Max Collins - Quarry's deal

After that I wandered in the hall a while. This lower floor was apparently in as much use as the upper one, withrooms labeled various functional things. The ceiling was a maze of exposed electrical wiring and pipes, cheerfully painted over in bland pastel, and would have been enough to make your average fire inspector check in as a permanent guest. The only advantage I could see to having the place set up this way, like a two-story building with the first floor under- ground, was it cut down on people jumping out of windows.

I’d never been in a nuthouse before and hoped this wouldn’t start a trend. But there was somebody here Tree wanted me to see, and I’d decided to go along with him, since it seemed to mean a lot to him.. but by now I was half expecting Tree to come through a door with a brace of boys in white coats and point his finger at me and say, “That’s the one.”

We had talked money first. I reminded him that in one of our earlier conversations he’d offered double the price of the contract on him. He reminded me that I’d had a gun on him at the time, which, like trying to get a good-looking woman to do what you want in bed, is a situation where a man will say anything.

And then I told him I didn’t want him to double the price, anyway.

I just wanted him to match it.

“What are they paying?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I can make an educated guess.”

“Make it, then.”

“Five.”

There was a short silence, and then he said, “Five thousand dollars,” slowly, shaking his head, smiling a little. “A man likes to think his life’s worth more than that.”

“It’s not your life we’re talking about, Frank. Just the opposite.”

He wanted to know how I’d be paid, and I told him a thousand up front, which would do little more than cover expenses. The balance would come only after I’d got some results. And it would be paid half in cash, half in check, so I’d have something to pay taxes on and keep the IRS happy. There were some details about how the check was to be handled that I needn’t go into here.

And he wanted to know what he’d be getting for his money.

I told him he’d already got quite a lot, and explained how I’d followed a woman named Glenna Cole from Florida to Des Moines, where she had been staking him out for five days, and figured she’d watch him no longer than two weeks total before the other half of the team stepped in to finish the job. I didn’t mention that Glenna Cole was his lady bartender at the Barn, Lucille. Or that I had tentatively tagged that house dealer of his with the glasses and sullen manner as the trigger. I didn’t want to lay too much on him all at once. Especially when he hadn’t come across with any cash yet.

“And you’ll stop the hit?” he said.

“I’ll stop this attempt. I’ll try to.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning I might fuck up and get shot to shit and you along with me.”

“And if you don’t fuck up, Quarry?”

“There’ll still be somebody out there who wants you dead. Who was willing to pay for it once, and’ll be willing to pay for it again.”

He thought about that a while.

Then he said, “Are you saying you can find out who bought the contract?”

“Maybe. Can’t guarantee it.”

“There’d be a bonus in it for you.”

“You’re goddamn right there would.”

“How much do you want?”

“Another five.”

“Looks like you get double after all.”

“You better hope I do, Frank.”

And I asked him what enemies he had, if he could think of anybody who’d pay not to have him around.

“I think I might know,” he said, a light going on in the back of his head somewhere. “I think I know.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know the name, or names I mean. But I know who, generally. There are some people into dope I caused some trouble for.”

“That doesn’t sound like your bag, Frank.”

“It’s nothing like you’re thinking. It’s a situation that’s hard to explain… I think you’ll understand better if you go along with me to Iowa City. There’s someone in the hospital there, the Psychopathic Hospital, that-I want you to meet.”

“Who?”

“My son.”

Tree pushed the button and pretty soon somebody came to unlock the big iron doors from the inside and we went in and the doors were locked behind us.

Then we were in a vestibule that was really just a continuation of the corridor we’d been out waiting in. A television blared against the wall on the right, and on the left people were sitting on a couch and some chairs, and we were in the way.

So we moved on quickly, in the company of the lanky short-haired girl in untucked blouse and blue jeans who had let us in and was apparently a nurse. She had the expression of a disillusioned social worker: compassion slowly curdling to boredom and worse.

Everybody wore street clothes, except the doctors, and I only saw one of those, briefly. It was an attempt at creating an atmosphere of normalcy, I guess. The large, high-ceilinged room we were now in was another attempt at a normal, even casual environment: couches, coffee tables, easy chairs, lamps, all designed to make you feel right at home. The catch was the furniture seemed to have been picked up at a Salvation Army Store clearance sale, but what the hell. It was better than a snake pit.

Over to one side was a quadrangle of couches where patients lounged, some reading old magazines apparently imported from a doctor’s waiting room, one middle-aged lady writing a letter, a kid in his late teens or early twenties with a guitar in his lap that now and again he looked at but did not play, a gray-haired man doing a crossword puzzle, a woman about thirty with dishwater blond hair and a round face sitting watching the rest of them. Over by the windows were some cardtables, one of which was in use, three people playing Scrabble, a man and two women, all in their forties, the man and one woman playing silently, the other woman rattling on about her children.

The expressions on the faces in the room were mostly blank. Or full of happiness that was false, or sadness that was real. But mostly blank. Empty.

“This way,” the short-haired girl said, with the enthusiasm of a tour guide in a dog food factory.

She led us down a hallway, past a glassed-in office, past a small cafeteria, and into a dormitory area, doors on either side of the hall open and revealing rooms with six or eight beds each in them. We stopped at the last room on the right.

She squeezed out a smile, like that last bit of toothpaste, and said, “Frank’s alone today, Mr. Tree, except for Roger, of course.”

She left, and we went in. The overhead light in the room wasn’t on; it was like an overcast day in there. The beds were covered with dark gray blankets, the word PSYCHO in gray stencil letters across the pillowcases. There were desks wedged in between beds, and some other desks huddled together in the middle of the room, old, scarred wooden desks, but every patient had his own, and in a room that slept this many, that could be important.

Sitting at one of them, by a window, was a boy about eighteen, in a robe.

He was a younger version of Tree. The major difference, besides years, was dark, longish hair. And the nose was a little different, smaller, the mother’s nose, probably.

It was Frank Tree, Jr., and he turned as we came in, and smiled, and turned back to the window.

I didn’t see the big guy, at first, standing over in the far corner like a suit of armor, though looking back I don’t know how I could have missed him. Seven feet tall and two or three feet wide. You could’ve hung a billboard on him. He had on a gray tee-shirt that said IOWA on it and brown slacks and white tennis shoes a family of five could’ve kept their belongings in.