Max Allan Collins
Quarry’s Climax
For Brian Van Winkle—
Quarry’s brother-in-arms
“There is nothing that will change a person’s moral outlook faster than money in large amounts.”
LARRY FLYNT
“I shall know the murderer when I know the victim well.”
GEORGES SIMENON’S MAIGRET
October 1975
One
I’d been doing murder for hire for five years now — well, seven and change, if you include the two tours in Vietnam. But in all that time, I’d never had a real, honest-to-God vacation. Unless you counted China Beach.
But this wasn’t twenty miles of white sand in Da Nang perfect for sunning, surfing and suckee-fuckee. The war was over and this was Las Vegas, and you could get plenty of sun and suck-and-fuck here, but surfing in the Flamingo pool was probably not possible, even if you were a high roller who got comped.
Which I wasn’t.
Not comped by the casino/hotel, that is. A pompous gent who called himself the Broker had paid for my room and anything I cared to charge to it, from meals to massage. So as vacations went, this was a winner. And it wasn’t always easy to be a winner in Vegas.
But then this wasn’t really a vacation, was it?
Next to the pool, on the sandstone apron, on a deck chair lapping up sun and letting his Ray-Ban-hidden eyes travel from one well-stuffed bikini to another was a slenderly muscular young man in his late twenties, nursing a tan with sunblock. He was good-looking in the kind of bland way that makes you forget his face almost immediately. His brown hair was short, but not military short; five ten, one-hundred-sixty pounds. He wore boxer trunks, dark blue, and he was me.
Oh, and in a nearby towel was wrapped a nine millimeter Browning. Just in case.
Someone settled into the deck chair to my left. Without looking, smelling the Brut aftershave, I knew who it was — my partner, and I don’t mean romantically.
Boyd was small, no more than five six, but broad-shouldered enough to seem bigger — burly with a modest pot belly, curly brown hair infesting his head with the bushy eyebrows to go with it and an optional mustache and muttonchops. The rest of him was hairy, too, with only the black Speedo for relief. He also was wearing Ray-Bans.
“If they could only all be like this,” he said.
He meant the job.
“Too many people,” I said.
“You can get lost in a sea of people, Quarry.”
“You can drown, too.”
But at least he was in a good mood. The last job, Boyd had been glum as hell, after breaking up with his hairdresser boyfriend where he lived back east, though I didn’t know exactly where that was. That was part of the Broker’s arrangement — the two of us, teamed up for four years now, didn’t even know each other’s real names.
Like you’re not going to know mine.
“My advice?” Boyd said, giving me a sideways glance, lifting and lowering the bushy brows like a bad Groucho imitation. “Let’s milk it.”
“You’ve already been here a week.”
“This is your first day. Why not relax on the Broker’s dime?”
Sun was lapping my face like a big friendly dog with a really warm tongue. “I don’t relax on the job. That can get you killed.”
“You’re such a bummer sometimes.”
That word, of course, was way out of date, and not used exactly right. But that was Boyd — a good half decade behind the curve. For a gay guy he could really be out of it sometimes.
“So, then...” He was looking at me with the bushy brows squinched together like fuzzy caterpillars mating. “...when do you want to go?”
The blonde I was looking at had lovely ass dimples rising above where her skimpy bikini cut across. She was almost plump, that wonderful way Playboy seemed to love.
“By ‘go,’ ” I said, after taking a sip from the glass of Coke that was resting on a little marble-top table between us, “I assume you mean do the job. After which we will go. Promptly go.”
The sigh came deep out of him, like a volcano letting out steam before erupting. “You are no fun, Quarry. No fucking fun at all.”
“Never have been. Haven’t you been paying attention?”
Instead of erupting, Boyd leaned toward me, his expression promising delight, like pudding bubbling on a stove.
“This is no ordinary job, my friend,” he said. “We are in vacationland. Sin City. We are here under unusual circumstances, and should take advantage. How many times have we sat in rat-hole vacant apartments and lived like street bums?”
“If you’re on the street, you’re not in an apartment.”
“You know what I mean! We’re lucky when we wind up in a stakeout pad with Goodwill furniture, figure we’re livin’ like kings. This is the fucking Flamingo! Can’t you just enjoy yourself for once?”
“It’s work. It’s a job. We’re not supposed to enjoy it.”
He patted the air, showing me palms that were among the few non-hairy areas of his flesh. Which put the lie to the old notion about what you got from jacking off.
“So, then, Quarry, what if we don’t split right after the job? Why would we have to? In this case, who’d know the difference? It might even make a better cover for why we’re here! Be less suspicious.”
I just looked at him.
He made a sullen brat face and turned away and did some erupting inside himself.
The curvy brunette my eyes secretly followed seemed a party-pooper at first, because she was in a one-piece. But it clung to her so tight you could see every facet of her areolae and practically count the pubic hairs. The hair on her head was a gypsy tangle and the suit rode up over where her ass stopped being ass and became thighs. A few days in Vegas would be nice. Colorful beach umbrellas. Palm trees.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
“Good! Great! Terrific! Why just think?”
“Well, thinking has worked out pretty well for me in the past.”
“No, I mean, go with your gut for once!”
This was one of Boyd’s problems, or anyway it was when he was between boyfriends, after a bad break-up. He thought with his gut, not his head. And of course his little head had its own ideas, which I really discouraged on the job. Pursuing his particular proclivities had risks. Of course, if he got himself killed off the job or something, that was up to him.
“We should clear it with the Broker,” I said.
One beauty after another. You could spend all afternoon trying to spot cellulite and come up empty. And the sun! The damn sun. It felt yellow, turning your sweat to melted butter.
“Aw, Quarry — were you the kind of kid who asked Daddy’s permission to take the car? Didn’t you ever learn that it’s less risky to apologize later than to ask up front?”
I didn’t answer that one. He knew damn well I was a risk taker — granted, a calculated risk taker — but this conversation had gone on long enough.
Still, I understood his frustration. When he babbled on and on about the shitholes that we sometimes got stuck with for surveillance, he had a right to bitch. He almost always worked the passive side of a job, going in ahead a week or two or more to establish the target’s pattern of behavior, and to generally assess the lay of the land. Me, I was the active guy, who came in a day or two before the job, got filled in, did some minimal stakeout myself to get comfortable, then took out the target, quick and clean and painless as possible. I was not some sadistic schmuck.