Max Collins - Quarry's deal

She sat in front of the mirror and started taking some pins out of her hair.

“Make yourself comfortable,” she said. “You want something to eat? I can fix us something. You rather wait till afterwards, for that?”

“Is that why you think I’m here?” I said, sitting on the round bed. “To fuck you?”

She shook her head, not in any response to me, but to make her blond hair tumble to her shoulders, which it did, as if in slow motion. Her smile in the mirror was as smug as it was sexual.

“Why else?” she said. “You knew it was here if you wanted it. And I knew you’d come and get it, sooner or later.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because this is exciting to you. You’re shacked up with my best friend… who’d scratch my eyes out if she knew, and yours too, probably. And I’m seeing your new boss… who happens to be the type who frowns on somebody messing with his property. I think all of that’s kind of exciting, don’t you?”

“I get chills.”

She dropped her robe to her waist. Cupped her big, small-pointed breasts and looked at them appraisingly in the mirror. Then she took some lipstick and touched it against each nipple, rubbed the dark red rouge into each nipple with the forefinger of either hand, then licked each finger.

I’d had this wrong, from the first day, and there was no excuse for it. I’d made an assumption I shouldn’t have and I was an asshole for it. I had assumed that simply because she was a woman, Lu would naturally play the stakeout role, the passive part.

But I knew now I was wrong.

Lu played the same role I used to play, when I was in the business: she killed people.

And her back-up man had almost as big a tits as she did.

“You’ve traveled around a lot, haven’t you, Ruthy? Played a lot of dinner theaters, all over the country?”

“Sure,” she said. She was using some kind of tiny black pencil or crayon or something to draw a star-shaped beauty mark to the right of the nipple of her left breast.

“And when you appear in a play, you might stay in a town as long as six weeks, or two months maybe?”

“That’s right,” she said, idly.

“Plenty long enough to strike up a relationship with a gentleman friend.”

She gave me that schoolgirl smile of hers, but it dissipated into a smirk as she said, “I’ve been known to know a man now and again.”

“You could get to know a man pretty well in that space of time. Know just about his every habit, whole pattern of his life.”

She shrugged, stood, and let the robe drop to the floor. She had a great ass. Her thighs in back looked smooth, slippery, but firm; her calves were muscular, tapering. She turned and rubbed her breasts, smearing the lipstick but leaving the little black star intact and then kind of scratched at her snatch and said, “I’m gonna have a bath,” and hip-swayed out of the room.

I heard the bath water drawing.

I walked across the nothing hall and into the large bathroom. She was leaning over testing the water as it came out of the faucet. She poured in some milky bubble bath.

There was a counter-top sink, with more make-up and feminine things and another big mirror. There was also a small portable television on the edge of the counter, for her to watch as she bathed.

“Know what a black widow is?” I asked her.

“Sure,” she said, getting in, water still flowing, bubble bath bubbling up, “it’s a female spider that eats her mate. Why? You want eaten?”

“Don’t get me wrong, now,” I said, putting down the lid on the stool and sitting, “I’m not comparing you to a black widow. You don’t kill your men. You just set them up for it.”

A hardening around and in her eyes, very slight, told me she had caught on, for the first time, to what this conversation was about. Till now, she thought it was all some kind of coy sexual ritual, some verbal foreplay thing I was engaging in.

But she didn’t change her style.

“When I get done in this tub,” she said, taking some soap and soaping between her legs, “I can love you to death, if you want, honey.”

“I don’t want. But there’s something I do want.”

“Oh?”

“I want to know whether you picked up your money yet.”

“Huh?” She turned off the water. She slid down under the surface so that bubbles covered-her, except for her lipstick-painted breasts, which bobbled surrealistically on the water.

“I said I want to know whether you picked up the money. “

“What money?” she said.

“If you picked up the money, I want to know where and when. If you haven’t yet, well, have you?”

“Jack, I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Standard operating procedure, back when I was working with the Broker, was for the middle man to accept twenty-five percent down, from whoever was buying the contract. The balance was picked up by the back-up man, the passive half of the team, just a day or so prior to the actual hit; and that was the only contact (and an indirect contact at that, since it amounted to going to a drop point and picking up the cash) the hitmen had with whoever hired them.

Ruthy knew this, and I knew she did.

I turned on the portable TV.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Turning on the TV,” I said. “What does it look like I’m doing? Say, Ruthy, tell me… you’re in show biz. Which soap opera is that that’s on? I can’t tell them apart. Is it One Life to Live, or Another World or what?”

“Jack…”

“You know it’s dangerous having something electrical like this in bathroom. It could fall off into the tub. Oh, but I see you have the cord knotted up, so if that happens the set would unplug itself. That’s smart thinking, Ruthy. Here. I’ll just unplug it for a minute and unwind this cord and, hey it’s nice and long isn’t it? Just plug it in again and there’s your soap opera back. You don’t mind if I keep the volume down while we talk?”

“Jack, I’m getting out.”

“No,” I said. “You just stay put.”

“Jack…”

“Stay put,” I said.

I was standing over her, holding the set by the handle on top, holding the plug in the wall socket with my free hand, while silent images of a man and a woman arguing, their faces in close-up, flickered across the screen. I held the set over the water, right above her lap, and said, “What about the money?”

“Jack, let me get out. We’ll go in the bedroom and I’ll make you real happy, Jack, God I’m good, Jack, look at these, Jack, Jack, look at me, you’d like it in me…”

“The money. Where. When.”

“I… I made the pick-up yesterday.”

Shit. I’d hoped she hadn’t made it yet, so I could make her lead me to the pick-up when it was made and I could find out who had hired Tree dead.

“Where?” I said.

“Iowa City,” she said.

“Iowa City?”

“Yes, in an alley, in a trashcan downtown. Jack. Jack, can I get out now?”

“You just sit there a minute.”

“If you let me out of here, Jack, I won’t say a word about this, I won’t mention this to Lucille, if you want, I’d even help you get rid of her, Jack, anything, anything you want.”

“Ruthy.”

“Jack?”

“For once I don’t think you’re acting,” I said, and tossed in the TV.

Along one side of the Psychopathic Hospital was a sun porch. Despite the massive iron doors that Tree and I had been buzzed through the other day, security here was nonexistent. Most of the patients at the hospital had signed themselves in, and were free to go when they chose to, theoretically anyway. I assumed there were some sections of the hospital where patients were in fact kept under lock and key. But the ward where Frank Tree, Jr., was staying was not a prison, nor a collection of padded cells. It was simply a sort of dormitory with doctors.