Max Collins: Quarry's cut

So I sat there, patiently, my state of mind remarkably serene for a guy hiding in a closet, and why not. Turner was in a tighter box than I was, and I don’t mean that in the sense of a pun. He was in a very bad situation and didn’t know it, which was part of what made it so bad.

I admit he was having a better time than I was, but that was largely because he was a man who thought he had a gun in a nearby dresser drawer and didn’t know that gun was still nearby but now in the possession of somebody in a closet a few feet away, waiting to possibly put that gun to use. Ignorance is bliss, all right, but it’s also a good way to get blown away. And that’s no pun, either.

The only reason I was sitting this out, of course, was the girl. Turner alone I could handle, no problem-or anyway not much of one. Turner in the company of an innocent third party was something else again. Particularly when that innocent third party was Wilma’s niece, whose honor I was here on the pretense of defending, even though from my occasional glimpses through the keyhole I could see there wasn’t much left to defend.

Contrary to what you might think, assuming you’ve read some of the bullshit fiction books written on people like me, or seen some of the ridiculous movies or TV things done on us, a paid killer is not usually a person who will be careless about killing, who would go out casually, heedlessly mowing down anyone who crossed his path in the course of a job. The killing of one person, if it’s handled with some intelligence and care, generally causes little commotion, unless the town is exceptionally small, or the mark exceptionally well-known. A murder is likely to be buried in the back of the papers the day it happens, in a major city, and on the front page and on TV for a day or so in a secondary-size city, and in either case consigned to the unsolved file of the cops after a few weeks of fruitless investigation.

But kill two people and the shit will hit the fan. Kill an innocent bystander, indiscriminately, without the planning that went into hitting the mark, and suddenly it’s on TV constantly and in the papers continuously and everybody’s hollering “Mass murder!” and the cops will have to go after it for however long it takes, because the media and the media-manipulated public will demand nothing less.

Even had I been on a job, out in the field somewhere, keeping all this in mind would have been necessary, important; here, at home, in my literal back yard, it was an overriding concern. Contact with Turner that involved Wilma’s niece would be unfortunate, even if the girl didn’t get killed.

So I sat, and I waited, and my back started hurting and the sweat started to roll down my face and everywhere else, because it was hot in there and stuffy, the air as stale as a political speech, and then I noticed them talking. Their voices were taking on a tone of normalcy, as opposed to the assorted sounds of sexual craziness that had been playing in the background during my confinement, like a pervert’s substitute for Muzak.

“It’s ten till two,” the girl was saying.

“Maybe you better go, then,” Turner said.

Who said chivalry was dead.

“I know, but… I don’t want to go. I want to stay with you. All night.”

“Nice if you could. But if you think you should go, you better.”

“I guess I better.”

“Here, I’ll help you get dressed.”

He had her dressed and out the door in three minutes; the poor little bitch had to ask for her goodnight kiss.

And then he stood in the middle of the room, right in my line of vision, stood naked, his sex shrunken like he’d just come out from swimming in very cold water, which wasn’t exactly the case, and he looked at the door the girl had just exited through and said, “Hee hee,” several times, and slapped his belly, as it wasn’t every day Turner got to diddle a sixteen year-old. He scratched his sides and yawned and left my line of vision long enough to switch off the lights and then a few seconds later I heard him crawl into bed.

Pretty soon he starting snoring, and that’s when I got to my feet, ducking the metal pipe that cut across the closet, the empty hangers presenting a danger, if I bumped into them and rattled them together. But I didn’t, and the closet door eased open soundlessly and none of my bones creaked either, despite the cramped position they’d been in for two hours, and I started across the room.

Some moonlight was filtering through the trees and in the window, bathing the room in semi-visibility. He was sleeping on his back, naked, on top of the blankets, possibly because the room was nice and warm from the radiator, or maybe he was still aglow from fucking his teenager.

Sometimes I think stupidity is contagious. I was so used to Turner doing dumbass things that I forgot he was a professional. An asshole, an idiot, but a professional. Which meant don’t underestimate him. Which meant you had to expect anything could happen. You had to be ready for a snoring man to suddenly whip an arm out at you and knock you over against the wall, and then come diving toward you like a linebacker going for the quarterback.

He buried his head in my chest and pinned me to the wall and threw some punches into my ribs and stomach and I batted him alongside his head with the Browning, caught some ear and got some blood going, and he stopped pummeling for a second and in that second must’ve realized I had his gun, or anyway a gun, and both his hands went for my gun arm, one hand around my wrist, the other catching me between shoulder and arm, his nails long and cutting the flesh of my wrist, a thumb digging up under into my armpit, and with his two hands he tried for a while to see if he couldn’t convince my right arm to abandon my body.

But I still had a left hand, and with it I grabbed a handful of wilted, exposed balls and squeezed and squeezed some more and twisted too and he released his grip on my arm and opened his mouth to scream but I put him to sleep with another whap on the head with the Browning before the scream got going.

He wasn’t out long. He would’ve been, maybe, if I hadn’t kicked him awake when he started in snoring again.

He looked up at me, hands cupping himself, squinting up in the half-darkness, and said, “Jesus… it’s Quarry.”

“I thought maybe you’d recognize me,” I said.

I told him to go sit on the couch and he did. I turned on the lights and he asked me if he could put something on. I said no. I said I had something in common with his girl friends: I liked him better naked.

Actually, he wasn’t much to look at, no matter what sex you were. He was just a narrow-shouldered, skinny man, though he had a spare tire he was working on, and his thick, shaggy head of hair was like a fright wig, his flesh pasty white with occasional dark body hair, and his Nixon-like five o’clock shadow. He looked very worried, and confused, sitting there slump-shouldered, looking up at me like a kid worried about getting grounded by a particularly strict old man.

He waited a long time for me to talk. When I didn’t, he said, “I.. I don’t understand, Quarry. What are you doing here? What’s this all about?”

I went over by the window, leaned against the ledge in front of it, the Browning at my side. I looked out the window, toward my cottage.

“Quarry? Why don’t you say something?”

“Why don’t you?”

“What the fuck you think I been doing?”

“Stalling. Play-acting. Something.”

“Nothing. Nothing like that. I honest to Christ don’t know what this is about. Is it…”

“Is it what?”

“A contract? Somebody took a contract out on me? And… you’re here to fill it? Is… is that it?”

I said nothing.