Max Collins: Quarry's cut

“God! You make it sound so clinical… like a goddamn textbook.”

“Maybe I ought to write one. So. Now it’s your turn.”

“What?”

“About the contract. About why the guy took the contract out on you.”

And he told me.

“He thought I killed his daughter,” he said.

“I see.”

“No you don’t. He was wrong. You see… it’s hard to explain. Have you heard of snuff movies?”

“Sure. That’s where somebody is actually killed on camera, right? Snuff flicks. While back there was a lot in the press about them.”

“Right. Snuff movies, slasher movies, they called them. Most of it was media hype, and I’m glad to say it finally died… pardon the expression. The media finally decided the slasher movies were a hoax.. which to a large extent they were. There were some fake ones, but there were some real ones, too. Rumor has it the Manson clan made some, but none of the media people ever turned one up. But I did. Not the Manson snuff movies. But there were a few made in Mexico. Rumor said South America, but it was Mexico. There were four or five of ’em, I found. I bought ’em from a guy… I didn’t even buy them, exactly. I was just a middleman. Jesus. It’s hard to explain.”

“You’re doing fine.”

“Well, like I said before, I know some people in mob circles, some of my backing’s been from them. Like for example, the guy that owns this place, this lodge, he’s a mob-related guy. He’s backing the picture, and one thing he insisted on was we use his place for some of the filming… he’s going to get off on having a print of a porno film shot in this lodge, his lodge, and he can show it to his friends and his girl friends and everybody can get off on it. Anyway, I was doing a favor for some mob people, being a middleman on these slasher flicks. See the goddamn things don’t go into any kind of wide distribution or anything. They’re too fuckin’ hot for that. But these hardcore violence freaks, these S amp; M guys, they’ll pay incredible coin for something like that. One print, going into a private collection and not likely to be seen by anybody but that one collector and maybe some of his pervert friends, is going to bring in maybe ten grand. Ten grand for a little reel of fuckin’ film! It boggles the mind. So I was a middleman for the things, and one of them somehow got seen by this guy Meyers. It was the film that was getting the most attention, of the five or six I handled. Going for something like twelve grand a shot. That was because all the other films had Mexican girls in it. This one had an American. You know how those films go, don’t you? They’re regular porno loops. Except different. The girl thinks she’s just there for the regular sex stuff, sucking, fucking, but then after the sex stuff, right at the climax, the guy, and maybe some other guys who come in the room, takes a razor or something and kills the girl. Really kills her. On film. It’s something. In some of ’em they dismember the girl. It’s something.”

“Something,” I said.

“Well this guy Meyers, he sees the one with the American girl in it, and he’s outraged and he uses his own mob connections to track down the source of the film, and I’m the source, and so he puts the contract out on me.”

“The girl in the film?” I said.

“Yeah,” Castile said, the images from the TV wavering across his face, “you’re right. Just my luck. Meyers’s daughter.”

We talked about a number of things after that. One of them was money: I told him how I wanted to be paid-one thousand now, the rest later-and he liked that, liked the idea of not having to pay any more than that up front, since it showed I had faith in my ability to keep my end of the bargain, to keep him alive so that I would eventually get the rest of the money. I explained that while the later payments should be cash, the first thousand needed to be a check (it’s necessary for me to report some income to the IRS each year) and went into other details about how the check was to be handled, which I won’t go into here.

Another thing we discussed was what he’d been doing to protect himself.

“I’m carrying a gun,” he explained.

“Where?” I asked. Even in the dim light cast by the TV screen, it was apparent he wasn’t concealing a weapon in an outfit that still consisted of a sweatshirt with the word DIRECTOR on it and jeans, same as he’d been wearing when we met hours before.

“It’s in my suitcase,” he said, sheepishly. “I know what you’re thinking… lot of good it’s doing me there. I can see it now, me saying, ‘Excuse me, while I go get my gun out of my suitcase.’”

“Not at all. You can’t go around with a gun on you while you’re working on the film set. You wouldn’t need it, anyway.”

“Are you armed?”

“I left my gun outside.”

“Shouldn’t you get it?”

“Nothing’s going to happen tonight.”

“How can you know that?”

“Hey, I been through this with you before, Castile. Pay attention: we’re snowbound here, and unless Turner and his partner want to kill everybody in the place, you should be safe. And I can’t see Turner or any pro doing that.”

“He could sneak in during the night and then leave.”

“Then we’d be snowbound with a corpse and we’d all have to stick around while the authorities looked into it.”

“Why would that matter to this Turner?”

“Because he’d be leaving his partner behind. As a suspect. I’m not saying we shouldn’t take precautions. Turner’s an idiot, and he might try to fake your death to look like an accident or something.”

“Jesus. What can we do?”

“Wait a minute…”

“What…?”

Footsteps were echoing in the nearby open shaft area, and I put my hand up to silence Castile.

“Jack…?” The voice was Janet’s.

She was wearing a robe, a thin flowered robe that obscured her good figure, and she didn’t have her glasses on; she looked sleepy, as if she’d just woke up. Or somebody woke her up.

“Can I talk to you a moment, Jack?”

“Sure. Excuse me, Castile.”

I took Janet by the arm and walked her into the adjacent room, another living room area, where we stood in the darkness and spoke.

“I’m afraid,” she said.

“What?”

“Afraid. I don’t know why, exactly. I just woke up and was afraid.”

“What woke you?”

“I thought I heard voices.”

“Castile and I were talking.”

“I don’t think you’re what I heard. I know, I know, I’m only one level up from here, and the rooms are sort of open… but I don’t think you’re who I heard. The sound came from above.”

“Are some of the others sleeping on the upper floors?”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s what it was. Somebody upstairs from you, talking.”

“Maybe I dreamed it. It sounded like… arguing.”

“Maybe it was. Harry and Richie and Waddsworth have a little triangle going, I understand.”

“I’ve noticed. So it was them, maybe.”

“Maybe. Probably.”

“Fine, but I’m scared. I woke up alone and was scared, that’s all. I expected you to be there. You said you’d be coming up.”

“It’s only been an hour or so since you went up, kiddo. I’ll be up soon.”

“Okay. I’m sorry to be a baby.” She gave me a kiss. A nice one. Just a little bit of tongue, this time, teasing.

“I’ll be up,” I said.

She touched me.

“You’re up now,” she said.

“You’re not scared, you’re just horny.”

“Maybe that’s it,” she said, and I could sense, if not entirely see in the unlit room, her pretty smile.

“Shoo,” I said.