The Last Quarry Page 12
“My final payment hasn’t reached my off-shore account,” I said, removing the sunglasses and tucking them in a breast pocket. “Why the delay?”
Green looked at me sharply with those money-color eyes, but he’d been to the rodeo a few times himself, so his surprise and alarm quickly faded to a weary bitter smile.
“Quarry. Nice of you to come.”
My cap was in hand now, respectfully. “Wouldn’t miss it.”
He turned back to the grave, looked down into it.
“As for your payment, well...you didn’t do the work, did you?”
“You interfered with the job. Or, anyway, that dope of yours did.”
The square head swung toward me again, his forehead creased with a frown but his mouth a straight line. “Was that really necessary? What you did to DeWayne?”
“Not as necessary as you killing your daughter....Nice turnout today.”
He stared down into the grave again. “Not many of them knew Janet—they were kind to pay their respects.”
“Where was her sister? Was Julie at the funeral? Didn’t spot her at the graveside service.”
He was maintaining an admirable cool; on the other hand, he knew we had that security crew of his, all around us. Still, he was well aware what I was capable of, and a certain tension, even nervousness, flicked in and around his eyes.
“I thought maybe you knew where Julie was,” he said. His tone was surface cordial, underlying contemptuous. “Hell, I thought I might get another phone call from you, wanting more unmarked money.”
“That hurts.”
He lifted his shoulders and set them down again. “All I know is, Julie’s dropped out of sight.”
“Well, maybe she’s afraid Daddy might be thinking of doubling up on the trust fund action.”
Green glared at me. “I would never harm that girl.”
“Sorry. How could I ever think such a thing?”
“I adore that child!”
“I was just thinking maybe it was a set-up all along—that maybe you engineered that snatch.... After all, you said yourself you had certain business connections, in those circles.”
He sneered. “Don’t be an ass.”
“Makes sense—the wild child dies, Daddy inherits. But I came along and screwed it up for you. So Plan B was daughter number one.”
He was shaking his head, looking out past the gravestone, at the world beyond; mostly all you could see of that world was more gravestones, some trees, and the gray tombstones of suburban Oak Brook’s business buildings.
“You’re wrong, Quarry—though why I should care what a creature like you thinks is beyond me.”
“There I agree with you.”
He swung toward me with his eyes slits, his face grooved grimly. “I was not responsible for that kidnapping—no. Julie has potential. She has fire. Spirit. She’s just...going through a phase.”
I nodded toward the hole in the ground. “So is your other daughter—it’s called decomposition.”
He leaned toward me, eyes furious, face otherwise blank; he’d been keeping his voice down, and his movements small, obviously not anxious to start a fracas between his boys and me, out here in front of God and everybody, with himself in the middle.
“What the hell do you want, Quarry? The rest of your money?”
“That would be a start.”
He shook his head, quietly disgusted. “Well, I don’t want a scene, here. Can you understand that? Can you have a little respect for the dead?”
“Did you really say that, or am I hallucinating?”
“Fuck you. Just go. Go, and I’ll make your goddamn money happen.”
I said nothing. Now I was the one looking down into that hole in the ground. “...You warned me that she didn’t deserve it.”
He winced. “What—Janet?...No, she was a nice enough young woman. Harmless. Silly, naive, in how she viewed the world, but...anyway. She was lost to me. Lost to me long ago.”
“Oh?”
He had a distant expression now. For the first time I detected a genuine sense of loss in him, if edged with a bitter anger. “To her...to her I represented everything bad about this country.”
I shrugged. “Kids.”
He glared at me again. “She had a nothing life, Quarry—a librarian.”
He said “librarian” the way another disappointed father might have said “shoplifter” or “prostitute.”
He was saying, “I have a small empire to maintain— thousands of employees, with families, depending on me for their paychecks.”
“Hey,” I said. “You sacrificed a child. Worked for God.”
He winced again. Sighed grandly. Said, “Go—just fucking go. Do that, cause no more trouble, and there’ll be a nice bonus for you—not that you deserve shit.”
“Oh,” I said, “I deserve shit...but your daughter didn’t. Mr. Green...Jonah? Okay I call you ‘Jonah’? I feel a certain closeness to you.”
“Are you insane?”
“Is that a rhetorical question? See, I always assumed the people I killed were marked for death, anyway, and I was a means to a predetermined end.”
Green—studying me now, clearly wondering where this was going—said, “I gathered as much.”
“People I put down probably did deserve it...or anyway put themselves in the gunsights, one way or another. By something they’d done.”
“Of course.”
“But Janet...” I smiled at him, only it didn’t really have much to do with smiling. “...she was a good person. A decent person. She didn’t deserve to die.”
He bit the words off acidly: “I told you that going in.”
“Yeah. My bad.” I shook my head, laughed a little. “You know, Mr. Green, in a long and varied career in the killing business, I’ve never encountered anyone quite like you—ready to kill your own daughter for another chunk of the family fortune.”
The security guys had started getting suspicious, taking notice of this unlikely long conversation between chauffeur and boss. From the corners of my eyes, I saw them talking into their headsets; it was like being stalked by air traffic controllers.
“Walk away,” Green said softly. “Your money will be doubled, and—since we’ve come to find each other so distasteful—we don’t ever have to have contact again.”
I raised a forefinger, gently, and nodded toward the names carved in granite. “One little thing—you’re going to need to revise that headstone.”
“Really?”
“That wasn’t Janet in that car.”
He took it like a slap. Time stuttered, and his mouth dropped open, his eyes flaring; but despite this obvious alarm, the millionaire went into immediate denial, saying, “Well, certainly it was Janet.”
“No. She’s alive and well and somewhere you can’t find her.”
“You are insane....”
“See, Jonah, your girls got a little tipsy, the night before,” I said, “and next morning Julie put on one of her sister’s coats...it was chilly...and went out to get the car, to bring it around to give her hungover sister a ride to work.”
His face turned white, like the dead skin a blister leaves.
I went on: “I liked Julie. You’re right—she did have fire. Particularly at the end, there.”
“No,” Green said, and he tried to smile, tried to shrug it off. “No, I don’t believe you....This is some sick—”
“Hey, what’s the difference, Dad? Trust fund money is trust fund money.”
That was when he lost it, and rushed me, reaching out with curled fingers to try to strangle me, I guess. And he was a big man, bigger than me, and powerful, despite the years he had on me. I could hear the security guys, not bothering with headsets now, flat-out yelling, on the run.
But then I had Jonah Green locked in an embrace, my arms pinning his, and I was close enough to kiss the bastard.
I grinned into his fucking face and said, “That’s not all you’ll need to revise on that headstone....”
Stepping back, releasing him from my embrace, I watched with pleasure as he stumbled back, open-mouthed, awkward and—arms windmilling—tripped over the metal tubing of the lowering device and tumbled backward into his daughter’s grave, smacking the metal of the casket, hard.
Now that echoed.
The security guys had me surrounded and I wheeled, going from face to face, smiling easily, my gun in hand pointed skyward, my other hand up, too.
“No need, fellas!” I said. “You’re off the payroll. Time to hit the unemployment lines....”
They began trading glances, considering my words—after all, they had just seen the prick they worked for gut-shot, twice, and presumably they’d been told I was dangerous, I was in fact why they were fucking here, so I was clearly a guy with a gun who, if confronted, would take some of them down.
But Jonah Green was a tough old bird, and badly wounded though he was, bleeding from the mouth, front of his clothing splotched with blood, he was nonetheless alive, and trying to crawl, claw his way up and out of the ground.
When his head popped up in that grave, his men jumped a little; and maybe I did, too.
“Shoot him!” Green cried, gargling blood a little as he did. He was holding onto a metal tube of the lowering device. “Cut him down!”
When the guns started appearing in the hands of the security men, I moved out, ducking back behind the massive Green family gravestone, firing the nine millimeter at the only guy in sunglasses, headset and raincoat on that side of the world.
The guy took it in the head, and fell backward, like a narcoleptic suddenly asleep, but leaving blood mist behind.
With the headstone as cover, I took out the two closest ones, and each did an individualistic death dance, though with much in common—spurting blood, tumbling to the snowy grass—while the surviving trio went scrambling for cover, behind other gravestones.
I used the rest of the clip exchanging gunfire with them, bullets careening and whinging off the granite headstones, carving nicks and holes. But they were spread out just enough to make my task difficult.
Concentrating on one at a time, I took the nearest to me when he slipped his head out to take aim, my shot sending him back, sprawling against another gravestone, staring in surprise with both eyes and the new hole between them.
We all stayed put while shadows chased each other under the cold cloud-shifting sky. Wind riffled branches and stubborn leaves whispered and some of us were breathing hard, but not me. I felt fine, and was thinking what a tempting goal the Caddy hearse on the hillock made.
The keys to it were in my pocket, but the remaining security boys were between me and the vehicle. I needed to get closer.
Plus, I had to get a better angle on the other shooters, so I quickly reloaded and took a chance, breaking cover to sprint for a better position. I heard three shots but none of them came close to catching me, and I flopped behind another headstone, alive and well.
“Now,” I heard one of them say, and peeked out and saw them both running for new positions, in opposite directions.
I could only choose one. He had almost made it to cover when my shot caught him in the side of the head and he went tumbling on now useless legs.
The other guy had found a new spot, a good one, behind a massive affair with a granite angel perched on top. He and I both had good cover now, and we traded shots and chipped pieces off our respective headstones and didn’t get anywhere.
But I could hear him breathing—breathing hard—and, hell, I wasn’t even winded. I was older by fifteen years easy, but I was a swimmer, remember; this guy must have been a smoker, and that can kill your ass.
So I had that advantage, if nothing else. Listening carefully, I could hear him doing a speed-reload, and I was grinning as I popped up, blasting away at his headstone, specifically at the decorative angel, emptying the clip.
The cupid-like statue flew apart, into fragments, bursting into the guy’s face. He cried out as he reared back, and I took the opportunity to sprint for that hearse, shoving in a fresh clip as I did.
My opponent was too busy blinking away dust and chips, his face flecked with shards of granite, to get a good aim at my fleeing figure.
Still on the run, I took a look back and thought what the hell and aimed and fired.
He, too, took a bullet in the head and fell backward, haloed in blood, flung between stones, just as dead as anybody already underground.
I got into the hearse and started it up, then swung around onto the little gravel roadway, where the windshield gave me a view on a tableau that would have been memorable even without the scattered bodies of the security team...
...Jonah Green emerging from his daughter’s grave, crawling up over those metal lowering tubes, the front of him shot up, but definitely still alive, and then he was on his feet, albeit weaving like a damn drunk.
He teetered at the edge of the grave, his back to it—unsteady yes, but standing, and the square face set with almost crazed determination.
To do what? I wondered. Survive? Kill me?
So I floored the fucking thing, found a lane between gravestones, and went charging across the grass, and he must have heard the engine’s roar because he turned toward me, the determination shifting to terror, as the hearse bore down.
I clipped him good as I passed, garnering a truly satisfying crunch, and sent him toppling back into the grave, landing to make another metallic, echoing thud.
Slamming on the brakes, I hopped out, nine millimeter in my fist, and ran to the grave, where Green—down in there on top of his daughter’s copper coffin, arms in crucifixion position—looked up at me with the money-color eyes wide open and staring.
But he didn’t see me. He was very, very dead.
Which was a bit of a disappointment, because I would just as soon have shot him some more.
Time to go.
I was paused just long enough to dump the duct-taped mummy of the real hearse driver, and got back in a vehicle that looked little the worse for wear for having just run a guy down.
This time I didn’t floor it, just cruised out of the cemetery in my chauffeur’s uniform, my hands on the wheel of the hearse, passing assorted Oak Brook Memorial personnel coming out of hiding, scurrying along the periphery, now that the shooting was over.
Sixteen
Oak Brook Memorial was easing into spring, the snow gone, the grass greening, but this could just as easily have been November as late March. Once again cloud cover threw shadows on the cemetery, but this time they more or less stayed put, just lending a blue-gray cast to the tombstone-studded landscape.
The gravesite still looked fresh, the unusual procedure of the contents of a grave needing to be shifted one to the right making it look like two relatively recent burials had taken place.
A correction had also been made on the massive granite gravestone. Whether this was a fresh slab, or whether tombstone cutters have their own kind of Liquid Paper, I couldn’t tell you.
At any rate, it now read:
MARY ANN GREEN
(1940–1985)
Beloved Wife and Mother
JONAH ALLEN GREEN
(1938–2005)
Husband and Father
and below:
JANET ANN GREEN
(1975–)
JULIA SUSAN GREEN
(1985–2005)
Cherished Daughter
A woman in a black wool coat, black slacks and red sweater knelt to place a floral wreath at one of the graves, taking care to position it just right. She lowered her head and, apparently, began to pray.
I let Janet finish the mumbo jumbo before I wandered down from my surveillance post behind that mausoleum on the hillock, and when she finally stood, I wa
s at her side.
At first, she was startled—couldn’t blame her: she hadn’t seen me for several months, not since I’d shuffled her out of Homewood and onto a plane. But very soon her expression turned calm, almost serene.
“Your friend Gary,” she said, “was very nice.”
I nodded. “Florida makes a nice getaway in the winter.”
She was looking at me the way a mother checks a kid getting over the measles. “He wouldn’t tell me anything about you.”
And once again, I was glad I hadn’t killed my old Vietnam buddy, after getting drunk and spilling my guts to him, that time. Even a prick like me can use a friend now and again.
“His wife’s nice, too,” she said conversationally.
“Ruthie. Yeah. A peach.”
“She doesn’t know anything about you.”
“Yeah, well, I’m an enigma wrapped up in a riddle.”
She almost smiled. “What now?”
My eyes met hers, and it wasn’t the easiest thing I ever did. “We can do it two ways. I can tell you everything...or nothing.”
She thought about that.
Then Janet said, “If you tell me everything...” She gestured toward the gravestone. “...will I be next?”
“No. But you were supposed to be.”
She frowned. “My father...?”
My eyes remained locked with hers. “Can you live with it?”
She sighed; looked away; shivered—it was still cold, after all—and folded her arms to herself, her hands in leather gloves. Her gaze lingered on the gravestone and then slowly shook her head.
“You mean, what Daddy did? Or what you’ve done?...What you might have done?”
“All that,” I said.
Her eyes came to mine again. “Or do you mean... could I live with you?”
I said nothing.
Our eyes remained locked.
“Your call,” I said, and I walked away, moving across the cloud-shadowed landscape, finding my way between tombstones, heading up that hill.
I could feel her eyes on me, but she did not call out.
So I was back where we began, in my A-frame, still managing Sylvan Lodge for Gary Petersen, and caught up in getting the place ready for the new season. Next week staff would be in, and I’d have to start dealing with being around people again.