Max Collins - Quarry's ex

What the hell-I needed a place to stay myself.

Maybe the Spur had another room available.

The Spur Motel was not my first stop, after returning to Boot Heel; in fact, I rolled right past it in the late Jerry’s red Mustang. I had another motel in mind, which required making my way through Main Street’s four-block minicanyon of neon.

Traffic was modest-this was a Thursday night in the little casino town-as I made my way to the northern outskirts where that other motel awaited…the Saddle Up, which I have to say is one of the best names I ever heard for a sleazy little motel.

The Saddle Up certainly fit that shabby bill. The Spur, which I’d only glimpsed, was three stories and quite modern. This was a horizontal strip of rooms with a freestanding office, a light-blue badly cracked and chippedup stucco structure that had been around since Bonnie and Clyde went looking for places to shack up away from the law. Billy the Kid may have attended the grand opening.

Not that there was anything grand about the Saddle Up. Even its neon sign couldn’t deliver, depicting not a saddle but a horseshoe, a red one with yellow nails, several of which had burned out. Yellow neon lettering filled the upside-down U:

COOL AIR

COLOR TV

NO VACANCY

These were shorting in and out. No pool, just a gravel lot. Twelve rooms with only three cars, despite the buzzing No Vacancy notice.

Which I knew to be inaccurate. Jerry had been staying here, and he’d checked out, all right. Maybe not from the Saddle Up, but…

I nosed the Mustang into its stall outside Jerry’s room- number eight-and used the key I’d found in his wallet. I’d considered stopping at my car, which you may recall was parked on Main Street down from the Four Jacks, to get my nine millimeter Browning out of the glove compartment. But I didn’t really see any need for a weapon. Jerry was dead, and his partner Nick had no idea I was in town. It pays to be paranoid in my business, but why go to extremes?

When I flipped on the light switch, I for the first time felt sorry for the late Jerry. That he’d had to live in this dump for the last month or so of his life was a small tragedy. The best that could be said for number eight was that the bed was made; oh, and for a quarter the mattress would vibrate. And the chugging air conditioner indeed delivered the cool air the neon sign promised.

Looming over the bed’s nubby piss-color spread was one of those garishly framed matador prints that every cheap motel room seemed to have, jarring against ancient peeling wallpaper the color of sand dotted with green cartoon cacti. For that Southwestern flavor. The green shag carpeting gave you the feeling a whole realm of dirt and germs existed down in the underbrush, well out of any sweeper’s reach, not that any sweeper had recently gone on safari there.

If some industrious biographer discovered Alfred Hitchcock had been traveling through these parts in the late 1950s, this bathroom with its shower stall might well turn out to have inspired a certain very famous scene. Of course, this was sheer speculation on my part; after all, Hitch couldn’t have fit inside that bathroom unless they’d built it around him.

Beyond number eight’s natural ambiance, Jerry had added his own touches, namely a stack of well-thumbed men’s magazines (Hustler, Club, Gallery) on the junky dresser, which was also home to a bottle of baby oil, a king-size box of Puffs tissues, a boom box with a scattering of audio cassettes (Boston, Foghat, ZZ Top), two bottles of Dewar’s, one unopened, and a bathroom water glass with Scotch traces, adding more circles to the wooden dresser top. Everything a sophisticate like Jerry required for a rewarding night in.

I didn’t touch much of anything. Whether that was to prevent fingerprints or to avoid catching something, I’ll leave for you to decide. But I found what I was looking for: a spiral notebook in a drawer by the bed that had all of Jerry’s surveillance notes. Each day was dated and ran to three pages. Three weeks and a few days worth.

Everybody in the trade took such notes. But hanging on to them was a dangerous practice. On those rare occasions that I took the Passive role, I made sure my notes were cryptic, never including the name or even initials of the target or any secondary subjects.

And by the time the Active half of the team showed up, a month or more of such information would be distilled- “He takes breakfast at the diner on Vermont Place every morning around seven,” “She walks the dog when she gets home from work, between five and five-thirty,” “He smokes a joint in the hot tub on his deck every night at eleven,” and so on. You transferred information along verbally, like the Indians used to pass their lore from generation to generation.

And any notes were disposed of. Burned, usually.

Jerry had names or initials and times and dates. Perfect for my purposes. But also another reason to wonder why he’d lasted as long as he had, or why somebody as skillful as Nick Varnos-staging accidental deaths was maybe the hardest kind of hit to pull off-had for ten fucking years put up with this douchebag.

Part of why I stopped by the Saddle Up was to remove any trace of Jerry. So I packed his suitcase, including everything from his clothes (here at least he did well- they were as bland as mine, a page out of a Sears catalogue) to his stroke books, from his Dewar’s to his boom box with blues-rock cassettes. Toiletries, too. Included among the deceased’s effects were a. 38 Colt Super Automatic from his nightstand drawer and the box of slugs that went with it.

I saved out a HENDRIX LIVES t-shirt (Hendrix maybe, not Jerry) and used it to rub away any fingerprints I might have left. Better than going near that box of Puffs.

When the one-room suite was devoid of Jerry’s personality and had been returned to its own natural charming state, I hauled the suitcase out and stuffed it in his trunk. Jerry had another handgun in there-a Colt Diamondback revolver in a little belt holster-and two boxes of ammunition for it. Just sitting there.

Fucking idiot-what if a cop, suspecting a DUI, had stopped him and found this? Or worse, what if just now I’d gone through a stop sign or something, unfamiliar with Boot Heel, and got stopped, and the fuzz checked the trunk when they ran my driver’s license (a phony) and found it didn’t go with a red Mustang?

Shit, if I hadn’t already killed that fuckwad, I’d have gladly done so now. It was all I could do not to drive back to that lonely road and run over him a few more times.

Anyway, I used the Hendrix t-shirt to wipe any potential prints off any surface I touched, then drove the Mustang back into Boot Heel. I found a parking space not far from the Four Jacks in front of the Old West Museum amp; Gift Emporium-open but doing scant business-and (with some more Hendrix wiping) left the Mustang there.

With the keys in the dash, and the windows rolled down.

I had checked the registration and Jerry’s name wasn’t on it-at least, not any name I knew him by. Probably he’d bought it specifically for this gig, paying cash and using false I.D. Should any cops lay hands on it, there was no reason to think it would lead to Jerry, either the Jerry who lived somewhere with a straight cover story, or the Jerry who lay on a dirt highway with a head looking like a Halloween pumpkin some nasty neighbor kids kicked in.

Might have made one of the more interesting wagers in Boot Heel tonight-betting somebody how long it would take the Mustang to disappear.

Personally I didn’t give a shit where the Mustang wound up. I was just looking to get rid of it and simplify matters in a way that would buy me a day or two. With his skidmark puss, Jerry was unrecognizable, and when (next county over) he was found, whenever he was found, the wheels of justice should grind fairly slowly. At least as slowly as mine had over Jerry.