Max Collins - Quarry's deal

“Not entirely. More like drunk.”

“I think somebody hit me with a lamp.”

“I think so, too. Anyway there’s a busted bulb all over the floor next door. All but the pieces of it I been picking out of your face, that is.”

“That’s where you found me?”

“The door was open, you were on the floor, against the wall, glass all over your face. I thought you were dead for a minute.”

“No such luck. Who’s your new neighbor? The guy that wrote Psycho?”

“Nobody lives next door. Not that I know of.”

“Help me off this couch. I want to go see for myself.”

She did.

The door was still ajar. I went in carefully, reaching a hand around to switch on the light before going in all the way.

And saw an apartment exactly like Lucille’s, with one exception: it was unfurnished.

Some shattered, bloody glass lay near one wall; so did the screw-in socket of the bulb with its claw of red-flecked glass shards sticking out.

“Let’s go back,” she said, a hand on my shoulder.

“Let’s.”

She locked the door and nightlatched it. A lot of doors in the Midwest don’t have nightlatches. I was glad hers did, though I had no reason to feel safer locked in here with her than I’d been next door with the guy who’d used my face to switch off the lights.

Did I say “guy”? No. There were two of them: the one who came up behind me; and the one who opened the door. Of course the one who opened the door could’ve been a woman.

“Listen, I think there’s some mercurochrome in the bathroom cabinet. You better let me dab some on.”

“Go ahead.”

She went and got the stuff, and I had a sip of the Sanka she’d found time to make.

“This’ll hurt,” she said, and began daubing it on.

It did hurt. I felt a tear roll down my cheek and she made a concerned face and with her free hand brushed the tear away. Then she put little bandaids over each cut. Pressed them gently into place.

When she touched my face like that, it bothered me. When she looked at me concerned like that, it bothered me. The way she’d been in bed the other night bothered me, too. Responsive. Giving. Loving.

The bitch was a killer. More importantly, so was I. How could she seem so genuine? Why did she strike a chord in me, even when I knew she had to be faking?

This was only the second night I’d been with her.

I’d left her apartment Friday morning before she got back, and spent the afternoon watching her window from the parking lot below. I was at an angle she couldn’t easily spot, and I was sitting in a car she wouldn’t recognize as mine, a Ford I rented for the occasion. I didn’t need a particularly good vantage point. A good look wasn’t what I was after. I just wanted to see the glimmer of circular glass. I just wanted to see the binoculars at the window. And I saw them, all right.

And I saw Frank Tree drive down the curved lane of the Town Crest apartment building around four-thirty in the afternoon, and the reflecting binoculars disappeared in the window, and I pulled the Ford around the block to watch her come down from her apartment, out the door by the rundown storefront, get in her Corvette across the street at the curb, and take off.

I hadn’t been surprised. I’d spotted her watching Tree that first night at the Barn, and figured she wasn’t watching him because she had the hots for him, either, though he was handsome enough. I knew even then he was her target, but I needed more.

Friday night I got it. She was watching him even closer now, didn’t miss a move he made. What she was doing wouldn’t begin to show to the casual observer, but I’ve done that kind of watching myself, and had no trouble picking up on it. In fact I was watching her that way; I could risk it, since she knew I had the hots for her.

She had begged off that night, saying she had promised that girl friend of hers they’d get together for a drink at one of their apartments, after the Barn closed, and I’d be bored silly by all that girl talk anyway, so…

So I complied. It was fine with me. I was planning to beg off myself. I had other things to do.

Such as keep watching her. I still had that rental Ford, and followed her from the Barn to a place on University in Des Moines, not far from the Holiday Inn where I was staying. It was a dinner theater, a big brick two-story building with a block of parking lot and a billboard of a sign saying Candle Lite Playhouse, with the name of the current production (Born Yesterday) beneath. The parking lot was nearly empty; one of the handful of cars was Tree’s LTD. Soon Tree could be seen coming out of the theater in the company of a stacked little blonde in work clothes, who kissed his cheek and scurried back in the building, while Tree reluctantly headed for his LTD and drove to the Town Crest.

Today, in the morning, I repeated my parking lot vigil, but only long enough to determine those binoculars were still poised in her window; and then I drove back to the car rental people and let them have their Ford back.

“You want to tell me about it?” she said.

“About what?”

“About what. About what happened to you. About the fucking glass I picked out of your face.”

“Somebody hit me with a lamp. And before that they hit me with something else. Feel the top of my head if you don’t believe me.”

“That’s some goose egg you got there, pardner.”

“You’re telling me. Got any aspirin?”

“Yeah. But I also got better than that.”

And she sat in my lap and put her tongue in my mouth.

“They always tell you to take two,” I said.

“Sometimes three.”

And we necked for a while, and she said, “So tell me.”

“I came upstairs and it was dark on the landing and a guy jumped me. When I came to they shined light in my face and hit me with the lamp. They asked me some questions, too, I think.”

“They?”

“Two of ’em. I only heard one talk, though.”

“Any idea who they were?”

“No.”

“Any idea why they did it?”

“No.”

“Your wallet’s empty. Maybe that’s why.”

“Yeah. Could be. I been winning at the Barn.”

“How much?”

“Couple hundred a night, on the average.”

“Three nights. Six hundred bucks. Where’d you have it?”

“In the wallet.”

“All of it.”

“All of it.”

“You’re not the smartest guy I ever met.”

“Really? Name somebody smarter.”

“The retarded kid in the plumbing joint downstairs.”

“Name another.”

“You got me. Hey. Who are you, anyway, Jack?”

“Nobody. I used to be a salesman. I’m unemployed right now.”

“What did you used to sell?”

“Ladies underwear. The bottom fell out of the bra market.”

“Aren’t you good at anything but selling underwear?”

“Good at cards.”

“You aren’t trying to land a seat at the Barn, are you?”

“I don’t know. You think maybe I should hit that guy Tree for one?”

There wasn’t a flicker of anything in those almond eyes of hers. You think maybe I should hit that guy Tree… but not a flicker. Christ this bitch was good.

“I’ll put a word in for you. I’m new on the job, but I got some pull just the same.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Couldn’t’ve got that job if I didn’t. Got to have connections in this world, to get by.”

“No shit?”

“None. So what do you think? This thing tonight was just a glorified mugging or what?”

“Who knows. You wouldn’t happen to have any old boyfriends or anything, would you? Who might be crazy enough to follow you from wherever you came from and beat up your new boyfriends?”

“I hardly think so. It’s a long drive from Florida.”