Max Collins - The first quarry

“Your girl’s just another in that long line?”

He nodded. “The bastard’ll discard her like the rest of the hundred fuck-bunnies he’s run through.”

“Would you take her back?”

“In a goddamn heartbeat.” He pushed a half-eaten slice away. “You think I’m a pussy, Jack?”

Kind of.

“No,” I said. “She’s just going through a phase. So then, what? You’ll head back to Evanston?”

“Yeah. Or anyway to Naperville. That’s where my folks live. That’s also the Chicago area. But I’ll crash in some motel, first. I can’t drive after all this beer.”

“Don’t blame you. Then you’ll head home tomorrow?”

“First thing.”

That was good to hear.

He seemed like a nice kid. Would have been a drag having to kill him.

By four o’clock that afternoon, I had resumed my post in the split-level, and while my space heater and my radio and my dwindling supply of 7-Eleven delicacies were waiting patiently for me, the brunette’s white Corvette had finally departed.

This was good news, or anyway news, as it seemed to indicate Annette had not moved in over break with Professor Byron after all. That might have cleared a path for me to slip across the street, especially after sundown, and close the book on the supposedly famous writer, only another car was out front.

I knew whose car this was-a yellow Corvair from the early sixties, a model known to have a few deficiencies, such as leaking oil, impaling its driver on the steering column in a collision, sending noxious fumes into the interior, and occasionally blowing up. This specimen seemed pretty much in one piece, with dents here and there and twice as many anti-war and anti-Nixon bumper stickers as Tom’s

This questionable ride belonged to one of the four male students from the Writers’ Workshop who Professor Byron was known to advise. For just a moment I considered going over there and snuffing both of them, since they were both dead men, the prof my contracted target and his student a Corvair driver.

Around six-thirty, already dark as midnight but with a nearly full moon washing the snow an ivory-blue, the student exited-a skinny kid in a gray parka and jeans and galoshes. His nest of facial hair stuck out like a porcupine was sitting on his face. A porcupine with granny glasses on its ass. The prof stayed in the doorway and watched his charge stride toward the Corvair with the confidence of a Lafayette Escadrille pilot about to go up after the Red Baron. I figured his odds of getting home were about the same.

That left the prof alone in his cottage, and me wondering if I should spend a couple of more days updating the obviously flawed surveillance info I’d been given, before laying my ass on the line. Maybe Annette hadn’t moved out-maybe she’d skedaddled to the shopping mall over on the southeast side, to kill time while Professor Loverboy dealt with a student who was presumably stopping by to deliver breathless prose and not a blowjob.

By that reasoning, the brunette might wander in right when I was fulfilling the contract. If all I had to do was pop this fucker, that might be worth the risk-I could be in and out in minutes. But I had that extra assignment of rounding up certain manuscript pages and disposing of them-that “challenge” Broker had given me, as his new boy.

An hour went by and no Annette. The radio station had cycled through its playlist for the fourth or fifth time, and “American Woman” was back on when I decided to do something more than sit on my ass. I had Annette’s address, which was in Coralville, a small suburb to the west of Iowa City. I drove there.

She was on the second floor of a little modern redbrick apartment complex, six apartments up, five down, all with exterior entrances, the walkway above providing the first floor with an overhang. A laundry room on the lower level seemed to be the only shared living experience here.

The apartment facility was just a block off Coralville’s busy retail and restaurant strip, an artery pumping monetary life’s blood into the little suburb. And I was able to park in the lot of a Sambo’s restaurant on the corner, the Maverick nosed in against the cement-block six-foot wall that separated the restaurant from its residential next-door neighbor, but with a clear view of Annette’s digs. She was on the second floor, apartment 204, with her white Corvette parked in a specified spot in the complex’s tiny parking lot.

The curtained windows of her apartment glowed yellow. She was in there, maybe writing. She had to produce material for her advisor to advise her over, right? For maybe an hour, I sat watching those windows, figuring if she stayed in her nest until, say, midnight, she wasn’t likely to go back out and rejoin the prof.

This wasn’t scientific. I was learning on the job, which is to say making it up as I went along. But I was giving serious thought to making tonight the night- drive back to my split-level and go over to the cobblestone cottage and get this the fuck over with. The longer I hung around, it seemed, the more wild cards were getting played. In a game like that, you either play what’s dealt you and hope for the best, or you get the hell away from the table.

And what would the Broker say if I bailed on my very first contract? Not only would I be a disappointment to my new employer, I’d be an instant loose end. This wasn’t the kind of job, wasn’t the kind of business, where you can apply, get a position, discover you’re not right for it, shake hands with the boss and say thanks anyway and go along your merry way, until the next position came along. No. I knew the Broker was a middleman in the murder business, and that was dangerous information to possess, in and of itself. On top of that, I knew about the Concort Inn and could extrapolate that the Quad Cities was Broker’s base of operations.

If I didn’t want to go through with this, I would have to disappear and leave behind my A-frame on the lake and money in the bank and still risk getting shot to shit by some asshole sent by the Broker.

Amway and the Jehovah’s Witnesses were looking better all the time.

I’d been watching maybe another half hour when she came out of her apartment and trotted down the central staircase, a big white purse on a strap over her shoulder. Again she was in the white leather coat with the white fur collar; her bell bottoms were dark blue with black polka dots that didn’t show till she’d crossed the street and walked right past where I was parked.

I watched her go into the Sambo’s.

What the hell. I went in after her. I hadn’t eaten since the pizza at the Airliner.

The restaurant had a motif based on the old children’s book about little black Sambo chasing tigers around a tree until they turned into butter, which must have seemed like a fun concept for a chain of pancake houses until Black Power came along. The Sambo kid on the menus and in decorative art in this aggressively bright orange-and-white restaurant was not black, rather some vague turbaned Oriental type, like that wouldn’t offend somebody in a college town like Iowa City.

The place was damn near empty, Sunday night during break, a few families in booths and a couple of truck drivers at the endless counter, with the young waiters and waitresses in their orange outfits and caps stricken with that hollow expression that says, How did my life bottom out so soon?

I took a counter seat and ordered some eggs and pancakes and sausage and iced tea. I was able from here to see Annette, seated by herself in a corner booth, reading a book whose title was Armies of the Night; I wasn’t actually seated close enough to see that, but I’d picked up on it when I walked past her.