Макс Коллинз - Quarry in the Black

I popped the blade and slashed across his throat, like a stock boy using a box-cutter, and his eyes opened wide, combat knife clattering to the alley floor, and the gash in his throat sprayed my face red, like a horrible spigot had been turned on all the way, and the warm coppery stuff was in my hair and all over my shirt and fucking everywhere, even in my eyes. At least it didn’t burn.

I shoved him off of me and he lay on his side with vacant eyes, the blood oozing from the gash but not really flowing anymore because his heart wasn’t pumping. I was a mess. A bloody mess. How the fuck had Jack the Ripper managed it, anyway?

My shirt and shoes I took off immediately, wrapping the latter in the former, so I wouldn’t leave bloody footprints. Then with all the care I could muster, I left the alley, bare-chested, in stocking feet, making sure as best I could that no cars were coming and nobody was on the sidewalk or in a window. I was shivering and some of it was the chill air. The loaves of dope I dumped down a sewer, the switchblade too, once I’d rubbed any fingerprints off.

Then I moved quickly, though not running, back to the apartment, the alley way. Up the back stairs and getting out of all of my clothes, underwear too, off of me and into the garbage bag with the clothing from the earlier fun and games. Then I took my third or was it fourth shower of the day, and leaned against the shower wall with both hands, my head under the spray and watched the blood go Psycho -ing down the drain.

Afterward, smudgy red was on the towel here and there, and I was bent over bare-ass adding it to the garbage bag of clothing-turned-evidence when Boyd came in. In his undies, finding me stark naked stuffing a bloody towel into the bag. His eyes opened as wide as their puffy pouches would allow.

“I’ll have to reimburse you for the switchblade,” I said.

The water in the YMCA pool was exactly the way I liked it, comfortable once you’d been in for a while, and not so immediately warm that you felt you’d fallen into a great big bath. Just enough snap to the temperature to let you think, and I could stand some of that. Thinking, I mean, although swimming would fill the blank just as well.

As the Broker had suggested, I’d gone to the YMCA on Locust Street in downtown St. Louis, where a room had been booked and paid for, to be seen and to have a look at the cubicle where I’d supposedly been staying. The setup was that you always asked for your key at the desk and handed it in when you left. So between the various clerks, mostly part-timers, kids and the underemployed, it would be assumed I’d already been here.

At the pool, I had an “open swim” time to myself, just me and that echoey lap-lap-lap ambiance that I knew so well and the strangely soothing scent of chlorine in that world of reflecting water that helped me reflect.

Right now I was swimming freestyle with a stroke smooth enough to be envied by a high school champ, like the one I’d once been. At the same time, my mind was finding nothing smooth about how I’d been handling things lately. If you’re somebody who yells at the TV when the hero does something stupid, I can only remind you that this was not TV and I am not a hero.

A hero wouldn’t have impulsively broken ranks at that KKK meeting and caused fiery chaos to erupt. A hero wouldn’t have blundered into the aftermath of a drug deal and slit some bastard’s throat and gotten drenched in warm sticky red. I would have to do better.

Of course, doing better meant leaving St. Looie right now, and if the Broker advised that, I would not argue. What I would learn from this lively debacle was not to let myself be talked into coming out of the shadows where my gun and I belonged to get involved up-close-and-personal in the target’s life and his sphere of influence.

In the pre-dawn hours — after I was showered with blood and then showered blood off me — I’d told Boyd what had happened, more or less, in the alley behind Coalition HQ. The “less” part was that I left out that I’d confronted André, saying instead that he’d caught me eavesdropping.

“Well now,” Boyd said, “we have to scrap the job.”

We were in our underwear at the kitchen table again.

“Probably,” I admitted.

“No probably about it, Quarry.”

He was right, of course, if for no other reason than a staffer with his throat slit in the alley behind Coalition HQ unquestionably meant cops.

I said, “The thought of walking into that office and having to weather a bunch of questions from some St. Louis Columbo does not give me a warm fuzzy feeling. I admit it. But what if I don’t show up today? Suddenly I’m a suspect. In a day or two, my background story blows up. They bring in sketch artists. My face is on the news. Think of it this way, Boyd — your partner’s face is on the news.”

The swelling had gone down some, but bruising and scrapes still made him look the monster in a Grade Z horror flick — particularly when he made a face, like he was doing now.

“Quarry, we can’t stick. We just can’t. We got five grand each out of what you did last night. Let’s cut our losses and count ourselves lucky.”

I flipped a hand. “Why don’t we hold off till we see how the morning goes down? And then we can call the Broker and get his take.”

He was shaking his head. “His take on you killing some colored drug dealer behind the target’s place? After he hears that, you think you’ll even still be on the Broker’s team?”

That sent my brain a quick image of Boyd and me and others I’d encountered in Broker’s network of damaged goods, all of us in basketball jerseys. With him as frustrated coach, yelling at the refs. But then I immediately realized the coach’s way of benching me in this game would be to have my ass killed.

“No, Boyd. That’s gotta be our little secret. Here’s what we tell him. We woke up this morning, and learned to our dismay about the murder of one of the Reverend’s staffers. An apparent drug deal gone wrong.”

“Yeah,” Boyd said thoughtfully, “Broker would wonder why you went over there last night, when you saw those lights on. Why did you go over there, Quarry?”

“You didn’t question it last night.”

“We didn’t discuss it, really. You just did it.”

How could I explain to Boyd that something in me wanted to make sure our target was part of the dope distribution ring operating out of his domain? How could I make him understand that I needed Reverend Raymond Wesley Lloyd to be dirty, to somehow deserve what we’d been hired to do to him?

How could I explain all that to Boyd if I couldn’t explain it to myself?

“I had to make sure,” I said, “that whatever was happening over there wasn’t a result of what went down at that Klan meeting.”

Which sounded lame even to me, but Boyd let it pass.

Boyd and the sun were up before I was. I’d found him at the window in his half-turned position, one pillow under his ass, the other propped against the wall, as he used the binoculars. The portable radio, turned to the easy-listening station, was softly playing “The Good Life” by Bobby Darin.

“Anything yet?” I’d asked, barely awake.

“Not yet,” he said.

That didn’t surprise me. While André’s body had surely been discovered by now, any cop cars would be along the side street in and near the alley, beyond our sight. And nobody got to the Coalition HQ till eight A.M. Plus, everybody who’d made the weekend trip had been told they could wander in as late as they liked. Even if that meant after lunch.

I’d crawled out of bed after a bracing three hours of sleep, took yet another shower, shaved, shat, and got into some of the few clothes of mine that weren’t stuffed in a garbage bag ready to be dumped somewhere. Then I walked down to the Majestic, got us doughnuts and coffee, and walked back.