Макс Коллинз - Quarry in the Black

“I... I... I...”

Aye yai yai.

I said, “You were hired to kill him, too.”

“I was hired to kill him, too!”

Boyd’s eyebrows went up. His puffy eyes otherwise stayed put. They had no choice.

“Delmont,” I said, “my friend and I handle contracts. Is that what you do? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Delmont swallowed thickly. “Maybe so. Maybe so.”

This was not one of Broker’s people. Not by a long shot. But there were other Brokers around, some not so sophisticated. Like Delmont wasn’t quite as sophisticated as Boyd and me.

“Popular guy, the Reverend Lloyd,” I said. “Looks like two people with money want him dead. Two separate contracts.”

Delmont was trying to make that work in his head. “That’s... that’s...”

“A coincidence, yeah, I said that before. It’s also possible that we were hired by the same party, and this is some kind of half-assed attempt to make sure the hit really goes down. Like we fail, you step in. Or vice versa.”

“But that don’t work,” Delmont said, goggling at me. “Not without us knowin’ about each other. Without us knowin’ about each other, somethin’ really bad could go down.”

“Right. Like you stumbling in on us and taking us for cops or feds or interlopers.”

“Right,” Delmont said, nodding, then he winced, because that hurt. “So... so what happens now?”

“Chances are,” I said, “though we’re not likely working for the same party, that those parties are aligned.”

“A what?”

“Well, allies. On the same side. Delmont, you’ve heard that expression, the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing?”

“I heard it.”

“That’s what happened here. I’m almost sure of it.”

He squinted in apparent thought. “I’m workin’ for one hand and you for the other.”

“That’s it. You got it.”

His eyes widened. “Well... where do we go from here? If we’re on the same job... sort of... could you maybe let me out of this here chair?”

“I like the way you think, Delmont. And there’s a good chance you’ll be getting out of that there chair. A good chance you’ll live through this and wind up in the black.”

“In what black? If you mean pussy, I ain’t interested, ’less maybe she’s high yellar or somethin’.”

“No, no, Delmont. I mean, you wind up with what you’re supposed to get paid, and we wind up with what we’re supposed to get paid.”

“But that nigger can only die once.”

“Nothing wrong with your math skills, Delmont. But the right hand, who hired you, and the left hand, who hired us, won’t know that. All our employers will know is that the hit went down successfully. Everybody wins. Except Reverend Lloyd.”

Smoke was threatening to come out his ears again. “Okay... but...”

“Delmont, what I’m saying is... I suggest we partner up.”

Boyd sighed. Applied the homemade ice pack to his face.

Delmont shrugged, as much as he could, duct-taped up like that, and said, “I’m willin’. How ’bout I kill his black ass, and we all get paid, and we all go our separate ways?”

“Close. I’m going to suggest much the same thing. I suggest that my partner and I do the hit. We get paid for doing it, and you get paid for doing nothing.”

He was starting to smile.

“And if we screw up,” I went on, “and wind up dead or something, with Reverend Lloyd still aboveground? Well, then you can come in and finish the job. And get paid.”

“Will you still get paid?”

“No, Delmont, we won’t — we’ll be dead.”

“You’ll be what?”

“Dead or in stir. This happens if we screw the job up, and you have to come in and do it after all. But right now you just sit back and wait to see how we do.”

“Not in this chair I won’t.”

“Just a figure of speech, Delmont.”

“Not to me it’s not. And anyway, this’ll all go tits up if I don’t get out of this chair and out of here, lickety damn split.”

“Why is that?”

He looked at me like I was really, really dumb. “The money drop is tonight. I pick up my share. That’s the way it works where I come from. Night or two before I do the job, they got to pay me. But I don’t have no direct contact. Everything’s done through a middleman.”

This all sounded a little too familiar.

I asked, hoping I wanted to hear the answer, “What do you call your middleman, Delmont?”

“Well, I call him Fred. That’s his name.”

That was a relief.

I said, “So the drop is tonight?”

“Right. I’m gettin’ payment straight from the guy who hired the job.”

“So, uh, you work alone?”

“Right. I come in and do recon, then bang bang, I shoot ’em down.”

Boyd was groaning softly.

I said, “Delmont, I’m confused. First you said no direct contact, then you said the guy who hired the job is paying you in person. Tonight.”

“Yeah, it’s at this meeting. If you saw, you’d understand.”

“Well, Delmont, I am going to see. Because you’re taking me.”

“I am?”

And Boyd cut him out of the chair, looking not at all happy about it. About as unhappy, in fact, as Delmont was pleased to get his Charger keys back.

The moon crawled above the horizon, huge, full and blood-red, what we called a Hunter’s Moon back in Ohio. With Delmont at the muscle-car wheel, we were heading southwest on US 50 through rolling countryside, with idyllic rural Middle America gliding by, from forested ridges and well-tilled valleys to antebellum brick mansions and fenced modern farmhouses. Along the way, the moon floated higher, its face now a glowing Halloween orange.

I was the navigator, reading typewritten directions off a small piece of paper to the driver. Traffic was light. Delmont had switched the radio on to a country station and I looked for rock and failed, nothing but more steel guitar and nasal singing, and lots of Sunday fire-and-brimstone preachers who wanted you to send them money. I switched the radio off.

On stretches we’d talk, snippets of conversation initiated by the blond, square-jawed lumberjack behind the wheel. Before we left him behind, Boyd had bandaged his hunky former captor, who now really did look like he’d cut himself shaving. The paucity of cars sharing the concrete strip made for a dream-like ride.

Delmont flashed a vaguely nasty grin over at me. “You know, a car like this is a weapon all by itself.”

“That right.”

“Oh yeah. You can run people down with it. Go fast enough, hit ’em just right, they go flyin’.”

“That a fact.”

His eyebrows flicked up and down. “Really, that gun you got there don’t stack up at all to the weapon I got control of.”

“I’m not pointing it at you, Delmont.” The nine mil in my right hand was draped across my lap.

“I know, I know you’re not. I’m just sayin’ — what if I was to swerve and just crash into a telephone pole or some other car, or maybe... in of these little towns? Just punch the pedal and slam into a building or somethin’?”

“What if you did, Delmont?”

“Well, my point is, I’m at the wheel of a car that weighs, oh shit, I don’t know... four-thousand pounds?”

“You’re probably guessing a little high, but yeah, right. And?”

“And all you’ve got is that gun. That little ol’ gun.”

With the extension of the noise suppressor, it didn’t look all that little. But compared to the car it was.

“So you’re saying,” I said, “that you have the more dangerous weapon. Of the two.”

“That’s what I’m sayin’. I could wreck this here car with you in it, and then where would you be? And if you was to shoot me, ’cause you saw I was steerin’ toward somethin’? Well, we’d just crash anyway and you’d be up shit crick.”