Макс Коллинз - Killing Quarry

For various reasons, the Quarry novels have jumped around in time, sometimes taking place during the protagonist’s “hitman” years of the early to mid-1970s, others dealing with the later ’70s and ’80s and even occasionally thereafter.

Readers concerned about chronology may find it useful to know that Killing Quarry takes place a year or so before Quarry’s Vote (aka Primary Target ).

M.A.C.

When you get to the point of losing track of how many people you’ve killed, you might want to take a moment and reevaluate.

That’s where my head was at, on the drive from my A-frame in Wisconsin on Paradise Lake to Naperville, Illinois, where someone I didn’t know stood a good chance of being on the wrong end of my nine-millimeter Browning automatic.

But if I said I felt compelled to stop using murder as a tool of my trade, I would be lying. And guilt or remorse had nothing to do with it, either. It was everything else that went with my work that was bringing me down — the business shit, like explaining to somebody they’ve been targeted for death. And the boring parts, like when the background gets laid in, in a book.

For example, do I really have to tell you any more about myself besides I did two tours in Vietnam? Maybe that I was a Marine sniper would help. Or that Reagan was in his second term as president when the things I’m about to share happened. That should do it, right? From that, you can guesstimate how old I was when all this went down, and around what year it did. Even I can do that math.

What else.

I was five ten, one-hundred-seventy pounds, light brown hair, dark brown eyes. Or maybe dark brown hair and dark blue eyes. Telling you exactly what I looked like would be like sharing my real name with you, which I’m not about to. I was just a guy in a restaurant at the next table or on the bar stool beside you; a glance and a smile and a nod. Pleasant-looking, boyish, fuckable, at Last Call anyway (ladies only, please).

Leave it at that.

Not enough? Well, usually I went by Jack Something. Not always. Think of me as Quarry, which is what the Broker called me.

Broker had these supposedly clever code-type names for his entire stable of contract killers — I was Quarry, “empty and carved out of rock.” My partner, dead by the time this takes place, was “Boyd” — a gay guy who “boyed.” Get it? The Broker’s dead, too, and maybe you already figured out who made that happen.

Or maybe you’ve read one or more of the memoirs of mine that preceded this one, in which case I’m fine with you skimming a while. For those who haven’t...

After I came home from the Nam (yes, we put “the” in front of it, don’t ask me why) and killed my wife’s boyfriend, I attracted some attention in the papers. Not nationwide — southern California, near San Diego where I’d done my basic training and met the girl. Anyway, I had medals and they decided not to prosecute. I was arraigned, but that’s as far as it went.

Somehow the Broker found out about me. There had been outraged editorials when I was arrested, and outraged editorials when they cut me loose. Maybe some of that got picked up by a wire service. Maybe Broker had a clipping service. He must have had some kind of feelers out, for soldiers prone to not fitting back in.

He was a country club type, prematurely white hair with a skimpy matching mustache, slender and handsome in an executive kind of way, well-dressed but not flashy. Leisure suits, mostly. He asked me if I wanted to kill people for good money, having killed plenty for chump change.

I was interested.

For five years or so, I carried out contracts with a partner, the one whose corny code-name was Boyd. Broker’s method was to have one of us go in to a location a few weeks or so early to research the target, get the pattern down, look for... windows of opportunity. This was done by the passive half of the duo. The active half would roll in a few days before the hit was set to go down, the passive partner filling in his active half, there to do the deed.

I much preferred active, and that was fine with Boyd, who liked the passive role. A catcher at heart, not a pitcher. But at the Broker’s insistence, we switched it up now and then. Sometimes it was my turn to be on the bottom. Just to keep our skills honed.

Anyway, I was Broker’s fair-haired boy until I wasn’t, and he double-crossed me. So pretty soon he was dead and I came to have his list. What list, you ask? Well, today they would call it a database, but this was definitely analog days. Not even analog — we’re talking pen-and-ink or typewriter.

The list had the names and addresses and fairly detailed info on everybody in the Broker’s stable, including photos. I put it that way before, stable, like we were all sharing a barn or something. Really, other than the handful of others we worked with, none of us knew each other.

That meant the list’s fifty-plus hitmen, to use the TV term, were mostly unknown to me. Again, except for any potential partners I’d been put with early on, the Broker looking for a good fit. Once he was satisfied with the mix, the Broker liked to keep a team together over the long haul.

So unless you didn’t get along with who you’d been assigned — or that partner got killed and needed replacing — you knew jack shit about the others in that “stable” of Broker’s. Just thumbing through the list, mostly men and a handful of females, I saw almost exclusively former military. Vietnam was a terrific breeding ground for psychos and sociopaths. How I managed to come out of there as grounded as I did, I’ll never know.

Earlier, just trying to get your attention, I mentioned having to explain to somebody that he or she had been targeted for death. But you may have taken that wrong. Actually, I kind of meant for you to.

When I was carrying out contracts, I never explained to the marks why they were about to die. Instead, I tried to make it as quick and painless as possible, for both of us. Only a psycho would have done otherwise. I took no pleasure in killing. Pride, yes, as a professional. But, really, not a whole lot of that, either.

For me, killing was just a living.

How explaining to a guy that he’s been marked for death comes into it is this: the list. I figured there must be some way to use that list to my benefit, to take advantage of what these days they call a skill set.

But I had no desire to use the names to become the new Broker. Just didn’t suit me, booking gigs for guys with guns, playing daddy to a bunch of damaged goods. Wasn’t long, though, before I came up with a plan.

You know the kind — like in the movies or on the tube (Christ, that dates me), when somebody says, “This is so crazy, it just might work!”

And it did work.

I would pick a name in the murder business from the Broker’s list, go to wherever that subject was living his fake life, and set up surveillance. Which was the worst part, admittedly. Because suddenly I was in the passive role.

Which sometimes required great patience — people in the murder business don’t work steady, after all. You don’t punch a clock, you punch the mark. Me, I used to do maybe four or five jobs a year. Tops.