Max Collins - Quarry's list

“This won’t change anything about what I feel has to be done about her… there’s no way around that…”

“That’s okay. Let’s just ease her mind.”

“You amaze me. Sentiment?”

“Just do it, if you want your fucking list.”

He stared at me, but all he saw was a poker face, and he couldn’t read it; he just wasn’t a very good gambler and that’s all there was to it.

I watched him dial. I had him hold the phone away from his ear a little so I could hear her.

“Yes?” she said, answering.

“Carrie, this is your father. I want you to know I’m sorry, for everything.”

And he hung up.

“Good,” I said. “Now, here’s your list.”

I opened the manila envelope and dumped its contents on the desk.

His eyes were very wide as he looked at the ashes heaped before him. You’d think somebody had tipped over an urn full of a favorite relative’s cremated remains, though in Brooks’s case, I doubted he had any favorite relatives, not unless you counted those he wanted to inherit money from. He touched the ashes with the fingers of one hand, sifting, searching, then slapped his hand against them, hard, and dark flakes floated in the path of the rays of dawn just peeking in the window behind him.

“The list,” he said.

I nodded.

“All yours,” I said.

He surprised me. I didn’t think he had it in him, but he lunged forward, sliding across the top of the desk, knocking the phone jangling to the floor, knocked me and the chair I was sitting in back and onto the floor, and he was on me, his hands on my throat, and I cuffed him on the ear with the. 45 and pushed him off.

“That… that call I made,” he said. “It was… a suicide note, wasn’t it?”

“Don’t cause me any more trouble, and it’ll go easier for you.”

“You want to know the funniest part? She wasn’t even my daughter, Quarry. She wasn’t even mine.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, and I didn’t want to know. He was defeated now, just a slack sack of humanity, of a sort, anyway. He didn’t cause any more trouble. I kept my word. I kicked him in the head, and he was unconscious when I took him over to the window, opened it, and threw him out.

The Cozy Rest Motel was everything its name promised, and less. The office was just one of a dozen and a half individual huts covered with sheets of pink pseudo-brick. In the office window was a Christmas tree, a little plastic one on a table, and a frowzy fat woman was decorating it with tinsel. A tinny speaker hanging from a nail over the door was spitting Christmas music, and it was still November, for Christsake. The rest of the cabins were in the wooded area behind, united by a gravel road that curved around like a drunken snake, through trees that had to look better than this during some season. It was cold again this morning, and the snow that hadn’t melted yesterday was clumped and misshapen and hard-crusted, looking like chunks of Styrofoam randomly scattered around the gray ground the cabins overlooked.

Ash was in number two.

I’d left him a note on the dresser saying, “I lied. Wait for me and I’ll tell you all about it. It’s too late for you to do anything else, anyway.”

He was waiting. Sitting on the lumpy bed in the dreary little cabin, whose wallpaper walls were peeling to reveal other, even uglier wallpaper.

“Oh, it’s you, Quarry,” he said. He gestured to the four tight walls around him. “I was expecting Bonnie and Clyde.”

“Brooks is dead.”

“Yeah, well, I figured. Where you got the broad hid?”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s all over.”

“Not if you really got the list, it isn’t. We can go in together. I didn’t trust Brooks that much, anyway.”

“That was smart. He tried to get me to kill you and take your place.”

“That fuckin’ little pimp shyster. What’d you do to him?”

“Tossed him out the window.”

“Good for you. He wanted a fall guy, well, he got one. Hey, not a bad sensa humor on the kid, huh? So what about the list?”

“I had it. I burned it.”

“Burned it! Je-sus Christ! You got any idea what that mother was worth?”

“I don’t care. I got no desire to play Broker.”

“Well, fuck, I do!”

“Anyway, I didn’t like all the stuff about me that was down in black and white. And about you, and a lot of guys like us.”

“Quarry! That was like burning money.”

“Well, it’s gone now.”

“Jesus, Quarry.”

“You should thank me. That list fell into the wrong hands, your ass and mine and a lot of people would’ve been in one fine sling.”

“I suppose. But shit.”

“You want your gun back?”

“My. 45, you mean? Please.”

I gave it to him.

“Bulky son of a bitch, ain’t it?” he said. “That federal fucker had one, you know, with a silencer too, even. Silencers are illegal as shit, what’s a federal fucker doing with one, I mean, what’s the goddamn country coming to. You know… you could’ve killed Brooks with this, and set me up for it.”

“I know. I didn’t.”

“Well, while I’m not exactly thrilled you burned my future up for me, you bastard, I got to thank you for giving me an out.”

“What are friends for.”

“Right. Looks like I owe you another one.”

“Let’s just say this one’s on me and leave it go at that.”

“Anything you say. I suppose you made it look like suicide?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll let on like I figure that’s what it was, if the mob guys ask me, and they will. Well. Nothing to hang around this dump for. Shit. First thing, I’m going to have to unload that fuckin’ LTD on somebody and get something cheaper to drive.”

“Got any other plans?”

‘‘No. I don’t know. What the hell. There’s other Brokers around, you know. I suppose I’ll find one and stay in the business. What about you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe I’ll see you sometime.”

“Maybe.”

I watched him walk out to his car. He waved before he got in. I waved as he left. Maybe I would see him again. I hadn’t burned the list, of course. Those ashes I dumped on Brooks’s desk were just some papers I burned in the wood-burning stove down at the cottage. But I wanted it to filter back to Chicago, through Ash, that the list was gone. I didn’t want anyone thinking I had it, because I had plans for it.

And I knew why Ash and Curtis Brooks hadn’t been able to find the list. It wasn’t a list at all, really. Certain people on the payrolls of Broker’s businesses (the mail-order ones, like the lingerie company I “worked” for) were coded in a way that matched up with certain slides in little yellow boxes that otherwise contained memories of various vacations Broker had been on. There was a whole pine chest packed with these boxes of slides, and only by going through every one of thousands of slides would you be able to find the less than fifty that counted, which were not really slides at all, though mounted like the rest; they were a type of microfilm, a single panel of microfilm with photographs and document- ary material on forty-eight individuals, of which I was one, and Ash another. On the cardboard-mounting material were the number/letter combinations that coincided with names on master payroll lists from the mail-order businesses. I’d been up almost all night, piecing this together. I wasn’t about to burn any of it, except for my own card.

But I really didn’t want to be the Broker, and I wasn’t going to blackmail anybody, either… professional killers aren’t the best people to try to blackmail. What I had in mind was something different. A one-man operation.

Life is a precious commodity. People will pay a lot to have one taken. But they will pay even more to hang onto one… if it’s their own. This was the profit angle Ash hadn’t been able to see. All he could see (and Brooks, too) was the killers. I could see the victims. People like Carrie, who without help were going to die.