Max Collins - The first quarry

Because my theory now was that this wasn’t about the manuscript Annette had carried out of the prof’s at all. No. The prof was writing his own in-depth book about Lou Girardelli, and Annette was just one phase of his research. He was encouraging her, building her up, to get more out of her, and not just blowjobs. I was convinced the prof had a book in progress that Annette knew nothing about.

And that was the manuscript I’d been sent to destroy.

I paid the check and was coming around the building when I spotted those two black guys again, the supercool dudes in the threads and pimp hats. They were at the rear of what I assumed was their car, a Cadillac Fleetwood Eldorado like the Broker’s, except bright red with white sidewalls, and they were stuffing something into the trunk.

Annette Girard.

The good news was the girl wasn’t dead. The bad news was everything else.

Well, maybe some more good news at that: they hadn’t seen me. Coming around the side of the restaurant like I had, I’d been able to slip behind some snowy bushes, and plaster myself against the stucco wall and peek around.

The two black guys, whose presence at Sambo’s seemed ever less comical, were in their dark leather coats and had just completed dropping Annette into the trunk like a big golf bag that took both their best efforts. Since the girl probably weighed 130 pounds, those efforts had been expended in part by subduing her, though not knocking her out or chloroforming her (even these guys didn’t know where to get chloroform), just slapping some duct tape over her mouth, a slash of it covering much of her lower face, her eyes wide and wild above, and very much conscious. Her wrists were also duct-taped and so were her ankles. She wasn’t struggling now, fairly paralyzed with fear, I’d say.

Then the one in the red hat, who was a little bigger than his partner, held up a palm toward the one in the green hat, who gave him, I shit you not, a high five. The slap rang in the chill night like a gunshot, and they both chuckled, the bigger one’s voice higher, the slightly smaller one having more of a low growly laugh.

They seemed pretty proud of overcoming a coed in a Sambo’s parking lot. Some fucking people.

I watched like an Indian behind a tree, scouting a cowboy campfire, as the red Fleetwood roared to life, the red-hat kidnapper behind the wheel (apparently color-coordinating). The driver made more noise revving up his engine than I would have, had I just thrown a live girl in my trunk (or a dead one for that matter), but no one noticed except me. Then they backed out of their space and drove out of the lot, turning left toward the Coralville strip.

I knew where they were heading, or was at least pretty sure, and by “knew” I mean what city, which since the city was Chicago maybe was a little vague at that.

Anyway, I got into the Maverick and went after them. I was fond of Annette, but that wasn’t why I took what I guess you’d call pursuit. Even on my first job, I knew this was not standard operating procedure; but I had inadvertently learned that her father was our client, and this was after all our client’s daughter being driven away to face a variety of possibilities, the most benign of which wasn’t very benign.

I’d been told by the late Des Moines PI Charles Koenig that Chicago mobster Lou Girardelli was in the middle of a drug turf war with black gangsters. You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes or even Charles Koenig to figure out these two black thugs had been sent to kidnap the mob boss’s daughter for fun and profit. Might be a straight ransom kidnapping, might be a trade-off for turf rights (you get the girl, we get the South Side), might be they wanted to fuck her, torture her, fuck her again, kill her slow, maybe fuck her one more time, and dump her on daddy’s porch. That last one wasn’t the benign possibility, by the way.

Two blocks down and a few more over were the east and west ramps onto Interstate 80. The Caddy would almost undoubtedly take the I-80 E ramp, and head toward Illinois and sweet home Chicago. I hadn’t thought much farther ahead than that, except for the possible futures for Annette outlined above, and had nothing specific in mind.

I did know that if that pair of soul brothers made it to Chicago with Annette, I would not be able to lend the girl a hand. I needed them to interrupt their trip with a stop. It was a good four hours and change to Chicago, and considering they’d just been in a Sambo’s, both guys would need to piss and/or shit, sooner or later. Probably sooner.

I was nervous. I don’t apologize for that. I’d been through rough stuff in the jungle, but a kind of adrenaline high plus the camaraderie of your fellow soldiers got you into it and then through it, and sniper duty was a whole other deal, more a Zen kind of state where nerves didn’t come into play, not if you wanted to survive.

I liked surviving. It was about all I valued. I’d seen plenty of evidence supporting the notion that life and death were meaningless, and God was either nonexistent or uninterested, but what was wrong with breathing? Didn’t a decent meal and getting laid and watching something funny or exciting on television or reading a good western and did I mention getting laid, didn’t that all beat nothingness inside a box six feet under all to shit? So I tend to come down strong on the survival side.

And these two guys were big. They were also black, and fuck you, I’m no racist, I fought alongside black guys and I bet you didn’t; so you go up against a couple of streetwise soldiers for the Black Mafia, taller than you, fifty pounds each on you, probably packing all kinds of shiny steel. Either one of those guys could fuck me up in a fair fight, and together they could throw me down and kick me till a busted rib punctured something and I drowned in my own goddamn blood.

So, hell yes, I was nervous.

But not scared, really. My nine millimeter was on the seat next to me, the radio tuned to an FM station where the Beaker Street program was going, DJ Clyde Clifford doing zonked-out intros to album cuts against electronic space music right out of Forbidden Planet, and while I hadn’t done weed since Nam, Clyde and his offbeat music choices chilled me out nicely, though “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida” (coming up on the drum solo) probably meant we again had a disc jockey who needed a bathroom break.

The landscape was an ivory-washed blue once more, the snow frozen in odd clumps and clusters on the terraced earth along I-80, the temperature having gone up and down today, thawing, freezing, thawing, freezing, making modern art out of precipitation. The trucks were blowing past me again, and the traffic in general was heavier. This didn’t bother me, and even encouraged me, because it meant I could stay several car lengths away from the Fleetwood and not be spotted. An interstate in general was proving a great place to tail somebody; so what if you and somebody else were going in the same direction?

Several exits for gas and restaurants slipped by, including the green dinosaur and the Cove. We drove such a distance that even “Vida” ended, and the Vanilla Fudge doing “Season of the Witch” took over, filled with screams and whimpering, and though normally I dug that cut, I ditched Clyde for an easy listening station. Frank, Dino and Sammy were more like it, anyway. I was doing a job for Frank’s pal, Lou, right? Even if Lou didn’t know it.

As Frank sang “My Kind of Town,” we blew past the Quad Cities where the Broker and his Concort Hotel were. Then, with Bobby Darin doing “Once in a Lifetime,” just west of the Mississippi River and north of Walcott, Iowa, they pulled off at a dinky oasis economically called the I-80 Truck Stop-two diesel pumps, four gas pumps, a small white enamel gas station attached to a slightly bigger restaurant.