Max Collins - The last quarry

Janet’s eyebrows went up. “A problem?”

“And I know just what to do about it,” Julie said. She grabbed the passing waitress and said, “Scotch rocks, double-my sissy sis’ll no doubt want a mar-garita…and how about you, big boy?”

“Coke,” I said.

“Give him a twist of line,” Julie said, “and let him live dangerously…and keep ’em comin’.”

When the waitress had departed, Janet leaned across the booth and took some of the stress out on her sister, saying bitchily, “That’s always your solution, isn’t it? Getting drunk!”

“Or stoned,” Julie said, “or laid. But this? This I think calls for drunk.”

That was when I noticed someone at the bar, his back to us, as he watched us in the mirror-a brawny big-shouldered guy in gray sweats in his twenties with a close-cropped blonde haircut.

“Excuse me, ladies,” I said, and slipped out of the booth.

I sat on the stool next to the guy.

“Hello, DeWayne,” I said.

Jonah Green’s flunky, his sweatshirt labeled usmc, sipped his beer and said, “Don’t talk to me. Are you crazy?”

“That’s a matter of opinion. Why are you here, DeWayne? What are you up to?”

DeWayne didn’t look at me. He whispered: “Mr. Green has me following that crazy cunt.”

“Julie?”

He forgot to whisper this time, saying, “You see any other crazy cunt around here? Mr. Green was afraid she’d screw things up. With the…you know, job.”

“ My job, you mean,” I said.

Now he looked at me.

The close-set sky-blue eyes in the oval Clutch Cargo-ish face stared at me unblinkingly; his upper lip approximated a sneer. This was apparently his menacing expression.

“Your job,” he said nastily, “which apparently includes hangin’ out in public with the intended? What are you doin’, making contact with-”

I put my hand on his sleeve, and smiled pleasantly. “Leave, DeWayne. Go home. Right now.”

“You can’t-”

“Do you want to die, DeWayne?”

That stopped him. But then he managed, “You don’t-”

“Leave, DeWayne. Or die. Those are the options. Choose.”

DeWayne turned away and looked at himself in the mirror. He was bigger than me and younger and he didn’t like taking this from a geezer like me-he was trembling, whether with rage or fear or some combo, I couldn’t say.

But take it from me he did. He finished the beer, threw a crumpled five-spot on the bar, and headed out the door almost at a trot.

I joined the sisters at the booth.

“Who was that?” Janet asked.

I looked sharply at Julie and shook my head; she, of course, knew who DeWayne was, but she nodded back, almost imperceptibly, and I told her sister, “Nobody, really. Just somebody I thought I knew, but didn’t.”

“Well, that’s funny…” Janet’s eyes narrowed, watching where DeWayne had gone. “…I’m pretty sure he was at the library today, just hanging around.”

I said nothing.

We spent several hours in the bar, and I asked Janet and Julie lots of questions about their father, about his business, his private and public life. I was fairly subtle about it, and both young women were drinking enough to make my information-gathering relatively inconspicuous. By the time the evening was over, I had plenty of information on Jonah Green and his whereabouts and his patterns.

When it was time to go, I drove Janet home in my rental Ford-she’d had way too many margaritas-while Julie drove her sister’s Geo. Julie was pretty drunk, too, but she was used to it, and could navigate well enough. Still, I followed her, to make sure she stayed on the road.

No one tailed us, by the way-just as there’d been no sign of DeWayne in Sneaky Pete’s parking lot. Maybe he’d had the sense to follow my advice and survive.

Julie parked the Geo in the lot behind the building and entered through the kitchen to meet us at the apartment’s front door. I carried the plastered Janet in my arms like a bride over the threshold into the apartment. Julie, with a display of intense concentration, worked at getting the door night-latched, and made her way to the couch-this time I didn’t have to throw her over there.

I carried Janet into the bedroom, left the lights off, and settled her on top of the covers, taking off her shoes but otherwise letting her sleep there, fully clothed. Already she was snoring gently.

Then I returned to the living room and checked the door, finding it locked and successfully night-latched. I turned off the lights and only a little neon from the street pulsed in-I glanced at the double windows past Janet’s comfy chair and footrest; across the way, the windows of my surveillance post were dark and anonymous.

Janet’s sister was curled up on the couch, in a fetal position. The heat was on but cool air leeched in those double windows, so I went off and found a blanket and came back and covered Julie with it.

She stirred a little and looked up at me, blinking. “You…you really do love her, don’t you, you big jerk?”

I said nothing.

“I thought so,” she said, and smiled a little, and then it faded dramatically and she said, “Daddy… Daddy’s got something bad planned for Jan, doesn’t he?”

“You’re on a roll,” I said.

I sat on the edge of the couch. I felt fond of this kid, suddenly, and I didn’t even want to fuck her. I was getting so goddamn soft.

“Were you supposed to do it?” she asked.

“Do what?”

“The bad thing to Janet for Daddy.”

I nodded.

“And now…instead…you’re going to stop it?”

I touched her lips with a finger. “Get some sleep. You know where the bathroom is? ‘Cause you’re gonna have to piss like a racehorse.”

“I know where the bathroom is…Some night?”

I frowned at her. “What about ‘some night?’ ”

She got herself more comfortable. “Some night, when you’re sittin’ all bored and shit…with only my mousy little sis to keep you company…?”

“Yeah?”

“Maybe it’ll occur to you.”

“What will?”

“That you wound up with the wrong sister.”

I stared at her. She did her drunken best to stare back.

“Well,” I said, “you are more like what I deserve.”

In a goofily good-natured way, she said, “Fuck you,” stuck her tongue out and smiled and I tucked her in some more and she was asleep.

My nine millimeter and I went out and prowled the back alley, including checking the parked cars in the lot beyond, where the Geo was. Then I came back in and locked up and returned to the bedroom.

Janet was still on top of the covers, fully dressed, really sawing logs now, looking not at all glamorous, and incredibly beautiful.

I placed my nine millimeter on the bedstand beside me and stretched out next to the slumbering woman, and lay there in the dark, elbows winged, staring at the ceiling.

The explosion jolted me from deep asleep to fully awake-or the sound of it did, anyway, coming from outside the apartment, to the rear.

Still fully dressed from the night before, I sat up straight, as if from a nightmare; but I was waking to a nightmare, and knew it, as I noted the absence of Janet on the rumpled bed next to me.

I grabbed the nine millimeter off the nightstand and bolted toward the noise, which had shifted from full-scale world-rattling boom to lion’s roar of fire punctuated by snapping of flames.

The kitchen opened onto a small unenclosed porch and a half-flight of stairs down to the alley, across which lay half a block of metered parking lot, from which the smoke and flames curled a question mark into an overcast morning sky.

Something had exploded in that lot, and it didn’t have to be Janet’s car, could have been someone else’s or something else entirely, gas main maybe, only I knew in my tightened gut that it did have to be Janet’s car…