Макс Коллинз - Quarry in the Black

I shook my head, smiled a little. “You’ve had to play second-fiddle to Reverend Raymond Wesley Lloyd for a lot of years. You, a skilled public speaker yourself. You, who are not naive like the Reverend is. You know that sometimes corners have to be cut. That the ends have to justify the means — like raising money by trafficking in the same illegal drugs that the Reverend has worked so hard to fight. I mean, it’s not like dope is going away — not until a lot of things change in this country. And that’s a gradual thing, right?”

He sighed. Then he turned the dark eyes on me, and very quietly he said, “The Coalition is going broke. We face bankruptcy. Donations and speaking fees and those modest book advances and royalties — we can’t function on that paltry income. Something had to be done. Something has to be done.”

I nodded. “Oh, I get it. I see it. Utilize the Reverend’s prison pal, André, who on his own had slid back into old bad habits, let’s say... and use him to do some sub rosa fund-raising. Just a temporary thing, till the coffers get filled. But that isn’t enough, is it? As long as Reverend Lloyd is around, with his pesky morality and his annoying Christianity, you simply cannot keep the Coalition funded.”

He stroked his mustache with a thumb and middle finger. “I don’t see why this is any of your concern.”

“Here’s a hint: it’s my ass on the line . You have the skills and the vision and lack of ethics needed to take the Coalition into solvency and on to the next level. You’ve got the perfect plan — transform Reverend Raymond Wesley Lloyd from a pain in your ass into a superstar martyr. Everybody says he’s the next Martin Luther King. You mean to finish the job.”

His upper lip curled. “Am I being lectured by a fucking assassin?”

I held up the traffic cop palm again. “I know, I know. I seem out of line. And I understand why you acted so desperately... yes, desperately. You knew or strongly suspected that the Reverend was on to you. And I spoke to him earlier tonight, when I was doing bodyguard duty in the Ville — and found you were right. Lloyd was planning to sack both you and André after the big speech Saturday — still plans to oust you. But he doesn’t want any bad publicity to harm the good he hopes to do with that speech. He thinks, he really thinks... and I guess this proves you’re right, thinking the Reverend has his head up his ass... that George McGovern is gonna be our next president. I have the political savvy of a hedgehog, and I can see it’s ridiculous.”

He swallowed. His eyes were hooded now. “When did you know... that I...?”

“That you’re our client? Not as soon as you picked me out as the probable hitter. After which, you made it all too easy for me. You paved the way for me to join the team, really rolled out the welcome wagon. You made sure I was along on the weekend campus trip, even got me a room by myself so I wouldn’t be hampered if I decided that DeKalb was the place where the Reverend needed to die. And when you said you wouldn’t put up with dope smoking on the campus trip, you sounded a little too knowledgeable — ‘mowing grass,’ ‘blasting a joint.’ Oh, and you being the guy who makes all those arrangements, the campus bookings and so on... plus the ranking guy riding on the bus... that made me think you just about had to be arranging the drug deals that André was carrying out.”

His eyebrows went up. “And from that you knew I was the client?”

“Any doubt that you were went the fuck away when you arranged for me to ‘guard’ the Reverend at his house tonight. And let me tell you, it would’ve been an easy hit. And it’d be easy tomorrow night, too.”

He looked confused again. “What do you want... more money?”

I shrugged. “My middleman may demand more — you may get penalized for your breach. Speaking of which... let’s deal with that. Deal with how you got on my bad side and turned me into this windy prick you’re having to listen to.”

“Why don’t we,” he muttered.

“You had a deadline coming up, remember? After the Saturday speech, you were getting shitcanned. Your way around that was to have the Reverend killed running up to the speech, so you could take his place and eulogize him. You had a dream — and it was assassinating the Reverend. You know, I have to hand it to you. I’ve killed my share, more than my share, of bastards for other bastards... but never one who planned to cry crocodile tears over the body, and make a dead hero out of it so that a whole movement could be built up around the deceased.”

He was breathing hard, the rage difficult to keep in. “Take your money, and do your job. I don’t want to hear any more of your opinions. Your disapproval is laughable. I did not breach shit , Mr. Blake. The money is right here.”

He patted the bag between us.

I unsnapped the thing, opened it up, and found packets of crisp, fresh bills with five-hundred-dollar bank wrappers. I counted fifty of them. I took one random packet and thumbed it — twenty-five twenty-dollar bills.

“Right on the money,” I said.

“Are we done here?”

“One last thing. That breach.”

“ What fucking breach?”

“Hiring a second contract, remember? You have everything riding on not getting fired by the Reverend until after the rally speech Saturday. So you decide that you need a back-up. If for some reason Lloyd doesn’t go down before the rally, he will have to die during the rally, while he’s speaking. Think of the drama, with you holding him in your arms, and getting his blood all over you. That would be an image that would become goddamn historic. And the hillbilly hitman would likely be killed or captured, and you’ve arranged it so that it would impossible to trace back to you. Anyone who suggested such a thing would just be another silly conspiracy freak.”

The eyes were so hooded now, they were almost shut. “Suppose that’s true, Mr. Blake. How does it impact you?”

“It impacts me because the hillbilly, in the course of doing his job, noticed us and took us for interlopers. He was ready to kill me, and my partner, and that kind of thing just rubs me the fuck the wrong way.”

“I... I never anticipated that.”

“Oh I know. But did you anticipate this?”

I raised the nine millimeter and its endless silenced snout angled up at him, and his eyes were huge as he looked into its tiny mouth.

He spoke quickly: “Listen to me, Blake — it was just a fallback. Had you successfully removed Raymond, I would have called off the second contract.”

“Here’s my fallback. I take the money, I kill you, and with the client dead, the hit becomes a moot point, and I don’t have to shoot a man who’s better than either one of us.”

His arms went up, as if he were a ref calling a play, and out of the trees they came, his two white gangster pals, the ones I’d seen in the alley with André. Their hats flew off and their topcoats flapped as they ran right at me, the big guy with the pasta-fat face and his slender superior, mustached and looking like he was playing Nathan Detroit in a Muny production of Guys and Dolls . They were absurdly old-fashioned gangsters, yet not laughable at all, not with those big automatics that were firing at me, breaking the silence of the night into loud little pieces.

I hit the deck, hard, the cement scraping my elbow right through the windbreaker, and the running men were shifting their aim when Boyd came out from behind his tree and shot them both down into tumbling piles of dead.

On my feet now, I looked over at Jackson, whose small mouth was forming the kind of big hole you scream out of, only he remained silent. He had lowered his hands to chest level and his eyes begged for the mercy he himself was incapable of granting.