Max Collins - The last quarry

I was nearby, pretty much directly behind my subject, going through old bound volumes of Life magazine from the ’40s and ’50s, stopping at the surprisingly frequent shots of starlets in bathing suits.

A conversation started up between my librarian and the Yuppie, for which lip-reading would not have been a necessary step-in fact, the obnoxious Yuppie made it hard not to overhear. Apparently this whole quiet-it’s-a-library concept was foreign to him.

He flicked the HELP DESK sign and said, with a grin that told me he appreciated his own wit, “ I could use some help.”

The librarian I could barely make out, and her back was to me.

But I think she said, “Rick-please. Not here.”

He leaned a palm against the edge of the desk and his smile was a white slash in the too-tanned face.

“Come on-you’re not still mad…”

She said nothing, her head down. She was doing paperwork, or pretending to.

The smile disappeared and he leaned in, his expression approximating humility. “Baby. Come on. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

On her response, I heard her just fine: she wasn’t talking any louder, but the words were crisp and clear.

“Next time,” she said, looking right up at him, “I’ll call nine-one-one. I swear I will.”

He drew back; shrugged. “Hey. You pissed me off. Deal with it.”

She slammed a book shut.

“I am dealing with it,” she said.

“Baby…”

“You had no right-no right.”

And now she looked back down at her work.

“It’s over, Rick,” she said. “Don’t make me call security.”

He leaned in again, got another smile going, though it bordered on a sneer. “Why-you want another scene?” He laughed and it sounded forced. “Sometimes I think you like scenes.”

She said nothing. Did not look up at him.

He turned to go, but had only moved a step when he looked back and said, “Hey-pick you up. Usual time.”

“No. No!”

“Meet you, then.”

He shot her a goodbye with a gun of thumb-and-forefinger, and sauntered off, cocky as hell. She didn’t bother to reply.

Pity-seems like nobody ever hires you to kill a prick like that.

Another librarian, a busty, almost plump woman also in her early thirties, moved in and pulled up a chair-on-wheels from somewhere and sat behind the desk with Janet. The second librarian had on a bright pink blouse and darker pink slacks; her hair was very blonde and big and sprayed, and her makeup was loud. Fuckable, though.

“Janet,” she was saying, making no attempt to keep her voice down, “you have got to do something about that creep! ”

Janet shrugged. “I told him it’s over, Connie. I told him just now.”

“Do you think he heard you? You think he ever really listens to anything you say? Listen to me, sweetie. He is going to really hurt you, next time.”

Janet, who had swiveled on her own wheeled chair, to face her colleague, sighed and shook her head. “Maybe…maybe he’s right. Maybe it was my fault.”

“ Your fault?”

She was shaking her head. “I shouldn’t’ve made him mad. I mean, I knew about his temper. When you touch a hot stove and get burned, you can’t blame the-”

Connie put her hand over Janet’s mouth and leaned in closer.

“Talk like that,” she said, “and I’ll send you to the emergency room.”

Then Connie withdrew her hand from Janet’s mouth and cupped her friend’s chin with that same hand and leaned in close. I had to lip-read now, but I got it. Probably I’d have got it just from the busty one’s compassionate expression and the other’s chagrined one.

“Do you hear what I’m saying, Janet?”

“I do. I do. I’m not seeing him anymore.”

“And if he hurts you-the police?”

A laugh that wasn’t a laugh. “What good would that do, in this town?”

Connie’s features were stone. “They have to write it up. And you can see a lawyer if you need to. There are ways to deal with jerks like Rick.”

She was right about that.

Connie said, “Word to the wise,” and shook a mildly scolding finger, got up, and moved away, guiding the wheeled chair back to wherever the hell she got it.

A few moments later, Janet left the help desk and I followed her, a half room of shelved books between us, me seeing her flickeringly as I moved along, strobe style. Or maybe I was just getting punchy spending all this time around so many books.

Finally she stopped at a water fountain.

Nervously, she put something in her mouth-a pill?

She bent at the fountain and, when she pressed the handle to create an arc of water, her sleeve rode up a little, and revealed part of a purple bruise.

I shook my head.

Rick might have been somehow important or connected in this town (as the busty librarian had indicated), but that didn’t make him any less a brutal dunce. Takes a lot of awful people to make up this old world.

From another conversation Janet and Connie had, I got the drift that my target’s work day was drawing to a close, so I gathered my jacket from a chair at a reading table and headed outside into the cold, clean-if thin-mountain air.

Homewood reminded me a little of Boulder, Colorado, minus the heavy tourism. Thirty thousand or so had the privilege of living in this idyllic little burg, where mountains edged a sky so blue, clouds should’ve paid rent for the privilege. I felt lucky to have a contract take me to such pleasant if dull surroundings; it helped make up for having to kill somebody as harmless as Janet Wright seemed to be.

Dusk was settling when Janet emerged from the library with her friend Connie and another librarian, whose name was Don, my surveillance had gathered. A nerd.

From my rental vehicle-a blue Taurus (was that all these fucking rental agencies had these days?)-I watched as the librarians paused to chat and then go their separate ways.

Janet’s vehicle was parked on the street-I’d observed her going out and feeding the meter every two hours, during the six I spent in the library. She got into the little yellow Geo, mid-’90s vintage, started it up and pulled away, moving right across my line of vision.

Her rear bumper had stickers that I could have predicted-she was still advertising KERRY/EDWARDS 2004, among other lost leftist causes-and started my own car and took off after her, in slow pursuit.

I followed her, usually with a few cars between us, through sleepy Homewood, from the downtown and on through a quietly affluent residential section; it was the kind of place Norman Rockwell could have painted, though had he spent much more than an afternoon here, he might have hanged himself out of boredom.

Soon the town had disappeared, as had my cover traffic, and she was out into the countryside, making my job harder.

Already my point was proven about the staleness of my client’s research: Janet Wright was not headed in the direction of her own apartment, the address for which was the first place I’d checked out getting to town. Nor was there anything in the written reports indicating that anything out this way was a regular stop of hers.

When Janet Wright turned down a lane into a deeply wooded area, I almost missed it; then I caught the tail of her Geo between the trees, and drove on. Pulled into a driveway half a mile later, turned around, and followed.

In five minutes, I caught sight of her pulling off the lane into a private drive. Cutting my speed to almost nothing, I waited until she was well out of view, then moved on by, and parked alongside the road, what there was of it. I walked back and slipped into the trees along the private drive; the snow on the ground was minimal, my shoes crunching on leaves and twigs underneath the dusting, and I was in no danger of earning my Inconspicuous Tracker Merit Badge. But I didn’t worry about that-I could see her getting out of her Geo, fiddling for her keys in her purse, clearly oblivious to my presence.