The Last Quarry Page 2

  So for the past month, boredom had started to itch at me...and for the past few nights I’d had trouble sleeping. I sat up all night watching satellite TV and reading paperback westerns; then I’d drag around the next day, maybe drifting to sleep in the afternoon just long enough to fuck up my sleep cycle again that night.

  It was getting irritating.

  At about three-thirty in the morning on the fourth night of this shit, I decided eating might do the trick. Fill my gut with junk food and the blood could rush down from my head and warm my belly and I’d get the fuck sleepy, finally. I hadn’t tried this before because I’d been getting a trifle paunchy, with this easy job, even more so since winter kicked in.

  In the summer, at least, I could swim in the lake every day and get some exercise and keep the fucking spare tire off. But with winter here, I’d just let my beard go and belt size, too. I tried to make myself do laps in the pool across the way, but mostly I sat in the hot tub and drank Coca Cola and thought about my past. I wasn’t sure why—it wasn’t the kind of past you got anywhere with by thinking about it. The only thing I knew for sure was, this winter was making me fat and lazy and, now, fucking sleepless.

  The cupboard was bare so I threw on my thermal jacket and—since I was alone on my stretch of Sylvan Lake—took the ten-mile ride to the nearest junk food. At this time of night a shabby little convenience store, Ray’s Mart, with its one self-service gas pump, was the only thing open fifteen miles in either direction.

  The clerk was a heavy-set brunette named Cindy from Brainerd. She was maybe twenty years old and a little surly, but she worked all night, so who could blame her.

  “Mr. Ryan,” she said, flatly, as I came in, the bell over the door jingling. She was engrossed in a telephone conversation and this effusive greeting had been both an effort and a concession to a regular customer.

  “Cindy,” I said, with a nod, and I began prowling the place, three narrow aisles parallel to the front of the building. None of the snacks appealed to me—chips and crackers and Twinkies and other preservative-packed delights—and the frozen food case ran mostly to ice-cream sandwiches and popsicles. In this weather, that was a joke.

  I was giving a box of Chef Boyardee lasagna an intent once-over, like it was a car I was considering buying, when the bell over the door jingled again. I glanced up and saw a well-dressed, heavy-set man—heavy-set enough to make Cindy look svelte—with a pockmarked, Uncle Fester-ish face and black-rimmed glasses that fogged up as soon as he stepped in.

  He wore an expensive topcoat—a tan Burberry number with a red-and-black plaid scarf, the sort of pricey ensemble that required a small mortgage—and his shoes had a bright black city shine, barely flecked with ice and snow. His name was Harry Something-the-fuck, and he was from Chicago. I knew him, in my former life.

  I turned my back.

  If he saw me, I’d have to kill him—I was bored, but not that bored.

  Predictably, Harry Something went straight for the potato chips; he also rustled around the area where cookies were shelved. I risked a glimpse and saw him, not two minutes after he entered, with his arms full of junk food, heading for the front counter.

  “Excuse me, miss,” Harry Something said, depositing his groceries before Cindy like an offering on an altar. His voice was nasal and high-pitched; a funny, childish voice for a man his size—it went well with the Uncle Fester face. “Could you direct me to the sanitary napkins?”

  Cindy winced, phone in hand, annoyed by this intrusion. Harry was not a regular customer.

  She said, “You mean Tampax?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Toiletries is just over there.”

  Now this was curious, and I’ll tell you why. I had met Harry Something around ten years before, when I was doing a job for the Outfit boys in Chicago. I was never a mob guy, mind you, strictly a freelancer, but their money was as good as anybody’s. What that job was isn’t important, but Harry and his partner Louis were the locals who had fucked up, making my outsider’s presence necessary. Harry and Louis had not been friendly toward me. They had threatened me, in fact. They had beaten the hell out of me in my hotel room, when the job was over, for making them look bad.

  I had never taken any sort of revenge out on them. I occasionally do take revenge, but at my convenience, and only when a score strikes me as worth settling. Harry and Louis had really just pushed me around a little, bloodied my nose, tried to earn back a little self-respect. So I didn’t hold a grudge. Not a major grudge. Fuck it.

  As to why Harry Something purchasing Tampax in the middle of the night at some backwoods convenience store was curious, well, Harry and Louis were gay. Like my old man used to say, queer as a three-dollar bill. Mob muscle who worked as a pair, and played as a pair.

  And I don’t mean to be critical. To each his own. I’d rather cut off my dick than insert it in any orifice of a repulsive fat slob like Harry Something. But, hey, that’s just me.

  Now while I’m as naturally curious as the next guy, I’m sure as hell not nosy, not even inquisitive, really. But when a faggot buys Tampax, you have to wonder why.

  “Excuse me,” Harry Something said, brushing by me.

  He hadn’t seen my face (had he?)—and he might not recognize me, in any case. Ten years and a beard and twenty pounds later, I wasn’t as easy to peg as Harry was, who had changed goddamn little.

  Harry, having stocked up on cookies and chips and Tampax, was now buying milk and packaged macaroni and cheese and provisions in general. He was shopping.

  Stocking up.

  And now I was starting to get a handle on what he might be up to....

  I nodded to surly Cindy, who bid me goodbye by flickering her eyelids in casual contempt, and went out to my car, a steel-gray Jag I’d purchased recently. I wished I’d had the Lodge’s four-wheel drive, or anything less conspicuous, but I didn’t. I sat in the car, scooched down low; I did not turn on the engine. I just sat in the cold car in the cold night and waited.

  Harry Something came out with two armloads of groceries—Tampax included, I presumed—and he put them in the front seat of a brown rental Ford Taurus. Louis was not waiting in the car for him.

  Harry was alone.

  Which further confirmed my suspicions....

  I waited for him to pull out onto the road, hung back till he took the road’s curve, then started up my Jag and glided out after him. He had turned left, toward Brainerd. That made sense, only I figured he wouldn’t wind up there—he’d likely light out for the boonies somewhere.

  I knew what Harry was up to, vaguely at least. He sure as shit wasn’t here to ski—that lardass couldn’t stand up on a pair of skis. And he wasn’t here to go ice-fishing, either. A city boy like Harry Something had no business in a touristy area like this, in the off-season...

  ...unless Harry was hiding out, holing up somewhere.

  This would be the perfect area for that.

  Only Harry didn’t use Tampax.

  He turned off on a side road, into a heavily wooded area that wound back toward Sylvan Lake.

  Good. That was very good.

  I went on by. I drove a mile, turned into a farmhouse gravel drive and headed back without lights. I slowed as I reached the mouth of the side road, and could see Harry’s taillights wink off.

  I knew the cabin at the end of that road. There was only one, and its owner only used it during the summer; Harry was either a renter, or a squatter.

  I glided on by and went back home.

  I left the Jag next to the deck and walked up the steps and into the A-frame. The nine millimeter Browning was in the nightstand drawer. The gun hadn’t been shot in months—Christ, maybe over a year. But I cleaned and oiled it regularly, because you never know.

  It would do nicely.

  So would my black turtleneck, black jeans, black leather bomber jacket, and this black moonless night. I slipped a spare .38 revolver in the bomber jacket right side pocket, and clipped a hunting knife to my belt. The kni
fe was razor sharp with a sword point; I sent for it out of the back of one of those dumb-ass mercenary magazines—which are worthless except for mail-ordering weapons.

  I walked along the edge of the lake, my running shoes crunching the brittle ground, layered as it was with snow and ice and leaves. The only light came from a gentle scattering of stars, a handful of diamonds flung on black velvet; the frozen lake was a dark presence that you could sense but not really see, the surrounding trees even darker. The occasional cabin or cottage or house I passed was empty. I was one of only a handful of residents on this side of Sylvan Lake who were staying year-round.

  But the lights were on in one cabin. Not many lights, but lights. And its chimney was trailing smoke.

  The cabin was small, a traditional log cabin of the Abe Lincoln and syrup variety, only with a satellite dish. Probably two bedrooms, a living room, kitchenette and a can or two. Only one car—the brown rental Ford.

  My footsteps were lighter now; I was staying on the balls of my feet and the crunching under them was faint. I approached with caution and gun in hand and peeked in a window on the right front side.

  Harry Something was sitting on the couch, eating corn curls, giving himself an orange mustache in the process. His feet were up on a coffee table. More food and a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun were on the couch next to him. He wore a colorful Hawaiian shirt; he looked like Don Ho puked on him, actually.

  In the nearby kitchenette, which was open onto the living room, Louis was fussing as he put the food away—a small, skinny, bald ferret of man, who wore jeans and a black shirt and a white tie. I couldn’t tell whether he was trying for trendy or gangster, and frankly didn’t give a shit.

  Physically, all the two men had in common was pockmarks and a desire for the other’s ugly body.

  And neither one of them seemed to need a tampon, though a towelette would’ve come in handy for Harry Something. Jesus. Imagine having a Burberry topcoat like that and a Hawaiian shirt underneath; they can make gay marriage legit if they want to, but that should be fucking illegal.

  I could hear them talking—muffled but audible through the window, the sound of the television, some old movie, underneath.

  From the couch Harry said, “Chip me!”

  From the kitchenette Louis said, “With your cholesterol? Isn’t a bag of cheese curls enough?”

  “Don’t mama me!...I wanna Coke, too.”

  “I thought you were off caffeine!”

  “Not when you expect me to sit up all fuckin’ night.”

  Louis was in the living room now. “I’m the one dealing with her—what a spoiled little cunt she is!”

  Harry laughed; the laugh was like Uncle Fester, too. “That’s why daddy’ll pay up, sweet cheeks!”

  I peeked at them—Louis was delivering barbecue chips and Harry took them with a “Thank you,” and they interrupted their bickering to exchange fond expressions. Then Harry worked at adding a new shade of orange to his junk-food mustache.

  Me, I huddled back down beneath the window, wondering what I was doing here.

  Boredom, for sure.

  Curiosity, maybe.

  I shrugged. Time to look in another window or two.

  Because Harry and Louis clearly had a captive, and a female one at that. That’s what they were doing in the boonies. That’s why they were stocking up on supplies at a convenience store in the middle of night and nowhere. That’s why there were in the market for Tampax.

  And through a back window, I saw her.

  She was on a single bed in the small rustic room, naked but for white panties—a wrist cuffed to a nearby bedpost, sitting on the edge of the bed, bending over in obvious discomfort, crying...a darkhaired, creamy-fleshed beauty in her early twenties, suffering menstrual cramps.

  Obviously, Harry and Louis had nothing sexual in mind for this captive; the reason for her nudity was to help prevent her fleeing. The bed was heavy with blankets, and she’d clearly been keeping under the covers, but right now she was sitting and doubling over and crying. Right now was a bad period for her any way you sliced it.

  Thing was, I recognized this young woman. Like Harry, I spent a lot of hours during cold nights like this with my eyes frozen to a TV screen. And that’s where I’d seen her: on the tube.

  Not an actress, no—an heiress. Jonah Green’s daughter—“Daddy” was a Chicago media magnate whose name you’d recognize if I was using his real one, a guy who inherited money and wheeled-and-dealed his way into more, including one of the satellite super-stations I’d been wasting my eyes on lately. The Windy City’s answer to Ted Turner, right down to sailboating and baseball teams and womanizing.

  His daughter was a little wild—seen in the company of rock stars (she had a tattoo of a star—not Justin Timberlake, a five-pointed star—on her white left breast, which I could see from the window) and was a Betty Ford clinic drop-out. Nonetheless, she was said to be the apple of her daddy’s eye, even if that apple was a tad wormy.

  So Harry and Louis had put the snatch on the snatch; fair enough. Question was, was it their own idea, or something the Outfit put them up to?

  I heard a door open, and peeked in carefully, just barely able to hear the muffled speech through the window.

  Louis came in and tossed the box of Tampax in her lap.

  The girl snarled, “You took long enough!”

  “We’re being nice—you be nice.”

  “Fuck you. Fuck you!...I need the bathroom.”

  A clearly disgusted Louis dug a handcuff key out of his pocket, and worked at undoing her wrist.

  The girl, a spoiled brat even in the presence of kidnappers, said, “Hurry the fuck up, faggot! You want blood everywhere?”

  He looked at her coldly. “Do you?”

  That sobered her a little.

  Maybe Daddy should’ve tried some of Louis’s brand of psychology.

  Then Louis walked her off somewhere as the girl clutched the Tampax box like treasure.

  I dropped down from the window, hidden there in the dark in my dark clothes with a gun in my hand and my back to the log cabin, and I smiled.

  When I’d come out into the night, armed like this, it hadn’t been to effect a rescue. Whatever else they were, Harry and Louis were dangerous men, and I had to be ready to protect my ass. And if I was going to spend my sleepless night satisfying my curiosity and assuaging my boredom by poking into their business, I had to be ready to pay for my thrills.

  So I sat in the cold and dark and decided, finally, that it just didn’t matter who or what was behind it. My options were to go home, and forget about it, and try (probably without any luck) to get some sleep; or to rescue this somewhat soiled damsel in distress.

  And if I went home, they’d kill this girl.

  What the hell. I had nothing better to do.

  I went to the front door and knocked.

  No answer.

  Shit, I knew somebody was home, so I knocked again.

  Then I got right against the door, putting my ear to the wood, so I could gauge their reaction within....

  Harry was saying, “Who the fuck is that? Who could that be?”

  Louis was calming him, saying, “Could be that security company the owner told us about—on patrol. Saw lights on.”

  TV sound stopped—muted.

  Harry’s voice again: “You want me to—”

  “No! Hide the shottie....”

  “Louis, no one knows we’re here....”

  “That’s right—nothing to worry about.”

  Louis cracked open the door and peered out and said, “What is it?” and I shot him in the eye.

  Three

  The still night was cut by the harsh, shrill sound of a scream—not Louis, who hadn’t had time for that, but the girl in the next room, scared shitless at hearing a gunshot, one would suppose.

  I paid no attention to her and shouldered the door open—no night latch or anything—and stepped over Louis, kicked aside the .38 revolver he’d been h
iding behind him when he answered the door, and moved into the claustrophobic living room, pointing the nine millimeter at Harry, whose orange-ringed mouth was frozen open and whose bag of barbecue potato chips dropped to the floor, much as Louis had.

  “Don’t, Harry,” I said.

  I could see in Harry’s tiny dark eyes behind his thick black-rimmed glasses that he was thinking about the sawed-off shotgun under the pillow on the couch next to him.

  “Who the fuck...?”

  I moved slowly to the couch; behind me, an old colorized movie was playing on their captive’s daddy’s superstation. With my left hand, I plucked the shotgun from under the cushion next to Harry and tucked it under my arm.

  “Hi, Harry,” I said. “Been a while.”

  His orange-ringed mouth slowly began to work and his eyes began to blink and he said, “Quarry?”

  That was the name he’d known me by.

  His eyes showed white all around and he pointed at me. “You’re that fucker Quarry!”

  I dipped down to pluck the .38 from the floor. “Taking the girl your idea, or are you still working for the boys?”

  His words came to him from some remote part of his brain, a response not unlike the kick from a doctor-applied mallet to a knee. “We...we retired, couple years ago. God.”

  He looked past me, wide-eyed, at the thing on the floor and pointed again, this time like a kid in the backseat who just spotted a Dairy Queen. But not as happy.

  “You...you killed...Jesus Christ, you killed Louis...!”

  I sat on the arm of the sofa and kept the gun on him, casually but on him. “Right. What were you going to put the girl’s body in?”

  “Huh?”

  “She’s obviously seen you. You were obviously going to kill her, once you got the money. So. What was the plan?”

  Harry wiped off his orange barbecue ring with a hand. He was blinking, trying to think. “Got a roll of plastic in the closet. Gonna roll her up and dump her in one of them gravel pits they got around here.”

  “I see. Do that number with the plastic right now, with Louis, why don’t you? Okay?”