Quarry's Deal (2 page)

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WE WENT DOWN
for a swim afterwards. I let Nancy do the swimming. I like to swim, but I don’t like crowds. You can’t swim in a crowd. All you can do is wade around bumping into people. So Nancy swam and I watched.

I didn’t watch Nancy, though. I just pretended to. What my eyes were really on was the young woman with the big breasts and oriental eyes and muscle-bound boyfriend. The boyfriend
had the look of a Hollywood glamour boy gone slightly to seed. Thinning hair; puffy face; on the road to a paunch.

She was bored with him. He’d given up trying to talk her out of her indifference to him and was sitting in a beach chair with a drink in his hands, watching a blonde in a yellow bikini who sat across the way looking as bored with her companion
as the big-breasted oriental-eyed girl was bored with him.

I was bored, too. I hadn’t been here a week and I was suffocating. I live in Wisconsin, near the Lake Geneva vacation center, and the summer months around those parts are cherished and enjoyed and, in the freezing cold winter months, looked forward to. I’d come here expecting a similar attitude. Instead I found the year-round summer was not so
much taken for granted as squandered. Made meaningless.

I never imagined yards of beautiful exposed flesh under sunny skies could get dull. I never thought cool evenings full of cool drinks and warm glances could grow monotonous. I never dreamed sex could become so tedious.

Nancy wanted it every time I turned around. Three or four times a day, and the first couple days I was glad to accommodate. I’d gone for months without getting laid, and was more than ready. But after close to a week of it, I was just plain tired. The crazy part was what Nancy told me about the breakup of her marriage: “The son of a bitch was a sex maniac. . . . He didn’t respect me as a person at all.” She told me this while we were taking a shower together.

All of this was new to me. I had never had to maintain a relationship with one woman while watching another woman I would most likely have to kill. I was used to keeping those two particular compartments of my life separate. I led a relatively normal social life in Wisconsin, including an occasional
Nancy. But the life away from home was something else again. The business part of my life, I mean. The killing.

Of course I was in a different business now; slightly different, anyway. A new, self-created business that would require an intermixing, now and then, of the social me and the other one.

And I was finding out now, in my first time out, that playing both roles at once could prove to be a little disturbing.

Or anyway, irritating.

Though considering the boredom of this would-be paradise, a touch of irritation was maybe a good thing. At least I was awake. Aware, always, I was here on business. Perhaps I should’ve been thankful I hadn’t been seduced by the sex-and-sun, flesh-and-fun atmosphere of the place.

Only I was finding something else irritating. Or disturbing, anyway. I had developed a nagging fascination with the woman I was watching, that oriental-eyed woman with the big breasts, a woman who didn’t seem to quite fit in here, and that fascination was unhealthy as hell, especially since this was my first outing in my new (make that revised) line of work.

How much longer was I going to have to watch her? Another week? A month? Longer? I never have liked stakeout work, and this swinging singles lifestyle, with its fringe “benefit” of constant sex, seemed likely to kill me before I had a chance to kill anybody myself.

Maybe tonight would be different. After all, the afternoon had been different. The tall, busty woman I’d been watching these past few days had acted a little strange this afternoon. All week she’d been giddy, just another bubble-headed fun-seeker playing footsy and everything-elsey with her blond boyfriend. But this afternoon she’d gotten moody. Her face had taken on an almost grim look. Her efforts at having fun seemed just that: efforts. Efforts that had failed and lapsed into . . . what? Depression? No. More like seriousness. A serious mood, rather than a black or bitchy one.

Something was up, maybe.

Not me, certainly: I was wilted. Nancy was going to have to learn to respect me as a person—for the rest of the night, anyway.

Meanwhile the crowd in and around the pool was beginning to thin. Nancy begged off around two-thirty and by that time there was only half a dozen of us left. My dragon lady was one. Her blond hunk of manhood was another, only now he was in the water with a blond hunk of womanhood whose own hunk she had managed to lose, along with the top of her bikini, and two small but perfectly shaped boobs bobbled in the water like apples, pink apples, if there is such a thing, or even if there isn’t. I didn’t much care either way. I was too wrung out to care. Not so the two blonds: they climbed out of the pool giggling and one chased the other into the shadows.

That left me alone with her.

Which was not good. A harmless conversation, idly struck . . . and the ballgame was over. Of course there was a whole pool between us; better an ocean. I needed to stay just some anonymous bearded guy who she had never really looked at close, otherwise the entire deal was blown.

But she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at the water. Staring at it, the surface rippling with the slight breeze, the torch lights shimmering eerily in reflection.

And then she got up and went up the open stairway to the second level, where her apartment was.

I stayed behind. I was, to say the least, relieved. And now that I had the pool to myself, I could have a nice, private swim, which is a daily ritual of mine, whenever possible, anyway.

I dove in.

I’d just swum my sixth easy lap when she came down wearing a dark, mannish pants suit, suitcase in either hand, and headed into the parking lot, from which, moments later, came the sound of squealing tires.

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I COULD HAVE
followed her. I had my car keys in the pocket of my robe, which was with my towel, under the beach chair where I’d been sitting before I started my swim.

But I might have looked just a shade conspicuous jumping into the Opel GT soaking wet, in nothing but a pair of swim trunks, and considering I was already afraid she might have taken some notice of me, following her, at this moment, in my present condition, didn’t seem, well, prudent.

The next best thing to following her was to find out where she was going.

So that’s what I decided to do. Try to do, anyway.

I hadn’t ever gotten in her apartment to look around, despite the number of days I’d been there. She hadn’t left the grounds of the place since I’d arrived: she sent her boyfriend out to do the grocery shopping, and with all the drinking and sex available on the premises, who needed to go out for anything except supplies?

I maybe could have got in and searched her place while she was down by the pool with her blond plaything; she did spend a lot of time down there, after all, but who was to say when she or the plaything might tire of the pool and come up for a nap or something. And, too, during all but a few of the nocturnal hours, I was playing plaything myself, for Nancy, so when the fuck was I supposed to get in that apartment for a look?

Now.

Now I could do it. The dragon lady was gone, packed and left in the middle of the night, as a matter of fact, and her boyfriend was apparently shacked up, at least temporarily, with a new mistress . . . and I don’t mean mistress in the modern sense, not exactly.

I mean mistress in the dictionary sense, “woman in authority, in control.” Women ruled at that place. It should’ve been called-the Amazon Arms (and not Beach Shore Apartments, which is redundant as hell, I know, but then the owner/manager’s name was Bob Roberts, so you figure it). The Beach Shore rented exclusively to women. Divorced women, mostly, alimony-rich divorced women.

All the rooms had double beds, and there were a lot of men around, but the men would come and go, so to speak, and the women stayed on.

Which is why it hadn’t been hard to infiltrate the place. I just dropped in one afternoon and sat by the pool, wearing my tight little trunks, and waited to be picked up. It wasn’t as degrading as I’d imagined it, but it was degrading enough. As any woman reading this could tell you.

So now that the dragon lady was away, with an apparent rift developed between her and her plaything, I figured I’d find that apartment very empty. And the risk of being interrupted while I had my look around was little or no.

Getting in would be no problem. Getting in was never a problem around this place, in about any sense you can think of. The asshole who managed the place (the owner, old Bob Roberts, remember?) was never in his own apartment, as he considered that part of his function was servicing any of his tenants who were momentarily between playthings. He liked to tell his tenants his door was always open, and it was. So was his fly.

Anyway, I walked in one afternoon, found his master key in a drawer and took it to a Woolworth’s in the nearby good-size town, where I had a dupe made, returned his key, and got back in bed with Nancy, all in the course of fifty minutes.

I used to be good at picking locks, but got out of the habit. For what I’d been doing the past few years, I’d seldom needed tools of that sort, as most of my work was in the Midwest, where security tends to be lax, where most doors can be opened with a credit card, and there are lots of other ways to get in a place if you have to, easier ways than picking a lock, I mean, which honest-to-Christ requires daily practice. Anybody tells you picking locks is easy is somebody who doesn’t know how to pick locks.

I got out of the pool.

I put on my robe, went up the steps and inside, where I found the corridor empty and felt no apprehension at all as I worked the dupe of the owner/manager’s master key in the lock and went in. I turned on the lights (the windows of her apartment faced the ocean-front side of the building, so no one was likely to see them on, and even so, so what?) and began poking around.

The apartment itself was identical in layout to Nancy’s, except backwards, as this was on the opposite side of the hall. The decorating was very different, which surprised me: apparently each tenant could have her own decorating done, so where a wall in Nancy’s had pastel blue wallpaper, light color blue like Wisconsin summer sky, the dragon lady had shiny metallic silver wallpaper; other walls were standard dark paneling in either apartment, but in this one, for example, a gleaming metal bookcase-cum-knickknack rack jutted across the living room, cutting it in half, with few books on it and a lot of weird African-looking statues and some abstract sculptures made of glazed black something. And where in Nancy’s place there was a lot of wood, nothing furniture, everything antiques, this place had plastic furniture, metal furniture, glass furniture, all of it looking expensive and cheap at the same time.

In the bedroom, above the round waterbed, with its white silk sheets and black furry spread, was a painting. A black square with an immense red dot all but engulfing it. Nancy had a picture above her bed, too. An art nouveau print of a beautiful woman in a flowing scarf against a pastel background. Nancy had an antique brass bed. I had the feeling these girls weren’t two of a kind.

Meanwhile, I was going through things. The name she was using here was Glenna Cole, but I found identification cards of various sorts in several other names. The Broker’s name for her was Ivy. Knowing Broker’s so-called sense of humor, that probably came from poison ivy. Broker called me Quarry. Because (he said) a quarry is carved out of rock. The Broker’s dead now.

I found a gun. A spare, probably. She wouldn’t have taken her suitcases with her unless she was going off on a job. That was my guess, anyway, and it came from experience. Also, the gun was just a little purse thing, a pearl-handled .22 automatic, and I imagined she used something a little heavier than that in her work. A .38, at least. Speaking of which, I did find a box of .38 shells behind some lacy panties in a drawer, and that substantiated my guesswork, as there was no gun here that went with these shells.

What I didn’t find was evidence of where she’d gone. I went through the wastebaskets, and I even went through a bag of garbage in her kitchen, and found nothing, no plane or bus reservation notice, no nothing. I even played the rubbing a pencil against the top blank sheet of a note pad trick, and while it seems to work on television, all I got for my trouble was dirty fingers.

I sat on an uncomfortable-looking comfortable couch in her living room and wondered what to do next.

That was when her boyfriend came in.