Max Collins: Quarry's cut

After all, I had killed people overseas for little money, and killed somebody since coming home for no money… why not do it for real money, for a change? And Broker was talking very real money-two thousand and up for a simple hit.

All of which stands as a gross simplification of what the Broker said to me. I have tried on several occasions to record the scene, but have always failed. I have good, almost uncanny recall; I’ve proven that, I think, in the three accounts I wrote previous to this one. But that first meeting with the Broker stays a blur in my mind; the sensations of it, the gist of what was said, that much I can tell you.

And I can tell you also I was an easy sale. Not that I was bloodthirsty or anything: I wasn’t. I’m still not.

But he approached me at a time in my life when I could have gone in about any direction. I had nothing left but the contradictory notion that while life and death are meaningless, survival remains essential. It doesn’t seem to make sense, I know, but it seemed to make sense in Vietnam, which is where I learned it. And it has stayed with me till this day.

The Broker was the middleman between client and killer. He used to describe himself as “sort of an agent,” and it’s a good description of his role. A client would come to him with a problem, and the Broker would come to somebody like me to see to it a means was provided for solving that problem.

Actually, I was part of a team, a two-man team breaking down to active (hitman) and passive (back-up man). I usually played the former role, but not always. For most of the five years I worked through the Broker, I was teamed with a guy named Boyd, who has since been killed. But then so has the Broker.

The first year and a half or so, I filled in here and there, never working with a steady partner. Until Broker teamed me with Turner.

We did five jobs in six months, Turner and I, which is probably at least one too many. And maybe that had something to do with why Turner fucked up on number five. You can get sloppy, working too many jobs too close together. You can get careless. You can also get dead.

Which is why I resented what happened in Twin Cities, at the carnival.

It was the second week in June, cool, overcast, getting toward dusk; the carnival was on the fair grounds, which lay somewhat uneasily between Minneapolis and St. Paul, in the midst of residential and business areas. A big show, with a score of crazy rides: their bizarre, oversize metallic shapes-the Yo-Yo, the Loop, Zipper, Octopus, Tilt-a-Whirl, Doubledecker Ferris, Death-Wish Roller Coaster-rose out of the city of tents like lunatic skyscrapers. Along the wide, occasionally puke-strewn sawdust streets of this city, people strolled, particularly young people, sometimes couples, often-times packs of three or more of a single sex, middle-class kids in tight jeans and fresh faces, while skinny men with smoldering cigarettes behind ears and dark tee-shirts on and dark complexions or perhaps just in need of baths stood on platforms and spoke into loud, muffled mikes, extolling the desirability of viewing In Person the Fattest Boy In The World, the Smallest Living Man In The World, the Strangest Teenage Women In The World (one of whom had no face, thanks to the radiation color TVs emit) and a woman who before your very eyes turned into a gorilla, and no doubt was the only one of her kind In The World, and other men, not all of them skinny in black tee-shirts but many of them needing baths, coaxed passersby into throwing balls and throwing money away (sometimes literally, in the dime/quarter/dollar toss) in pursuit of prizes of no discernible worth, including stuffed animals of indeterminate species and cigarette lighters with the American flag on them.

The mark was a guy running a game tent, a red canvas cubby-hole where you threw baseballs at milk bottles. You could win anything from a tiny stuffed skunk to a pink stuffed dog the size of a Volkswagen. Odds are you’d win the skunk.

The guy was short, fat and dark, Jewish maybe, or Italian. Could be either one, if he was a mob guy hiding out, which I figured him to be.

Understand, I was never told why this or any mark was getting hit, other than somebody wanted them hit bad enough to pay good money. Much of what I did for Broker was tied to the mob but only in that clients were often referred through mob sources; relatively little of what I or any of us did for Broker was directly Family-related. They had their own people to do that kind of thing, and only in special instances would it prove useful to them to bring in somebody outside, like me…

However sometimes it was pretty obvious a hit was a Family contract, and this time was one of them: the way the guy looked, not just his ethnic look but his vaguely urban speech and his almost polished manner-none of it fit the carny image. Not that everybody connected with the carnival was some kind of lowlife or deadbeat: not at all. But the professional carny men have a look to them, as does the summer help, the kids (including pretty college girls, some of whom work game tents, others of whom work as strippers) who do the carny number as a money-making lark. A guy like our short, fat, dark, somewhat well-bred mark sticks out like a nun at a nightclub.

I went over to his tent and threw some balls.

“Cool day,” I said.

“Cool,” he agreed. His voice was high-pitched, like it hadn’t changed yet.

I seemed to be his first customer in some time, but he wasn’t particularly excited about the prospect.

“How much?” I said, pointing to the pile of baseballs on the counter.

He pointed to the sign that said “3 Balls — 35? Everybody Wins.” His features were bulges in his puffy face. His thinning gray-brown hair was cut short and neatly combed to the side. He was in his early fifties. He wore a Hawaiian print shirt and white pressed slacks. He looked like the host at a country club luau.

I threw three balls and won a skunk.

I threw three more and won another.

“What do I win,” I asked, “if I play again and keep missing?”

“A skunk,” he said.

“I figured. Well. Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

I walked away, passing several other game tents where the pitchmen did everything but reach out and grab me to pull me in for a game.

Shriners were standing around in their fezzes like foreign cops. Some of them were ticket-takers; others just stood and in so doing reminded anyone who cared, that the Shrine was sponsoring all this family entertainment. One of the Shriners was Turner.

He was standing in a small open area between the House of Mirrors and the tent where the Bonnie and Clyde Death Car was being exhibited, and he was watching the pretty young girls in tight jeans go by He was tall, a good three inches taller than my five ten, and while neither of us was overweight, he was leaner looking. His hair was dark brown and shaggy, his complexion pale, almost pasty, with heavy five o’clock shadow; his eyes were dark as his hair and so close set they crowded his nose.

He nodded to me as I approached, saying, “How they hangin’, Quarry?”

“Turner,” I said, nodding back. We stood there a few minutes.

“Lots of nice pussy,” he said, smirking. He did a lot of smirking. His voice was like sandpaper rubbing against itself.

I didn’t say anything for a while.

“You won’t see nicer pussy,” he said. “Young pussy. Nice young pussy. You won’t find pussy any tighter. You know what I’m talking about, Quarry?”

“It seems to have something to do with pussy.”

“Bet your ass it does. You hungry?”

“I could eat.”

So we went over to one of the few food stands that had a counter and stools, and ordered knockwurst sandwiches with grilled onions and peppers, and lemonade, and sat at the far end of the counter by ourselves and ate and talked.