“You’re wrong, Quarry-though why I should care what a creature like you thinks is beyond me.”
“There I agree with you.”
He swung toward me with his eyes slits, his face grooved grimly. “I was not responsible for that kidnapping-no. Julie has potential. She has fire. Spirit. She’s just…going through a phase.”
I nodded toward the hole in the ground. “So is your other daughter-it’s called decomposition.”
He leaned toward me, eyes furious, face otherwise blank; he’d been keeping his voice down, and his movements small, obviously not anxious to start a fracas between his boys and me, out here in front of God and everybody, with himself in the middle.
“What the hell do you want, Quarry? The rest of your money?”
“That would be a start.”
He shook his head, quietly disgusted. “Well, I don’t want a scene, here. Can you understand that? Can you have a little respect for the dead?”
“Did you really say that, or am I hallucinating?”
“Fuck you. Just go. Go, and I’ll make your goddamn money happen.”
I said nothing. Now I was the one looking down into that hole in the ground. “…You warned me that she didn’t deserve it.”
He winced. “What-Janet?…No, she was a nice enough young woman. Harmless. Silly, naive, in how she viewed the world, but…anyway. She was lost to me. Lost to me long ago.”
“Oh?”
He had a distant expression now. For the first time I detected a genuine sense of loss in him, if edged with a bitter anger. “To her…to her I represented everything bad about this country.”
I shrugged. “Kids.”
He glared at me again. “She had a nothing life, Quarry-a librarian.”
He said “librarian” the way another disappointed father might have said “shoplifter” or “prostitute.”
He was saying, “I have a small empire to maintain- thousands of employees, with families, depending on me for their paychecks.”
“Hey,” I said. “You sacrificed a child. Worked for God.”
He winced again. Sighed grandly. Said, “Go-just fucking go. Do that, cause no more trouble, and there’ll be a nice bonus for you-not that you deserve shit.”
“Oh,” I said, “I deserve shit…but your daughter didn’t. Mr. Green…Jonah? Okay I call you ‘Jonah’? I feel a certain closeness to you.”
“Are you insane?”
“Is that a rhetorical question? See, I always assumed the people I killed were marked for death, anyway, and I was a means to a predetermined end.”
Green-studying me now, clearly wondering where this was going-said, “I gathered as much.”
“People I put down probably did deserve it…or anyway put themselves in the gunsights, one way or another. By something they’d done.”
“Of course.”
“But Janet…” I smiled at him, only it didn’t really have much to do with smiling. “…she was a good person. A decent person. She didn’t deserve to die.”
He bit the words off acidly: “I told you that going in.”
“Yeah. My bad.” I shook my head, laughed a little. “You know, Mr. Green, in a long and varied career in the killing business, I’ve never encountered anyone quite like you-ready to kill your own daughter for another chunk of the family fortune.”
The security guys had started getting suspicious, taking notice of this unlikely long conversation between chauffeur and boss. From the corners of my eyes, I saw them talking into their headsets; it was like being stalked by air traffic controllers.
“Walk away,” Green said softly. “Your money will be doubled, and-since we’ve come to find each other so distasteful-we don’t ever have to have contact again.”
I raised a forefinger, gently, and nodded toward the names carved in granite. “One little thing-you’re going to need to revise that headstone.”
“Really?”
“That wasn’t Janet in that car.”
He took it like a slap. Time stuttered, and his mouth dropped open, his eyes flaring; but despite this obvious alarm, the millionaire went into immediate denial, saying, “Well, certainly it was Janet.”
“No. She’s alive and well and somewhere you can’t find her.”
“You are insane…”
“See, Jonah, your girls got a little tipsy, the night before,” I said, “and next morning Julie put on one of her sister’s coats…it was chilly…and went out to get the car, to bring it around to give her hungover sister a ride to work.”
His face turned white, like the dead skin a blister leaves.
I went on: “I liked Julie. You’re right-she did have fire. Particularly at the end, there.”
“No,” Green said, and he tried to smile, tried to shrug it off. “No, I don’t believe you…This is some sick-”
“Hey, what’s the difference, Dad? Trust fund money is trust fund money.”
That was when he lost it, and rushed me, reaching out with curled fingers to try to strangle me, I guess. And he was a big man, bigger than me, and powerful, despite the years he had on me. I could hear the security guys, not bothering with headsets now, flat-out yelling, on the run.
But then I had Jonah Green locked in an embrace, my arms pinning his, and I was close enough to kiss the bastard.
I grinned into his fucking face and said, “That’s not all you’ll need to revise on that headstone…”
Then I shifted, holding him by one arm, and I let him sense the nose of the nine millimeter in his gut, just so he could know it was coming, and I fired twice. The sounds were muffled by his clothing and his body, and were like coughs, not even loud enough to echo.
Stepping back, releasing him from my embrace, I watched with pleasure as he stumbled back, open-mouthed, awkward and-arms windmilling-tripped over the metal tubing of the lowering device and tumbled backward into his daughter’s grave, smacking the metal of the casket, hard.
Now that echoed.
The security guys had me surrounded and I wheeled, going from face to face, smiling easily, my gun in hand pointed skyward, my other hand up, too.
“No need, fellas!” I said. “You’re off the payroll. Time to hit the unemployment lines…”
They began trading glances, considering my words-after all, they had just seen the prick they worked for gut-shot, twice, and presumably they’d been told I was dangerous, I was in fact why they were fucking here, so I was clearly a guy with a gun who, if confronted, would take some of them down.
But Jonah Green was a tough old bird, and badly wounded though he was, bleeding from the mouth, front of his clothing splotched with blood, he was nonetheless alive, and trying to crawl, claw his way up and out of the ground.
When his head popped up in that grave, his men jumped a little; and maybe I did, too.
“Shoot him!” Green cried, gargling blood a little as he did. He was holding onto a metal tube of the lowering device. “Cut him down!”
When the guns started appearing in the hands of the security men, I moved out, ducking back behind the massive Green family gravestone, firing the nine millimeter at the only guy in sunglasses, headset and raincoat on that side of the world.
The guy took it in the head, and fell backward, like a narcoleptic suddenly asleep, but leaving blood mist behind.
With the headstone as cover, I took out the two closest ones, and each did an individualistic death dance, though with much in common-spurting blood, tumbling to the snowy grass-while the surviving trio went scrambling for cover, behind other gravestones.
I used the rest of the clip exchanging gunfire with them, bullets careening and whing ing off the granite headstones, carving nicks and holes. But they were spread out just enough to make my task difficult.
Concentrating on one at a time, I took the nearest to me when he slipped his head out to take aim, my shot sending him back, sprawling against another gravestone, staring in surprise with both eyes and the new hole between them.
We all stayed put while shadows chased each other under the cold cloud-shifting sky. Wind riffled branches and stubborn leaves whispered and some of us were breathing hard, but not me. I felt fine, and was thinking what a tempting goal the Caddy hearse on the hillock made.