Max Collins: Quarry's cut

“I want to reverse this situation sometime.”

“Maybe you will. Do me one favor.”

“What?”

“Don’t mess around with that little girl anymore.”

“Why? What’s it to you?”

“Boring.”

And I hit him with his Browning, and left the gun in his lap, empty, the clip in my pocket, but the box of slugs still in the dresser.

Wilma was waiting downstairs, at the bar. She looked especially big, poised on the barstool like a magician’s balancing act. She also looked tired and not a little old, the oddly pretty blue eyes barely visible under heavy lids, the rows of chins hanging limp and loose, a cigarette drooping from her mouth like another tired appendage. The bartender, Charley, was putting glasses away nearby. He was bald and friendly looking but a hard-ass old guy who was also bouncer for the place. He and Wilma apparently had a thing, though nothing was ever said about it.

“About gave up on you,” Wilma said.

“I talked to him,” I said, taking a stool.

“And?”

“He’ll stay away from her.”

“I think the son of a bitch was with her tonight.”

“I know he was. But I think it’ll be the last night.”

“Well. I owe you.”

“No you don’t.”

“Shit if I don’t. Have Charley pour you one.”

“No thanks. I’d take coffee, though.”

“Sure. Charley?”

He went after some coffee.

“I do appreciate what you done. That pecker-head looked shifty to me, forty or better and her only sixteen, Jesus.”

“The guy is shifty. Does he stay in his room most of the time?”

“Not really. Comes and goes. Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Wilma. Just curious.”

“Think he might be up to something on the shady side?”

“Could be. I don’t know.”

Charley came with a pot of coffee and poured Wilma and me a cup, and went back to wiping the glasses. He hovered nearby, listening, but not participating.

“Let me give you some advice, Wilma.”

“Sure.”

“Stay away from the guy. I got him straightened out, I think. But at the same time keep an eye on him. And if he messes around with your niece anymore, you can let me know and I’ll talk to him again.”

“You really think he’s some kind of crook or something, is that it?”

“No, no. But keep your distance from him.”

“And my eyes open?”

“That’d be smart, I think.”

“Okay.”

“Thanks for the coffee.”

“Stop by for lunch tomorrow. It’ll be on the house.”

“I just might take you up on that.”

“You better.”

“Goodnight, Wilma. Charley.”

And I went home.

I went home and considered the things Turner had told me.

And the more I considered them, the more likely it seemed they were true. I began to believe that Turner really was here on a job, to help rid the world of some porno movie mogul, that Turner’s presence here, a literal stone’s throw from my door, was sheer coincidence.

But sheer coincidences are something I have always had trouble swallowing. This one was no exception. In my line of work, it pays to be skeptical, even paranoid, especially in the face of anything even vaguely coincidental. Otherwise you may find yourself dead. And death is nature’s way of telling you you fucked up.

Still, there was reason to believe Turner, and not just because of his convincing performance: Wilma’s descript- ion of Turner coming and going did not fit the pattern of a guy doing stakeout duty. That supported the notion that the mark was someone other than me.

I was considering all of this while sitting on the couch in the open loft that looks out on the living room of my A-frame cottage. Downstairs, under the loft, were two more bedrooms, a laundry room and a john. A kitchenette was off to one side of the living room. A modest, comfortable little place, with a beautiful lake at the edge of the front yard. It was a home, a life, worth fighting to keep.

I was sitting with my nine-millimeter in my hand. The silencer was on. There was, I thought, at least some chance of my having to use the gun sometime tonight.

If Turner had lied to me, if the real reason he was staying at Wilma’s Welcome Inn was to watch me and set me up for the kill, he and/or his partner would make their attempt tonight, or not at all. Possibly not at all, since I had seen him and talked to him and would be expecting him. And if they didn’t try tonight, the hit would be scratched and they would have to go back to the middleman who gave them the assignment and say that the mark (me) had made Turner, so the game was off. And the middleman would send somebody else, later, to try again.

If the hit was scratched, Turner would of course expect me to try to follow him home. But I wouldn’t need to do that. I could wait a week or so and then pull Turner’s card from the Broker’s file and go to Turner’s home base and stake him out and wait for him to lead me to whoever his middleman was. From the middleman I could find out who took the contract out on me and do something about it.

Turner didn’t know about the Broker’s file. It included fifty names, fifty entries, with extensive biographical information, current and past addresses, photos and a listing of specific jobs carried out. The fifty people in Broker’s file were the people who used to work through him. People like me. Like Turner. Killers for hire.

I’d inherited the file, indirectly, after Broker was killed, earlier that year. I have recorded all of that in some detail, elsewhere, and won’t go into it again here.

But I should explain what the file had come to mean in my life. The years of working through a middleman-a Broker-had ended in a series of doublecrosses that convinced me I would never put up with such an arrangement again, that I would work for myself, and only myself: my life in my hands… not the Broker’s.

So I devised a way of making that file of Broker’s work for me. I would choose a name from it-the name of someone else like myself, who murdered for hire, by contract-and I would go stake out that someone, follow him to his latest assignment, and, once having determined who his potential target was, I would approach said target and offer my services.

That was the tricky part: approaching someone and saying, “Somebody’s been hired to kill you.” But such people tend to lead the sort of lives that include the possibility of violence, or they wouldn’t be on the receiving end of a contract: nice, quiet, respectable people seldom are assassinated. The potential targets also tend to be the sort of people who like my solution to their problem: that is, killing the killers, and also finding out (and presumably taking care of) whoever hired the killers.

All of which is not entirely relevant to the story at hand, but it is hard for me to explain my state of mind, where Turner was concerned, without discussing the file. Because it seemed to me possible that someone had found out-or figured out- that I had the Broker’s file; I had made an effort to lead the Broker’s associates to believe that the file was destroyed, but perhaps that effort had been less successful than I thought. If someone knew I had the Broker’s file, that, in itself, was good enough reason for Turner being sent to kill me.

Anyway, for now there was nothing to do but sit with gun in hand and wait and see if Turner was going to try and kill me. If he blew up my house or set fire to it or something, he could possibly get the job done, even now. Only he wasn’t imaginative or bold enough for anything like that. He’d come plodding in, about half an hour before dawn, probably, and I’d kill him, after getting the name of his new Broker out of him. Or maybe he’d come with his partner. Burden, wasn’t that the name he’d used? In which case I’d kill them both. But Jesus I hated the idea of that happening here, at home. It could be a messy, unpleasant business.