Макс Коллинз - Quarry in the Black

“You mind if I take a shower, Jack?”

“Not at all.”

“Just wait for me there in the bedroom off the livin’ room, okay?”

“Okay. Should I... get undressed?”

The lush sticky-pink lips smirky-smiled again. “Why? You prefer just unzippin’ and whippin’?”

And she flounced out. Apparently that was a rhetorical question.

I went into the bedroom and climbed out of the windbreaker, kind of wrapping the nine mil in it. Set it on the dresser. Then I got undressed and turned off the overhead light, switching the nightstand lamp on to the lowest of its three settings. The effect was very soft, low-key, almost dreamy. The drilling of the shower water in the background reminded me of the naked woman under the spray. Then it stopped. I could hear her moving in there, toweling off I guess.

The bedroom off the bathroom she’d left dark, and she emerged from that darkness like a pale vision with all that red hair framing her face and the carrot-colored tangle below. The plump, round breasts had large tips as red as her hair, aureole just a little pinker than the pale pink flesh. Her shoulders and upper chest were freckled, her waist tucking in, her hips flaring out. She couldn’t be much older than twenty-two or — three, but her ripe figure was womanly in the best sense.

She stood there posed in the doorway, legs unembarrassedly apart, the light from the bathroom providing her with an outline.

She said, “Are you clean, Jack? I’m clean. No diseases or nothin’.”

“I don’t even have a cold,” I said, under the covers, tenting them.

“I mean, I got some rubbers in that drawer there, if you want. But I’m on the pill, honey. I trust you if you trust me.”

That may not sound romantic to you, but to the part of me that was doing the thinking at the moment, it was sheer poetry.

She strolled over like a nudist carhop and looked down at me, where the blankets were in tee-pee formation. She flicked the covers away, twanging my hard-on, which made a motion at her like a summoning finger. She crawled on the bed kittenish or was that panther-like and stopped between my legs and looked up at me wickedly, then descended on my cock like she was famished. I gave her an inch and she took a mile, and I was slicker than a rain-swept highway when she stopped short of getting an even bigger mouthful and said, “Now you do me.”

She flopped onto her back and spread her legs, knees up. I was new to red-haired muff but eager to learn. The tuft was softer and less coarse than any I’d encountered, and her pink-nailed fingers spread red lips apart to expose inner flesh that was redder still. Just when I had her licked, she told me to stick it in and I did. She was hot, wet and tight. I plunged in and out, deeper and faster, as her hips lifted and churned and lifted and churned, at first very slow, then less so, building to a frantic dizzying finish. I came so hard I practically passed out. She stared at the ceiling, breathing hard, her red-flushed chest gradually returning to freckled pale.

Then she grabbed some Kleenex from a box on the dresser, stuffed them between her legs and trotted comically out, her legs tight, her bottom jiggling. I used some of the Kleenex myself, then I got dressed.

I was sitting on the couch in the living room, the windbreaker-wrapped nine mil beside me. I was still getting my goddamn breath. She padded in, in sheer panties and nothing else, and plopped next to me, red hair bouncing. I gave her a little kiss and she gave me one back. Then she yawned.

“You wanna spend the night, Jack?”

“No. Better not.”

“Where you stayin’?”

“Not far from here.”

She got up, drifted to the window, so very beautiful. She parted drapes as sheer as her panties and looked out. “You know what, Jack?”

“What, Becky?”

“Somethin’ bad’s gonna happen to that nigger over there.”

Boyd and I had breakfast at a diner called the Majestic, a surprising walk back into the 1950s for a business district that was otherwise an assemblage of hippie-ish shops — antiques, books, witchcraft, candles, chocolates, drug paraphernalia.

I was having corned beef hash, Boyd a bowl of oatmeal. I had my coffee black, he had cream and sugar.

“What did you say to that ?” he asked, his dark eyes alarmed in their long-lashed, oddly pretty setting. That’s not to imply he looked effeminate or anything — more like a Greek grocer taking a break from unloading a truck in an alley.

“Well,” I told him with a shrug, stopping a forkful of hash halfway to my face, “I said, ‘What nigger?’ ”

It was the kind of place where you could get a very dirty look for using a word like that, but we were in a corner booth with nobody in the adjacent one or at a nearby table, either.

“Quarry, just give me a summary. I don’t expect blow by blow.”

“So I should skip how she blew me? Probably wise. In bad taste, and might spoil your meal.”

“Get bent. What? Are we in trouble?”

I shrugged again. Had a sip of coffee. “I honestly don’t know. She’s not stupid, but I don’t read her as smart enough to be one of us. Or that good an actress. Just a chick who made a racist remark, and who — when I asked what she was talking about — said the, uh... black gentleman across the street was getting ‘too big for his britches.’ ”

“She didn’t say that. Not in those words.”

“Sure she did. Well, not the ‘black gentleman’ part. I told you she was from a place called Poplar Bluff.”

He’d stopped eating, and if he leaned over farther, he’d be crawling across the table knocking plates and cups off. “Quarry, what’s your read ?”

“Seems to be a coincidence. She’s in the apartment above us, and I ran into her working at the bar next door.”

He sat back heavily. “I fucking hate coincidences.”

“And what, I love them? I think she’s just a good-looking hick from downstate. If she isn’t, I can only think of one possibility.”

I made him ask. I’m kind of a prick that way.

“What possibility, Quarry?”

A cute blonde waitress in an old-fashioned green uniform refilled my coffee. She smiled at me and I just nodded. I’d already got in enough trouble.

When she was elsewhere, I said, “Maybe whoever hired us, through the Broker, installed Becky What’s-It to keep an eye on us. To... well, not to supervise exactly. Just keep an eye.”

Now he drank some coffee. “I suppose that’s possible. Never ran into her before on the stairs or anything... but possible. Her being a little bigot, what do you make of that?”

I sighed. Admitted, “Well, I don’t like it. Her presence implies she’s part of some racist bunch who maybe hired us and she got assigned to watch us, or help provide back-up we didn’t request. Could even mean our client intends to pull a double-cross.”

“Shit. But what could some little hillbilly gal do?”

“Ask Bonnie Parker.”

“Shit,” he said again.

“I got onboard because the Broker said this wasn’t really political or racial. Assured me that our subject is a bad boy who’s diddling his own people.”

His eyes lifted ceiling-ward. “Oh, fucking please! Don’t go getting self-righteous on me again. You with a conscience makes me sick. It’s like John Wayne sticking up for the Indians.”

“Stop bitching and think, Boyd. If we’re doing a job for a bunch of racists... if that’s what this job is about... it changes everything.”

“Does it? Tell me. Is the way the money spends any different?”

“No, but the attention level is. Suddenly everybody’s looking into this from the chief of police to the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover. It’s on the evening news every day for weeks, on the covers of Time and Newsweek , until they find... who? The ones that did it.”