Max Collins - Quarry's list

She was sleeping soundly, now, and wouldn’t be doing much complaining about me letting the fire go out, so I again lifted her in my arms, a heavy little bundle in her blanket, and took her over to the double bed and tucked her in.

Then I went back to the desk and started going through drawers.

A noise woke me, and for a moment I thought I was home, back in Wisconsin, and then I remembered where I was, in a cottage all right, but a different one, and on a river, not a lake. The circle had come around and this was ending as it began, with me waking up in the middle of the night, hearing somebody who was coming in to try and kill me.

Me and someone else, this time.

I was on the bed with Carrie, but not under the covers with her, just stretched out on my back, with all my clothes on, on top of the blankets, the silenced Ruger on my stomach, the. 38 snug in my waistband. I hadn’t really intended to fall asleep, but hadn’t fought it either, despite the fact I was expecting a caller.

After all, I knew who my caller would be, and how he’d come in. Right now, for instance, he was working a key in the front door, just as I’d known he would. That wasn’t the noise that woke me, though.. it was the sound of him creeping up the outside steps; soundlessly, I suppose he thought. If so, he thought wrong. I’d heard him, and was awake, and by the time that key was slipping in the lock on the door, I was almost smiling.

I leaned over and put a hand across Carrie’s mouth and nudged her awake with my other hand, put my lips to her ear, and whispered, “We have company… be quiet, and don’t panic.”

The beam of a big heavy flashlight was probing the porch area, the door between the rooms having a window through which we could see our intruder and his light, though in the total darkness of the place he didn’t see us yet. But he would soon.

Very soon, as now he was opening that door between rooms, that door with the window we’d been observing him through, and he stepped inside, into the room where we were on the bed in the far right corner, and I shoved Carrie off onto the floor, so she’d be between bed and wall and not in any line of fire, and took a couple of silenced shots with the Ruger at the source of the beam beginning to poke around the room.

By source I mean the flashlight itself, not the man carrying it, but I wasn’t used to the Ruger and it was dark in there and I nicked his arm with one shot and I don’t know where the other shot went, but the flashlight tumbled to the ground and some other metal thing did, too, as the guy slammed back against the door he’d just opened, then got the hell out and was clomping down those outside steps he’d come up so carefully minutes ago, before I was even off the bed.

Not that I was in a great hurry. I did get off the bed and turn to the window, which was right above where Carrie was on the floor, cowering, and I threw the lock and forced the window up and saw the guy running out there in the fog, which had thinned a bit, running off the gravel and splashing into the marshy area, an instinctive move I guess, an attempt to find a shortcut maybe, or lose himself as a target in the snarl of brush and branches and bog. All it served to do, of course, was slow him down, and he was hardly off the road, only a dozen feet from the house, when I yelled, “Ash!”

He froze a second, then trudged on a step.

He was well within range, and knew it, and I hardly had to yell at all when I leaned out the window and said, “Ash! You can stop, or I can stop you. Choose.”

He chose to stop. He turned. Shrugged and grinned up at me, though as he shrugged the pain in his left arm where I’d nicked him made his grin turn into a wince. He walked back up onto the gravel of the drive and called up to me, “I’ll wait here for you.”

“You’ll be covered from the window,” I said, “so stay put while I come to you.”

I tugged the. 38 out of my belt and gave the gun to Carrie, who was still wide-eyed and quivering on the floor, back to the wall. She took it, but the gun lay in her palm like a stone, and she looked at it like she didn’t know what the hell it was.

“Hey,” I said. “Snap out of it.”

She cupped the gun in both hands, pushed it toward me, her eyes pleading.

“You won’t have to shoot at anybody,” I said. “Just aim it at that guy out there till I can get to him. It’ll take me a couple minutes to get there, because I don’t know for sure he came alone, and I have to be careful and do it kind of slow. Okay? Now if he starts to run or anything, anything that seems wrong to you, fire the gun, but you don’t have to aim it at him. The sound will stop him. I know him, and believe me, the sound will stop him just fine.”

She sighed.

And I watched while she slowly, reluctantly, made her hand conform to the contours of the gun, and I lifted her off the floor by the waist, and she took the post at the window. Well, she was the prettiest backup man I’d ever had, anyway. Had to give her that much.

I went over and picked up the flashlight he’d dropped, and found that the other thing he’d dropped was a gun, the big. 45 that went with the silencer I’d seen back at his motel room a couple days ago, and the silencer was on, and I wasn’t surprised that this was the other thing he’d dropped. I put the flashlight on the desk and stuck the Ruger in my belt, in back, where it would be covered by the jacket I slipped on. I didn’t want Ash to see the Ruger; he might recognize it. His. 45 I kept in hand.

He had taken off the black thermal jacket he was wearing and was looking at where my slug caught him, as I approached.

“Bad?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Just a graze, but fuck, you could’ve killed me, Quarry, you know that?”

“Not could’ve. Should’ve.”

“Aw, Christ, but you hold a grudge.”

“Ash, I got no intention of standing out here in the cold listening to you explain how every time you try to kill me it’s nothing personal.”

“Well, it isn’t, and I never tried to kill you in my life, Quarry, that’s a fact.”

“You sent people to do it last time, I know, so that one doesn’t count. But what the hell do you call tonight?”

“Tonight?”

“You remember. A couple minutes ago. Think back.”

“Yeah? Who shot at who? I didn’t know you was in there. Shit. I thought it was crazy even to look down here, but I was told look, so I the fuck looked, is all. I didn’t see a car, and there were no lights on, and I was…”

“Stupid?”

“That wasn’t the word I was looking for but, yeah, I was stupid. And you’re real smart. Now that that’s settled, tell me… you got the broad in there, or not? She the one with the gun on me. Up in the window? Can she hear us talking?”

“Yes on all counts, except if you keep your voice down, she can’t hear us.”

“She wouldn’t use that gun, would she?”

“Let me put it this way. She knows you were going to kill her last night, that you would have if you and your boy hadn’t fucked up. And she knows you still want to kill her, if you can ever stop fucking up.”

“I don’t want to kill anybody, Quarry. I just got to make a living like everybody else.”

“Fine. Sometime you really must tell me all about your personal philosophy. But right now I got something else in mind for you. I want you to go wake up Brooks and tell him I have something he’s looking for.”

“The broad, you mean?”

“Not exactly. Oh, I have her, and she’s still for sale, but she’s part of a package deal. A twenty-thousand-dollar package.”

“So what else is in the package?”

“A list.”

“You know about that, huh? Well let me tell you something you don’t know. My backup got himself killed tonight, and killed somebody himself while he was at it… some federal guy who was snooping in your hotel room, yes, your hotel room, some federal fucker who evidently was watching the broad, too, only we didn’t know it before.”