Max Collins - The first quarry

You could access the garage through the basement, which I did (after I got my boots back on), and I put Charlie’s duffel bag in his car’s trunk, where I had a nice piece of luck: I found a fresh roll of electrical tape among some tools of the road. I dropped this in the same pocket as my flashlight. The little TV I rested on the rider’s side seat. On an otherwise empty workbench, I found a garage door opener that made my life easier and soon I’d moved Charlie’s car-a light-green Chevelle-over into the driveway of the split-level (right behind mine) whose garage was where I parked the rental Ford while on stakeout.

Back in my own digs again, I got out of my corduroy coat because I was working up a sweat, despite the cold, and tossed it onto my side of the breakfast nook. The splash of gore on the wall behind where Charlie slumped needed cleaning up, but I’d have to stop and buy paper towels and spray bottles and so on, and that just wasn’t a priority. Right now I wasn’t even sure I’d be in this house again, once I’d left to dispose of Charlie. That would be up to the Broker.

I did have a pocket knife on me, and that allowed me to cut just the right size sheet of plastic from the floor to roll Charlie up in. Some blood and stuff got on the kitchen linoleum, but if I did come back, that would spruce up easy enough. Charlie was awkward and heavy and he smelled bad-and I don’t just mean the cigarette smoke on him and his clothes, that would have been a relief compared to the stink of shit from the bastard evacuating himself when he died. Shouldn’t be critical-he couldn’t help it.

He made a nice fat plastic cocoon when I was done, and I used the entire spool of electrical tape to make it happen. The fucker was literal dead weight, though, and back in my cord jacket again, I had to drag him out of there like a dog pulling a sled. The plastic mummy slid over the top of the frozen snow, and the slope down to the driveway next door was steep enough that Charlie almost got away from me. That might sound funny to you, me chasing a corpse across a bunch of snowy yards in the moonlight, but the idea of it sure didn’t make me smile.

I managed to maintain control over my plastic-wrapped charge, and before long I was down in that driveway, popping the trunk and hauling him up and in. It took some doing, but rigor hadn’t set in yet and Charlie was pretty pliable.

The interior of the Chevelle needed fumigation, but that was a luxury I couldn’t afford; but let me tell you, chain-smoker Charlie was lucky he hadn’t died of cancer. Plus, he was a slob-the front and back seat floors littered with crushed sacks and drink cups from McDonald’s and Dairy Queen, with the back seat a kind of reading room, and not the Christian Science Monitor variety, either: boxing magazines, the National Enquirer and the Globe, men’s magazines like Stag and Male, with guys fighting wild animals on some covers and sexy female Gestapo agents torturing bare-chested he-men on others. Also a few more skin books, notably Dapper and Follies, where the cover models looked like the mothers of your high school pals only in pasties and not aprons.

My karma had caught up with me-I’d killed the fucker, and now was condemned to drive his car. I backed out, drove the fraction of a block to the stop sign at Country Vista and turned left, going past the cobblestone cottage, whose resident seemed suddenly very low on my “to do” list, and made my way to the nearest pay phone, which was at a Standard Station on Dubuque Street.

I called the emergency number and, to his credit, the Broker himself answered it, on the second ring.

“We have a problem,” I said.

“Oh dear.”

“We need to meet.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

“That would be most inconvenient.”

“I’m already driving a car that has something inconvenient in its trunk.”

“Well, good heavens.”

“Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.”

“Do I need to bring someone with me?”

“Let’s put it this way-I’ll be driving a car that I’ll have to leave behind. And I’ll need a ride somewhere.”

“Somewhere?”

“Where that somewhere is will be up to you.”

“Oh. So this is a serious wrinkle.”

“It’s fucking pruney.”

“All right. Understood. I have someone who can help us.”

“Peachy.”

“Where shall we meet?”

“Pick an all-night truckstop on the Interstate, why don’t you? Between where I am and where you are.”

“Fine. Drive east, toward the Quad Cities. Exit at Moscow. Look for the dinosaur.”

“Moscow? Dinosaur?”

“It’s one of those Sinclair gas station dinosaurs-at the Moscow, Iowa, exit.”

“If you say so.”

“When will you be leaving?”

“Now.”

“All right-go ahead. I can organize my end quickly and you have just a little farther to go.”

“I’ll say.”

I hung up.

When I started out, it was close to eleven. Interstate 80 was mostly big fucking trucks and me. I rolled along at seventy and might have found the ivory-cast winter landscape, with its gentle rolling terrain, serenely soothing if the tobacco smell in the car, which cracking the window didn’t seem to help, wasn’t damn near choking me. Charlie would have his revenge…

And then one of those big fucking trucks I mentioned would come along and, ten four good buddy, about blow my ass off the highway. Christ, I was almost glad to see first one and then another pulled over by the cops, or as glad as a guy with a plastic-wrapped stiff in his trunk can be to see the cops.

Charlie had some eight-tracks but it was all shit- country and western-and his radio seemed intent on pulling in Holy Roller preachers (“This is Garner Ted Armstrong, saying…”), additional hillbilly music (“Hello, Darlin’ ”), and really wretched rock stations (if “ABC” by the Jackson Five and “I Think I Love You” by the Partridge Family could be considered rock). Somewhere Charlie was laughing his ass off at me, although not in the trunk-he was nice and quiet back there.

Right alongside the Interstate, the green dinosaur loomed from in front of a Sinclair station truckstop, and I now knew the Broker’s instructions hadn’t been a hallucination on either of our parts. I took the Moscow exit and pulled in to a graveled parking lot filled with bigger, modern day dinosaurs, the semi variety; truckers not taking a nap in their rigs were inside having coffee and cholesterol. The Chevelle I left in a front space in front of God and everybody, and strolled into a brightly lit, wholesome-looking restaurant with a long counter.

I found a window booth, from which I ordered an iced tea, cheeseburger and fries. My waitress was a thousand years old, but was efficient for her age, and I enjoyed my meal while I waited for the Broker to show.

When he came in about fifteen minutes later, he didn’t look any more out of place than Rex Harrison at a 4-H meeting. His tan camel’s hair topcoat probably cost as much as every trucker at the counter’s red-and-plaid jacket put together, and his long face with the angular cheekbones and soft blue eyes and stark white hair wouldn’t be any more memorable than Martians landing, should the cops ever come around asking.

With him was a guy in a denim jacket and blue jeans, hands in the pockets of the jacket, which wasn’t near warm enough for winter. He was a fairly small specimen, maybe five six and of average build, but his burr haircut and dead dark eyes in a chiseled, weathered face said he was ex-military.

That didn’t surprise me. I figured most of Broker’s recruits came from the ranks of Uncle Sam’s cast-offs. His business worked best with outsiders, trained killers who were not mob-affiliated or otherwise burdened with criminal records and backgrounds. Clean-cut all-American mercenaries.