Макс Коллинз - Quarry in the Black

Whoever he or she was — no, he ... that Dodge Charger was a guy’s ride — the vehicle told me something about the owner. Well, not the vehicle so much as the mint-green “Heart of Dixie” Alabama license plates and the Confederate flag decal on the back window.

I unlocked the Impala trunk and shut the suitcase in there.

Ruth was waiting patiently in the recess of the HQ doorway. The bus was gone and so were any other staffers.

“Honey,” I said, “I’m sorry. I just remembered I promised somebody I’d do something tonight.”

“Oh... well, sure.” She seemed justifiably hurt by that lame excuse, but I didn’t dare be any more specific.

I asked her, “Do you have a car?”

“Sure.”

“Rain check?”

“You bet.” But the sticky-red smile was strained.

I gave her a kiss on the cheek, said I was sorry, and hustled across the street.

At the Impala, I opened the trunk back up and got in my suitcase, taking out the nine millimeter, which I’d folded up in some sportshirts. The noise suppressor, a black tube a little longer than the gun itself, had gotten an undignified wrapping up in my dirty underwear; I screwed it onto the Browning barrel.

Above the weathered wood of the second-floor deck, the kitchen lights were off. Nothing suspicious about that. Nothing suspicious except that Charger, which I wished was away down south in Dixie. Away, away.

I transferred the silenced weapon to my left hand and held it to my side. Went up the back stairs as quietly as I could — the boards had creaked since the day they were hammered together and tonight was no exception — and crossed the deck to the back door. The key I worked as gently as possible, but of course it made its little click.

I paused, as I dropped the key in my windbreaker pocket, looking through the door’s double glass panes across the darkened kitchen, to see if anyone would emerge. Emerge as in charge the fuck in there with a gun blasting or anyway raised to do so.

The door stuck some, so I had to put some shoulder into it, but I tried to do that gently too — the nine mil with its endless silenced barrel was in my right hand now — and the door gave and I stepped in. I left it ajar, which I didn’t love doing, but making a sound was the greater risk.

I could hear a voice echoing down the boxcar rooms. All the doors were open. That might or might not be a good thing.

“Now, li’l man,” somebody drawled, the Charger owner no doubt, “you best loosen up your lip ’fore I wipe it the hell off your ugly puss.”

I toed off my sneakers, oh so carefully. In my stocking feet I crept to the open door to my bedroom, where the lights were also off. Peering around I could see all the way down to the living room, where a big guy in a green-and-black plaid shirt and jeans and clodhoppers paced an area of four or five feet slowly in front of Boyd, who was in a chair with his hands tied behind him. Probably duct-taped, because that was how his ankles were bound to the kitchen chair he was in. I was two rooms away, and they were in the middle of the living room, but I could easily see that Boyd’s face was a battered bloody mess.

Boyd, knowing our target was out of town, had probably been loafing today, watching TV, in a white t-shirt and pajama bottoms and bare feet. Well, it had been a white-shirt. It was splotched scarlet now, like a tie-dye job that never really got off the ground.

“What in the fuckin’ name of our lord and savior Jesus H. Christ are you doin’ here, Jewboy? Best open that piehole now. Or you rather die in that chair?”

Boyd wasn’t Jewish, at least as far as I knew, but he didn’t correct the guy. He seemed barely awake, his eyelids swollen till only slits were left, his mouth puffy, welts and abrasions at odd angles on his cheeks, like war paint applied by a drunken Indian.

The big man — a good six-three, broad shoulders, narrow waist, muscular legs, a regular lumberjack in that plaid shirt — backhanded Boyd with a left. His right had a Smith and Wesson .22 auto in it. Not a small weapon, yet it looked like a purse gun in that massive fist.

I was in Boyd’s room now. By the door. Or anyway by the nightstand where his latest fairy porn paperback was folded open. Funny, the lumberjack sported a thatch of blond hair, like he’d walked off the cover of one of Boyd’s books — a dream man, giving him a nightmare time of it.

“You been watchin’ them niggers across the street, ain’tcha? Why? What the fuck you up to , you kike sumbitch?”

Boyd’s surveillance set-up was over by the window, the pillows, the radio, the binoculars, the notebook.

Boyd licked his puffed-up lips and said, “I’m not Jewish, you big steaming pile of shit.”

That cleared that up.

He backhanded Boyd again. “Don’t get mouthy with me, you little cocksucker!”

“You’re... you’re getting warmer, asshole,” Boyd said. He was smiling a little. Not defiance in the face of fear and pain, no — he saw me in the doorway.

But our guest didn’t.

Not wanting to fuck up the suppressor — it had taken a long damn time to find one worth a damn — I shifted the gun so that I held it by its barrel, tubing angled down, and swung the nine-mil butt like I was pounding a stake into the ground, making a satisfying mushy crunch. Still, he was so big I had to reach up to do it, and I wondered if he’d just say, “ Owww! ” and turn and look at me with one eye squinting.

But instead he went down like a felled tree, only less dignified, shaking the floor and the furniture. The .22 auto seemed to jump from his hand of its own accord, landing over by the couch.

Now he was down on the carpet on his left side, mouth open like a big slumbering baby, and I cautiously moved him onto his back with a foot on his shoulder. Should he be faking, and make a grab for my leg, the nine mil was turned around in my hand again and he’d be fucking dead.

If he wasn’t already.

Through the thick lips, Boyd managed, “Is it alive?”

Blows to the back of the head like the one I’d delivered killed you often as not. Wasn’t like on TV where Mannix got clocked on a weekly basis.

The lumberjack had a peaceful look, the kind they pay morticians to achieve. But he was breathing, all right, and quite a specimen. His hair was a golden yellow many a female would covet and his jaw was strong and firm in a way some men might envy. His eyes, however, were close-set, his nose flat above and lumpy below, broken so often that the point was moot.

Boyd’s fat lips flapped. “Duct tape... he brought... on the couch.”

Got to admire a pro attitude like that. Tied to a chair, beat to shit, he doesn’t yell for me to untie him or help him or any such nonsense. First make sure the intruder is out of commission.

I used the duct tape to tie the lumberjack’s wrists behind him, then wrapped it around his ankles, and finally wound more of the stuff around his legs under the knees. Then I checked for a wallet and found none. A couple hundreds in fives, tens and twenties were in one pocket, and went into mine. In the other was a small pouch of lockpicks, not unlike the one I carry in my wallet. Also the keys to his Dodge Charger. Nothing else. Certainly no I.D.

Only then did I use a pocket knife I’d found in a denim jacket our guest had tossed on a chair. I cut Boyd loose and got him to his feet.

“Go clean yourself up,” I told him. “Take half a dozen aspirin, why don’t you?”

He nodded like that was a fine prescription and trundled off.

I sat in the now-vacated kitchen chair, some Boyd blood spattered at my feet. Several yards away, Boyd’s slumbering questioner breathed hard, scarlet dripping through his longish hair like somebody had cracked a bloody egg on his skull.