Max Collins - Quarry's deal

“What?”

“We just might be able to line up that job at the Barn for you, tonight.”

“Why’s that?”

“Ruthy’s boyfriend’s going to be there, too. This’ll come as a shock to you, but her boyfriend happens to be Frank Tree himself.”

“You got to be kidding,” I said.

I parked around the corner from DiPreta’s Italian Restaurant, which was on a one-way that I couldn’t turn onto coming from the direction of Lu’s apartment, and as we were getting out of the car, the blue Chevelle I’d noticed following us on the way over slid by innocently and pulled into a place half a block up. The guy was either new at this or a moron. Both, maybe.

“You go on ahead,” I said to her.

“Why?”

“Tell you later. Please go ahead.”

She made a shrugging face and got out of the car and walked. When she’d disappeared around the corner, I leaned over and got the nine-millimeter out of the glove compartment, checked it over to see if it had been fucked with, stuck it in my belt. I was wearing a sportshirt and slacks but the night was cool enough to require a light jacket and the jacket covered the gun.

This took a couple of minutes and in that time the sidewalk on my side of the street stayed clear. It stayed clear on the other side, too. Midnight Monday in Des Moines isn’t exactly rush hour.

The little moron in the Chevelle was sitting tight, waiting for me to do something.

I did something.

I got out of the GT and walked, slowly, and before I turned the corner I heard a car door open and shut somewhere not far behind me.

Christ, what a loser.

DiPreta’s was down at the far end of the block, half of which it encompassed, an alley separating the restaurant from the other half block of commercial buildings. I turned down the alley, making no secret of it, but then picked up speed and about a third-way down stepped into a recessed doorway that had just enough room for me and three garbage cans. I took the lid off one of the cans and when the guy walked by hit him in the face with it.

He staggered back a step, seemed to momentarily regain his composure, then did a belly flop on the brick alley floor. He hit like a wet sack of sand.

I turned him over.

He looked familiar. Naggingly so.

He was average size, average build, wearing a dark ribbed sweater over a light pressed shirt, brushed denim slacks, almost collegiate-looking. He had short blond hair, ordinary features, his large ears being the only distinguishing feature he had. That and the broken nose the garbage can lid had given him.

I’d seen him before, no question, but where?

Wherever, he wasn’t anybody I’d paid any attention to. I’d been half expecting that sullen young prick from the Barn, the house dealer who I was so sure had smashed that lamp in my face. In fact that was why I’d put so much oomph behind the garbage can lid. I wondered if I’d decked some poor schmuck who just happened to be on his way to the same restaurant, at the same time, as Lu and me.

Then it came to me.

He was from the Barn. Not the guy I’d expected, but someone else I’d seen there; not a house dealer, but a regular. A clown who’d been there every night, and who liked to play five-card stud but didn’t have the balls for too high stakes, though he didn’t play badly, if I recalled right.

I checked his billfold. There was a couple hundred bucks in there, and it might have been mine, so I pocketed it. He had a driver’s license, too. It said he was from Santa Barbara, California, and that he was twenty-eight. And here’s the good part: his name was John Smith.

Well, I guess somebody has to be named John Smith. And I figured that’s who this guy was, because nobody, not even a little moron, picks a phony name that obvious.

He also had no gun. No weapon of any kind. Not even a goddamn pen knife.

Something was starting to tingle on the back of my neck. It was a bad feeling and it was spreading. Something was very, very wrong here.

My still unconscious friend was clearly not a professional anything. His idea of shadowing you was to tailgate; he was unarmed; and his name was either the worst alias in the world or maybe just proof he was some poor, dumb, bland-looking son of a bitch named John Smith from Santa Barbara, California.

Shit. The numbers here were not adding up. If the former Glenna Cole, current Lucille was the stakeout, and that prick dealer from the Barn was the hitter, where the hell did John Smith fit in?

The frustrating thing was I couldn’t just shake him awake and have a talk with him and find out. Talking to him meant I might have to kill him when I was done, and I didn’t want to do any killing right now. Killing him would perhaps tell certain people something about me I didn’t want them to know; leaving him alive, as the possible victim of a mugging, might make it necessary for the jury on me to stay out a while longer.

So I had to be content with stuffing him ass first in a garbage can and leaving him to wake up and wonder, after which I returned to my car, left the nine-millimeter in the glove compartment, and walked back to the restaurant to meet Frank Tree for the first time.

The outside of the place was classy-looking charcoal- colored brick with white mortar. There was more brick inside, but whorehouse-red brocade wallpaper dominated. And that’s the whole story of DiPreta’s Italian Restaurant: it was alternately sleazy and luxurious, as plush as the backseat of a millionaire’s limo, as tasteless as a girl whose panties have the day of the week on them.

Lu was waiting for me just beyond the huge. wooden front doors, with their elaborate carved wood handles shaped like rearing, roaring lions (you grabbed a lion around the belly to pull open a door), and she looked genuinely worried.

“What was that all about?” she wanted to know.

“I thought somebody was following us,” I said.

We walked past the area in front where some guys in white outfits and chef hats were making pizzas in front of the street window, the pizza ovens built of that same fancy charcoal-color brick, and moved into the subdued lighting of the dining area.

“ Was somebody following us?”

“Yes,” I said.

A lady in her forties wearing a dark red evening gown and a white corsage, with dark black brittle hair piled as high as a small child, and a mole as black as her hair next to a mouth as red as her dress in a face as white as her corsage, said, “Party of two?” and Lu told her we were with the Tree party and the lady asked us to walk this way, and I resisted the urge to turn that into an even bigger joke than it already was.

There were booths on either side of us, as we walked, and each booth had its own tiffany shade hanging lamp and its own original oil painting, which ran to matadors and still lifes and crying clowns and big-eyed children and frozen summer landscapes. We followed the lady in red into a large open area, where a mammoth cut-glass chandelier was suspended which no one seemed anxious to stand under, with an ornate bar off to the left, the prerequisite reclining-nude oil painting in the midst of an obscenely well-stocked series of wine and liquor racks, and an open stairway rising before us to reveal the second floor, or anyway a hallway thereof, with more oil paintings and the closed doorways to banquet rooms, apparently, and we went off to the right, to a private nook (or was it a cranny?) where Frank Tree and Ruthy sat at a table big enough for twelve.

“Jack Wilson, Frank Tree,” Lu said.

Tree stood and extended a hand and I shook it. If he was surprised, he didn’t show it.

He said, “I’ve seen you around, Jack. You been winning some money off me, if I’m not mistaken.”