Quarry in the Middle - Max Allan Collins [6]
We’ll skip the suspense stuff—nobody was in the house. I searched it slow and careful, because that’s what you do in such a case; but the place had not a stick of furniture in it, much less a person. Even the flotsam and jetsam of the lives lived here by good solid immigrant stock for maybe a hundred years had gone to Dumpster heaven.
I should have said “no stick of furniture” original to the house, because in the living room, by the front bay-type window, was some recently-brought-in stuff that indicated the presence of a human being, not a rodent (except maybe figuratively).
The blond kid’s set-up included a folding chair, the beach variety (Mike Love again), like he’d been sitting by a pool or maybe on the deck of cruise ship, and not in the front room of an old farmhouse where he could maintain surveillance on the target of a contract killing. He had a portable radio with cassette player that ran off batteries (yes, Poison tapes), and a Styrofoam chest with ice keeping cans of Pepsi cold as well as a few wrapped Casey’s General Store sandwiches. Some small packets of potato chips leaned against the Styrofoam chest, and a pair of binoculars rested on the window ledge. Having searched the house, I’d already determined that the toilets still worked, so he had a decent stakeout post here, though my own back couldn’t have stood that flimsy chair for days on end.
If the fact that he was a Pepsi drinker wasn’t disgusting enough, I noted to one side of the beach chair a pile of Hustler magazines, a box of Kleenex, some baby oil, and a metal wastebasket filled with crumpled, wadded tissues, which told me more about how the blond kid dealt with boredom than I wanted to know.
For two hours and maybe fifteen minutes, I sat in his beach chair, long enough to get so thirsty I almost drank one of his damn Pepsis. I used the binoculars and could see the Paddlewheel okay, but without any meaningful view into a window. The late afternoon turned blue and then black. The house was warm and stuffy at first and then, without the sun, got cool and stuffy. At one point, I thumbed through a Hustler, but did not partake of the baby oil and Kleenex. I was raised on Playboy and still preferred Hefner’s fantasy to Flynt’s gynecology.
The kid drove a Mustang (I’d seen it parked next to Monahan’s Buick at the Wheelhouse Motel) whose headlights announced him when he pulled into the mouth of the drive. What followed was a graceless dance: he got out and unlocked and moved the metal gate, returned to the car, pulled in deeper, got out and locked up again, then back in his car to come crunching up the gravel drive.
When he unlocked the kitchen door and came in, I was to one side and put the nose of the nine millimeter in his neck. By now it was dark in the house, but some moonlight filtered in the dirty cracked windows over the filthy old sink and I could see his blue eyes pop. They were light blue and looked spooky in the dimness. I mean the room’s dimness, not his.
“Hands on your head,” I said.
He put them there. The eyes stayed wide. He was even skinnier, close up—still in the black Poison t-shirt, but a light tan jacket open over it. He had a snubby .38 in a jacket pocket. I took it, slipped it in my left-hand windbreaker pocket.
“Let’s talk,” I said.
He said, in a husky tenor, “Who the fuck are you?”
“Not cops.”
He swallowed. “Then what are you?”
“An interloper.”
“What the fuck’s an interloper?”
“A guy who noticed what you’re up to, and wants in.”
He frowned. Thinking took effort; it even made lines in his boyish face. By the way, I made him for maybe twenty-five.
He asked, “What do you mean, ‘wants in’?”
“Sit down.”
“Where? Do you see a fuckin’ chair?”
“I see the fuckin’ floor.”
“It’s filthy.”
“I don’t think I mind.”
He sat, cross-legged, Indian-style. He folded his arms, as if that would protect him. He looked up at me, like an inexperienced girl afraid of her first blow job.
I said, “Who’s the target?”
“What do you mean?”
“This is going to go very slow if you keep asking me that.”
“Well, I don’t know what