Max Collins - Quarry in the middle

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 told 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?

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.”