Quarry in the Black Read online

  I said, “Duly noted.” I looked at his friend. “That your opinion, too?”

  The blond squeaked some more. “We didn’t do a goddamn fucking thing she didn’t beg for, man! And I don’t think she’s your sister, either. You’re just sticking your nose in where it don’t the fuck belong.”

  “Fine. But are you done hassling the chick or not?”

  The denim-hat guy balled a fist and raised it to chest level and the blond stepped back to give him room and I whipped the nine mil from my waistband and pointed it at him.

  The blond swallowed, goggling at me. “Maybe he is her brother, Willy.”

  Willy didn’t have time to ponder that because I cuffed him alongside the head with the Browning barrel. His eyes rolled back like he was coming and his feet went out from under him and his cap flew off and he hit his head on the sink as he went down and landed in an ungainly pile, wiping up poorly aimed urine from the floor with his ugly apparel. The denim cap was floating in the crapper.

  “You fucker!” the blond said, looking down at what I’d done. But he wasn’t coming at me. He was just concerned about his friend and probably afraid. He really wasn’t a threat at this point.

  I smacked him alongside the head with the nine mil barrel anyway. Some lessons can’t be learned secondhand. He knocked back against the pebbled window and slid bumpily down past the sill till he was sitting on the floor with his knees up, since the space his unconscious friend was taking up made it impossible to do otherwise.

  Both were out, trickles of scarlet down their left cheeks. They would have made a great subject for a black-and-white art photograph. But what they were was two more shits in this toilet.

  I slipped out, shutting them in but knowing they’d be quickly found.

  Becky was just exiting the ladies and she smiled and laughed a little when she saw me. “Fancy meetin’ you here, honey.”

  “None of us are above nature’s call,” I said. “May I show you something?”

  Confused, she nonetheless said, “Well, sure.”

  “All I ask is that if you disapprove, you don’t alert what’s-his-name, the bartender, till I’ve been gone five minutes or till somebody else finds them.”

  “Finds who?”

  I pushed the men’s room door open.

  She gasped, a pink-nailed hand flying to her mouth. “Oh my!” And then she giggled again. “Did you do that for little ol’ me?”

  That’s what she said. Sue me.

  “I just wanted to elevate your opinion of the male sex. Have I succeeded?”

  “Sure as shit have, honey.”

  I shut the men’s room door; they weren’t stirring yet. “I better slip out. Where can I meet you?”

  “Just wait outside. I’ll take off work now. Lou won’t give a damn.”

  I did that, hoping she wasn’t suckering me. Shortly I was standing on the sidewalk, thinking maybe I’d really screwed the pooch here, and that the bartender would emerge with a sawed-off or a baseball bat and I’d be off to the St. Louie pokey and out twenty-five grand.

  But only she came out, her eyes big and wild as she said, “Somebody just found the jerks. We better shake a tail feather.”

  I followed her, because she was on the move, not that she moved very far. She opened the same door between the bar and the hippie dress shop that I’d come out of—the door to the stairs up to Boyd’s lookout pad.

  I asked, “Where are you…?”

  “Honey, I told you I had somewhere we could go. My apartment’s upstairs. Third floor.”

  Howdy neighbor.

  * * *

  Disconcertingly, the apartment was so similar to Boyd’s, he might have emerged from his bedroom to greet us, or maybe shoot us. The furniture was damn near identical, suggesting both apartments were outfitted for rental at the same time, again probably the early ’60s. Really, the major difference was no couch cushion and bed pillow had been moved near the far right window for Boyd to look out at the target. No binoculars or portable radio, either.

  She led me through the boxcar layout to the kitchen. I sat at a Formica-topped table identical to the one where Boyd and I had conversed, what, an hour and a half ago? Or was that a lifetime? Still in her white blouse and black pants, she remained in waitress mode.

  “How about some Sanka?” she said. “I have instant. No caffeine to keep you up all night.”

  We’d apparently run through all the “up” double entendres.

  “Sure.”

  “You want a doughnut? I got a couple doughnuts from this mornin’ that ain’t too stale yet.”

  “Okay.”

  She gave me a glazed doughnut on a napkin and did the same for herself, and soon we were nibbling them and having the fake coffee.

  Eyes just a little tight, she asked, “What did you do to them two boys?”

  The nine mil was still in my waistband, the windbreaker zipped.

  “Just took ’em to the woodshed,” I said, hoping that phrase would resonate with this slightly Southern-sounding girl. “Nice pad.”

  “Yeah, it come furnished. I ain’t been here long enough to apply any girly touches yet.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “In this apartment? Or this here town?”

  “Both.”

  She shrugged, smirky-smiled. “Well, I guess it’s the same answer either way. I moved to town and into this place three weeks ago.”

  Christ, about the same time as Boyd.

  “Where are you from, Becky?”

  “Down South.”

  “Where down south?”

  Georgia? Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi…?

  She nibbled doughnut. “Poplar Bluff.”

  “What state?”

  “Well, Missouri.” She pronounced it miz-ur-ah.

  “So…from the Southern part of the state.”

  Her eyes popped a little, at how dumb I was sounding. “Uh, yeah.”

  “What prompted the move?”

  “Some of us went to high school together decided to come up here where the job opportunities was better. Poplar Bluff, it’s the ‘Gateway to the Ozarks,’ so-called. About all it’s got’s some tourist industry, which means waitressin’ for a girl like me.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Yeah, Jack, I know I’m waitressin’ now, but that’s just temporary. Till I get my feet under me. The bunch of us that moved north, the fellas all have decent factory jobs.”

  “Cool,” I said.

  She finished her Sanka and carried the empty cup to the sink. I handed her my still half-filled one and she put it there, too.

  “You mind if I take a shower, Jack?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Just wait for me there in the bedroom off the livin’ room, okay?”

  “Okay. Should I…get undressed?”

  The lush sticky-pink lips smirky-smiled again. “Why? You prefer just unzippin’ and whippin’?”

  And she flounced out. Apparently that was a rhetorical question.

  I went into the bedroom and climbed out of the windbreaker, kind of wrapping the nine mil in it. Set it on the dresser. Then I got undressed and turned off the overhead light, switching the nightstand lamp on to the lowest of its three settings. The effect was very soft, low-key, almost dreamy. The drilling of the shower water in the background reminded me of the naked woman under the spray. Then it stopped. I could hear her moving in there, toweling off I guess.

  The bedroom off the bathroom she’d left dark, and she emerged from that darkness like a pale vision with all that red hair framing her face and the carrot-colored tangle below. The plump, round breasts had large tips as red as her hair, aureole just a little pinker than the pale pink flesh. Her shoulders and upper chest were freckled, her waist tucking in, her hips flaring out. She couldn’t be much older than twenty-two or -three, but her ripe figure was womanly in the best sense.

  She stood there posed in the doorway, legs unembarrassedly apart, the light from
the bathroom providing her with an outline.

  She said, “Are you clean, Jack? I’m clean. No diseases or nothin’.”

  “I don’t even have a cold,” I said, under the covers, tenting them.

  “I mean, I got some rubbers in that drawer there, if you want. But I’m on the pill, honey. I trust you if you trust me.”

  That may not sound romantic to you, but to the part of me that was doing the thinking at the moment, it was sheer poetry.

  She strolled over like a nudist carhop and looked down at me, where the blankets were in tee-pee formation. She flicked the covers away, twanging my hard-on, which made a motion at her like a summoning finger. She crawled on the bed kittenish or was that panther-like and stopped between my legs and looked up at me wickedly, then descended on my cock like she was famished. I gave her an inch and she took a mile, and I was slicker than a rain-swept highway when she stopped short of getting an even bigger mouthful and said, “Now you do me.”

  She flopped onto her back and spread her legs, knees up. I was new to red-haired muff but eager to learn. The tuft was softer and less coarse than any I’d encountered, and her pink-nailed fingers spread red lips apart to expose inner flesh that was redder still. Just when I had her licked, she told me to stick it in and I did. She was hot, wet and tight. I plunged in and out, deeper and faster, as her hips lifted and churned and lifted and churned, at first very slow, then less so, building to a frantic dizzying finish. I came so hard I practically passed out. She stared at the ceiling, breathing hard, her red-flushed chest gradually returning to freckled pale.

  Then she grabbed some Kleenex from a box on the dresser, stuffed them between her legs and trotted comically out, her legs tight, her bottom jiggling. I used some of the Kleenex myself, then I got dressed.

  I was sitting on the couch in the living room, the windbreaker-wrapped nine mil beside me. I was still getting my goddamn breath. She padded in, in sheer panties and nothing else, and plopped next to me, red hair bouncing. I gave her a little kiss and she gave me one back. Then she yawned.

  “You wanna spend the night, Jack?”

  “No. Better not.”

  “Where you stayin’?”

  “Not far from here.”

  She got up, drifted to the window, so very beautiful. She parted drapes as sheer as her panties and looked out. “You know what, Jack?”

  “What, Becky?”

  “Somethin’ bad’s gonna happen to that nigger over there.”

  FOUR

  Boyd and I had breakfast at a diner called the Majestic, a surprising walk back into the 1950s for a business district that was otherwise an assemblage of hippie-ish shops—antiques, books, witchcraft, candles, chocolates, drug paraphernalia.

  I was having corned beef hash, Boyd a bowl of oatmeal. I had my coffee black, he had cream and sugar.

  “What did you say to that?” he asked, his dark eyes alarmed in their long-lashed, oddly pretty setting. That’s not to imply he looked effeminate or anything—more like a Greek grocer taking a break from unloading a truck in an alley.

  “Well,” I told him with a shrug, stopping a forkful of hash halfway to my face, “I said, ‘What nigger?’ ”

  It was the kind of place where you could get a very dirty look for using a word like that, but we were in a corner booth with nobody in the adjacent one or at a nearby table, either.

  “Quarry, just give me a summary. I don’t expect blow by blow.”

  “So I should skip how she blew me? Probably wise. In bad taste, and might spoil your meal.”

  “Get bent. What? Are we in trouble?”

  I shrugged again. Had a sip of coffee. “I honestly don’t know. She’s not stupid, but I don’t read her as smart enough to be one of us. Or that good an actress. Just a chick who made a racist remark, and who—when I asked what she was talking about—said the, uh…black gentleman across the street was getting ‘too big for his britches.’ ”

  “She didn’t say that. Not in those words.”

  “Sure she did. Well, not the ‘black gentleman’ part. I told you she was from a place called Poplar Bluff.”

  He’d stopped eating, and if he leaned over farther, he’d be crawling across the table knocking plates and cups off. “Quarry, what’s your read?”

  “Seems to be a coincidence. She’s in the apartment above us, and I ran into her working at the bar next door.”

  He sat back heavily. “I fucking hate coincidences.”

  “And what, I love them? I think she’s just a good-looking hick from downstate. If she isn’t, I can only think of one possibility.”

  I made him ask. I’m kind of a prick that way.

  “What possibility, Quarry?”

  A cute blonde waitress in an old-fashioned green uniform refilled my coffee. She smiled at me and I just nodded. I’d already got in enough trouble.

  When she was elsewhere, I said, “Maybe whoever hired us, through the Broker, installed Becky What’s-It to keep an eye on us. To…well, not to supervise exactly. Just keep an eye.”

  Now he drank some coffee. “I suppose that’s possible. Never ran into her before on the stairs or anything…but possible. Her being a little bigot, what do you make of that?”

  I sighed. Admitted, “Well, I don’t like it. Her presence implies she’s part of some racist bunch who maybe hired us and she got assigned to watch us, or help provide back-up we didn’t request. Could even mean our client intends to pull a double-cross.”

  “Shit. But what could some little hillbilly gal do?”

  “Ask Bonnie Parker.”

  “Shit,” he said again.

  “I got onboard because the Broker said this wasn’t really political or racial. Assured me that our subject is a bad boy who’s diddling his own people.”

  His eyes lifted ceiling-ward. “Oh, fucking please! Don’t go getting self-righteous on me again. You with a conscience makes me sick. It’s like John Wayne sticking up for the Indians.”

  “Stop bitching and think, Boyd. If we’re doing a job for a bunch of racists…if that’s what this job is about…it changes everything.”

  “Does it? Tell me. Is the way the money spends any different?”

  “No, but the attention level is. Suddenly everybody’s looking into this from the chief of police to the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover. It’s on the evening news every day for weeks, on the covers of Time and Newsweek, until they find…who? The ones that did it.”

  He was shaking his head. “We’ll be long gone.”

  “Maybe. Normally. But I’m going undercover today, and people will see my face and post-game there will be police sketch artists talking to staffers and Christ knows what all. Wanting to know all about their fellow staffer who came on recently and then up and disappeared. Right after the tragedy.”

  He stroked his mustache with a thumb and forefinger; he did that sometimes, when he was actually thinking.

  Then he said, “No offense, Quarry, but your face is about as memorable as a mannequin. Still, however this goes down, whoever hired it, the cops and probably feds’ll be all over it.” Very quietly he said, “The next Martin Luther King, remember?”

  I shook my head. “Maybe for a day or two. But they’ll dig in and come up with drugs and organized crime, fucking quick, and the manhunt for the Reverend’s ‘slayer’ will go back-burner so fast, you’ll get a nosebleed.”

  He thought about it. Sipped some coffee. Thought some more. “You’re right. If he’s dirty, it’ll come out, whoever hired it done.”

  Now I thought about it. Sipped. Thought some more. “Maybe. Maybe.”

  “You think we should bail?”

  “Not sure yet.”

  The black caterpillars that were his eyebrows rose. “What about your Hee-Haw honey?”

  I pushed my plate away, half-eaten. “I’ll stay in touch with her sweet little ass. I don’t know if she’s keeping an eye on us or not, but I’ll sure as shit keep an eye on her.”

  “But, Quarry,” Boyd said with sarcasti
c mock-concern, “how can you fuck her now that you know she doesn’t like black people? Doesn’t it just sicken you?”

  “You know what would sicken me? Details of your love life. Just like mine would sicken you.”

  He didn’t argue the point. I let him pay and then we walked back. Back to our apartment below Becky’s.

  * * *

  Just after nine A.M., I entered the office of the St. Louis Civil Rights Coalition, where in a space three times as long as it was wide, a group of people ranging in age from twenty to fifty were at beat-up mismatched desks on phones or at old typewriters or up and around bustling from here to there, usually with clipboard in hand. A chattering teletype was going along one wall near three four-drawer files; the opposite wall had a fold-up banquet table of coffee and refreshments. At the rear were a pair of glassed-in offices at left and right, with restrooms between. The walls bore more McGovern for President posters but also some for a black guy named Bill Clay who was running for re-election to the House of Representatives.

  The racial makeup of this group was a little surprising—perhaps only a third were black, although that sub-group was of varied age while the whites were mostly college kids or recent grads. Some of them may have been at that bar last night. What unified them was clothing. In my limited imagination, I had figured I’d walk into something out of Shaft or Superfly—wild colors, African prints, tie-dye, Dashikis—but this was a world instead of conservative black or brown suits with ties on the males, and conservative pantsuits for the females, with only the occasional splash of color from a blouse. Solid colors, though: yellow, navy, deep red. No flower-power prints.

  Just three steps in and I felt out of place, though I was following exactly what the Broker had suggested—coming in wearing a light-blue Ban-Lon sportshirt, new jeans and Hush Puppies, plus the windbreaker (minus the nine-millimeter Browning).

  “Casual but not sloppy,” he advised. “And then bring several business suits.”

  But that was all he’d said on the subject.

  On the other hand, Afros abounded, including some pseudoones on the white kids, though the more extreme examples were on the girls. Or rather women. Despite the predominance here of youth, nobody here looked very much like a “girl.”