Макс Коллинз - Quarry in the Black

He leaned forward, too, swiveling toward me as I had him. “Like the Biloxi job, this will require you going undercover. Joining the subject’s organization — not an overtly criminal one, by the by. This should be easily accomplished. Once in, you will study the landscape, seeking a window.”

“Landscapes don’t have windows.”

“My apologies for the mixed metaphor,” he said, just a tad testily, “but what I’m saying is that you will need to do your own fact-finding beyond what your partner will do from his perch. Boyd is on this job, with or without you, already. He is stationed across the way from the subject’s organizational headquarters.”

How could this fucker provide so much information without giving me anything, really?

“Sounds like,” I said, “we already have a window. A literal one. Just pop him from ‘across the way.’ ”

He shook his head and, I swear, a finger. “The subject both arrives and exits through an alley behind his headquarters. He has bodyguards, and I doubt the idea of conducting a fire fight in an alley would hold much appeal to you.”

“Not much,” I said. “What about the target’s residence?”

“Difficulties there as well. But you are welcome to find a way to make that work for you. En route from home to work and back again might also suggest a possibility. Still, I believe you’ll need inside access to accomplish that, due to the specific exigencies.”

I had no idea what an exigency was, specific or non-specific.

He was saying, “You’ll have a literal deadline — the end of the month. This must be done before the last weekend in October. Before a big outdoor event on Saturday of that weekend.”

“Not at the ‘big outdoor event?’ ”

“No. For the reasons previously cited.”

But by now I well understood that this wasn’t just any killing — not the usual cheating spouse or troublesome business partner, nor the occasional mob hit we carried out to keep suspicion off the local bent-nose who hired it.

Not when the Broker shows up on my turf to present this job with the delicacy of asking a father from the old country for his daughter’s hand. Not when he comes alone, minus one of his usual driver/bodyguards at the wheel of his Caddie.

And he had.

“Doesn’t hold office,” I said.

“Does not.”

“Isn’t running for office.”

“Is not.”

“You realize I do not like getting next to a target. It’s dangerous in every way there is.”

His ice-blue eyes reflected dancing flames. “I know, Quarry. But a twenty-five-thousand-dollar payday requires a certain sacrifice.”

“Getting my head blown off isn’t my idea of a ‘certain sacrifice.’ Neither is spending the rest of my life in prison. Death Row isn’t on a lake.”

He gave up an elaborate shrug and said, “Granted.”

“God fucking damnit,” I said, tossing a hand. “Who is it? But if it’s the guy who plays Archie Bunker, I’m not interested.”

He frowned. “Who?”

“It was a joke, Broker. My life’s ambition is making you crack a smile.”

“You may be disappointed.”

That made me crack a smile. He was one up on me.

“So, then. Are you on board, Quarry?”

“Yeah,” I said, and it was a sigh. “Holding onto the railing, hoping the ship doesn’t hit an iceberg, but yeah.”

Then he smiled faintly — not at my weak humor but in satisfaction for having lured me in — and reached for the manila envelope beside him on the couch. Handed it across to me.

The close-up photo on top of the paper-clipped documents was from the AP wire service; so were a few others, taken at speaking events. Still others were surveillance shots. The latter had various individuals circled and identified, obviously people on the target’s staff. He had the kind of handsome, well-carved features you find on an African tribal mask or the hero of a blaxploitation flick. No major Afro or sideburns, though, and no flashy threads — dark suit, dark tie, like an undertaker.

Or a preacher.

“I’ve seen this guy,” I said, “on the news. Don’t remember his name.”

“The Reverend Raymond Wesley Lloyd,” the Broker said, enunciating each word as if I were taking notes. Mentally I was.

“Civil rights activist,” I said, in a thinking-out-loud way. “Kind of getting to be a big deal.”

“Many think he’s the next Martin Luther King,” the Broker said, nodding, smiling again, pleased that his slow student had some smidgen of knowledge. “But Reverend Lloyd stays unaffiliated with any major activist groups, whether traditional like the NAACP or the more radical SNCC. He’s his own man with his own organization.”

I flipped through some materials that provided background well beyond what Boyd might have gathered; this was clearly a job that had been in the planning stages long before either Boyd or I had been brought in.

The Broker sat quietly, sipping his beer, while I skimmed the materials, which included magazine and newspaper clippings. All I knew going in was what I’d picked up from the nightly newscast, when it happened to be on while I ate a TV dinner or something. I vaguely remembered that Lloyd had come up through the St. Louis slums and been involved in drug dealing, but had got religion in prison.

Upon his release, he became pastor of a small church in St. Louis and built a following; after the church was burned to the ground, Lloyd did not rebuild, at least not the church itself. Instead he struck out as an activist leader.

According to a Time magazine piece, former dealer Lloyd of all the black leaders of our day was the one who spoke out most forcefully against illegal narcotics on ghetto streets. They were “genocide,” he said. Heroin was “a plague upon our people.”

I put the materials back in the envelope, and tossed it back on the little table.

I said, “I know I pressured you into revealing who the subject was... but this isn’t for me.”

His expression was placid. “Why is that?”

“It’s just not what I signed on for. You made it clear in our very first meeting, going on two years now, that by the time I’d be called in on a job, the person targeted was already dead, in a way. That when somebody is willing to pay good money to have somebody else taken out, well, out that second somebody goes.”

He’d begun nodding before I finished. “That’s correct. Another way to look at it is that if you don’t take a job, someone else will. The subject will die, whether you are the means or not.”

One actor refuses a role , he’d said in that first meeting, and another steps in. Because the show must go on.

I gestured to the manila envelope. “But you also said that any target in my crosshairs would be there as a result of their own actions. They screwed somebody’s wife, they embezzled money, they were criminals who got on the bad side of other criminals. Not... not somebody decent, for Christ’s sake.”

He grinned. I finally made him smile. Really smile. In a coochy-coo of a voice he said, “Why, is that a sense of moral outrage I detect, Quarry?”

The fire felt hot on my face. “I don’t know that I want to kill somebody because a client doesn’t like black people. Somebody in my crosshairs because they’re the wrong color? Not my deal. Even for twenty-five k.”

The smile was fading but lingered; he leaned toward me. “That’s something I like about you, Quarry. Unlike most of the Vietnam veterans I work with, you returned home with some semblance of humanity buried inside there.”

“I thought I was carved out of rock.”

He flipped a hand. “My first impression. Now I realize that you have standards. Perhaps even a code of sorts. In a world without meaning, that can come in handy. But it can also get in the way.”