Max Collins - The last quarry

Julie glared out the window.

Green shifted his weight, his eyes unblinking but not exactly cold as they settled on me. “I just want you to know, Mr. Quarry, that there will be no efforts made against you. Not with the law, not privately-and a man with my resources could easily do that, either way. But you saved my daughter’s life…and I value that. I do value that.”

Julie’s jaw tightened but her eyes didn’t leave the window.

“Swell,” I said. “I value money. Where is it?”

Green lifted an eyebrow, offered up a half-smile that was wholly conspiratorial. “If you’ll reach under the table…I trust you prefer that I not reach under there myself…you will find a briefcase.”

My left hand found it easily. I hauled the brownleather attache up beside me, near the aisle, away from the girl.

I said, “I’d be annoyed if this contained pepper spray or dye or some such shit.”

“I’m sure you would be,” Green said, reasonably. “But you’ll find it’s all there-just as you asked…” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Small bills. Unmarked.”

“Is this case locked?”

“No.”

“Well, your daughter’s handcuffs are,” I said, a foot in the aisle. “I’m going to the men’s room to count this. I’ll be back with the cuff key.”

Julie, eyes finally leaving the window, chimed in: “Good. That way I won’t have to stick my face in my pie…Mr. Quarry here loves it when I talk dirty, Daddy.”

Green ignored her, saying to me, “You really trust me, trust us, to be here when you get back?”

All sarcasm and attitude gone, serious as a heart attack, Julie leaned forward and gave her father the following advice: “Don’t fuck with this guy, Daddy…”

The magnate lost his cool momentarily: “Why-didn’t you?”

Her upper lip peeled back over teeth as white as they were feral: “No…but not for lack of trying.”

Green heaved his largest sigh yet, gathered his dignity and said to me, “You’ll have to forgive our little family bickering, Mr. Quarry, but-”

“If this isn’t money,” I told him, hefting the briefcase, already half out of the booth, “I’ll find you in hell.”

Green summoned another half-smile but his eyes were narrow. “Isn’t that a little melodramatic, coming from you, Mr. Quarry?”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “But from what I see, melodrama is what you people understand…If you’ll excuse me.”

I could feel the millionaire’s eyes on my back as I headed to the men’s room, passing the redheaded waitress bearing Julie’s pie and coffee as I did.

And before I took the turn toward the restrooms, I could hear the handcuffed girl blurt, “Ah shit,” behind me. Maybe she’d have to stick her face in that pie, after all.

The men’s room (“Pointers”) was another small single-stool affair, but I knew that. I was not a regular here by any means, having only stopped at the Log Cabin twice since coming to the area; but I remembered the window, and the briefcase and I went out it.

DeWayne was behind the wheel, keeping loyal if pointless watch when I slipped in on the passenger side, the briefcase handle in my left hand and the nine millimeter in my right.

The gun was low, in my lap, as I pointed it up at the oval, unformed face.

His eyes were light blue and wide as hell when he looked at me, and then down into the dark unfathomable eye of the automatic’s snout.

“Fuck a duck,” he said.

His voice was on the high side, about a second tenor; but at least he didn’t squeak.

I asked him, “Are you going to make me kill you, DeWayne?”

His eyelashes, which were long and oddly feminine, fluttered. “No. Hell no!”

He put his hands up, shoulder high.

“Put those down,” I told him.

He did.

He seemed a little hurt-here he’d been trying to cooperate and voluntarily raised his hands, and all he got for it was a sharp rebuke. It’s a tough world, DeWayne.

I gestured with the nine. “Now put your weapon and your cell phone, pager, keys, anything in your pockets, on the seat here between us.”

DeWayne carried that out-his gun was a glock-and he was about done when I asked, “What branch?”

He frowned, parsing that, then said, “Marines.”

That got a dry chuckle out of me. “Semper fi, Mac.”

This caused DeWayne to brighten with hope. “You, too…? Where’d you serve?”

“In a real war…Now get out and open the trunk.”

He swallowed, nodded, and within seconds he was crawling up inside the Taurus trunk, a big ungainly fetus making a tight fit. The overflow lot was empty, except for us, and the windows on this end of the restaurant were vacant. So we were cool.

His expression was pitiful when he said, “Thanks.”

“What for?”

“Not…not killing me.”

“It’s early yet,” I said.

And slammed the trunk shut.

Super soldier.

Jonah Green’s face was in his booth’s window when I pulled out casually in DeWayne’s rental vehicle. Julie Green’s face was in the window, too. She was laughing her ass off.

“ Goddamnit! ” her father yelled.

Didn’t take a seasoned lip-reader to make that out.

And that should have been the end of it.

I’d left DeWayne in the trunk of his rental at the rest stop where my Jag waited. The kid’s glock and belongings I left in the front seat-no call to take them and, anyway, I’m not a fucking thief.

I’d cleaned up after myself, disposing of Harry’s brown Taurus in the gravel pit, and doing further clean-up at the cottage, and put the money in a safe deposit box at Brainerd.

Rationalization is a seductive bitch, and I’d pretty much convinced myself that if Harry and Louis turned into floaters on that lake after the thaw, their mob credentials would get the killings written off as Chicago fun and games.

Almost a month had passed when, on an afternoon so overcast that the northwoods were more blue and gray than green and brown, I was lounging in the hot tub in the barnwood-sided building that housed my personal off-season sauna and swimming pool. The world outside was cold as fuck, but my indoors universe was pleasantly muggy, the jet streams working on that chronic low back of mine like Spanish dancers minus the castanets.

I didn’t even have trunks on. Since I was the sole winter resident of Sylvan Lodge, except on the two days a week Jose came around, I would just jog across the private lane to the pool building without even my jacket, and go in and strip down and swim a few laps, sauna a while and wind up in the Jacuzzi. I liked the free feeling, but in retrospect, bare-ass was vulnerable.

And vulnerable is not a condition I like to put myself in.

I was nursing a can of Diet Coke, the tub’s jets feeling just fine, and the events of less than a month ago were nowhere in my mind. Even over the hot tub burble, I heard the sound of the glass doors opening-this was not one of Jose’s days-and my hand drifted toward my folded towel, under which was the nine millimeter.

Bare-ass is one thing; unarmed something else again…

Jonah Green appeared to be alone.

I could see another Lexus parked out front-this one sky-blue-and no driver was apparent. The millionaire was in a jogging suit the color of his name with running shoes and no jacket or topcoat, despite the cold; and his face was red with the weather because of it.

My first instinct was, he wanted me to know (or anyway think) he was not armed.

Very tentatively, he stood there with a glass door slid open, halfway in, and-with a deference I didn’t figure was usual coming from this man-asked, “May I come in?”

I just looked at him.

When he didn’t get permission, he came in just the same, closing the door behind him, and was goddamn lucky he wasn’t dead by the time he turned and said, “Don’t get your balls in an uproar, Mr. Quarry-I’m alone.”