Макс Коллинз - Quarry in the Black

You may think, reading this one, that I’ve gone soft. Let me assure you that the only time I go soft is after fucking. Then I suffer an understandable physical reaction as well as a sleepy emotional affection for the female, whoever she might be, that lasts a good thirty seconds.

Now soft in the head, that’s another matter altogether. For me to take on a contract like the one the Broker proposed to me at my A-frame on Paradise Lake that crisp fall evening, I had to be stupid or half-nuts or maybe completely greedy since it did, after all, involve a lot of dough.

In my defense, I was fairly new to the game. I had been killing people for money for less than two years, so maybe my relative inexperience played a role. Of course, really I’d been killing people for money a number of years longer than that, if you counted Vietnam; but the targets were “gooks,” as we used to inelegantly put it, and the employer was Uncle Whiskers, not the Broker, who paid better — much better, in this instance.

With his rich man’s tan and perfectly coiffed white hair with matching mustache — and his blue-plaid sportcoat, white pointed-collar sportshirt, navy slacks, and blue-toed white loafers — the Broker might have been a bank president or the dean of a small college on his day off. But he wasn’t. Not a banker or a dean or on his day off, either.

This was a business call. And this distinguished-looking man’s business was brokering contract killings, serving as the buffer between the respectable people who wanted someone dead and the disreputable types who made them that way. For money.

I might have been a college kid — grad student maybe — in my gray long-sleeve WISCONSIN sweatshirt, blue jeans and sneakers, though I’d never been to college (including the University of Wisconsin). What I really was was one of those disreputable types I mentioned above.

The Broker’s age I could only guess at — forty? Fifty? As for me, I was in my twenties with thirty still seeming abstract, a fairly average-looking guy at five ten and one-hundred-sixty pounds, fit from frequent swims at the Lake Geneva YMCA, with brown hair longer than it used to be. But that was true of Broker’s generation, too, wasn’t it? Parents were wearing hair that they’d abhorred on their kids just a few years ago.

Having the Broker inside my A-frame home was unusual — during the years I worked with him (which would eventually total five and change) he had done that maybe three or four times. More normally we met at the hotel he co-owned in Davenport, on his home turf of the Iowa/Illinois Quad Cities. Or we met at some out-of-the-way spot halfway or so between here and there, a truckstop on an Interstate or a bar in some city or town.

But right now we were sitting each on his own side of a dark brown overstuffed modular couch that made an L arranged around a metal fireplace in the midst of my living-room, itself part of a big open area overseen by a loft and shared with a kitchenette. Only a few lights were on.

It was evening and a fire was going. The Broker had enough angles in a face out of a Playboy liquor ad that the flicker of flames turned him into a good subject for a charcoal sketch, if I were a fucking artist, which I’m not.

“Quarry,” he said, resting his bottle of Coors on a coaster on the low-slung glass-topped table between him and the fire, “I want you to understand that you are free to take a pass on this one. No harm, no foul, as they say in the sporting world. But if you do say yes, keep in mind: volenti non fit injuria .”

“Yeah,” I said, “I was just thinking that.”

Quarry was, by the way, the name the Broker had tagged me with — all of us in his network of mostly war-bred assassins had what I considered cutesy monikers. According to the Broker — who as you’ve already seen was one pretentious son of a bitch — mine signified that I was hollowed out “as if from rock.” As for my real name, you don’t need it.

“Decline this opportunity,” he said, with a magnanimous gesture, flames turning his tan orange, “and it will in no way reflect badly upon you.”

“Wouldn’t want it on my permanent record.” My legs, crossed at the ankles, were on an ottoman. My bottle of Coke was on the little table. I am not a heavy drinker, even if I had been on a bender when the Broker first looked me up.

My guest lifted two palms toward me. “I would completely understand were you to say no. This assignment — strictly volunteer — is quite outside our usual methodology.”

He used words like “methodology” a lot. I wasn’t kidding when I said he was pretentious. Also pompous, if there’s a difference.

“Well,” I said with a shrug, “the job in Biloxi wasn’t usual. But it paid well. Does this?”

He nodded. “Very well indeed. And there are similarities to that assignment, although you would not be on your own this go-round — rather, you’d be working with Boyd, as is the norm.”

I’d been partnered with Boyd for some months now. He generally worked the passive side, going in early and collecting intel on the target, while I handled the active role, coming in a week or so before the hit and carrying it out. The passive role sometimes included providing back-up and escape support.

“For the moment I must remain vague about our subject,” he said. He meant the poor bastard I’d be killing. “That’s requisite, because should you say no to this, it’s best for all concerned — yourself included — that you remain blessed with the bliss that is ignorance.”

Christ, this guy.

“How much?” I asked. Usually I cleared about five thousand.

“Twenty-five thousand,” he said.

My eyebrows went up. I didn’t send them in that direction — it was entirely their own idea.

I said, “How much of that is my end?”

“That is your end.”

I squinted at him. “If this is political—”

“It has a political aspect,” he admitted, lifting one palm this time, and firelight flickered there like a silent movie gone out of focus, “but we’re not talking about a political assassination per se.”

“Per what then?”

“As I said, we can’t talk about the identity of the subject until we discuss a... broader outline, and if that outline suits you, then we will move on to specifics.”

“Is the target bigger than a breadbox?”

“It’s not a politician, either in or out of office. But it is a public figure — the kind of public figure who is well insulated and, at public appearances, well guarded by local police and occasionally by those higher up the law-enforcement food chain.”

“So shooting from a rooftop or a high window might not be practical.” I’d been a sniper in Vietnam and I preferred it that way. Anonymous, impersonal.

“No. Unless you consider Lee Harvey Oswald or James Earl Ray suitable role models.”

I kicked the ottoman away and put my feet on the floor. Some wind was rattling the glass doors onto the deck and howling through the skeletal trees surrounding the lake — nature could be so fucking corny sometimes.

Leaning forward, my hands clasped between my legs, I said, “Fill it in some. That outline of yours.”