Макс Коллинз - Killing Quarry

After half an hour of laps, I swam slowly over near her, then, treading water, said, “Come join me.”

Her smile was sleepy. “You come join me.”

“No, that heat will lull me too much. Drowning asleep in a hot tub would only embarrass me.”

She smirked. “Risk it.”

So I climbed out, toweled off, and slipped down and in and under the water next to her, sitting on a little submerged ledge with a jet working on my lower back.

She purred, “This is a nice break.”

“From lunacy. Yes. It is.”

A row of high windows was letting in moonlight. Red and white awnings at this end of the pool, a family friendly touch in post-Playboy Club days, were subdued into submission.

“I thought,” she said, “you wanted to stay away from here.”

She meant the main lodge.

I said, “I did.”

“Because there are people here who know you.”

“Yes. But I needed this. And nobody’s around, really.”

“Okay.” She was studying me. “Do you feel like you know any more about what’s going on, now that we’ve crashed the party and stayed a while?”

I frowned. “Maybe ‘know’ is too strong. But I have the feeling that, with one exception, my seminar buddies don’t know about me.”

She frowned back. “You mean, that you’re the fly in the ointment? The one behind ten years of contracts getting upended, here and there?”

“That, but also they seem to accept my story about being Vanhorn’s business partner. These brokers don’t work together. Oh, they know about each other. But they’re independent businessmen with ties to the Outfit, who feed them jobs. Yet they aren’t themselves Outfit.”

“That makes a difference?”

“I think so. Your Envoy took over most of the Broker’s players. So he felt the squeeze of my interloping, over the years. He had reason to try to understand what was going on, and eventually figure out what I was up to. These other middlemen in murder? No.”

“You said an exception. Who?”

“Poole. Something’s not right about him.”

Her eyebrows hiked. “I’ll say. Slapping his honey around like that. Getting soused. Handing out coke like Halloween candy.”

I shrugged. “I don’t exactly run with this crowd. Maybe that was normal behavior, tonight. Par for the course. Maybe these bland sons of bitches are wild-ass party animals, when they attend something like this — work by day, play at night.”

It was her turn to shrug. “Fairly typical convention-goer-type behavior, I’d say.”

I nodded again. “But that’s not the only thing bothering me about Poole. He had an attitude toward me the others didn’t. Skepticism, maybe. Suspicion for sure.”

“So what do we do tomorrow? Just let this play out?”

I huffed a sigh. “That’s part of what I’ve been mulling. For one thing, I’m not sure this seminar isn’t already over. Seymour M. Goldman seemed fairly freaked out. He may head back to tax-dodger paradise.”

“Which leaves us where?”

“Not sure,” I admitted. “As for right now, we can go back and spend the night, then leave first thing in the morning. Announce that tonight’s fun and games were just a little much for us, and go.”

“Go where?”

“That is a goddamn good question. Back to my place, to wait to see if anybody comes around to kill me? Back to yours in St. Paul, to wait to see if anybody comes around to kill you? Or do we, together or separately, walk away from those left-handed lives of ours and start over, right-handed? We both have the money for it. Tahiti maybe. You go topless and I’ll learn to paint like Gauguin. Maybe sell black velvet paintings of you to tourists.”

By the end of that, she was laughing. Not hard, but laughing, though we both knew it was no laughing matter, really.

“Maybe,” she said, finally, “ I should swim for half an hour and think about it.”

“There’s an aspect of this,” I said, “we haven’t looked at. What about the list?”

“The list? The Broker’s list?”

I nodded. “What if this is an unfriendly takeover, in the business sense? Those four are all working the Midwest. So was Vanhorn. Maybe one of them wants to expand. Take over Vanhorn’s market share. In which case he — whoever ‘he’ is — needs access to the Envoy’s roster of friendly neighborhood hired guns.”

“Wouldn’t he — whoever he was — force that list out of Vanhorn first? Get it out of that wall safe of his? Or get access to it in some way or fashion?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” I lifted my shoulders and put them back down. “If not, then my list becomes really valuable, even with ten years of tire tread worn off it. Or maybe... shit, that could be it!”

“What could?”

I leaned toward her. “If one of my seminar buddies does know about me — knows what I’ve been up to — he’d obviously want to stop me. Stop me from screwing up contracts and bumping off his assets. But maybe he also wants to lay hands on that list, to see if it still has useful assets.”

The Asian eyes opened wider than I thought they could. “God. It’s starting to look like your only good option is to go home and wait for somebody to come around to kill you. And kill them instead.”

“...I’m going to swim some more.”

“I’ll join you.”

She started to climb out, her top-heavy, long-legged frame nicely water-pearled. Funny how ten years later she was even lovelier than she’d been — back then, she’d only been stunning.

I followed her over to the pool and we swam lazy, loping laps for around fifteen minutes. Then, wordlessly, we got out, gathered our handguns wrapped in towels, and went to our appropriate locker rooms.

We had driven over in the Firebird. We walked to the car in the side parking lot under half a moon and a scattering of clouds and a handful of stars flung carelessly around by a God who didn’t care about our problems or what we did about them. The cold felt bracing, after the hot tub and warm pool. With no wind, it really wasn’t so bad.

Behind the wheel, with Lu next to me, I glanced over and said, “We could just go. Just ride.”

“Into the sunset?”

“Into the dawn, anyway. For now, we don’t have to make our minds up. If we don’t want to play this game of kill or be killed, fuck it. We have enough money to set up shop somewhere. Antiques is fine. We are not old, lover.”

She smiled. “Lover. You never called me that before.”

“Well, it’s overdue.”

I leaned over and kissed her. She kissed me back, as warm as the night was cold. It lasted a while. Then we went to our respective corners, with more rounds left to fight.

“We’ll sleep on it,” she said.

“Sleep on it,” I said with a nod.

I drove over to the chalet, where not a single car was in the lot until I parked mine, close to the entry. No lights on in the place, either, not on any of the three floors.

“Odd,” I said.

“Why so?”

“Well, after the coke and music and slapping and screaming... our busy little party animals all seem to be tucked in their wee little beds.”

“It’s after one, Jack.”

I was looking at the chalet like it was a spooky house and our car had broken down, and was it wise to ask for help there? Let’s do the Time Warp again.

“I know it’s after one,” I said. “But nobody’s reading in bed, or humping with the lights on or anything? Even a TV would provide some glow. Nobody’s rustling around in the kitchen for food? Or a stray line of coke?”

She touched my arm, squeezed. “It’s fine. You’re getting paranoid. Let’s just go in and go to bed. But that decides it.”

“What?”

Her expression was firm. “We’re out of here in the morning. First thing.”