Max Collins: Quarry's cut

I found my way out with little trouble. Behind me I heard somebody finding him, and making a fuss, going into a screaming panic. That was too bad. Had everything gone as it should, the mark would have been found no sooner than morning, in all probability.

I found Turner in the trailer behind the Gorilla Girl’s tent.

I knocked and, finally, was answered by a pretty brunette of about twenty, though her face was an easy ten years harder.

“Tell Cheetah Tarzan’s here to see him,” I said.

“Go away,” she said, starting to push shut the door.

I pushed it open and found Turner naked in bed and pulled him out by the arm and threw him on the floor.

“What the hell…?” he said.

I kicked his balls up in him.

That kept him busy for a few minutes, during which time I told Zamorita to get him his clothes.

“I’ll fix you, fucker,” he said, after a while, still holding himself. “I’ll fix you.”

“Never mind that,” I said. “You better just get your pants on so we can both get the hell out of here.”

Now, five years later, going through Turner’s room at Wilma’s Welcome Inn, I wondered why I bothered going back for him at all.

From the window above the old-fashioned radiator in Turner’s room I could see my A-frame cottage clearly, despite the partial sheltering of trees. The radiator was hot and making hissing noises, complaining about its unexpected April workload; but at least it helped keep the frost off the window, which was a plus for Turner, as he was apparently using this window to watch me, to study my pattern. He no doubt used the same binoculars I was now using: I’d found them in his bottom dresser drawer, between a box of. 380 shells and the Browning they were used in.

A gunsmith had done some improvising on the automatic, because the original barrel was gone and replaced with a new one that had a built-in silencer. I didn’t see the point, as the length of the new barrel was practically the same as the old one would’ve been with silencer attached. So nothing in particular had been gained, and something had been lost: the ability to detach the silencer, which is nice to be able to do at times, as they aren’t always necessary and do make the weapon more bulky. But to each his own.

The room was orderly, though Wilma did not provide maid service. That is, unless the sixteen-year-old niece Turner was humping was playing housekeeper, too. There was just the one big room, with a double bed with maple headboard against the left side wall, and a living room area opposite, with sagging couch and a chair or two and a beat-up coffee table with a scuffed metallic portable TV on it. The wallpaper was flowered and purple-faded-to-gray. Varnished light wood floors showed around the worn edges of the large round braided rug. There was no john (other than the floor’s communal one, down the hall) and a single, shallow closet he hadn’t hung anything in was behind the couch, in the corner. The dresser was over left of the window, near the bed; its drawers contained clothing and what I mentioned before. His shaving kit was on top of the dresser, which had a mirror. On the floor under the bed was a stack of skin magazines, of which Hustler was the most genteel.

I was surprised I could find nothing in writing, no record of my activities as noted by Turner. He might possibly be keeping that on his person, in a little notebook or something, but I didn’t think it likely: the kind of record a person working stakeout would keep isn’t easily kept in anything smaller than a secretarial-size pad, and Turner’s habit during the time he’d worked back-up for me had been to use a spiral notebook larger than that. Of course that was five years ago.

Which in itself had me thinking. It was a little late in the day for Turner to come looking for revenge. Five years ago I’d kicked him in the balls, and reported him fucking up to the Broker, but it hadn’t cost Turner anything: Broker had simply put him with another partner. I didn’t doubt Turner carried a grudge against me, but I did doubt it was big enough a one for him to come looking for me with a gun.

Besides, he was obviously on stakeout duty. Which meant he was part of a team, and not the trigger part, either. He was hired help and nothing more. My first instinct was to tie his presence here in with the bad blood between us: but I no longer felt that way. Turner was not working on his own initiative.

So I’d just have to talk to him and find out who hired him. Or at least find out who his new Broker was, so I could put a gun to that guy’s head and get the name of whoever it was took the contract out.

I put the binoculars in the dresser, but stuck the Browning in my belt. I turned out the lights and went over to the couch to wait for Turner to come.

I didn’t let myself think. There was a lot to think about, a lot in my life that was threatened by all of this, not the least of which was my life itself, but I didn’t think. I didn’t let myself. There are times when it’s smart to sort through the things that have been happening to you, and figure out what it is they all mean, and there are times to clear all the shit out of your head, empty your head of everything but now, so you are ready, not edgy, but on edge, perched like an animal waiting for its prey to make a move. So I sat on the uncomfortable, spring-bulging couch, waiting for Turner to come.

In two hours and some odd minutes, I heard his voice. It was still grating, had that same sandpaper quality. He was standing outside his door, talking to somebody. And that could be a problem.

The other person spoke, and it was a girl, a young woman’s voice. Possibly the sixteen-year-old niece Wilma was worried about.

A key was working in the door, in the lock, and I ducked into the closet, to the rear of the couch.

“Don’t worry, baby,” he was saying. I heard the door close. I heard a thud, which I guessed to be the sound of his hunting jacket being tossed on the couch. “She works till two in the morning It ain’t even midnight. We got plenty of time.”

“If she finds us together,” the girl said, her voice sounding very young, “she’ll kill us.”

“Aw the hell with her. You going to let some fat old windbag run your fife?”

“She’s my aunt.”

“She can’t give you this.”

There followed considerable, moaning and groaning, most of it from the girl. In the background the radiator hissed.

“Here. Let me help you out of that stuff.”

“No… I’ll… I’ll do it.”

I was sitting on the floor. It was cramped in there. I decided I might as well enjoy myself, so I looked through the keyhole while the girl undressed. My view was partially blocked by the couch, but I saw everything, as the girl moved around a little, placing her clothing piece by piece over on the dresser.

She was small, tan and big-breasted, with a simple, pretty face that had those same blue eyes as fat Wilma. She had shoulder-length dark brown hair and an equally dark brown pubic tangle that started as a trail at her navel and turned into a dense undergrowth soon after; it was a place you could get lost in for weeks. I hoped her overage boy friend wouldn’t be quite that long.

Turner took his clothes off, then. That I didn’t bother watching. I felt stupid, like a husband who didn’t have it right: the idiot didn’t realize it was the lover who hid in the closet, not the cuckold.

Then the bed was making noise and so were they. The radiator got its two cents in, too.

Me, I was slouched quietly down in the closet, back to the wall, gun in my lap.

Still waiting for Turner to come.

He and the girl stayed in the sack nearly two hours. I didn’t watch much of it, though the keyhole provided an unexpur- gated if small-screen view of the proceedings. Between rounds he would teach the girl things to do to him, and watching her crawl around on the bed and him doing them certainly beat watching reruns of “Celebrity Bowling.” But eventually, inevitably, he’d get on top of her and stay on top, which meant the view I had was largely of him, and I wasn’t particularly interested in looking up that asshole’s asshole.