Quarry's ex q-9 Read online

  “So when does it go down?”

  Hitting the director, I meant.

  Jerry understood. “Not sure. Soon. But Nick, he doesn’t work like you, you know. He’s a real artist, and I don’t mean to put you down in any way, Quarry, you could take care of business just fine, it’s just…Nick doesn’t do straight, you know…” He made a pointing gun gesture, fairly steady for as blasted as he was.

  “What does Nick do?”

  He makes the kills look accidental.

  “He makes accidents happen. Not vehicular, either, which is, you gotta say, relatively easy shit to pull off. No, I mean, he’s an artist…” Jerry leaned over and his bleary blue eyes widened behind the smudgy granny lenses, and he whispered, as if what we’d been discussing hadn’t already been taboo. “…he sets fires… he fixes balconies to give way…he packs overdoses into ’scription meds…he sends guys down icy stairways…he makes people drown… he even fed a farmer to a fuckin’ wheat thresher.”

  “He is an artist. How’s the movie director gonna buy it? I hear film stock catches fire easy.”

  Jerry shrugged. “Not my department. Nick and me, we’ll talk, later on-Nick takes a certain pride. Likes to share with his partner. But always after the fact.”

  “Sounds like a sweetheart.”

  “Great guy. Great guy. Don’t get me wrong, Quarry, I think you and me made a great team, too. Or woulda, if Broker had given us half a chance. But we didn’t have a chance to grow, to get to know each other, really.”

  I knew Jerry, all right. He was a drunk and a talker. And it was a wonder he and Nick had lasted this long. As a team. And on Mother Earth. Nick would need to be an artist to survive working with this jackass.

  “So is Nick staying here?” I asked, indicating our surroundings, knowing he wasn’t-he was at the Spur Motel.

  “No,” he said. He laughed, for some unknown reason, and flecks of spit touched my cheek. I didn’t brush it away till he was focused on his next sip of Scotch. “Nick’s at the same motel as the mark. Handy, if you’re in the accident game.”

  I shook my head slowly. “Man, I don’t think I’d have the stones. What are you doing at the Four Jacks? You aren’t staying here, right?”

  His face fell. “Right. Nick…Nick’s got a rule.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He won’t let me stay any place that has a bar. He thinks I have a drinking problem.”

  “I think you hold it just fine.”

  “Thank you! Thank you!” His expression turned melancholy, the bleary eyes tearing up. “I mean, I have had to hear this shit forever. Every goddamn one of my wives, ’cept the new one, Wanda, has ragged and nagged and fragged me about my drinking. Can’t a guy fuckin’ relax in his own goddamn fuckin’ home?”

  “Women can be such bitches.”

  “Yes! Yes! And Nick can be such a bitch, too, for a man, let me tell you. Oh, I love the guy. Don’t misunderstand me. But never once, in all these years, has drinking caused me any trouble on the job. You know, I hardly drink at all on the job.”

  “Well…aren’t you on the job right now?”

  “Naw. I’m not even meeting up with Nick.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Jerry pawed the air. “He doesn’t want back-up out of me-just surveillance. Background stuff. Mark’s pattern and all. I write it all up. It was waiting for him in a manila folder in his mailbox at the motel when he checked in. That’s how we work it.”

  I told you I got lucky.

  “So that’s why you’re letting your hair down a little,” I said.

  “Yeah. Damn straight. I thought I’d gamble some, maybe have a nice meal, maybe take in Jerry Vale and laugh my ass off at that square shit.”

  That wouldn’t attract any attention.

  “But now, Quarry…” He put a hand on his plump stomach and rubbed it, like he was trying to summon a genie. “…I don’t know…”

  “Change of plans, Jerry?”

  “Yeah-I think I better crash. I maybe put away a few too many of these…” He tapped his empty Scotch glass. “Tell you what-why don’t you drive me to my motel, and I’ll have a little nap, and we can get together later? Maybe around…ten-ish? There’s a blues club where the local girls go-they’re not USDA prime, maybe, but they know how to make a guy’s dick go boy howdy.”

  “Sounds like a blast. Give me your keys and lead me to your car. What motel are you staying at again?”

  Dusk had doused the little casino town purple, a nice shade for neon to glow against. Something cool was blowing in off the desert, but for a guy used to the Midwest, this lack of humidity was flat-out strange. Heat that didn’t feel hot. Nevada was another planet.

  His car was a late-model red Mustang-what a brilliant surveillance guy this Jerry was. Who would ever spot a red Mustang? He and Nick had done forty jobs and lived this long? Unreal.

  Anyway, the car was in the lot behind the Four Jacks, and Jerry fell asleep in the rider’s seat probably thirty seconds after he managed to fasten his seat belt. Driving north toward Vegas would have put us in Clark County and that meant big city cops maybe taking an interest. Jerry had half a tank of gas, so I drove south a good thirty miles, with the last gorgeous gasps of an orange desert sunset glowing off to my right, like a fire far away. Jerry was snoring.

  By the time I pulled off the highway and took the dirt road to nowhere, darkness had fallen. Christ knew what kind of evil critters were out here. Lizards, snakes, coyotes. I decided not to take Jerry off exploring, risking the Mustang on sand, and instead to stay on the dirt strip. I stopped five miles or so off the highway. No lights of houses were visible, just stars and scrubby silhouettes of yucca and cactus against darkness diminished by a fingernail trimming of moon.

  I hauled the slumbering Jerry out of the car and dragged him onto the dirt road and let him sleep there. I did crouch to take his wallet from his back jeans pocket and the wad of cash from in front. Otherwise, I didn’t disturb him. He lay sprawled, ripping the night with the z’s he was cutting, blissfully unaware of his circumstances, even the Mustang’s headlights not disturbing him.

  When I drove the front right wheel over his head, vehicle barely moving, the crunch made an unsettling sound in the stillness. The back right wheel rolling over him made only the slightest bump and no discernible sound at all. The bad part was I had nowhere to turn around, and had to back up the whole five miles. Had somebody swung down that road, I might have had a problem.

  But like I said, I got lucky.

  TWO

  You’re probably wondering how a nice guy like me could end up killing people for money. A lot of nice guys, particularly young ones, start out their adult lives killing people for money. It’s called being a soldier. In my day, it was also called getting drafted, although with a lottery number breathing down my neck, I enlisted and managed to get into the Marines.

  I understand plenty of guys who came back from World War Two spent their post-war years being seriously screwed up, nightmares, drinking, smacking wives and kiddies around, among other diversions. But at least those lucky bastards had a war that meant something. My war-maybe you’ve heard of it…Vietnam? — was a fucked-up bunch of nonsense and the only thing I learned from it was how to kill without giving much of a shit. Maybe I would have turned out different if I’d settled comfortably back into civilian life with the beautiful California girl I’d married before I shipped over. But it didn’t work out that way.

  I was eighteen and fresh off the farm. Well, not really-fresh off the tract-house middle-class Midwestern assembly line, the kind of bland background that makes Leave It to Beaver look like a documentary. So when I got thrown into boot camp at Camp Pendleton, I was putty in the hands of a D.I. whose purpose in life was to wipe out any individuality and make us good little killing machines for God and country.

  On a weekend pass, I met Joni at Gazzari’s on the Sunset Strip. She was a typical, fresh-faced mini-skirted California girl-not the beach bunny type, more the leg
gy Cher variety, with dark brown hair straight to her shoulders, and big brown eyes that seemed startling against blue eye shadow. She was about five eight but seemed even taller, though she didn’t wear heels-it was just the shortness of the minis she wore, making her legs go on forever.

  She started coming down to visit me at San Diego, whenever I had liberty, and if I had leave, I’d go up and see her. She owned a little house in La Mirada and we would bunker in and drink beer and eat pizza, and listen to music, Beatles, Turtles, Association, watch Star Trek on TV, and fuck like guppies.

  Other times, we went to Disneyland and to Grauman’s Chinese and the Santa Monica Pier, the California girl humoring the corn-fed hick with touristy junk, and we did the kind of things young lovers do that in the movies require a montage and syrupy music… Happy together…

  I seemed to be able to make her laugh, and she was quiet but very sweet. She would stroke my face a lot. We talked about family, a little-how my mother had died of cancer two years ago, and my father had recently remarried, a woman I didn’t like much, a stone bitch but I wouldn’t have said that then. Joni was from a large family and they didn’t have much and her factory-worker father had been abusive (which I thought meant he hit her, but much later it occurred to me he’d been fucking her).

  Frankly most of it is a blur. When I met Joni, I was a near virgin-I’d been with one girl in high school, my senior year-and the heady sex included things I’d heard about but never expected to experience…I said “heady” sex-get it? All of those memories exist in snippets, a parade of still photos interspersed with little movies of sweetness here and sensuality there, as if the films playing in my mind were scratchy old drive-in prints, kind of grainy with missing frames and garbled sound.

  I remember only two conversations in some detail. One we had at a drive-in outside La Mirada (she had a little blue Marlin, a pretty slick number for a Rambler) where I was doing my best not to make a mess of a chili dog, and she was having just fries, which was the way girls dieted back then.

  “I envy you,” she said.

  “What for?”

  “You had a normal life. You had a loving family.”

  “Not really. Lonely being an only child. My mom was nice but she was sick all the time. And my dad barely spoke to me.”

  “Why?”

  “He was on the road a lot. In his day, he’d been a real jock. I lettered in swimming, but that wasn’t football. I read books. I liked movies. We got along okay, I guess. But maybe I wasn’t macho enough for him.”

  “And now you’re a Marine!”

  “He was a Marine, too.”

  “So you thought that would impress him? Make him really think you’re a man?”

  “Don’t make fun, Joni.”

  “Am I wrong?”

  “No.”

  She dipped a fry into the tiny ketchup cup on the drivein tray next to her (she was behind the wheel-her car, after all).

  “I still say you’re lucky,” she said. “Everybody thinks it’s glamorous out here. It’s not. It’s all spread out and you live in your own little world and you never go anywhere or get anywhere.”

  “You get around.” I meant that in the Beach Boys sense — like, she had a car-and not that she was fast in any other way.

  “I get around now.” She meant the car, too. “But until I was old enough to move out and make something of myself, I lived in a smaller world than you ever did, back in Idaho.”

  “Ohio.”

  “Wherever.” She nibbled another red-tipped fry. “We shopped and ate and went to movies all in about a sixblock radius. Never went anywhere else. That includes school. I teased you about being a typical tourist, Jack, didn’t I?”

  Jack was my name then. First name. You won’t get a last one out of me-not a real one. And Quarry isn’t it.

  “Yeah,” I said, “you ribbed me pretty good.”

  “Well, guess what-I never went to Disneyland before. I never saw a movie on Grauman’s big screen. I never ate cotton candy or rode the carousel at Santa Monica. Not till…” Funny pause. “…till you came along.”

  Now, years later, I know why she paused. I’ll fill you in, when the time comes.

  Another night, possibly that same week, she drove us to a stretch of beach where, at uneven intervals, yelloworange fires glowed and sparked against the deep blue of the night and deeper blue of the ocean. These were bonfires with kids gathered around and the scene of much partying-beer, dope, sex. All the stuff that you figured happened in those Beach Party movies after the cameras stopped rolling.

  We found a nice bed of sand between some big rocks and laid out a blanket. We’d been there before, three or four times; our place, our spot. Neither one of us was into dope but we had a six-pack of Coors. It was one of those warm California nights Leslie Gore sang about, even the wind off the lazy waves was warm. No humidity, though. California was another planet, too…

  I loved her so fucking much. She was very beautiful, twenty-two and older than me, darkly tan except where the bikini had protected skin so shockingly white that the dark curls of her pubic triangle screamed for attention. She would lay on her back and those long slender legs would part and glistening pink would beckon and I’d be balls deep before she could finish her initial gasp. Her long legs would pump, like both our hearts, and her head would roll back and her eyes go half-lidded, and almost cross, and each time I’d thrust, her small pert breasts would thrust, too, their long erect points like little scolding fingers, naughty, naughty…

  “Marry me,” I said, when we’d finished, but still inside her.

  “Oh yes,” she said breathlessly. “Oh, Jack- yes. ”

  So I’d married her.

  From Vietnam, I wrote her love letters on a daily basis for a while, and she did the same with me, until my world got darker and it was all I could do to maybe write once a week and then once a month crawl out of that hole into temporary sunshine to say something to the girl waiting for me, the girl who was the only reason not to give in to despair and either walk into a bullet or go AWOL and maybe get sent stateside to the brig or better yet frag a moronic officer and get sent home to a firing squad or just stick around and maybe join the hardcore Corps who were slamming heroin to escape for now or maybe for good. Me, who didn’t even accept a toke when a doobie was passed, suddenly I was thinking heroin was an option.

  Finally I had stopped feeling, which when they made me a sniper was a necessity. If you viewed your target as a flesh-and-blood human, you might upset your balance. You had to understand, in war, that if you weren’t manning the gun shooting this poor bastard, somebody else would be there with a finger on the trigger. So what was the difference? In war, all soldiers are dead men. Sooner you get that, the better off you are. Thinking of yourself as alive only put you at risk-you could get killed that way.

  We all knew: You are dead until you are sent home, at which time you will maybe get to be alive again.

  I came home a day early. The letters from Joni had become more and more sporadic, just as had mine, but hers were at least loving and encouraging whereas mine were frankly terse and straining to be something akin to pleasant, since hopeful was out of the question. By the end of my tour, I had probably killed thirty men. And I was fine with that. Because I hadn’t really killed them, had I? The war designated them dead long before I came on the scene.

  Anyway, I showed up in La Mirada at the little white stucco house (no picket fence) on La Flor Drive. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if that side door had been locked (the front was). I felt odd, because I’d been away going on two years and was not the same guy, even if I was back in civvies; but the sunshine and the smell of flowers did make me feel alive. Not a walking dead man. Which was nice.

  Anyway, I went in to surprise Joni, just sort of crept in, sneaky bastard, not yelling her name or any honey-I’mhome shit. I wanted to enter a room and she would be sitting in a comfy chair listening to our song (“No Fair at All”) or maybe at the ki
tchen table writing me a loving letter, or possibly taking a bubble bath, and in all those instances, her big brown eyes would get even bigger and she would beam and be in my arms and, before you know it, I’d be in her. You think a lot about such things when you are overseas and a walking dead man.

  I know you’re way ahead of me. You wouldn’t have bothered looking in every other room first, before trying the bedroom. And maybe I knew before I opened that door. Hell, I did know. The sounds of heavy breathing and bed springs provided a little clue.

  She was facing me with big brown eyes, all right, and they did get bigger, though since she was on all fours on the bed, getting it from behind, I’d have to say it’s surprising her eyes had the capacity to get bigger. Maybe he wasn’t in her backdoor. Maybe it was just rear entry. That’s a detail I didn’t explore.

  I didn’t know the guy. He had what we call a farmer’s tan back in Ohio, although the paleness of his flesh was blocked out by a lot of hair. Real hairy-chested bastard, about thirty-five I’d say-really old, I thought at the time, old enough to be her father. Now I know my math was way off, but that’s one of the things that popped into my head.

  If I’d had a gun on me, I’d have killed them both. In that position, one bullet could have done the trick-a shot through her open mouth could have penetrated his chest, too, and it would have been your classic two-birds-with-one-stone parlay.

  “ Jack! ” she said.

  I said nothing.

  Also, the guy said nothing-he just looked confused and irritated, pausing in his pumping, his hands on the bikini-white of her ass. I would have preferred that he look embarrassed or maybe scared. I couldn’t even be sure he knew who I was. I mean, we’d never met. And I didn’t see my picture on her bedside table.

  I just turned and got out of there. She was screaming my name but not following me or anything. Far as I know his dick was still in her when I slammed the door and shut off the sound.

  This was in the afternoon, and I didn’t call her that night. Actually, I never called her at all. I knew of a girlfriend of hers, who had kind of liked me when Joni and I had been dating, and from her I found out the guy’s name was Williams (I’ve forgotten his first name) and that he worked as a mechanic at a garage a couple blocks from Joni’s house. A house I had mistakenly thought of as “our” house.