—during the years I worked with him (which would eventually total five and change) he had done that maybe three or four times. More normally we met at the hotel he co-owned in Davenport, on his home turf of the Iowa/Illinois Quad Cities. Or we met at some out-of-the-way spot halfway or so between here and there, a truckstop on an Interstate or a bar in some city or town.

  But right now we were sitting each on his own side of a dark brown overstuffed modular couch that made an L arranged around a metal fireplace in the midst of my living-room, itself part of a big open area overseen by a loft and shared with a kitchenette. Only a few lights were on.

  It was evening and a fire was going. The Broker had enough angles in a face out of a Playboy liquor ad that the flicker of flames turned him into a good subject for a charcoal sketch, if I were a fucking artist, which I’m not.

  “Quarry,” he said, resting his bottle of Coors on a coaster on the low-slung glass-topped table between him and the fire, “I want you to understand that you are free to take a pass on this one. No harm, no foul, as they say in the sporting world. But if you do say yes, keep in mind: volenti non fit injuria.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I was just thinking that.”

  Quarry was, by the way, the name the Broker had tagged me with—all of us in his network of mostly war-bred assassins had what I considered cutesy monikers. According to the Broker—who as you’ve already seen was one pretentious son of a bitch—mine signified that I was hollowed out “as if from rock.” As for my real name, you don’t need it.

  “Decline this opportunity,” he said, with a magnanimous gesture, flames turning his tan orange, “and it will in no way reflect badly upon you.”

  “Wouldn’t want it on my permanent record.” My legs, crossed at the ankles, were on an ottoman. My bottle of Coke was on the little table. I am not a heavy drinker, even if I had been on a bender when the Broker first looked me up.

  My guest lifted two palms toward me. “I would completely understand were you to say no. This assignment—strictly volunteer—is quite outside our usual methodology.”

  He used words like “methodology” a lot. I wasn’t kidding when I said he was pretentious. Also pompous, if there’s a difference.

  “Well,” I said with a shrug, “the job in Biloxi wasn’t usual. But it paid well. Does this?”

  He nodded. “Very well indeed. And there are similarities to that assignment, although you would not be on your own this go-round—rather, you’d be working with Boyd, as is the norm.”

  I’d been partnered with Boyd for some months now. He generally worked the passive side, going in early and collecting intel on the target, while I handled the active role, coming in a week or so before the hit and carrying it out. The passive role sometimes included providing back-up and escape support.

  “For the moment I must remain vague about our subject,” he said. He meant the poor bastard I’d be killing. “That’s requisite, because should you say no to this, it’s best for all concerned—yourself included—that you remain blessed with the bliss that is ignorance.”

  Christ, this guy.

  “How much?” I asked. Usually I cleared about five thousand.

  “Twenty-five thousand,” he said.

  My eyebrows went up. I didn’t send them in that direction—it was entirely their own idea.

  I said, “How much of that is my end?”

  “That is your end.”

  I squinted at him. “If this is political—”

  “It has a political aspect,” he admitted, lifting one palm this time, and firelight flickered there like a silent movie gone out of focus, “but we’re not talking about a political assassination per se.”

  “Per what then?”

  “As I said, we can’t talk about the identity of the subject until we discuss a…broader outline, and if that outline suits you, then we will move on to specifics.”

  “Is the target bigger than a breadbox?”

  “It’s not a politician, either in or out of office. But it is a public figure—the kind of public figure who is well insulated and, at public appearances, well guarded by local police and occasionally by those higher up the law-enforcement food chain.”

  “So shooting from a rooftop or a high window might not be practical.” I’d been a sniper in Vietnam and I preferred it that way. Anonymous, impersonal.

  “No. Unless you consider Lee Harvey Oswald or James Earl Ray suitable role models.”

  I kicked the ottoman away and put my feet on the floor. Some wind was rattling the glass doors onto the deck and howling through the skeletal trees surrounding the lake—nature could be so fucking corny sometimes.

  Leaning forward, my hands clasped between my legs, I said, “Fill it in some. That outline of yours.”

  He leaned forward, too, swiveling toward me as I had him. “Like the Biloxi job, this will require you going undercover. Joining the subject’s organization—not an overtly criminal one, by the by. This should be easily accomplished. Once in, you will study the landscape, seeking a window.”

  “Landscapes don’t have windows.”

  “My apologies for the mixed metaphor,” he said, just a tad testily, “but what I’m saying is that you will need to do your own fact-finding beyond what your partner will do from his perch. Boyd is on this job, with or without you, already. He is stationed across the way from the subject’s organizational headquarters.”

  How could this fucker provide so much information without giving me anything, really?

  “Sounds like,” I said, “we already have a window. A literal one. Just pop him from ‘across the way.’ ”

  He shook his head and, I swear, a finger. “The subject both arrives and exits through an alley behind his headquarters. He has bodyguards, and I doubt the idea of conducting a fire fight in an alley would hold much appeal to you.”

  “Not much,” I said. “What about the target’s residence?”

  “Difficulties there as well. But you are welcome to find a way to make that work for you. En route from home to work and back again might also suggest a possibility. Still, I believe you’ll need inside access to accomplish that, due to the specific exigencies.”

  I had no idea what an exigency was, specific or non-specific.

  He was saying, “You’ll have a literal deadline—the end of the month. This must be done before the last weekend in October. Before a big outdoor event on Saturday of that weekend.”

  “Not a
t the ‘big outdoor event?’ ”

  “No. For the reasons previously cited.”

  But by now I well understood that this wasn’t just any killing—not the usual cheating spouse or troublesome business partner, nor the occasional mob hit we carried out to keep suspicion off the local bent-nose who hired it.

  Not when the Broker shows up on my turf to present this job with the delicacy of asking a father from the old country for his daughter’s hand. Not when he comes alone, minus one of his usual driver/bodyguards at the wheel of his Caddie.

  And he had.

  “Doesn’t hold office,” I said.

  “Does not.”

  “Isn’t running for office.”

  “Is not.”

  “You realize I do not like getting next to a target. It’s dangerous in every way there is.”

  His ice-blue eyes reflected dancing flames. “I know, Quarry. But a twenty-five-thousand-dollar payday requires a certain sacrifice.”

  “Getting my head blown off isn’t my idea of a ‘certain sacrifice.’ Neither is spending the rest of my life in prison. Death Row isn’t on a lake.”

  He gave up an elaborate shrug and said, “Granted.”

  “God fucking damnit,” I said, tossing a hand. “Who is it? But if it’s the guy who plays Archie Bunker, I’m not interested.”

  He frowned. “Who?”

  “It was a joke, Broker. My life’s ambition is making you crack a smile.”

  “You may be disappointed.”

  That made me crack a smile. He was one up on me.

  “So, then. Are you on board, Quarry?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and it was a sigh. “Holding onto the railing, hoping the ship doesn’t hit an iceberg, but yeah.”

  Then he smiled faintly—not at my weak humor but in satisfaction for having lured me in—and reached for the manila envelope beside him on the couch. Handed it across to me.

  The close-up photo on top of the paper-clipped documents was from the AP wire service; so were a few others, taken at speaking events. Still others were surveillance shots. The latter had various individuals circled and identified, obviously people on the target’s staff. He had the kind of handsome, well-carved features you find on an African tribal mask or the hero of a blaxploitation flick. No major Afro or sideburns, though, and no flashy threads—dark suit, dark tie, like an undertaker.