He looked confused again. “What do you want... more money?”
I shrugged. “My middleman may demand more — you may get penalized for your breach. Speaking of which... let’s deal with that. Deal with how you got on my bad side and turned me into this windy prick you’re having to listen to.”
“Why don’t we,” he muttered.
“You had a deadline coming up, remember? After the Saturday speech, you were getting shitcanned. Your way around that was to have the Reverend killed running up to the speech, so you could take his place and eulogize him. You had a dream — and it was assassinating the Reverend. You know, I have to hand it to you. I’ve killed my share, more than my share, of bastards for other bastards... but never one who planned to cry crocodile tears over the body, and make a dead hero out of it so that a whole movement could be built up around the deceased.”
He was breathing hard, the rage difficult to keep in. “Take your money, and do your job. I don’t want to hear any more of your opinions. Your disapproval is laughable. I did not breach shit, Mr. Blake. The money is right here.”
He patted the bag between us.
I unsnapped the thing, opened it up, and found packets of crisp, fresh bills with five-hundred-dollar bank wrappers. I counted fifty of them. I took one random packet and thumbed it — twenty-five twenty-dollar bills.
“Right on the money,” I said.
“Are we done here?”
“One last thing. That breach.”
“What fucking breach?”
“Hiring a second contract, remember? You have everything riding on not getting fired by the Reverend until after the rally speech Saturday. So you decide that you need a back-up. If for some reason Lloyd doesn’t go down before the rally, he will have to die during the rally, while he’s speaking. Think of the drama, with you holding him in your arms, and getting his blood all over you. That would be an image that would become goddamn historic. And the hillbilly hitman would likely be killed or captured, and you’ve arranged it so that it would impossible to trace back to you. Anyone who suggested such a thing would just be another silly conspiracy freak.”
The eyes were so hooded now, they were almost shut. “Suppose that’s true, Mr. Blake. How does it impact you?”
“It impacts me because the hillbilly, in the course of doing his job, noticed us and took us for interlopers. He was ready to kill me, and my partner, and that kind of thing just rubs me the fuck the wrong way.”
“I... I never anticipated that.”
“Oh I know. But did you anticipate this?”
I raised the nine millimeter and its endless silenced snout angled up at him, and his eyes were huge as he looked into its tiny mouth.
He spoke quickly: “Listen to me, Blake — it was just a fallback. Had you successfully removed Raymond, I would have called off the second contract.”
“Here’s my fallback. I take the money, I kill you, and with the client dead, the hit becomes a moot point, and I don’t have to shoot a man who’s better than either one of us.”
His arms went up, as if he were a ref calling a play, and out of the trees they came, his two white gangster pals, the ones I’d seen in the alley with André. Their hats flew off and their topcoats flapped as they ran right at me, the big guy with the pasta-fat face and his slender superior, mustached and looking like he was playing Nathan Detroit in a Muny production of Guys and Dolls. They were absurdly old-fashioned gangsters, yet not laughable at all, not with those big automatics that were firing at me, breaking the silence of the night into loud little pieces.
I hit the deck, hard, the cement scraping my elbow right through the windbreaker, and the running men were shifting their aim when Boyd came out from behind his tree and shot them both down into tumbling piles of dead.
On my feet now, I looked over at Jackson, whose small mouth was forming the kind of big hole you scream out of, only he remained silent. He had lowered his hands to chest level and his eyes begged for the mercy he himself was incapable of granting.
Boyd was out there, long-barreled revolver in hand, checking the bodies.
“Hey!” I called.
“You’re welcome,” he said. He was in a black sweatshirt and black jeans.
“Now him,” I said, pointing at Jackson. “With one of their guns!”
Jackson flew to his feet, as I stepped away from the bench with the bag in hand. Boyd shot four times and only one of the shots hit, but it was in the forehead, so that did the trick. Jackson sat back down on the bench in that effortless way only a corpse has.
Bringing Boyd in meant I’d have to split my twenty grand with him, and come up with some half-assed reason why there was extra in the bag. But people are never hard to convince when they’re getting more money than they thought.
Anyway, after last night, I was happy just to wind up without blood all over me.
Sixteen
As expected, the Broker called off the job.
He did so immediately after I gave him the news of our client’s death. Of course, the story I told him wasn’t the one you’ve just heard — what he got was that two white accomplices of Jackson’s had tried to steal the payoff loot, and everybody got shot for their trouble.
Everybody, that is, but Boyd and me, who had helped ourselves to the bag of cash the client had brought.
“How did it happen,” the Broker asked me on the phone, “that you and Boyd were there when the money was delivered?”
“Too much crazy shit had gone down for us not to be,” I said, nestled in one of the phone booths at Duff’s. “Like that hick who dropped in on us...” Delmont. “...and that drug dealer who got killed in that alley.” André.
“You felt,” he said, “the need to exert some caution.”
“Yup. And I’m exerting some more by sticking for a few days — to keep John Blake from attracting undue official attention.”
“Probably wise. But, Quarry — stay alert.”
“Will do. Listen, should it come up, I split the payoff with Boyd.”
“Why is that?”
“I just felt like he earned it as much as I did. Since the job never really came off.”
“Ah. A man with a conscience.”
“Let’s not get carried away, Broker.”
To this day, I’m not sure the Broker really believed what I told him about what happened at the Korean War Memorial near the Jewel Box; but he pretended to, and it never came up again.
And I did return to the Lloyd house in the Ville, after the Forest Park payoff drop. Nobody had noticed I was gone. I returned with breakfast rolls and coffee, carrying in the built-in alibi I hadn’t needed. I was still there when the Reverend got the call about his “friend” Jackson’s body being discovered near the floral memorial.
As for Boyd, he was able to fly out that morning. I dropped him at the airport but he was already flying high.
“Boy,” he said, “that job couldn’t have gone smoother.”
“Really?”
“Great surveillance pad, we don’t even have to go through with the job, and wind up way in the black.”
I didn’t have the heart to remind him of certain little bumps in the road — like two Nazi country boys jumping me, Delmont beating him senseless, a KKK Klavern chasing me across an open field. Then there was me getting splashed with blood — more like in the red than the black — and him shooting it out with St. Louis hoodlums before assuming the active role and finishing Jackson off.