“When do you get to the part where you and me make a pile?”
“I’m there already. All we got to do, Quarry, is ease Ash out. Or, Ash and whoever’s behind him, if there is somebody behind him. That part I’m not sure about, but it’s no problem.”
“Then what?”
“Then we, Quarry, we take over for the Broker. We play the middleman role and get some of the safe money, for a change. Shit! Who in fuck is better qualified than us?”
I nodded. Sat staring thoughtfully at him.
“I know, I know,” he said. “There’s more to it than just what I’ve said. I’m just sketching it in, broad strokes, broad strokes. But it’s not hard to see that there’s more here than just one man can handle. Two men… if they’re men like you and me, Quarry, the sky’s the fuckin’ limit, man. What do you say?”
“How about ‘this is so sudden’?”
“Take your time. Think it over. Nobody’s rushing you.”
“You keep talking. I’ll be thinking it over.’’
“Okay. First move is, hit Ash. Got to question him first, of course, find out if this was his idea, and if not, whose it was. We got to find out about the mechanical side, too, you know, find out just how exactly taking over Broker’s old setup could be put into effect. I mean, I assume there’s a list or something of the people like you and me who worked through the Broker, and we’ll need that; that’ll be the key. Questioning Ash won’t be any big deal. I, uh, know how to get people to talk to me, if I have to. Even somebody like Ash.”
I remembered the stiletto in the other room and knew what he meant.
“All right. I gave you the name, like I said, But it’s meaningless without the address. I can take you there. We can go see Ash together, we could go tonight.”
“It’s within driving distance, then?”
“That’s right. You’ll excuse me for not being exact about how far, or how long it’ll take us, you understand. But if we left now, we could be there in… a reasonable amount of time, yes.”
“You do realize there’s a body in the other room that needs getting rid of.”
“Oh, well, sure. No problem. We could do that on the way.”
We wrapped the body in the bedclothing; the plastic cover I’d put on the bed was dark green, and not only held in the mess, but made for a nice dark bundle that would look relatively inconspicuous, should we happen to be seen depositing it in the back of his station wagon. The wagon was parked beyond the bushes that separated my property from the road. I am on the outskirts of a town of less than one hundred population, so the road is lit, but not particularly well traveled, especially in winter, in the early predawn hours.
There are a lot of sand and gravel pits along the Wisconsin and Illinois border. The greatest number are near Woodstock, which is thirty or so miles from my cottage. The abandoned pits fill with water, and there was one of those, a large one, a mile and a half from me. In the summer the tree-encircled, water-filled pit is used by kids of various ages for skinny dipping. In the winter it isn’t used for much of anything.
Around a year ago August some teen-agers were swimming there and some kid with good lungs went tooling way down underwater to see what he could see. What he saw was a car with three bodies in it. The bodies were floating around inside, bloated, decomposing, full of bullet holes.
The authorities called it a gangland killing, which it probably was.
I didn’t have to mention any of this, of course. We both knew that we were close enough to Chicago to be able to dump a shot-up corpse about anywhere and have it called a gangland killing.
He was still talking, but I wasn’t listening. I had him drive, just to keep his hands busy, and interrupted him with instructions when necessary, which he followed cheerfully. We were on a gravel side road, now.
“See that little inroad, up there?” I said. “There between those two big trees?”
“I see it.”
“When you get there, back in, slowly.”
“Okay. You know something funny, Quarry?”
“Not that I can think of.”
“I feel a little bad about that kid back there.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the lump in the bedclothes behind us.
“Really.”
“I mean it. He was too young. I thought working the backup spot, after so many years of going in first, would be relaxing, but shit.. with a young guy like that, no experience, impulsive, I was sitting on pins every time around, waiting to see if he pulled it off or stepped on his dick or what. No, last couple years, Broker was bringing ’em in too young. I don’t think Beatty was twenty-five, even. What are you, Quarry, thirty? You must’ve come in young, yourself. Fuck. Must be gettin’ sentimental in my old age.”
“I guess I know how you feel,” I said. “I lost a partner myself last year. Hey! This is it right here… don’t miss it.”
He started backing in, saying, “So you lost one, too, huh? Well, it happens.”
“Yeah. I worked with the same partner for something like four years. Okay, whoa. This is good.”
He shifted into park. “I had three different partners, since I got in the business. I guess you’re my fourth.”
“Yeah, well, I worked with other guys, myself. I spent a whole year, filling in where Broker needed me, whenever one half of a team wasn’t available. I even worked with a guy named Ash once or twice.”
He didn’t catch it right away.
He was looking into the silencer by the time he said, “But I thought you said you never heard of Ash…”
“I lied,” I said.
He took it between the eyes and the side of his head hit the horn. I eased him over a bit, to stop the honking, and got out of the car.
I opened the door on his side and he almost fell out. I pushed him forward so that he was prone across the seat, put the car in neutral, shut the door, got around front and pushed. A few feet from where the little inroad ended, the watery pit began.
There was a thin layer of ice that cracked open to receive the station wagon, which took only a few seconds to disappear.
I had plenty to think about on the mile-and-a-half walk back, and hardly noticed the cold.
6
The sun was out, but it seemed far away, and wasn’t doing much to melt the heavy snowfall of the day before. The major streets in Milwaukee were clear, as had been the highways coming in, but many of the residential areas were still clogged with snow. Along curbs cars were surrounded by and heaped with white, their owners not even bothering to try to dig them out; homes with scooped sidewalks and driveways were few and far between. I felt lucky to find the driveway shoveled when I pulled up at the two-story house where Ash lived, or anyway where he had lived a few years ago, when I knew him.
Behind the house was a cement court which had been put in over what used to be a garden to provide parking for tenants. The big old house, with its fine Gothic lines, had been converted into an apartment house perhaps ten years ago: six apartments, four up, two down. Ash’s was upstairs, with entry from the outside, here in back, the access provided by an exposed stairway and balcony that had been added onto the old house when it was changed over, a necessary measure, I supposed, but hardly a beautifying one: the staircase with balcony, and the modern-looking doors to the apartments, all but defaced the building. Which just goes to show there’s more than one kind of murder people are willing to commit to make a buck.
I left my Opel GT in one of several open spaces; it was midmorning and apparently some of the tenants had gone ahead to work, despite the heavy snow. Possibly one of the remaining handful of cars belonged to Ash, but if so, I had no way of knowing which. It had been over four years since I’d seen him, and he’d have long since traded in that Thunderbird of his. Of course, I did know the name he used here, Raymond Drake, and could go peeking in the cars looking at names on registrations, if I was in the mood for making a bare-ass suspicious move like that, which I wasn’t.