Макс Коллинз - Quarry in the Black

“Thank you, Jack,” he said, getting up. “I mean that most sincerely. And thank you for the frank talk.”

He put the empty Bud can in the trash and headed back to his study to work on the speech.

He was right to thank me.

I had decided not to kill him.

But somebody else wouldn’t be so lucky.

Three in the morning wasn’t the best time to take in St. Louis’ Forest Park, its fourteen-hundred or so acres home to several museums, a planetarium and a famous zoo — unless a lack of company was what you were after. The municipal theater would be empty, the golf courses and tennis courts and boathouse, too. No one was likely to be taking in any of the statues or paying respects at memorials, either.

That made me a rare moonlight visitor to the park’s Korean War Memorial, a giant floral clock maybe thirty-five feet in diameter, formed by thousands and thousands of colorful flowers, mums and sunflowers and more, looking muted in the full moon’s glow, like a hand-tinted photograph, and spelling out below

Curving around the memorial were a number of stone benches to sit and reflect. Also a number of substantial evergreens to stand behind and wait.

Nearby was the fifty-foot high, glass-walled, steel-skeletoned, stone-fronted Art Deco greenhouse known as the Jewel Box, a big tourist destination and frequent site for weddings; but not at three in morning. My instructions had been to enter the park from Hampton Avenue, take a right on Wells Drive to a round-about where the Jewel Box would be on my left. That promise had been kept. The money would be waiting at four A.M. That promise, not just yet.

Of course, I was an hour early.

Ninety minutes ago or so, I’d still been at the Reverend’s home in the Ville, seated at the kitchen table, watching that back door as promised. Two more cans of Pepsi were in me, and I was a little caffeine-wired.

I had seen Deon stumble into the TV room, yawning, half an hour before. Now, after a good healthy piss, I checked on him, and found him sacked out on his belly on a sofa that was barely as big as he was. It looked like he’d been dropped there from a plane.

I peeked in the study, where even more crumpled-up pages surrounded the wastebasket, and found Reverend Lloyd also asleep on a sofa, a brown leather one; he was on his back, like a guy in a coffin, only breathing. How easy it would have been to pop him.

Terrell was still in the dining room, leaned forward with his big head on his big arms like a kid resting in class, snoring more softly than you’d expect. On the TV, Mantan Moreland was driving his boss around (“Mr. Chan! Mr. Chan!”), and one of the not-as-smart-as-Mantan sons. Must be showing those late every night.

I slipped out the back, leaving the door unlocked, which was not exactly stellar bodyguard work but I wanted to be able to return. With luck nobody would notice I’d been gone, and if they did, I’d come up with some kind of story. Like I’d heard somebody out back and followed them somewhere or maybe went for a wee-hours breakfast or some bull.

The first phone booth I spotted, I pulled the Impala over and made the call to the Broker. No flunky this time — the man himself picked up on the first ring. He gave me the drop location and the payoff instructions. They were simple enough.

Now I was tucked behind a tree, smelling pine needles, with my Impala parked along one of the smaller curving roadways about a quarter mile away. Of course I’d checked the bench the money was supposed to be left under, not expecting to find anything and I didn’t. Though it varied, what typically went down was the client arrived with the cash no more than an hour (and often as little as ten or fifteen minutes) before I was to pick it up. Make the drop and get the hell out.

The point was for the client not to come in contact with me or somebody like me. Such drops were routinely middle-of-the-night, nobody-likely-to-be-around affairs, so the risk of leaving a box or a bag of money unattended for a short while was minimal.

What the client didn’t know, and what the Broker surely must have, was that a guy like me wasn’t going to accept a risk like that, minimal or not. Either I or my partner would always go early, find a vantage point and watch, picking up the package as soon as the client had cleared the scene.

The night was cool and just a little breezy. Still in the windbreaker, I was comfortable enough, but with all these trees and bushes around for the wind to ruffle, I got to thinking, every whipstitch, that I heard something suspicious.

I didn’t have long to wait. About three-thirty, he showed up, wearing a black raincoat and a black fedora, looking about as subtle as a bad guy in one of those Charlie Chan movies. He was carrying a black bag like doctors used to when they made house calls — Gladstone bag? Whatever, he was half-kneeling and tucking it under the bench when I came up behind him and said, “Starting to feel like fall, Mr. Jackson. Perfect football weather, don’t you think?”

He rose, still clutching the bag in his gloved fist, whirling toward me, eyes wide, brow knit. “What the hell is—”

“Nothing to be worried about,” I said, left hand raised like a traffic cop about to blow a whistle. “We’re just going to sit down here and have a nice little chat.”

My words didn’t diminish his alarm. He could easily see the nine millimeter in my right hand, which had to be troubling for him even though I held it down at my side, the extended noise-suppressor snout touching my jeans well below my knee.

He did not sit down. He swallowed, forced his expression to smooth out, and said easily, “Mr. Blake, I can’t believe you’re here.”

Yet here I was.

“This,” he continued, “is a major breach. You know goddamn well I was guaranteed not to have any direct contact with... with you.”

He was choosing his words carefully. Despite the silenced weapon at my side, I could be an undercover cop wearing a wire, as far as he knew.

“The reason I insist we talk,” I said, “is I suspect you committed a breach of contract yourself. If you can satisfy me that you haven’t, I’ll just fade away. If I’m not satisfied, I will contact my middleman and he will decide where we go from here.”

Alarm had been replaced with confusion. “And what then? Will the contract be carried out or not?”

“Let’s sit and talk.”

He frowned, gestured around us. “Out here in the open like this? Are you out of your mind?”

I hate two-part questions.

“It’s after three-thirty A.M.,” I said. “No security walks these grounds. Maybe a cop car will go by at some point. So what? We’re not easily visible from the street, and as long as one of us isn’t on his knees in front of the other one, we don’t look like we’re breaking any laws. Can we please sit?”

We sat.

“You put me in a bad position, Mr. Jackson.”

He was not looking at me, staring straight ahead, across the floral clock and into the trees. “How is that?”

“Things have been going on that I didn’t know about. That I should have known about. You took out a second contract, didn’t you? That must have required a few steps, and fancy ones, because I don’t think the people you hired would have taken something on directly from a nigger...”

Now he looked at me, eyes blazing.

“...as they would crudely put it. Funny, thinking of you doing business with Nazi types, KKK clowns. Because I think, and this is just my reading of it and I’m no expert, that you’re sincere about your activism.”

He looked away again, across the trees, his jaw firm. “Of course I’m sincere.”