Quarry in the Middle - Max Allan Collins [7]
I slapped him with the nine millimeter. Not hard enough to cut the flesh, just to get his attention, and to give me time to take the noise suppressor from my right-hand windbreaker pocket and affix it to the nine millimeter’s snout.
Seeing the silencer bothered him more than the love pat.
“I don’t dig roughing guys up,” I told him, meaning it. “But I can shoot a kneecap off and live with it. Assuming you don’t pass out, you’ll get talkative. You won’t annoy me with dumb questions.”
“It’s a guy named Cornell. Richard Cornell.”
“What does he do?”
I thought, Runs the Paddlewheel.
“He runs that club across the way—the Paddle-wheel.”
“Who hired you?”
“Doesn’t work that way.”
“You work through a middleman?”
He swallowed again and nodded. “Are you one of us or something?”
“How’s it going down?”
“Parking lot.”
“After closing?”
He nodded.
“How late does the Paddlewheel stay open?”
“Late. Five a.m. That’s the point.”
“The point?”
“The point of Haydee’s Port. The point of the Paddle-wheel. Across the river, they have to close at one a.m. People drive over to keep partying.”
“Is it dawn by five a.m.?”
“Why don’t you get a fucking almanac? Jesus.”
I shot him twice, thup thup, once for each eye of the skull on his Poison t-shirt. It was a smart-ass thing to do, but then I was responding to a smart-ass remark. The blood that spattered on the old fridge behind him gave the old kitchen a dash of color, even in the near dark.
It could use it.
The pain in the ass part came next, and I’ll spare you most of it. I had to get the keys for that gate out of his jacket pocket, then had to walk down through the cornfield to my car and bring it around and go through the gate routine myself and then back the Sunbird up to the rear steps.
Finally I dragged the kid across the ancient linoleum—he made a snail’s trail of blood slime—and down the steps, his head bumping and clunking down, and pretty soon I had him up and in the trunk.
An argument could be made for leaving him there on the dirty kitchen floor, but I felt I wanted his body in the trunk, in case later on I needed to make a point.
It got your attention, didn’t it?
Chapter Two
The sky was full of stars with a nearly full moon that gave the outdoors a nice ivory tinge. I was floating on my back in the Wheelhouse Motel pool, feeling pretty mellow for a guy who had just killed somebody. A guy who before long would probably be killing somebody else.
I could even see my Sunbird from here, parked at Unit 28 on the same wing of the motel where Monahan’s Buick still occupied Unit 36’s slot. The adjacent slot yawned empty. I figured the blond kid had checked out before he went over to take his farmhouse stakeout one last time; with the job set for dawn, he would have had no reason to go back to the motel.
And yet he had come back in a way, because right now he was in the trunk of that Sunbird. But who could argue that—one way or another (to quote Debbie Harry)—he hadn’t already checked out?
In my mellow, floating state, I wondered if I was getting over-confident, even cocky. I had checked into the same goddamn motel as Monahan…with his dead partner in my trunk. Of course, my other choices would have been to stay across the river in River Bluff at a Holiday Inn or some shit, or risk the sperm-infused sheets of the Eezer Inn (and I was way too squeamish for that).
Even my only precaution—wrapping my nine millimeter in a towel, stowed poolside under a deck-style chair—was risky. What if somebody kicked or otherwise moved the bundle, and the damn automatic clunked out on the concrete? Went off, even?
You might even say it looked a little suspicious, because I’d draped another towel on the chair itself…
On the other hand, there were no other swimmers in the early evening at the Paddlewheel’s pool. An hour ago, I’d had a piece of pie (butterscotch cream) at the restaurant and an older gal named Marge had chatted with me, starting with answering my query about why the restaurant was so dead at supper time.
“The Paddlewheel opens at five,” she said.