Quarry's Choice (25 page)

“That’s fine. Make it just a bar then. Or some other kind of business. You know, you could get a night-school high school diploma and go to college and just make a whole new life of it. Future’s a blank slate, honey. Don’t keep doing what you’re doing just because it’s all you know. Learn something else.”

Like maybe I should give up killing people and become a guidance counselor.

Her eyes sparked and now her hand was on
my
knee. “What if I went with you? You must live somewhere.”

“But you know what I am and what I do.”

“I don’t care long as I don’t have to watch. I bet you live somewhere nice. We could be more than friends.”

The thought of her sharing the A-frame on Paradise Lake with me did not actually suck. But I didn’t think what we’d had this past week was really something to build a life on. Of course, when your kid wanted to know how you met Mommy, you’d have some tale to tell.

“Luann, we need to go our separate ways. Together we might. . .get caught.”

“Really?”

I nodded toward the money. “You may think you’re a witness to crimes I committed, but you’re not.”

“No?”

“You’re an accomplice. You were Bonnie to my Clyde at the Dixie Club when I killed three people. You hired me to kill Mr. Woody. Makes you as guilty of murder as me. Also, we blackmailed him with that video tape you made. We stay with each other, somebody might put the pieces together. Connect us with bad things.”

This was part bullshit, part reality.

She frowned at the blank TV screen. “I thought you might have to kill me. Because I was a witness.”

“No. You’re an accomplice.”

“Cool.”

I had to laugh. “I don’t know if that’s how I’d put it, Luann.”

She shrugged. “Well, it means we each know things about each other that we can’t tell without gettin’ both of us in trouble. If I tell, you tell. If you tell, I tell.”

“Right.”

“Means I can trust you and you can trust me.”

The Jack Killian definition of trust again.

I said, “Yes it does, Luann,” hoping they didn’t teach her about immunity if she went to college. “Look, can I drop you somewhere?”

She studied me, nodded toward the bed. “You want to do it one last time?”

I gave her a kiss. Small one. “I don’t think so. I think we covered that. We should go.”

“Okay. We’ve probably made enough nice memories.”

The funny thing was she was right.

On the way out of town, I would call the Broker and tell him I was on my way home, and that I had a hell of a story to tell. I figured he’d be happy with how I handled things and maybe even throw in some extra cash. That meant I’d have to edit out the twenty thousand I’d kept. And I would have to revise my report to leave Luann out. Didn’t want her to be my next contract.

That memory I didn’t need.

Despite its period setting,
Quarry’s Choice
is not an historical novel, and does not intend to suggest real people or events. Much of it takes place in the Biloxi, Mississippi, of the author’s imagination, including among other things a loose interpretation of geography.

Though none of these works should be held accountable for any inaccuracies and excesses herein, I would like to acknowledge the following:
Biloxi
(Images of America series, 2009), Jamie Bounds Ellis and Jane B. Shambra;
Biloxi
(Postcard History Series, 2012), Alan J. and Joan C. Santa Cruz and Jane B. Shambra;
Dream Room
(2009), Chet Nicholson;
Mississippi Mud
(2010 edition), Edward Humes; and
The State-Line Mob
(1990), W. R. Morris.

Also, thanks to my pal Ron Parker for answering a couple of research questions.

The ruthless hitman’s first assignment: kill a philandering professor who has run afoul of some very dangerous men.

When two rival casino owners covet the same territory, guess who gets caught in the crossfire. . .

Retired killer Quarry gets talked into one last contract—but why would anyone want a beautiful librarian dead. . .?

An easy job: protect the director of a low-budget movie. Until the director’s wife turns out to be a woman out of Quarry’s past.

Quarry zeroes in on the grieving family of a missing cheerleader. Does the hitman’s hitman have the wrong quarry in his sights?

For a guy who killed people for a living, he was just about the most boring bastard I ever saw.

I had been tailing him for two days, as he made his way from Woodstock, Illinois, where he owned an antiques shop on the quaint town square, to. . .well, I didn’t know where yet.

So far it had been every little town—on a circuitous route taking us finally to Highway 218—with an antiques shop, where he would go in and poke around and come out with a few finds to stow in the trunk of his shit-brown Pontiac Bonneville.

If it hadn’t been for the explosion of red hair with matching beard that made his head seem bigger than it was, he would have been a human bowling pin, five-foot-eight of flab in a gray quilted ski jacket. He wore big-frame orange-lensed glasses both indoors and out, his nose a potato with nostrils and zits, his lips thick and purple. That this creature sometimes sat surveillance himself seemed like a joke.

I was fairly certain he was on his way to kill somebody—possibly somebody in Iowa, because that was the state we’d been cutting down on the vertical line of Highway 218. Right now we were running out of Iowa and the flat dreary landscape was threatening to turn into Missouri.

Soon there would be fireworks stands—even though it was crisp November and the Fourth of the July a moot point—and people would suddenly speak in the lazy musical tones of the South, as if the invisible line on the map between these Mid-western states was the Mason-Dixon.

Some people find this accent charming. So do I, if it’s a buxom wench with blonde pigtails getting out of her bandana blouse and cut-off jeans in a hayloft. Otherwise, you can have it.

Right now my guy was making a stop that looked like a problem. Turning off and driving into some little town to check out an antiques shop was manageable. No matter how small that town was, there was always somewhere I could park inconspicuously and keep an eye on Mateski (which was his name—Mateski, Ronald Mateski. . .not exactly Bond, James Bond).

But when he pulled off and then into the gravel lot of an antiques mini-mall on the edge of a town, I had few options. Pulling into the lot myself wasn’t one of them, unless I was prepared to get out and go browsing with Mateski.

Not that there was any chance he’d make me. I had stayed well back from him on the busy two-lane, and when he would stop to eat at a truck stop, I would either sit in my car in the parking lot, if that lot were crowded enough for me to blend in, or take a seat in the trucker’s section away from the inevitable booth where Mateski had set down his big ass.

This time I had no choice but to go in and browse. Had there been a gas station and mini-mart across the way, I could have pulled in there. But this was a tin-shed antiques mall that sat near a cornfield like a twister had plopped it down.

Mateski’s penchant was primitive art and furniture—apparently it was what sold well for him back in rustic Woodstock. He didn’t have his truck with him (a tell that he wasn’t
really
out on a buying trip), so any furniture would have to be prime enough to spend shipping on; but he did find a framed oil that he snatched up like he’d found a hundred-dollar bill on the pavement—depicting a winter sunset that looked like your half-blind grandmother painted it.

I stopped at stalls with used books and at one I picked up a few Louis L’Amour paperbacks I hadn’t read yet, making sure I was still browsing when he left. Picking him up again would be no problem. He’d be getting back on Highway 218 and heading for somewhere, probably in Missouri. Hannibal maybe. Or St. Louis.

But when I got back on the road, I thought I’d lost him. Then I spotted his mud-spattered Bonneville at a Standard pump, said, “Fuck,” and took the next out-of-sight illegal U-turn I could to go back.

When I got there, he was inside paying. I could use some gas myself, so I turned my dark green Ford Pinto over to the attendant and went into the restaurant side of the small truck stop and took a piss. Mateski was gone when I got out, which was fine. I paid for my gas, bought gum and a Coke, and hit the road again, picking him up soon, always keeping a couple cars between us.

This is just how exciting yesterday and today had been. Not the Steve McQueen chase in
Bullitt
. But despite his fat ass and his thing for lousy art, Mateski was a dangerous guy. That he usually worked the passive side of a two-man contract team didn’t mean he hadn’t killed his share himself. The Broker had always insisted that the passive side of a duo had to take the active role once out of every four jobs. Keep your hand in. Use it or lose it.

The Broker had been the middleman through whom I used to get my assignments. I much preferred the active role, coming in for a day or two and handling the wet work, rather than sitting for a couple of weeks in cars and at surveillance posts taking detailed notes as to habits and patterns of a target.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t enjoy killing. I just don’t mind. It’s something I learned to do overseas, as a sniper, where I developed the kind of dispassionate attitude needed for that kind of work. Killing is a necessary evil, as they say, although I don’t know that it’s all that evil in a lot of cases. War and self-defense, for instance.

On the other hand, there was one notorious asshole in the trade who specialized in torture. I mention him in passing now, but eventually it will have some importance. File it away.

As for me, my name is unimportant, but when I first started killing people for money—not counting Vietnam—I worked through the Broker. This tall, slender, dapper, distinguished-looking man of business, who might have been a banker or a CEO, recruited people like me, who had unwittingly learned a trade in the employ of Uncle Sam. He was something of a pompous ass—for example, he called me Quarry, which was a sort of horseshit code name, derived from my supposed coldness (“Hollow like carved-out rock,” he said once) and also ironic, since the targets were
my
quarry.

So Broker’s people that I worked with called me “Quarry” and I got used to it. On occasion I even used it as the last name of a cover identity, and as it happens, this was one of those occasions. John R. Quarry, according to my Wyoming driver’s license, Social Security and Mastercard. So for our purpose here, that name will do as well as any.

I should probably clue you in a little about me. I was closer to thirty than forty, five ten, one hundred-sixty-five pounds, short brown hair, but not military short. Kept in shape, mostly through swimming. Handsome enough, I suppose, in a bland, unremarkable way. When was this? Well, Reagan hadn’t been president long enough for his senility to show (much), and everybody was hurting from the recession.

Well, actually, I wasn’t. Hurting. I lived quietly, comfortably and alone in an A-frame cottage on Lake Paradise near Geneva, Wisconsin. I had no one woman, but the resort area nearby meant I was rarely lonely. I had a small circle of friends who thought I sold veterinary medicine, but really I was semi-retired from the killing business.

“Semi” because I still kept my hand in, but not in the old way. After the Broker betrayed me and I got rid of him, I sort of inherited what today would be called a database, but back then was just a small pine file cabinet. Within it was what was essentially a list of over fifty names of guys like me, who had worked for the Broker—detailed info on each, photos, addresses, down to every job they’d gone on.

Since I was out of work, after killing the Broker, I’d had an intriguing idea. I could see how I could use the Broker’s file, and keep going, in a new way, on my own terms. After destroying the information on myself, I would choose a name and travel to where that party lived and stake him or her out (a few females were on the list), then follow said party to their next job.

Through further surveillance, I would determine their target’s identity, approach that target, and offer to eliminate the threat. For a healthy sum, I would discreetly remove the hit team. For a further fee, I might—depending on the circumstances—be able to look into who had hired the hit done, and remove that threat as well.

The risks were considerable. What if a target—approached with a wild story from a stranger claiming to be a sort of contract killer himself—called the authorities, or otherwise freaked out?

But I was well aware that anyone designated for death was somebody who had almost certainly done something worth dying over. Targets of hitmen tend not to be upstanding citizens, unless they are upstanding citizens with down-and-dirty secrets. And weren’t they likely to be aware that they presented a problem to some powerful, merciless adversary? The kind of adversary who would be capable of such an extreme solution. . .?