Quarry in the Middle - Max Allan Collins [60]
The wide-set green eyes were as unblinking as her husband’s. “Why did you…take care of Jerry G, if you knew he wasn’t responsible for the contract on Richard?”
I shrugged. “Hey, I made it clear to Dickie that I had my doubts about Jerry G. I let him know that my services included trying to determine who took the contract out, and so on. But Dickie was convinced it was Jerry G. He wanted Jerry G gone, and I admit I developed a certain grudge against the guy myself, so I took the job. Did the job. End of story.”
The eyes remained wide but the flesh around them was tightening. “End of…”
“I haven’t told Dickie about you, or anyway my theory about you.”
Now she frowned. The eyes finally narrowed, and fear was in them. “What are you after? What do you want from me?”
I lifted the CD. “This’ll do. This is plenty.”
“…You’re not telling Richard?”
“No. I did the job he hired me to do, and I’m out of here.”
“How do you know I won’t…won’t go to my ‘Chicago connections’ and somehow make this happen someother way?”
“I don’t. Do what you want. Fuck him. Kill him. Fuck him, then kill him. He’s your husband. But I don’t want a contract from either one of you. I’ve had my fill of Haydee’s Port.”
She had a clubbed baby seal expression, and just couldn’t find any words. Hard to sing torch songs over breakfast.
“I’ll enjoy this,” I said, gesturing with the CD, “I really will…I’ll get the check.”
I left her there to contemplate her future, and Dickie bird’s, and went to my room and showered and shaved and changed my clothes and got my things and got the hell out.
I did make one stop on my way—that little mobile home with the rusting Mustang out front. I had a paper bag in my left hand, held in a choke hold, like a trick-or-treater protecting his candy hoard.
I went up the handful of wooden steps and knocked. Nothing. It took prolonged and increasingly insistent knocking to get a response, and I finally got the little kid. He opened the door fearlessly and glared up at me.
“Mommy’s sleeping,” he said, and started to shut the door.
I pushed in, shut the thing behind me and looked down at the tow-headed boy in the Star Wars pajamas. “Listen, kid—I don’t care if your mom is home. Don’t go just opening the door ’cause somebody’s knocking. You don’t know who it might be.”
From the bedroom came her voice: “Jack?”
“Go watch TV, kid,” I said.
He gave me a dirty look but followed instructions, and I tiptoed around the wooden train set to where she was receding into the bedroom. She was in a t-shirt and cotton panties, had no makeup on and her natural blonde hair was ponytailed back and she looked fucking great.
“I didn’t think I’d see you again,” she said, her voice indicating she was glad she’d been wrong.
“Listen, Candace. I’m on my way out of town. When you left the Lucky, was there any fuss going down?”
“No.”
“What time did you walk home?”
“Around quarter to six.”
So she’d been gone when I dropped by to see Jerry G.
“Well, you need to know something,” I said. “There’s going to be a change of management. Some bad shit went down not long ago, but you don’t know anything about it.”
“I don’t?”
“No.” I handed her the paper bag.
“What’s this?”
“Fifteen grand.”
“What!”
“Yours.”
She held it in a choke hold just like I had. “Are you kidding…Why…?”
“Because you saved my life. That’s just some crumbs that got spilled, and maybe they’ll do you some good. Thing is, there was a robbery over there at the Lucky…this isn’t that money, you have to believe me, you have to trust me…”
Of course, it was that money.
“All right…I believe you, Jack. Are you saying this money is…mine?”
“Yours. Here’s the conditions. You run that over to River Bluff and put it in a safe deposit box—don’t open an account. A safe deposit box. Then you go back to dancing at the Lucky and keep your head down during the management change and maybe any kind of investigation