Max Collins - Quarry in the middle

Three bodyguards, then…with the ones babysitting the hookers way too busy to be overly bothered with the parking lot.

I hadn’t expected to see any increased security-after all, had everything gone peachy for the boys dumping me downriver, they would just be getting back. They might not even be expected to check in with the boss, who soon would be playing his precious poker game, and disliked being interrupted.

Speaking of which, after I’d kept watch for possibly fifteen minutes, the door to the private poker room abruptly opened, and a familiar yellow-permed figure exited, with Jerry G following her a step or two. They exchanged a few words, he patted the behind of her tight jeans, then slipped back inside as she started toward the lot.

I hopped in the back of the convertible, and positioned myself on the floor behind the front seats. The Firebird was parked about mid-lot, which was its most under-lit section, and I figured I could get away with it. Anyway, I didn’t suppose Chrissy felt she needed any weapon that God hadn’t already granted her, but if she’d upgraded to a revolver or something, and had it handy in her pink purse, I had a shotgun shell available to rearrange her perm.

She got in the car and behind the wheel, started it up, and pulled out, wheels crunching gravel and then I felt the shift onto the smooth blacktop of Main Street. That was when I slipped the double-nose of the shotgun between the seats and into her bare side-I was still tucked below sight of anybody but birds and truckers.

“ Jesus! ” she said, and hit the brakes.

“Keep driving,” I said.

She tried to see me in her rearview mirror, but the angle was wrong. “What?”

“It’s your Coke buddy. I’m not dead. But you will be, if you fuck around.”

“I’m not afraid of you!” she said, terrified. “What if I go one hundred miles an hour and crash us?”

“Then we’d both be dead, only I won’t let you take this baby past forty-five, without reducing your waistline first.”

I poked her flesh with the shotgun’s cold snout.

“You…you wouldn’t shoot me…”

“I think I would. Drive us to the Wheelhouse Motel. Pull in the space at room twenty-eight.”

A maybe three-minute drive followed, proving as uneventful as it was silent. I felt the car slide into the stall, and she shut the car off.

“Now what?” Her voice sounded entirely different, sort of medium-range, that middle ground between alto and soprano, and grown-up. Before, all she’d emitted was a sullen, childish mumble. I realized these last few minutes were the first time I’d heard her speak when she wasn’t bored, or pretending to be, anyway.

I hopped out of the back, facing the room, the shotgun in front me, out of sight from any motel guests who might have been loitering, although there really weren’t any-they were all around the bend down at the Paddlewheel.

“Get out,” I told her.

She gazed up at me in fear and loathing-she looked a little like Tuesday Weld, Dobie Gillis — era, though her cheeks were more sunken; still, it was Tuesday’s smirky kiss of a mouth. Her eyes, dark blue and large, showed no sign she’d been tooting recently, neither dilated nor red. She’d apparently spent her time with Jerry G in the private poker room either filling him in or getting filled by him. Or both.

I unlocked the room and she went in first, and sat on the edge of the bed, still in the pink shirt tied under her nice little titties, her jeans so tight they would have given Brooke Shields pause. The pink purse was beside her, and I reached over and flipped it out of her reach.

She was studying me. Looking to see how much trouble she was in. Looking to see how she could get out of it.

I went to my suitcase on its stand and got out my spare nine millimeter, and left the sawed-off on top of some clothes.

“Let me tell you all about you,” I said, pulling up a chair opposite where she sat, but angling it so my back wouldn’t be entirely to the door.

“You don’t know me,” she said.

“You were a cheerleader in high school, but you had a bad reputation, well-deserved. Your grades and activities were just good enough to get you into college, but you either flunked out or got in trouble over drugs, and so you started dancing. Maybe in Chicago. You caught somebody’s eye in family circles, maybe Jerry G himself, on a visit…but anyway, when Jerry G did see you, he knew you were something special, way too cute to waste on dancing or whoring, and anyway you didn’t like to think of yourself as a whore, so you became Jerry G’s favorite little squeeze. He lavished you with credit cards and cocaine, with never a notion of wasting you in any capacity at the Lucky, and then he got an idea. He knew all about Dickie Cornell’s weaknesses, and he needed somebody to keep an eye on the Brit prick’s activities and ambitions. So you enrolled in community college in River Bluff…probably just a class or two…and you applied as a waitress at the Paddle-wheel. I’ve seen the female help there, it’s like walking around inside a men’s magazine. But you are exceptionally cute, Chrissy, even by Paddlewheel standards, and when Dickie interviewed you, you two hit it off. Were you ever a waitress there, I wonder, or maybe a bartender? Or was it straight up to the Playboy penthouse on the third floor, with hot-and-cold running tootski and all the decadence a nice Midwestern girl could ever dream of?”

She had started frowning about halfway through that. The frown indicated that in about ten years she’d look like hell, even if at the moment she did look heavenly.

She said, “You didn’t get everything right.”

“What did I miss?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Come on,” I prompted her. “What did I get wrong?”

“I wasn’t a cheerleader. I was a pom-pom girl.”

“Even better.”

“And I never danced. I was never a fucking… stripper.”

I could see that. Her boobs were even smaller than Candace’s.

“What were you, then?”

“I was a hostess at a restaurant.”

“An Italian restaurant?”

“Yes, an Italian restaurant! What of it?…Listen, I haven’t broken any laws or anything.”

“You haven’t? When did cocaine get legalized? While I was away on a boat trip?”

“I mean, it’s not illegal to fool somebody. Or to tell somebody else about somebody else.”

“You mean, not illegal to work for Jerry G and spy on Dickie Cornell? You could be right, but when you’re dealing with men whose business is illegal gambling, or in Jerry G’s case, gambling and prostitution and drug-running, legal doesn’t come into it. Somebody feels fucked over, so somebody else…somebody like you, for example…gets killed.”

Her chin came up. Her defiance was almost equal to her fear. “Are you going to kill me?”

“I don’t think so. You almost got me killed, though, tonight, so it’s a possibility.”

Her eyes and nostrils flared. “How did I get you…almost get you…killed?”

“You told Jerry G about the conversation you over-heard today-about me ‘taking care of’ Jerry G for Dickie bird. And then Jerry G handed me over to a couple of pals of his, who took me for what was supposed to be a one-way boat ride.”

The big blue eyes went to half-mast. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t know if you do. I don’t know if I care. Tell me, what’s on Jerry G’s mind tonight?”

She blinked; nice long lashes, under the mascara. “On his mind?”

“Yeah. You just came out of that private poker den of his. What’s his mood?”

“Well…good, I guess. Just getting ready for his regular Friday night poker game.”

“Didn’t seem anxious? Waiting for word on some pressing matter?”