Quarry in the Middle - Max Allan Collins [58]
“No. No, I don’t. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Right. Now let’s transfer the package from my trunk to yours…”
He had no objection, and I was about to pop the lid when someone exited the big brick building—a woman, and we were far enough away that Cornell felt he had to prompt me.
“That’s just Angie,” he said.
But I already knew that, because I’d made her car. His wife or ex-wife or whatever she was strolled right toward us, which was natural, because she belonged to the one remaining ride in the lot. She was wearing jeans, rather looser than those Chrissy preferred, and a white blouse whose sleeves stopped at mid-forearm and with some ruffles up the front, like a gambler’s shirt seen on a real paddlewheel a hundred years ago.
“Fellas,” she said, with a smile. She looked her age in the cold morning light, with no lipstick and not even eyeshadow, but her face was nice enough to get away with it. Her red hair was pinned and piled up like a turban, nothing fashionable, just getting it out of her way. “This looks like a serious pow-wow.”
“My friend Mr. Gibson has finished his work for me,” Cornell said stiffly.
Angela—who not long ago had helped me dump two bodies (let’s call it aiding and abedding)—knew damn well that that “work” almost certainly had to be something on the nasty side; but she didn’t blink. She was, after all, this man’s wife—separated or not—and moreover she was Tony Giardelli’s daughter. She had spent a lifetime on the fringes of violence and had to be used to it, or at least used to ignoring it.
“Sorry to hear you’re going, Jack,” she said, and offered me her hand, and I shook it. She gave it a secret squeeze. “Kind of hoped we’d have time for that breakfast you promised me. I’m headed over to the Wheelhouse diner now…”
“Grab a booth in back. I have to check out of my room. Before I hit the road, I could use a meal, wouldn’t mind some pleasant company.”
She said sure, smiled at me, nodded at her sort of husband, and went over to the Subaru and stirred gravel a little as she exited.
“What are you, hitting on my wife?” he asked, with an eyebrow arched.
“Maybe I already fucked her till eyes rolled back.”
“You can be crude sometimes, Mr. Quarry.”
“Normally no. Haydee’s Port is a bad influence on me. It’s all sex and murder and money, and an All-American boy like me can get corrupted. Shall we move the little slut?”
For now, we tucked Chrissy in his trunk, and she squirmed like a calf not wanting to get branded, making noises of protest that came off strangely like yummy sounds.
I left him there, standing at the rear of the Corvette, staring at the closed trunk. For a moment I wondered if he might not kill her, or have her killed, at that.
But it wasn’t any of my business.
Angela Dell had taken the same booth we’d shared before, and of course she remained unaware that, a few days and several lifetimes ago, Monahan and the blond kid had sat there, too, and plotted her husband’s death.
She was drinking coffee already, and when I joined her, I ordered iced tea. Coffee was for grown-ups. I was hugely hungry—I’d been through a lot of unappetizing shit over the past twenty-four hours or so, but hadn’t eaten a thing since my mobile-home Florence Nightingale had fed me leftover alphabet soup.
So I ordered scrambled eggs, hash browns, link sausage and silver-dollar pancakes. She had a half order of French toast and we ate in silence for a while—well, not quite silence: a breakfast the size of mine, on a stomach that empty, required some spirited grunting and swallowing and silverware clanking.
She watched me with mild amusement, just nibbling at her French toast. When I pushed my cleaned plate aside, she said, “I don’t know what to make of you.”
“Nothing to make.”
“What makes you tick, Jack?”
“Nothing. You’re just hearing the Timex.” I lifted my wrist. It got another little smile out of her. “I’m glad we had a chance to say goodbye, though.”
“Me, too. Oh!” She had a big black purse with her, and she dug inside it, came back with a CD—on the cover was a photo of her in a low-cut dress,