Not that I was in a great hurry. I did get off the bed and turn to the window, which was right above where Carrie was on the floor, cowering, and I threw the lock and forced the window up and saw the guy running out there in the fog, which had thinned a bit, running off the gravel and splashing into the marshy area, an instinctive move I guess, an attempt to find a shortcut maybe, or lose himself as a target in the snarl of brush and branches and bog. All it served to do, of course, was slow him down, and he was hardly off the road, only a dozen feet from the house, when I yelled, “Ash!”
He froze a second, then trudged on a step.
He was well within range, and knew it, and I hardly had to yell at all when I leaned out the window and said, “Ash! You can stop, or I can stop you. Choose.”
He chose to stop. He turned. Shrugged and grinned up at me, though as he shrugged the pain in his left arm where I’d nicked him made his grin turn into a wince. He walked back up onto the gravel of the drive and called up to me, “I’ll wait here for you.”
“You’ll be covered from the window,” I said, “so stay put while I come to you.”
I tugged the. 38 out of my belt and gave the gun to Carrie, who was still wide-eyed and quivering on the floor, back to the wall. She took it, but the gun lay in her palm like a stone, and she looked at it like she didn’t know what the hell it was.
“Hey,” I said. “Snap out of it.”
She cupped the gun in both hands, pushed it toward me, her eyes pleading.
“You won’t have to shoot at anybody,” I said. “Just aim it at that guy out there till I can get to him. It’ll take me a couple minutes to get there, because I don’t know for sure he came alone, and I have to be careful and do it kind of slow. Okay? Now if he starts to run or anything, anything that seems wrong to you, fire the gun, but you don’t have to aim it at him. The sound will stop him. I know him, and believe me, the sound will stop him just fine.”
She sighed.
And I watched while she slowly, reluctantly, made her hand conform to the contours of the gun, and I lifted her off the floor by the waist, and she took the post at the window. Well, she was the prettiest backup man I’d ever had, anyway. Had to give her that much.
I went over and picked up the flashlight he’d dropped, and found that the other thing he’d dropped was a gun, the big. 45 that went with the silencer I’d seen back at his motel room a couple days ago, and the silencer was on, and I wasn’t surprised that this was the other thing he’d dropped. I put the flashlight on the desk and stuck the Ruger in my belt, in back, where it would be covered by the jacket I slipped on. I didn’t want Ash to see the Ruger; he might recognize it. His. 45 I kept in hand.
He had taken off the black thermal jacket he was wearing and was looking at where my slug caught him, as I approached.
“Bad?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Just a graze, but fuck, you could’ve killed me, Quarry, you know that?”
“Not could’ve. Should’ve.”
“Aw, Christ, but you hold a grudge.”
“Ash, I got no intention of standing out here in the cold listening to you explain how every time you try to kill me it’s nothing personal.”
“Well, it isn’t, and I never tried to kill you in my life, Quarry, that’s a fact.”
“You sent people to do it last time, I know, so that one doesn’t count. But what the hell do you call tonight?”
“Tonight?”
“You remember. A couple minutes ago. Think back.”
“Yeah? Who shot at who? I didn’t know you was in there. Shit. I thought it was crazy even to look down here, but I was told look, so I the fuck looked, is all. I didn’t see a car, and there were no lights on, and I was…”
“Stupid?”
“That wasn’t the word I was looking for but, yeah, I was stupid. And you’re real smart. Now that that’s settled, tell me… you got the broad in there, or not? She the one with the gun on me. Up in the window? Can she hear us talking?”
“Yes on all counts, except if you keep your voice down, she can’t hear us.”
“She wouldn’t use that gun, would she?”
“Let me put it this way. She knows you were going to kill her last night, that you would have if you and your boy hadn’t fucked up. And she knows you still want to kill her, if you can ever stop fucking up.”
“I don’t want to kill anybody, Quarry. I just got to make a living like everybody else.”
“Fine. Sometime you really must tell me all about your personal philosophy. But right now I got something else in mind for you. I want you to go wake up Brooks and tell him I have something he’s looking for.”
“The broad, you mean?”
“Not exactly. Oh, I have her, and she’s still for sale, but she’s part of a package deal. A twenty-thousand-dollar package.”
“So what else is in the package?”
“A list.”
“You know about that, huh? Well let me tell you something you don’t know. My backup got himself killed tonight, and killed somebody himself while he was at it… some federal guy who was snooping in your hotel room, yes, your hotel room, some federal fucker who evidently was watching the broad, too, only we didn’t know it before.”
“Where do I send the sympathy card?”
“Chicago.”
“Come again.”
“That’s who Brooks works for, in case you didn’t know. The Family out of Chicago.”
“You mean he represents them in court.”
“I mean they own the son of a bitch.”
“What’s their interest in this? If Brooks is the new Broker, they wouldn’t figure in. The Broker’s operation isn’t a Mafia thing.”
“What you don’t know, Quarry, would fill a book.”
“Yeah, well so would what I know. Tell Brooks that. Tell him about the list, too. And the twenty thousand.”
“Anything else, while I’m writing this down?”
“Tell him be in his office at six-thirty, with the twenty thousand. I’ll let him know where he can take it and pay me and get his merchandise.”
“Six-thirty. This afternoon.”
“Six-thirty. This morning.”
“That’s a couple hours from now, Quarry! Where the fuck’s he supposed to get twenty thousand by then?”
“Probably out of a wall safe.”
Ash grinned. “Probably. I suppose you want me to go, now, right?”
“Right. Don’t come back, or bother sending anybody back. We’ll be gone. Anyway, before you make any move you’re going to have to talk this over with Brooks, aren’t you? And there isn’t a public phone for miles, and besides, maybe he wouldn’t want to hear about this on a phone, what with everything crawling with federal people, and…”
“All right, all right. You make your point. No funny stuff. Can I go?”
“Go.”
He went.
And I went back and told Carried to get her clothes on.
“First take this,” she insisted, handing me back the. 38, shuddering, like somebody squeamish who’d been made to handle a snake.
I took the gun, put it back in my belt, and said, “I got to get you to a motel, somewhere out of the way, till this is over.”
“When?”
“When what?”
“Will this be over?”
“Oh. Soon. It’ll be over soon.”
That seemed to ease her mind, and she got herself moving again. Which was the desired effect, of course.
Not that I’d been lying, when I said it would be over soon. It would be.
I just hoped she wasn’t expecting a happy ending.
23
The fog had lifted. Dawn was maybe an hour away, so the streetlights were still on, reflecting off pavement made slick by eight or nine hours of misting. I left the Buick in the parking ramp, which at this hour was all but empty, across from the Conklin Building in downtown Davenport. I was alone. Under my arm was a large manila envelope, which I’d found in the scarred-topped desk at the cottage. My corduroy jacket was slung over my right forearm, covering the hand with Ash’s silenced. 45 in it. I crossed the street.