Max Collins - Quarry's cut

Just that one thing missing: the gun.

Like I told Janet, sometimes you have to improvise, so I dug back around in the tool chest and found a small crow bar, which was certainly a better makeshift weapon than my fist and some car keys, and as I was doing that, I noticed a red puddle over by the canvas tarp that had been flung against the wall, by whoever tried to start the snowmobile.

So I went over and lifted the tarp off the floor to see where the red puddle had come from and found the answer.

Richie.

Castile met us at the door.

“Where’s your wife?” I said, stepping inside.

“She was tired, “ he said. “Had a headache, wanted to be by herself a while.”

“I told you to stay together.”

“You didn’t say that.”

“I said it.”

“We just searched the lodge, remember? There’s nobody in here but us.”

Janet was huddling behind me. Shivering.

“What’s wrong with her?” Castile said.

“She didn’t like what I just told her,” I said.

“What did you tell her?”

“That I saw Richie in the shed.”

“What’s he doing there?”

“Not much. He’s under a tarp with his throat cut. Ear to ear. Like a great big smile.”

“Jesus,” Castile said.

“Take me up to your wife.”

“She’s resting, I said.”

“Take me up there. Now.”

“Okay,” he said, and turned to lead the way. I hit him in the back with the crow bar.

A few minutes shy of two hours later, Castile woke up. He was sitting, tied to a straight-back chair, in the sunken living room in front of the fireplace, on the fake fur rug where, not so long ago, his wife and Frankie Waddsworth had humped for the cameras. Even now the massive black camera, a boom mike, the lights on tripods, looked silently on.

“What… Jesus… what’s going…”

He tried to move and couldn’t and looked down at himself and saw the thick rubberized cable I’d used to tie him to the chair and when he saw it, going around his chest perhaps twenty times, and then down around his legs and through the rungs of the chairs, he knew there was no reason to try to budge.

“Good morning,” I said.

“What the fuck are you doing to me?”

“It’s almost dawn.”

“Where’s my wife?”

“You know where you wife is. She’s upstairs with her throat slashed. Where you left her.”

“This is a mistake…”

“Right. Anyway, we’re alone in the place, Castile. I sent Janet away. Of course we’re not exactly alone… there’s Waddsworth over there, and Harry’s upstairs, and Richie’s outside… and then there’s your wife…”

His face became slack. His body too. It was like he was a figure molded in clay that was starting to lose shape. His red hair, once so carefully groomed by his ex-hairdresser wife to disguise that it was thinning, looked wilted now.

“I… I guess there isn’t much point in… pretending I don’t understand what you’re saying…”

“I guess not,” I said.

He could see the nine-millimeter in my gloved hand. I’d found the gun upstairs, in one of the built-in bureaus in one of the unused bedrooms on the fourth floor.

He got a weary smile going. “And now what… you kill me?”

“No.”

“Then, what? Oh. You… you figure to… leave me here, and this Turner will come along and finish his job.”

“Turner’s not going to kill you. He’s going to come in here in a while and take one look at any one of the dead bodies you’ve accumulated and he’s going to get his ass out. First rule of the profession is if anything’s out of whack, if things aren’t going exactly according to plan, then fuck it. Get out. And he will. So you aren’t in any danger from him, if I should decide to just leave you here.”

“You… you’d do that? Just leave me here, and go?”

“I might.”

“What do you want for it… money? I told you before… I can get you money. Eight thousand, we were talking… I could get you that, I could get you more…”

“That’s not what I want from you.”

“Then what… what do you want?”

“I want what happened… and I want it here.” And I tapped the big tape recorder I’d brought over from the table by the wail, where Janet had sat and done the sound on the film.

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re going to tell the whole story. Beginning with the phone call you got from that guy whose daughter starred in the snuff flick. I want it all… everything… with one exception. You’re going to leave me out of it. And Janet too. I was never here. And Janet left here, before the storm set in… well before the shit started hitting the fan.”

“And you want this… on tape?” He was looking at me like he thought I was crazy. It didn’t bother me. His opinion didn’t mean a whole lot to me.

“I want it on tape,” I said “I know your intention was to throw the blame for what you did my way… you figured, and rightly, that if I was around for an investigation to focus on, you’d be in the clear. Once they had hold of me and dug into who I am and what I’ve done, I’d be a natural for the leading role in this little horror movie you’ve been stage-managing. So my way around that is simple: I was never here. When they find you here, you can tell any story you like… anything you can come up with that’ll save your ass… but just make sure I’m not a part of that story, and that Janet has a bit part. Because I’m going to have your story on tape… the story of what really happened here… to use against you if you ever try to implicate me. So I won’t have to worry. Janet, either.”

He considered that for a moment, and then he tried out a small smile. “If I don’t make your tape… if I tell you to go fuck yourself… what then?”

“I’ll think of something,” I said, and I got the straight razor out of my pocket. I’d found it on him, when I patted him down after knocking him out with the crow bar. I flipped it open, the razor swinging out of its white plastic handle. The edge caught some light and winked. The surface of it wasn’t entirely clean, however: there were still flecks of something on it, brown flecks that had been red.

“All right,” he said. “And if I do make the tape…?”

I tucked the razor back in its plastic handle and put it in my pocket. “I’ll leave you here.”

“Tied up like this?”

“Yes. That’s to your benefit. If you’re tied up and everybody else in the house is dead, when you’re found, then obviously somebody else was here. So you can pin the blame on that imaginary somebody.”

“Why would a killer kill everybody else in the house, and leave me alive?”

“I’ll toss you behind that couch over there. You can say the killer forgot about you. Lost count.”

“That’s stupid.”

“Not really. When Richard Speck killed those nurses in Chicago, he lost count. One of them hid under the bed and got out alive. They’ll buy it. Leave it to them to come up with the explanation.”

“Maybe it would work…”

“It will. Now. I’m going to turn on the tape recorder, and once it’s going, I won’t be talking any more. This is your show. Make it good.”

And I hit the switch.

He began where I told him to, with the midnight phone call and snuff flicks and how he’d been living in fear for the past six months, getting little sleep that whole time, and when he did sleep he had cold-sweat variety nightmares, and when he was awake he thought about the nightmares he’d been having, and took to carrying a gun with him and just generally jumping every time he heard a noise and sometimes when he didn’t.