The Wrong Quarry
Authors: Max Allan Collins
“Crime fiction aficionados are in for a treat...a neo-pulp noir classic.”
—
Chicago Tribune
“No one can twist you through a maze with as much intensity and suspense as Max Allan Collins.”
—
Clive Cussler
“Collins never misses a beat...All the stand-up pleasures of dime-store pulp with a beguiling level of complexity.”
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Booklist
“Collins has an outwardly artless style that conceals a great deal of art.”
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New York Times Book Review
“Max Allan Collins is the closest thing we have to a 21st century Mickey Spillane and...will please any fan of oldschool, hardboiled crime fiction.”
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This Week
“Few people alive today can tell a story better than Max Allan Collins.”
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Book Reporter
“This book is about as perfect a page turner as you’ll find.”
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Library Journal
“Bristling with suspense and sexuality, this book is a welcome addition to the Hard Case Crime library.”
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Publisher Weekly
“A total delight...fast, surprising, and well-told.”
—Deadly Pleasures
“Strong and compelling reading”
—Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
“Max Allan Collins [is] like no other writer.”
—Andrew Vachss
“Collins breaks out a really good one, knocking over the hard-boiled competition (Parker and Leonard for sure, maybe even Puzo) with a one-two punch: a feisty storyline told bittersweet and wry...nice and taut...the book is unputdownable. Never done better.”
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Kirkus Reviews
“Rippling with brutal violence and surprising sexuality... I savored every turn.”
—Bookgasm
“Masterful.”
—Jeffery Deaver
“Collins has a gift for creating low-life believable characters ... a sharply focused action story that keeps the reader guessing till the slam-bang ending. A consummate thriller from one of the new masters of the genre.”
—Atlanta Journal Constitution
“Fantastic.”
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Fear.net
“For fans of the hardboiled crime novel...this is powerful and highly enjoyable reading, fast moving and very, very tough.”
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Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Entertaining... full of colorful characters ...a stirring conclusion.”
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Detroit Free Press
“Collins makes it sound as though it really happened.”
—New York Daily News
“A great fast-paced read.”
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Books and Writers
“Collins tells his cynical little tale with plenty of tough wit [and] a knack for capturing period with a few succinct details; he also has a pithy way with violence...it’s every bit as mean as you want it to be.”
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Seattle Post Intelligencer
“Crisp and brisk, with an economy that doesn’t sacrifice creating an evocative world...fast, sharp and brutal.”
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IndieWire
“An exceptional storyteller.”
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San Diego Union Tribune
“Nobody does it better than Max Allan Collins.”
—John Lutz
What kind of makeup, I thought, requires a girl taking off her panties?
She was naked as she walked over to the shelves with the sound system and picked out a homemade cassette tape and inserted it into the machine. “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple burst out of the speakers like the thunder had returned.
Then she cranked it some more.
She asked, almost shouting, “Could you switch off the bedside lamp?”
I said I could, and did.
“Can you watch me from there?” she yelled sweetly. “Does it hurt? I’m gonna work it over here.”
I swung my body around, ribs complaining just a little, but the hell with them. Though darkness had returned, I could tell she was moving the coffee table to one side and making a little performance area out of the throw rug.
Then she went over to a nearby wall switch and a click announced overhead black-light tubing coming on to make Jimi and the Fudge and Janis glow. Also her lips and her finger- and toenails and the tips of her breasts and the petals of flesh between her legs—all glowing red as she did a swaying dance to the thumping music, arms waving, feet shifting weight from leg to leg, the mirrored wall behind me echoing and multiplying her. Then she began to twist and grind in rhythm with the pounding guitar riff, a native dance that grew in intensity, lifting right fist and left knee, then left fist and right knee, swinging her arms, her torso, awkward, graceful, until finally she tossed herself on the couch on her back and spread her legs, summoning me...
OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS FROM MAX ALLAN COLLINS:
THE FIRST QUARRY
THE LAST QUARRY
QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE
QUARRY’S EX
DEADLY BELOVED
SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT
TWO FOR THE MONEY
THE CONSUMMATA
(with Mickey Spillane)
SOME OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY:
MEMORY
by Donald E. Westlake
NOBODY’S ANGEL
by Jack Clark
MURDER IS MY BUSINESS
by Brett Halliday
GETTING OFF
by Lawrence Block
CHOKE HOLD
by Christa Faust
THE COMEDY IS FINISHED
by Donald E. Westlake
BLOOD ON THE MINK
by Robert Silverberg
FALSE NEGATIVE
by Joseph Koenig
THE TWENTY-YEAR DEATH
by Ariel S. Winter
THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS
by James M. Cain
WEB OF THE CITY
by Harlan Ellison
JOYLAND
by Stephen King
THE SECRET LIVES OF MARRIED WOMEN
by Elissa Wald
QUARRY
Max Allan Collins
A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK
(HCC-114)
First Hard Case Crime edition: January 2014
Published by
Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street
London SE1 OUP
in collaboration with Winterfall LLC
Copyright © 2014 by Max Allan Collins
Cover painting copyright © 2014 by Tyler Jacobson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Print Edition ISBN 978-1-78116-266-8
E-book ISBN 978-1-78116-267-5
Design direction by Max Phillips
Typeset by Swordsmith Productions
The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.
Visit us on the web at
www.HardCaseCrime.com
For John Mull
who likes ’em down and dirty
“It’s frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America.
”
W. H. A
UDEN
“Someone once told me that every minute, a murder occurs. So I don’t want to waste your time. I know you want to go back to work.”
A
LFRED
H
ITCHCOCK
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 Midwestern 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.