Quarry in the Middle Read online

  Actually, the restaurant’s way. The place had enough patrons to make me inconspicuous, and when Monahan and the blond kid took a booth at the back, against the wall, where I had a good view of them, I managed not to smile.

  I say the blond was a kid, but he could have been thirty. He had that blue-eyed Beach Boy look that makes you a kid your whole life (as long as you don’t get a gut), including shaggy soup-bowl hair and a tan that said he probably operated out of somewhere coastal. He was wearing a black Poison t-shirt with a skull and crossed guitars, so he was a metal head, despite his Mike Love demeanor.

  In his short-sleeve light blue shirt with darker blue tie and navy polyester slacks, Monahan looked like the kid’s high school counselor. Or he would have if they both hadn’t been smoking. Christ, didn’t those two know that shit could kill you?

  The hardest part was not staring, because they were close enough to lip read. Though surveillance had never been my specialty, I’d done enough of it to pick up the skill in a rudimentary way. What follows is part guess, but it’ll give you what I got out of it.

  “Sunup,” Monahan said.

  “Little soon, isn’t it?” the blond said, frowning.

  “Sooner the better. This is too wide-open here.”

  “The road?”

  “No, the town. You can’t predict jack shit in a place like this.”

  True, I thought, gaining respect for him. Smart.

  “And too small,” the older man went on. “Where do you fuckin’ lay low? I don’t know how in hell you ain’t been spotted.”

  I wondered if Monahan was one of these guys who reverted to tough-guy talk on the job. Surely he didn’t talk like that pretending to be an insurance salesman. I lost respect for him.

  “No problems,” the kid was saying, grinning, waving it off. “I got a good set-up—farmhouse right across the way.”

  I’m guessing about “the way,” because a waitress in a white-trimmed brown uniform got between us, taking their order.

  So I watched the bikini girls for a while. Shit, there were eight or nine of the little dolls frolicking around. Must not have been much to do in Haydee’s Port before nightfall.

  The waitress left, and the kid asked: “So, first thing, then? Where, do you think?”

  Monahan’s response seemed a non-sequitur: “Only three minutes from that joint to the Interstate ramp.”

  “That’s good.” The kid was grinning again. “Perfect from where I’m sittin’.”

  They stopped talking about the job. Monahan asked the kid about how Heather was doing, and she was doing fine, and this line of lip flap seemed to be about the kid’s girl or maybe wife. That meant these two worked together all the time. Not uncommon.

  Then their food came, and I let them eat it. I was done with my Famous Bacon Cheeseburger and lesser known fries, and paid at the counter and got the fuck out. I had an idea I knew what they’d been talking about, but I wanted to check it out.

  Without even speeding, it was almost exactly three minutes from the Paddlewheel parking lot to the Interstate bridge ramp. I pulled into the restaurant/casino’s lot—it was blacktop and half the size of a football field, rows and rows of white-outlined parking spaces. The entrance was near the building, the exit all the way down—only that one way in and one way out. Just seeing the geography told me how Monahan would do it.

  Across from the Paddlewheel was a field of corn that wasn’t as high as an elephant’s eye, but this was only June. A metal gate was across a gravel driveway that angled up to a rundown farmhouse in a small oasis of overgrown grass in the middle of all that corn.

  I drove half a mile south and pulled my Sunbird into an access inlet, which enabled tractors and other big farm rigs to get in and out of the cornfield, with the added benefit of slowing down traffic. This time of year nobody was planting or harvesting and I could leave the car there.

  The sun hadn’t gone down, the temp about eighty-five, so my dark-blue windbreaker wasn’t really necessary, and yet it was, because I had my nine millimeter Browning in my waistband and the windbreaker covered it. I was otherwise in black jeans, a light blue Ralph Lauren t-shirt and black running shoes.

  Weather aside, the windbreaker also proved invaluable in moving through that cornfield. The blades of those fucking stalks were like nature’s razors, and I was glad my head was above them, albeit just above. I was headed for that ramshackle two-story farmhouse.

  Which, when I got there, showed no signs of life. I could see from some oil on the gravel where the drive came around back that the blond kid (or somebody, but likely the blond kid) had been parking here. He would still be over at the motel for now, though he’d long since finished his own Famous Bacon Cheeseburger and there was no telling at what point he’d return.

  That was assuming, of course, that I’d figured right, and that this was where he’d been keeping watch on the target, who was clearly somebody who worked at (or more likely ran) the Paddlewheel.

  Anyway, I needed to get inside but not in a way the kid would notice. He’d have been going in the back way, but that door, which was up a few paint-peeling wooden steps to the kitchen, was locked. I’d have been surprised to find otherwise.

  What did surprise me was how sloppy the kid was—though the same could be true for whatever real estate agency represented the property—as I discovered the slanted cellar doors unlocked. I went down in and found sunlight sneaking in stubby windows onto a mostly empty cement area with a broken-down washer and dryer and not much else but exposed beams. There were pools of moisture here and there, but I could skirt them. I heard some mice or rats scurry, but they stayed out of my way and I did them the same favor.

  The chance of anybody being upstairs was minimal. But I got the nine millimeter out anyway, and took the creaky wooden stairs as quietly as I could manage—shit, probably took me two or three minutes to get to the top. All the way up I was wondering what I’d do if that door was locked. Forcing it would be no problem, but it might leave a visual record of my entry, plus if anybody was up there, I’d be announcing myself more obnoxiously than I cared to…

  But it wasn’t locked.

  I eased the thing open, and it didn’t make any more noise than the Crypt Keeper’s vault, though it didn’t matter a damn. Nobody was in the kitchen, which was where I came out. Nothing was in the kitchen, except a dead refrigerator that dated back to Betty Furness days, no kitchen table, nothing except a counter and sink and empty cupboards.

  We’ll skip the suspense stuff—nobody was in the house. I searched it slow and careful, because that’s what you do in such a case; but the place had not a stick of furniture in it, much less a person. Even the flotsam and jetsam of the lives lived here by good solid immigrant stock for maybe a hundred years had gone to Dumpster heaven.

  I should have said “no stick of furniture” original to the house, because in the living room, by the front bay-type window, was some recently-brought-in stuff that indicated the presence of a human being, not a rodent (except maybe figuratively).

  The blond kid’s set-up included a folding chair, the beach variety (Mike Love again), like he’d been sitting by a pool or maybe on the deck of cruise ship, and not in the front room of an old farmhouse where he could maintain surveillance on the target of a contract killing. He had a portable radio with cassette player that ran off batteries (yes, Poison tapes), and a Styrofoam chest with ice keeping cans of Pepsi cold as well as a few wrapped Casey’s General Store sandwiches. Some small packets of potato chips leaned against the Styrofoam chest, and a pair of binoculars rested on the window ledge. Having searched the house, I’d already determined that the toilets still worked, so he had a decent stakeout post here, though my own back couldn’t have stood that flimsy chair for days on end.

  If the fact that he was a Pepsi drinker wasn’t disgusting enough, I noted to one side of the beach chair a pile of Hustler magazines, a box of Kleenex, some baby oil, and a metal wastebasket filled with crumpled, wadded tissues, which tol
d me more about how the blond kid dealt with boredom than I wanted to know.

  For two hours and maybe fifteen minutes, I sat in his beach chair, long enough to get so thirsty I almost drank one of his damn Pepsis. I used the binoculars and could see the Paddlewheel okay, but without any meaningful view into a window. The late afternoon turned blue and then black. The house was warm and stuffy at first and then, without the sun, got cool and stuffy. At one point, I thumbed through a Hustler, but did not partake of the baby oil and Kleenex. I was raised on Playboy and still preferred Hefner’s fantasy to Flynt’s gynecology.

  The kid drove a Mustang (I’d seen it parked next to Monahan’s Buick at the Wheelhouse Motel) whose headlights announced him when he pulled into the mouth of the drive. What followed was a graceless dance: he got out and unlocked and moved the metal gate, returned to the car, pulled in deeper, got out and locked up again, then back in his car to come crunching up the gravel drive.

  When he unlocked the kitchen door and came in, I was to one side and put the nose of the nine millimeter in his neck. By now it was dark in the house, but some moonlight filtered in the dirty cracked windows over the filthy old sink and I could see his blue eyes pop. They were light blue and looked spooky in the dimness. I mean the room’s dimness, not his.

  “Hands on your head,” I said.

  He put them there. The eyes stayed wide. He was even skinnier, close up—still in the black Poison t-shirt, but a light tan jacket open over it. He had a snubby .38 in a jacket pocket. I took it, slipped it in my left-hand windbreaker pocket.

  “Let’s talk,” I said.

  He said, in a husky tenor, “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Not cops.”

  He swallowed. “Then what are you?”

  “An interloper.”

  “What the fuck’s an interloper?”

  “A guy who noticed what you’re up to, and wants in.”

  He frowned. Thinking took effort; it even made lines in his boyish face. By the way, I made him for maybe twenty-five.

  He asked, “What do you mean, ‘wants in’?”

  “Sit down.”

  “Where? Do you see a fuckin’ chair?”

  “I see the fuckin’ floor.”

  “It’s filthy.”

  “I don’t think I mind.”

  He sat, cross-legged, Indian-style. He folded his arms, as if that would protect him. He looked up at me, like an inexperienced girl afraid of her first blow job.

  I said, “Who’s the target?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is going to go very slow if you keep asking me that.”

  “Well, I don’t know what the fuck you mean.”

  I slapped him with the nine millimeter. Not hard enough to cut the flesh, just to get his attention, and to give me time to take the noise suppressor from my right-hand windbreaker pocket and affix it to the nine millimeter’s snout.

  Seeing the silencer bothered him more than the love pat.

  “I don’t dig roughing guys up,” I told him, meaning it. “But I can shoot a kneecap off and live with it. Assuming you don’t pass out, you’ll get talkative. You won’t annoy me with dumb questions.”

  “It’s a guy named Cornell. Richard Cornell.”

  “What does he do?”

  I thought, Runs the Paddlewheel.

  “He runs that club across the way—the Paddle-wheel.”

  “Who hired you?”

  “Doesn’t work that way.”

  “You work through a middleman?”

  He swallowed again and nodded. “Are you one of us or something?”

  “How’s it going down?”

  “Parking lot.”

  “After closing?”

  He nodded.

  “How late does the Paddlewheel stay open?”

  “Late. Five a.m. That’s the point.”

  “The point?”

  “The point of Haydee’s Port. The point of the Paddle-wheel. Across the river, they have to close at one a.m. People drive over to keep partying.”

  “Is it dawn by five a.m.?”

  “Why don’t you get a fucking almanac? Jesus.”

  I shot him twice, thup thup, once for each eye of the skull on his Poison t-shirt. It was a smart-ass thing to do, but then I was responding to a smart-ass remark. The blood that spattered on the old fridge behind him gave the old kitchen a dash of color, even in the near dark.

  It could use it.

  The pain in the ass part came next, and I’ll spare you most of it. I had to get the keys for that gate out of his jacket pocket, then had to walk down through the cornfield to my car and bring it around and go through the gate routine myself and then back the Sunbird up to the rear steps.

  Finally I dragged the kid across the ancient linoleum—he made a snail’s trail of blood slime—and down the steps, his head bumping and clunking down, and pretty soon I had him up and in the trunk.

  An argument could be made for leaving him there on the dirty kitchen floor, but I felt I wanted his body in the trunk, in case later on I needed to make a point.

  It got your attention, didn’t it?

  Chapter Two

  The sky was full of stars with a nearly full moon that gave the outdoors a nice ivory tinge. I was floating on my back in the Wheelhouse Motel pool, feeling pretty mellow for a guy who had just killed somebody. A guy who before long would probably be killing somebody else.

  I could even see my Sunbird from here, parked at Unit 28 on the same wing of the motel where Monahan’s Buick still occupied Unit 36’s slot. The adjacent slot yawned empty. I figured the blond kid had checked out before he went over to take his farmhouse stakeout one last time; with the job set for dawn, he would have had no reason to go back to the motel.

  And yet he had come back in a way, because right now he was in the trunk of that Sunbird. But who could argue that—one way or another (to quote Debbie Harry)—he hadn’t already checked out?

  In my mellow, floating state, I wondered if I was getting over-confident, even cocky. I had checked into the same goddamn motel as Monahan…with his dead partner in my trunk. Of course, my other choices would have been to stay across the river in River Bluff at a Holiday Inn or some shit, or risk the sperm-infused sheets of the Eezer Inn (and I was way too squeamish for that).

  Even my only precaution—wrapping my nine millimeter in a towel, stowed poolside under a deck-style chair—was risky. What if somebody kicked or otherwise moved the bundle, and the damn automatic clunked out on the concrete? Went off, even?

  You might even say it looked a little suspicious, because I’d draped another towel on the chair itself…

  On the other hand, there were no other swimmers in the early evening at the Paddlewheel’s pool. An hour ago, I’d had a piece of pie (butterscotch cream) at the restaurant and an older gal named Marge had chatted with me, starting with answering my query about why the restaurant was so dead at supper time.

  “The Paddlewheel opens at five,” she said.

  “Also closes at five, I understand.”

  She nodded. Brunette, brown-eyed, she was pushing fifty and just a little heavy, with a lined face and neck that weren’t enough to conceal how attractive she’d once been.

  “We’re just a kind of annex over here,” she said. “We run an hourly shuttle over there and everything.”

  “To the Paddlewheel? Really.”

  “Really. Anybody staying with us is here for the Paddlewheel, and they almost all take supper over there. We make it on breakfast and lunch and really do pretty well right up to late afternoon.”

  “How long has the Paddlewheel been around?”

  “Going on ten years. It’s on its third management, British ‘bloke’ named Cornell, Richard Cornell—but everybody calls him Dickie. Real smoothie. He’s the boss here. He built the Wheelhouse, and he’s done wonders with the Paddlewheel. Oh, it was always nice, you know, always the respectable entertainment alternative in Haydee’s. But Dickie upgraded everything—food,
entertainment, even expanded the gambling.”

  “How can you be respectable running an illegal casino?”

  She shrugged, refilling my iced tea from a pitcher. “Haydee’s has always been a wide-open little town. It’s like Reno or Vegas.”

  “This isn’t Nevada.”

  “No, honey, it’s Illinois.” She grinned like a female wolf; her bridgework could have been better. “And last I looked, Chicago was in Illinois, too, right?”

  She had a point.

  So I had the pool to myself. That I was feeling this mellow was either a testament to my self-confidence or my self-delusion. Still, it was nice knowing I could have that much caffeine (I’d consumed more than my share of Diet Coke and iced tea today) and still feel this laid-back.

  Plus (as I say) I’d killed a guy, who was currently in my trunk in my line of vision, and it didn’t seem to faze me, though the ass of the buggy was thumbing its nose at me. Idly I hoped that trunk didn’t leak. Be a bitch if it were seeping red stuff the way the late blond kid’s Mustang had dripped oil.

  I wanted to make sure I was relaxed before I went over to the Paddlewheel. No reason to go in right at five p.m.—last thing I needed, either for my own peace of mind or for staying inconspicuous, was to be a new patron who dropped in and stayed for twelve hours. I figured going over around nine should do it. Time would be required to make contact with Richard Cornell, but that should be plenty. And I could grab a late bite.

  My mellowness took a hit, however, when a memory floated into the stream of my consciousness like a turd in the pool.

  I had heard of Haydee’s Port before. And I’d heard of the Paddlewheel, too…

  About eight years ago, the very first time I utilized the Broker’s list, I’d helped out a guy who ran a much smaller casino in the hinterlands near Des Moines. His name was Frank Tree, and he’d filled me in on his personal history, and part of it had been running the Paddlewheel in Haydee’s Port. He’d sold the place, and that was all I knew about it.