Quarry's list q-2 Read online

  Ash was in number two.

  I’d left him a note on the dresser saying, “I lied. Wait for me and I’ll tell you all about it. It’s too late for you to do anything else, anyway.”

  He was waiting. Sitting on the lumpy bed in the dreary little cabin, whose wallpaper walls were peeling to reveal other, even uglier wallpaper.

  “Oh, it’s you, Quarry,” he said. He gestured to the four tight walls around him. “I was expecting Bonnie and Clyde.”

  “Brooks is dead.”

  “Yeah, well, I figured. Where you got the broad hid?”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s all over.”

  “Not if you really got the list, it isn’t. We can go in together. I didn’t trust Brooks that much, anyway.”

  “That was smart. He tried to get me to kill you and take your place.”

  “That fuckin’ little pimp shyster. What’d you do to him?”

  “Tossed him out the window.”

  “Good for you. He wanted a fall guy, well, he got one. Hey, not a bad sensa humor on the kid, huh? So what about the list?”

  “I had it. I burned it.”

  “Burned it! Je-sus Christ! You got any idea what that mother was worth?”

  “I don’t care. I got no desire to play Broker.”

  “Well, fuck, I do!”

  “Anyway, I didn’t like all the stuff about me that was down in black and white. And about you, and a lot of guys like us.”

  “Quarry! That was like burning money.”

  “Well, it’s gone now.”

  “Jesus, Quarry.”

  “You should thank me. That list fell into the wrong hands, your ass and mine and a lot of people would’ve been in one fine sling.”

  “I suppose. But shit.”

  “You want your gun back?”

  “My. 45, you mean? Please.”

  I gave it to him.

  “Bulky son of a bitch, ain’t it?” he said. “That federal fucker had one, you know, with a silencer too, even. Silencers are illegal as shit, what’s a federal fucker doing with one, I mean, what’s the goddamn country coming to. You know… you could’ve killed Brooks with this, and set me up for it.”

  “I know. I didn’t.”

  “Well, while I’m not exactly thrilled you burned my future up for me, you bastard, I got to thank you for giving me an out.”

  “What are friends for.”

  “Right. Looks like I owe you another one.”

  “Let’s just say this one’s on me and leave it go at that.”

  “Anything you say. I suppose you made it look like suicide?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll let on like I figure that’s what it was, if the mob guys ask me, and they will. Well. Nothing to hang around this dump for. Shit. First thing, I’m going to have to unload that fuckin’ LTD on somebody and get something cheaper to drive.”

  “Got any other plans?”

  ‘‘No. I don’t know. What the hell. There’s other Brokers around, you know. I suppose I’ll find one and stay in the business. What about you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you sometime.”

  “Maybe.”

  I watched him walk out to his car. He waved before he got in. I waved as he left. Maybe I would see him again. I hadn’t burned the list, of course. Those ashes I dumped on Brooks’s desk were just some papers I burned in the wood-burning stove down at the cottage. But I wanted it to filter back to Chicago, through Ash, that the list was gone. I didn’t want anyone thinking I had it, because I had plans for it.

  And I knew why Ash and Curtis Brooks hadn’t been able to find the list. It wasn’t a list at all, really. Certain people on the payrolls of Broker’s businesses (the mail-order ones, like the lingerie company I “worked” for) were coded in a way that matched up with certain slides in little yellow boxes that otherwise contained memories of various vacations Broker had been on. There was a whole pine chest packed with these boxes of slides, and only by going through every one of thousands of slides would you be able to find the less than fifty that counted, which were not really slides at all, though mounted like the rest; they were a type of microfilm, a single panel of microfilm with photographs and document- ary material on forty-eight individuals, of which I was one, and Ash another. On the cardboard-mounting material were the number/letter combinations that coincided with names on master payroll lists from the mail-order businesses. I’d been up almost all night, piecing this together. I wasn’t about to burn any of it, except for my own card.

  But I really didn’t want to be the Broker, and I wasn’t going to blackmail anybody, either… professional killers aren’t the best people to try to blackmail. What I had in mind was something different. A one-man operation.

  Life is a precious commodity. People will pay a lot to have one taken. But they will pay even more to hang onto one… if it’s their own. This was the profit angle Ash hadn’t been able to see. All he could see (and Brooks, too) was the killers. I could see the victims. People like Carrie, who without help were going to die.

  As Ash pointed out, there were other Brokers. Most of the hit men (and women) named here would be working again, soon, if not already, for new Brokers. If I picked a name from the list, followed whoever it was to a job, found out who the potential victim was, I could go to that potential victim and offer my services. If my offer was rejected, no skin off my ass; let the asshole die, it’s up to him. Some might prefer to go to the cops, though in most cases people lined up to be hit can’t go to the cops, because the hit usually has something to do with some less than legal activities the victim’s been mixed up in.

  But some would take me up on my offer, and be willing to pay my fee, in which case I’d prevent the hit, killing those sent to do it and doing my best in the process to find out who hired them, and possibly take care of whoever that was, too.

  At least it was something to think about. An idea, anyway, something to consider while I sat staring at the frozen lake in Wisconsin this winter, waiting to see if the federal snoopers would trace those Concort killings to me, which would cause me to have to start from scratch: new name, new residence, new face maybe, the works. That was a bridge I’d cross if I came to it.

  In the meantime, I’d consider this new idea, an idea I liked a lot better than that of working for somebody else. I’d had it with that scene. I didn’t want to work for anybody, and I didn’t want anybody working for me. Of course, I’d still be killing people, but for the most part it would just be other hitmen, like myself, and that seemed a step up, somehow.

  26

  Carrie was in number 9.

  “Jack,” she said. “The strangest thing… my father called me.. here!”

  “I know,” I said.

  I had her sit on the bed.

  “I went to see him,” I said, hands on her shoulders. “We had a long talk. Before I left, he asked me if I knew how he could get in touch with you. I gave him the number. What did he say to you?’’

  She told me.

  “I kind of thought it would be something like that,” I said. “Carrie, your father killed himself.”

  “Wh… what?”

  “I was barely out of the building. A small crowd was gathering on the sidewalk… it was just after dawn… he’d thrown himself out of his office window. I’m sorry.”

  “Why… why on earth would…?”

  “He had connections to organized crime. You probably know that. So did your late husband. You know that, too. Your father found out that some syndicate people from Chicago were trying to have you killed.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “You inherited some business interests from your husband that the Chicago people wanted to see in your father’s hands. Killing you would have made that possible. Your father knew that, and must have figured the only way to stop it was to kill himself, and in so doing end the need for anyone wanting to kill you.”

  She was crying by now, of course.

  “Thi
s is going to be difficult for you, I know. There’ll be a lot of questions, from a lot of quarters. Just tell the truth, tell them what your father called and said, tell them about me, that we spent some time together, at the Concort, at the cottage. Don’t mention that I worked for your husband, though. Better say I was, you know, just a casual pickup. Better not show any knowledge of any of this mob stuff, either, that killers were after you, none of that. Otherwise you could cause problems for yourself and maybe me.”

  “Will you… stay with me… help me through this?”

  “I can’t. I think you can understand why.”

  She threw her arms around my waist and sobbed into my chest. This went on for some time.

  Finally, I got her out into the Buick and went over all of it again for her, several times, as I drove into town. She was still crying, but now and then she would ask a question about the story I’d told her and I’d give her as good an answer as I could. She seemed to buy it all.

  Then, as I glanced at her, turning down Brady toward downtown, I noticed something about her I’d never noticed before. She had just the slightest resemblance to somebody, somebody I used to know. And some things suddenly made a crazy kind of sense to me, or maybe I was crazy, but I thought about the two college guys who, back east some years ago, had loved the same woman; and then one of them evidently faded away for a time, for some reason or other, while the other married the girl, partially for money, partially perhaps because she was pregnant with Carrie, which according to Carrie’s age would have been about right; and then the mother had developed a drinking problem and sad, sad eyes and died; after which the father, Curtis Brooks, couldn’t stand the sight of his daughter, because she reminded him of his wife, the resemblance was that striking, and yet Brooks had kept the wife’s portrait hanging in his office…

  He’d said something strange to me, before I killed him.

  “I wasn’t even her father…”

  Then who was?

  I never did see the inside of that brown brick castle. Just as I never would understand what had gone on in there. I didn’t know what the furniture was like, whether the colors were lively or somber; I didn’t know what the relationship was like, whose personality dominated, or did they share and share alike. I didn’t want to know, either.

  Maybe it was just my imagination that made me suddenly see a resemblance between the Broker and Carrie; anyway I kind of hope it was.

  But before I dropped her off at the Concort, where her car was still in the lot, she said, “Maybe… maybe in his own way, my father did love me.”

  Maybe she didn’t know how right she was.

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