Max Collins - The first quarry

I took a position at the electric hand drier, which I turned on, initiating its electronic wheeze, just as he finally flushed. My back was to him, so he couldn’t see I was wearing black Isotoner gloves and that the nine millimeter was in my right hand. I was hoping he had some sense of hygiene, because this would be easier if he did.

And, bless him, Leon went to a sink and began to wash up. “Man!” he said, and smiled over at me, flashing two gold teeth under the thickness of mustache. “I ain’t gettin’ any younger.”

I turned and showed him the nine millimeter and said, “You might not be, at that.”

He frowned; I’ve never seen more wrinkles in a face that young. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.

“Are you shitting me, white boy?”

“No. You’ve done enough shitting for both of us. This is a straight robbery. Behave yourself and we’ll be fine.”

“You got your fuckin’ nerve — ”

I was in the corner between the sinks and the drier, good positioning in case Charlie got impatient or curious or something and came in looking for Leon.

“Very slowly,” I said, “take off that coat. I can see there’s something heavy in the right pocket, and since it’s probably a gun, I’d encourage you to go nowhere near it.”

“Fuck you!”

But he did it. He unbuttoned the jacket and folded it in half and laid it carefully across the sink, not wanting it to go onto the bathroom floor. Couldn’t blame him.

“Now carefully empty your pockets onto that jacket.”

He did. He had various stuff, including a fat diamond money clip, but what attracted my attention was the straight razor.

“Okay. Now get into that stall. Make it the one you used.”

That was the closer of the two.

I didn’t have to ask him to put his hands up. As my gun and I moved forward, he backed up toward the stall, and edged in, his eyes moving fast. He was thinking. He was planning.

“You wait five minutes,” I said, “before you come out. I’m going to leave you your watch. You exit any sooner, and you’re a dead man.”

Something in his eyes relaxed.

“No problem,” he said. “Just take my money and split. Everybody got to make a living.”

“I like your new attitude. Stay with that.”

He was in the stall now.

“Turn around,” I told him.

“Don’t do that, man. Don’t knock me out! You don’t need to do that shit.”

“I won’t. Turn around.”

With a sigh of defeat and a disgusted sneer, he did.

“You can put your hands down,” I said.

He did, and that relaxed him.

When I cut his throat with the razor, the arterial spray got on the wall and maybe a little on him, but not a drop on me. I hate razors and knives, but they do have their uses, if you take a little care.

I arranged him on the floor so that he knelt over the bowl, where he did the rest of his bleeding into the water. That gave him the look of a guy throwing up, though the scarlet Rorschach test dripping on the wall was a dead giveaway.

I shut him in there.

The razor I threw in the sink. I wouldn’t be needing it. His leather coat I stuffed in the trash receptacle. Finally I glanced at myself in the mirror, checking for blood spatter I may have missed: nothing. My horrific greased-back hair was still in place.

In the outer area of the rest stop, through those smoky glass doors, I could see that no other cars had pulled in. I went over and grabbed that yellow plastic V saying CLOSED FOR CLEANING and placed it out in front of the MEN’S, but not blocking the path.

Quickly I went out to the Eldorado and knocked on the driver’s side window.

Charlie’s mustached face glowered at me; he didn’t have his red hat on now, and his head was shaved. Behind his window, he said, “What the fuck?”

I made a “roll the window down” motion, and he powered down the glass and said, “Do I know you?”

Hope not.

“Listen, your friend is in the restroom and he’s very sick. He asked me to come and get you.”

“Aw, shit, what is it now?”

That was to himself, or to the absent Leon; but I answered, anyway. “I don’t know, but he’s puking his head off. He said he was throwing up blood!”

Now some alarm came into Charlie’s face, and I stood back as he shut off the Caddy engine and shoved the keys in his pocket and threw open the door and rushed into the rest stop and on into the bathroom, past the yellow inverted-V CLOSED floor sign, with me on his heels.

He opened the stall door and said, “Charlie, what the fuck?”

I shoved the nine millimeter against the small of his back, right up against the leather of his coat, which muffled the blast, not as good as a silencer, but not bad under the circumstances. His spine must have been severed, because he dropped like a bag of laundry on top of the kneeling Leon. Just to make sure, I put one through his head, and red and white and gray and green splatter daubed the porcelain and steel fixtures, glistening and shimmering like spilled liquid mercury.

Somebody else could pull into the rest stop any time, and I had no desire to rack up collateral damage. So I worked fast, searching Charlie’s coat pockets, coming up with a big shiny. 357 magnum and the Caddy keys. In hopes of robbery being the initial motive the local cops came up with (eventually the mob connection would surface), I performed the distasteful task of checking Charlie’s pants pockets, too. And, listen, it had already smelled bad in there, thanks to Leon’s chicken attack. With Charlie vacating in his trousers after I blew his spine apart, this was turning into a real hellhole.

But Charlie had his own fat money clip, and between Charlie’s and Leon’s cash, I gave it a quick count of three thousand and change. Not a bad perk, and the diamonds on Leon’s clip were real. I left the razor behind, still down in the sink. Not my style.

I did stay long enough to clean up one mess: I ran some water and got that Brylcreem out of my hair, then stuck my head under the electric hand drier for a few seconds. When I got that girl out of the trunk, I didn’t want to look like a total fucking nerd.

When I opened the Caddy trunk, its light clicked on and the girl gazed up at me with those big brown eyes, and a wide range of human emotion-fear, surprise, relief, hope, confusion-flashed one at a time through them, each punctuated by a blink. Under the duct tape gag, she made an unnnngggh that, while not as impressive as what her eyes had done, was fairly communicative at that.

“No questions,” I said, as I peeled off the tape. “We have to get out of here, right now.”

She complied as I helped her up and out of the compartment. That those long lovely legs had been somehow compressed into that space seemed as impossible as the old one-thousand clowns and one car gag. Her white leather coat with the white fur collar and a green pants suit with ruffle-neck blouse looked remarkably fresh, but her hair was every which way. The innocuous brick structure of the rest stop was our backdrop, nothing to hint at the horrors within the men’s room. She was stiff and I had to walk her over to the Maverick as gently as if this tall young woman were a little old lady. I guided her into the front seat passenger side, and came around and got in behind the wheel.

Luck was kind: nobody had pulled in here off I-80 to take a break or a dump or piss or any combination thereof in the vital seven minutes or so it had all taken. I had passed a larger rest stop perhaps twenty miles back where many trucks were parked, their drivers snoozing, but this stop was too small to accommodate more than a handful of semis, and we didn’t have even one at the moment. Nice to catch a break.