“Don’t play with me, Quarry.”
“Who’s playing? Better zip up, Broker.”
“Quarry…”
I dried my hands and left.
4
I suppose at this point I should be filling you in on my background and telling you how I got into such a specialized line of work. Don’t count on it. There are two things you won’t get from me and that’s details about my past and my real name. The closest you’ll get to a name is Quarry, which is an alias suggested by the Broker and I always kind of liked it, as aliases go. Or I did until I asked Broker why he suggested an offbeat name like that one and he chuckled and said, “Know what a quarry is, don’t you? It’s rock and it’s hollowed out.” Broker isn’t known for his sense of humor.
I will sketch in some of my background, in case you feel the need to try to understand me. I’m a veteran of the Vietnam fuckup, which was where I learned about the meaninglessness of life and death, though the point wasn’t really driven home until I arrived back in the states and found my wife shacked up with a guy named Williams who had a bungalow in La Mirada and a job in a garage. I was going to shoot the son of a bitch, but waited till I cooled down enough to think rationally. Then I went to his house where he was in his driveway on his back working under his car and kicked the jack out… once in a movie I heard death referred to as “the big crushout,” and for that poor bastard the phrase couldn’t have been more apropos. I didn’t shoot my wife, or drop a car on her either. I just divorced her. Or rather she divorced me.
Of course no court in the world would have touched me, a cuckolded serviceman fresh home from the fight. But no one wanted me for an overnight house guest either. I couldn’t find work, even though I was a fully qualified mechanic… and it wasn’t like there weren’t any openings. The garage where Williams worked could’ve used a man, that was for sure.
The only relative I had who would even look me in the face was my old man, who came out to L.A. to see me after I had my little marital problem. He told me not to come home, said I’d made my stepmother nervous even before I started murdering people and God only knew how I’d affect her now. I never did ask the old man which murders he was talking about, the dozen or so in Vietnam or the one in California.
Since I couldn’t go home to Ohio with my father, I just hung around L.A. for a month or so, spending my money as fast as I could, going to movies during the days and bars at night. That got old fast. California got old fast. It was where I was stationed before going overseas and was where I fell into the star-crossed romance that ended in marriage, among other things, with that brown-haired bitch whose face is fuzzy in my memory now.
I don’t know how the Broker got a line on me. Maybe it’s like pro football teams recruiting players; maybe Broker sends scouts around to bars to look for guys with faces full of no morality. Or maybe Broker and his people pay attention to certain of us who get back from service and have problems. I know mine was in the papers and got enough publicity to keep me from getting jobs when I applied. You know I never did figure out how everybody could be so goddamn back-patting sympathetic and still not be willing to risk giving me a job.
Everybody but Broker. He had a job for me. I don’t remember the conversation. I know it was elliptical. You don’t come right out and ask somebody if he’d like to kill people for money. Even Uncle Sugar is more subtle than that.
Anyway, Broker showed up one day at what could best be described as my fleabag one-room apartment in L.A. and somehow or other got across to me what he was talking about… that I could make top dollar continuing to do what I had just finished doing for peanuts and, in one case, for free. Killing people, that is.
I accepted without hesitation. My eager but unemotional “yes” must’ve nearly scared the Broker off. He told me later he was usually wary of a fast yes; he didn’t want anyone working with him who might be the type who drooled for a chance to shoot anything that breathed: madmen don’t make the world’s most reliable, efficient employees. But my lack of emotion counterbalanced any such fear Broker might’ve harbored, especially on top of the thorough researching he’d had done on me.
Why did I say yes? Why did I say yes so quickly? I guess I was hungry for the chance to do something, anything, especially a high-paying something or anything. Though I’d learned in Nam to accept life and death as meaningless, I’d also learned the importance of survival. Maybe that’s inconsistent, holding life and death void of meaning while valuing survival. All I know is it’s how I think and feel and live, so I don’t care.
I said I wouldn’t go into detail and I won’t. All I’ll say is that by the time Broker called me to the Quad Cities and tossed that airport business in my lap, I’d been doing free-lance work for him for five and a half years. And I did consider myself a free agent, even though I worked solely through Broker, since I had no doubt I could hook up with some other similar “booking agent” with no trouble. There were other Brokers around, though I didn’t know them by name. But, like Broker, they would crawl out of the plush woodwork somewhere and contact me if I wanted them to.
Some of what I did for Broker was undoubtedly mob- related, but only some of it. To the best of my knowledge Broker was not in the direct employ of the Family (or Outfit or Mafia or whatever) and did only piecework for them, assignments that were in some way inconvenient for handling through conventional Family channels. Only rarely would a hit of mine in one of the larger cities, like Chicago or Milwaukee, be mob-related, as the Family had enough help on the local payroll to handle practically anything; with the smaller-scale Family operations, in cities of less than half a million, outside help through the Broker or someone like him might be called upon. Other than that, the person who came to Broker was your run-of-the-mill, everyday average citizen who has three to seven thousand dollars handy to pay for killing someone he doesn’t like.
I had built up no particular philosophy about my work, but then I had no particular problem living with myself, so I didn’t really need one. I guess I did develop my own little handful of rationalizations to fall back on, should I need them some rainy day. One of them was that any person somebody wanted dead more than likely deserved it. But I knew that wasn’t necessarily true. A better rationalization was that this was just an extension of being a soldier and what I was doing was neither moral nor immoral, but amoral, like war.
Which is a good rationalization, but then you have to rationalize war.
What I realized at the outset as well as later was that certain people are going to want certain other people dead, and what are you going to do? Once somebody decides another somebody is going to have to die, that’s the ballgame. All that’s left are details.
Anybody I ever hit was set to go anyway. I saw to it that it happened fast and clean. It was something like working in a butcher shop, only my job pays better, the hours are shorter and there isn’t the mess.
5
Eddie Robinson said, “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?” and somebody made a noise outside the motel room, out on the balcony. I eased the volume down on the television and listened: nothing for a moment, then whoever it was knocked at the sliding glass door.
I turned off the set and checked my watch. I’d been looking at the late late show, which was just getting over anyway, and it was ten before two A.M. About right for Broker, though maybe a shade early; I’d expected him to show more like three-thirty or four, when it’d be extremely unlikely anybody’d be up and about to see him come calling.
The knocking continued, got insistent. I swigged down the last of the Coke and got up off the bed, set the empty on the dresser next to the three bottles I’d drained watching the old gangster picture, which wasn’t bad at all considering its age. That Robinson guy was a pro, you really had to respect him. But every fifteen minutes two clowns came on and pitched used cars for half an hour, and each time they came on I went out for a Coke. On my way to the door I opened my suitcase on the stand and got out the automatic and held it behind me.