Quarry in the Middle - Max Allan Collins [0]
by
Max Allan Collins
A HARD CASE CRIME NOVEL
The woman on the small stage had reddish blond widow’s-peaked hair that was up off her high forehead but swept down to her bare shoulders. Her wide-set eyes were green, her face a gentle oval nicely disrupted by prominent cheekbones; her lips were full and ripe and glistening red. She wore a bare-shouldered black dress with a full skirt, the top part putting half of an admirable full bosom on display, no push-up bra, though some would argue she could use one—I would argue she’d never lack for a man to push them up for her.
She had a soft, smoky voice that reminded me of Julie London. She might have made it big in another era.
Rising, she got a nice hand and came down off the stage.
I rose and went over to her. “Excuse me,” I said. “But that was terrific. Can I buy you a drink?”
Her smile tightened, the teeth disappearing. “I never take a drink till after my last set.”
“Coffee, then.”
“Makes me jumpy.”
“Perrier? Not coming on to you. Just liked what I heard.”
The teeth returned. “Nice young man like you, maybe I wouldn’t mind.”
“A Perrier?”
“You coming on to me…”
For Richard Stark
“Feed lettuce to the bunny and eat the bunny.”
DASHIELL HAMMETT
“In a mad world, only the mad are sane.”
AKIRA KUROSAWA
“An assassin can display a sublime altruism.”
SERGIO LEONE
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Excerpt
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Praise
Other Books By
Copyright
Chapter One
I had a body in the trunk of my car.
I hadn’t planned it that way, but then it wasn’t that kind of job. It wasn’t a job at all, really, rather a speculative venture, and now I’d made more of an investment than just my time and a little money.
This was in the summer, and Reagan was still president, early enough that he wasn’t showing his Alzheimer’s yet and late enough that he was keeping a good distance between himself and the Press Corps, waving and smiling and pretending he couldn’t hear them. We’d already had the Chernobyl meltdown, the Challenger explosion, and Pac-Man fever. Disco was dead, which was fine with me, only I wish somebody had paid me to kill the fucker.
I make the above lame joke because I had once upon a time killed people for money—initially for Uncle Sam, but more profitably for a mobbed-up guy called the Broker (more about him later). Right now I was in business for myself, thirty-five years old and looking to make a killing. Financial kind.
Anyway, the body in the trunk of my car. And it was my car, not a rental, a blue ’75 Pontiac with a lighter blue vinyl top, a Sunbird, which was really just a Vega pretending to be a sports car. It had a lot of miles on it and had only cost a grand and change, bought for cash under a phony name in Wisconsin—another investment in this spec job.
I hadn’t known I’d wind up with a body in the trunk, but I was old enough a hand at this to know I didn’t want to use my usual vehicle and a rental would be a bad idea, too. But to tell you the truth, I’d had bodies in my trunk before, so maybe that was a factor, after all.
For around six years in the ’70s I had taken on contracts, and part of why I’d survived and even flourished was my ability to blend in. At five ten, one-hundred-sixty pounds, I’d maintained a fairly boyish look—into my late twenties, I could be been taken for a college student, and now I could pass for twenty-five or -six. I kept my brown hair medium-length because that helped maintain anonymity. I could be a working man in t-shirt and jeans or a salesman in narrow tie and sportcoat or a professional in button-down collar and pinstripe suit.
Tonight, though, I was doing my Don Johnson impression in a white Armani suit with a pastel yellow t-shirt and Italian loafers with no socks. Normally, the Miami Vice schtick was not for me, but I needed to fit in. The Paddlewheel attracted a wealthy crowd,