Макс Коллинз - Quarry in the Black

“What you eating?” Deon asked, writing down the latest scores.

“Well, you have a point. But I prefer Popeye’s.”

“Naw, you fool, that’s spinach.”

“No, really. Few months ago, I ate at one in New Orleans. You wait. You’ll be lining up.” I had another bite of chicken, the batter better than the banter. “I’m gonna take a stroll around the house, get the layout down. Mrs. Lloyd gone for the night?”

Both men nodded, looking at their cards.

“No children at home?”

“Children, boy and girl, growed and gone,” Terrell said. He looked up and smiled, showing off his one gold tooth. Funny how a face that has a natural glower can brighten like that. “Take your tour and come back, Jackie boy. Three of us, we can play some poker.”

“Poker? Well, all right, but could one of you nice men teach me the rules? And I’m afraid I don’t have any change. Can we play for dollars?”

Deon said, “Oh, I gonna watch his ass when he deal the cards.”

I went upstairs. Master bedroom, good-size bathroom, guest room, bedroom with school sports trophies, another with blue ribbons for instrumental music (flute). College graduation photos framed on a dresser in each.

Downstairs, in addition to the dining room and study and another bath, a TV room was off the kitchen, a mud room off that. The basement wasn’t finished, though the washer and dryer were down there, and furnace of course, tool bench, storage boxes, windows too small to crawl in. A fairly typical middle-class, maybe upper-middle-class home. Nothing to indicate a nationally prominent figure lived here.

From a strategic standpoint, the only ways in were the front and back doors. With the exception of the windows off the front porch, the others were too high up on the house to be a threat.

I returned to the dining room and said, “I’m gonna pass on the poker, fellas. One of us ought to be watching that back door.”

They looked at each other like my proposed tactic was Einstein revealing E=mc 2. Well, they were bodyguards, not Special Forces.

“Good idea, Jackie boy,” Terrell said. “You do that little thing.”

I said sure and was heading out when Deon advised, “Make sure that back door locked up tight!”

“Good place to start,” I said.

If you’re wondering, the back door was already locked, or anyway the one onto the mud room was — the kitchen door had no lock. Not that I was expecting anybody to come in any door. After all, the fox was already in the henhouse. And I was the fox.

Wasn’t like Delmont was about to come charging in to carry out his contract. Even if he were alive, he’d wait for the Saturday rally, to give his racist client more bang for the buck. And here I sat, at the target’s kitchen table, my nine millimeter in my pants, having another cold breast of original-recipe chicken, getting by on Pepsi, marveling at how easy they were making it for me.

Just screw on the silencer, take out the card-playing bodyguards — two nine-millimeter hiccups should do it — and then swing around and pop the Reverend at his desk, and beat it out the back door and around to the Impala and gone. Take maybe forty-five seconds. About as hard as reaching in the Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket for another piece.

Which I did.

The only tricky thing was that several staffers at Coalition HQ, including Jackson and Ruth, knew I was going to the Ville to help babysit the Reverend this evening. That meant going in tomorrow with a story — how I’d arrived and found everybody already tragically dead — or splitting the scene post-hit tonight, and taking my chances.

The former meant getting looked at by the cops a lot harder than I had been this afternoon. The latter meant holing up in my A-frame up north in the cold waiting for the heat to subside. Yes, they’d have police sketches, but nothing else, and if these looks of mine were any more average, I’d forget who that was in the mirror when I shaved mornings.

Hop in the Impala and split. Then wait it out. Curl up by my fireplace, counting my twenty-five grand. Thirty grand, counting my half of Delmont’s payday.

Of course, I hadn’t collected that twenty-five grand yet, had I? That was set for a few hours from now. And did I really want to pull the job before the payoff?

Which suggested another possibility: stay in town one more day, decline doing guard duty at the house tomorrow for whatever reason... and come back after dark to do the deed, having, as we criminals say, cased the joint.

I could pretty much count on Terrell and Deon resuming their card-playing in the dining room. Maybe a little chancy counting on the Reverend to still be working on whatever it was he was writing. But a knock on the back door tomorrow night would summon someone, no matter who in the house it was, who would not be alarmed to find my familiar face on the back stoop. Someone who would be dead before it occurred to him he’d misjudged.

Only... what if Mrs. Lloyd returned tomorrow?

While I wasn’t thrilled by the idea of taking Terrell and Deon out, they were guys with guns in a job with risks. Mrs. Lloyd, however, was just a nice married lady, and very beautiful, which made it a shame. I was not at all anxious to add her to the collateral-damage list.

Of course, tomorrow I could probably ascertain at HQ whether Mrs. Lloyd was still at her sister’s or not.

“Mind if I join you?”

The resonant bass voice belonged to the master of the house, the Reverend Raymond Wesley Lloyd, poised in the doorway between hall and kitchen. Still in his rolled-up shirtsleeves but with his black-framed glasses M.I.A., he looked haggard, or anyway as haggard as that well-carved African mask of a face could.

“Please,” I said, and gestured to the chair next to me at the kitchen table.

The Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket was between us on the table with a stack of napkins near it. He first went to the fridge and got himself a Budweiser and returned and selected a thigh from the bucket — about all that was left that was worth eating.

He had a sip of Budweiser, made a face, and said, “Well, isn’t that vile. I only stock it because it’s what the fellas like.”

Terrell and Deon.

We sat quietly eating chicken until we were both finished and wiping our fingers at the same time. I’d started first but his piece was smaller.

“Sometimes,” he said, giving the remains of the thigh a satisfied smile, “it just can’t be helped — fried chicken just really hits the bull’s-eye.”

Hits the bull’s-eye.

He folded his hands, as if getting ready to say grace after the meal. “You’re Mr. Blake. I’m afraid I’ve been negligent where you’re concerned.”

“You have?”

He nodded. He was very black in that way that makes some white people uneasy. Not me particularly. Maybe when I was younger and too stupid to know better. Or maybe he just reminded me of somebody I’d known well, somebody who had flushed whatever residual prejudice I might have had out of my system.

His sigh damn near ruffled the curtains over the sink. “I’ve been busy, Mr. Blake. Preoccupied. I want to do everything I can to see that the right man gets into the White House this time around.”

“Afraid it’s an uphill battle, Reverend.”

He smiled, the whiteness of his teeth almost startling against that smooth black skin. “Why don’t you call me Raymond... and is John all right?”

“Make it Jack.”

He leaned back in the kitchen chair, folded his arms. “Oh, I know. ‘Raymond,’ not ‘Ray,’ must sound pompous. I admit to a streak of that. But my momma used to call me ‘Ray Ray,’ and it stuck and all my friends got to calling me that, and I hated it. Grown man called Ray Ray.” He shivered at the thought, then smiled again. “So you’ll have to put up with calling me Raymond.”