The Last Quarry (16 page)

He teetered at the edge of the grave, his back to it—unsteady yes, but standing, and the square face set with almost crazed determination.

To do what?
I wondered.
Survive? Kill me?

So I floored the fucking thing, found a lane between gravestones, and went charging across the grass, and he must have heard the engine’s roar because he turned toward me, the determination shifting to terror, as the hearse bore down.

I clipped him good as I passed, garnering a truly satisfying crunch, and sent him toppling back into the grave, landing to make another metallic, echoing
thud
.

Slamming on the brakes, I hopped out, nine millimeter in my fist, and ran to the grave, where Green—down in there on top of his daughter’s copper coffin, arms in crucifixion position—looked up at me with the money-color eyes wide open and staring.

But he didn’t see me. He was very, very dead.

Which was a bit of a disappointment, because I would just as soon have shot him some more.

Time to go.

I was paused just long enough to dump the duct-taped mummy of the real hearse driver, and got back in a vehicle that looked little the worse for wear for having just run a guy down.

This time I didn’t floor it, just cruised out of the cemetery in my chauffeur’s uniform, my hands on the wheel of the hearse, passing assorted Oak Brook Memorial personnel coming out of hiding, scurrying along the periphery, now that the shooting was over.

Oak Brook Memorial was easing into spring, the snow gone, the grass greening, but this could just as easily have been November as late March. Once again cloud cover threw shadows on the cemetery, but this time they more or less stayed put, just lending a blue-gray cast to the tombstone-studded landscape.

The gravesite still looked fresh, the unusual procedure of the contents of a grave needing to be shifted one to the right making it look like two relatively recent burials had taken place.

A correction had also been made on the massive granite gravestone. Whether this was a fresh slab, or whether tombstone cutters have their own kind of Liquid Paper, I couldn’t tell you.

At any rate, it now read:

MARY ANN GREEN

(1940–1985)

Beloved Wife and Mother

JONAH ALLEN GREEN

(1938–2005)

Husband and Father

and below:

JANET ANN GREEN

(1975–)

JULIA SUSAN GREEN

(1985–2005)

Cherished Daughter

A woman in a black wool coat, black slacks and red sweater knelt to place a floral wreath at one of the graves, taking care to position it just right. She lowered her head and, apparently, began to pray.

I let Janet finish the mumbo jumbo before I wandered down from my surveillance post behind that mausoleum on the hillock, and when she finally stood, I was at her side.

At first, she was startled—couldn’t blame her: she hadn’t seen me for several months, not since I’d shuffled her out of Homewood and onto a plane. But very soon her expression turned calm, almost serene.

“Your friend Gary,” she said, “was very nice.”

I nodded. “Florida makes a nice getaway in the winter.”

She was looking at me the way a mother checks a kid getting over the measles. “He wouldn’t tell me anything about you.”

And once again, I was glad I hadn’t killed my old Vietnam buddy, after getting drunk and spilling my guts to him, that time. Even a prick like me can use a friend now and again.

“His wife’s nice, too,” she said conversationally.

“Ruthie. Yeah. A peach.”

“She doesn’t know
anything
about you.”

“Yeah, well, I’m an enigma wrapped up in a riddle.”

She almost smiled. “What now?”

My eyes met hers, and it wasn’t the easiest thing I ever did. “We can do it two ways. I can tell you everything...or nothing.”

She thought about that.

Then Janet said, “If you tell me everything...” She gestured toward the gravestone. “...will I be next?”

“No. But you were supposed to be.”

She frowned. “My father...?”

My eyes remained locked with hers. “Can you live with it?”

She sighed; looked away; shivered—it was still cold, after all—and folded her arms to herself, her hands in leather gloves. Her gaze lingered on the gravestone and then slowly shook her head.

“You mean, what Daddy did? Or what you’ve done?...What you might have done?”

“All that,” I said.

Her eyes came to mine again. “Or do you mean... could I live with
you
?”

I said nothing.

Our eyes remained locked.

“Your call,” I said, and I walked away, moving across the cloud-shadowed landscape, finding my way between tombstones, heading up that hill.

I could feel her eyes on me, but she did not call out.

So I was back where we began, in my A-frame, still managing Sylvan Lodge for Gary Petersen, and caught up in getting the place ready for the new season. Next week staff would be in, and I’d have to start dealing with being around people again.

Harry and Louis hadn’t shown up yet. Perhaps they were tangled in something down at the bottom of the lake, and were doing me the favor of feeding fish and turning to skeletons. I still felt that if their bloated remains did decide to float to the surface, their mob background would keep any heat off an innocent civilian like me.

And it was a big lake. Sylvan Lodge was only one little notch on it.

Of course, staying on at Sylvan at all was itself a risk—Jonah Green had found me here, hadn’t he? Come walking right into my world?

But Jonah was dead; he wouldn’t be crawling up out of that grave again, not even on Judgement Day. And he had no doubt been discreet in his inquiries about me—he had to be, since he was a selfish sociopath plotting his own daughter’s death, which generally calls for discretion.

Thing was, I was just too goddamn old to start over.

And I liked it here. I liked the cabin, and Gary, and
the (must I use this word?) lifestyle. In the unlikely event that assholes with guns came looking for me, they would find another asshole with a gun who would kill them.

A rationalization, sure; but I could live with it.

You will be relieved, I’m sure, to learn that my problem with insomnia was a thing of the past—I was sleeping long and deep with my only problem that low backache I had on waking, but walking over and swimming and using the Jacuzzi and doing a few stretches got rid of that.

Still, old habits die hard, and three nights before the Sylvan staff was about to arrive, a sound woke me—a clatter out there that was not fucking Santa Claus, and my waking thought was that somebody had broken in.

Funny how I can sleep so deep, but the littlest goddamn noise and I’m suddenly wide awake, alert as a butt-fucked sailor; I sat up in bed, the nine millimeter from the nightstand tight in my hand.

Call it paranoia, if you will. But when you make a career out of killing people, you tend to think the worst.

And something was definitely rattling around out in my kitchen.

I crept through the darkened cabin and saw a little light was on in there. Gun in hand, I slipped in and flipped the overhead light switch.

“Shit!” Janet said, wincing at the flood of illumination.

As usual, she was wearing one of my shirts, legs bare, her long dark blonde hair fetchingly tousled, and she was bending down, looking in the refrigerator. She straightened like an exclamation point. “Are you trying to scare me to death?”

I lowered the gun. “No.”

She shut the refrigerator door and turned to me, her expression innocently apologetic now. “Did I wake you?”

I sat at the kitchen table and put the nine millimeter down in front of me, like it was a fork or a spoon. Rubbed my face with two hands.

“I sleep light,” I said.

“So I’ve noticed.” She stood next to me and touched my shoulder and smiled in that way that meant she wanted something. “There’s not a damn thing in that fridge....Would you do me a favor?”

“Who do you want me to kill?”

She gave me a reproving look. One might say, a wifely look.

Then her expression softened and she asked, “Could you please make a convenience store run?”

I just looked at her. She had no notion of the significance of her request.

Janet gestured around the little kitchen, like a disaster survivor talking to a reporter about the damage. “We have cereal here, but no milk. I can
make a little list....Would you mind, terribly? And, uh—this is embarrassing, but...”

And now the poor-pitiful-me look.

“...would you mind picking up some Tampax?”

I let out a long sigh, pushed out the chair, stood, and said, “No problem.”

She touched my face and kissed my cheek. “You are
so
sweet....”

Maybe I was.

But I took the nine millimeter with me.

This is the sixth novel about the hitman who calls himself Quarry.

The first was mostly written around 1973 at the University of Iowa, where I was studying in the Writers Workshop; it was published by Berkley Books in 1975 as
The Broker
, though my preferred title was
Quarry
(and it’s been reprinted as such). Three novels followed in quick succession, at the publisher’s request, and that seemed to be it.

In the mid-’80s, the success of my Nathan Heller series inspired a couple of editors at a couple of houses to ask me to revive Quarry and my other early character, the retired thief Nolan. So I did a Quarry novel called
Primary Target
for Louis Wilder at Foul Play Press, and a Nolan called
Spree
for Michael Seidman at TOR. These were not intended as relaunchings
of those series, but a revisitation by an author in midstream of the creations that had launched him.

Over the years, Quarry has built a certain cult following (I always caution enthusiastic readers to remember the Donald E. Westlake definition of a “cult” success: “Seven readers short of the author making a living”) and, more recently, I’ve written an occasional short story about him. Not long ago, those stories and
Primary Target
were collected by Five Star as
Quarry’s Greatest Hits
.

One of the stories, “A Matter of Principal,” has taken on a kind of life of its own. Of any short story of mine, over my thirty-some-year career, it has been reprinted most often, and was even selected by Jeff Deaver as one of the best
noir
short stories of the 20th century. I have no idea why. I wrote it on assignment, one afternoon, with no plot outline—just working from something that had happened the night before when I made a midnight run to a convenience store and saw a burly guy buying tampons.

Perhaps half a dozen years ago, a young filmmaker in California, Jeffrey Goodman, discovered the short story and began getting after me to give him permission to make a film out of it. For a while I kind of shrugged this off, but eventually he wore me down—I liked the short films Jeffrey sent me by way of samples, and I liked his persistence, too.
Coincidentally, I’d begun working as an independent filmmaker myself here in my native Iowa. This I’d done out of frustration about having so many things optioned by Hollywood but seeing nothing made (this was before “Road to Perdition,” obviously).

So I finally told Jeffrey “yes,” on two conditions.

The first condition was that I would write the screenplay for the short film, which Jeffrey intended to be a showcase piece for the festival circuit. The second was that I would be the executive producer and would have input in post-production (I did not want to be on set, because I knew I would interfere). Jeffrey was as good as his word, and in particular my suggestions on editing the piece had a nice effect on the final cut.

Jeffrey’s short film “A Matter of Principal” became quite successful in the festival world, winning several and an official selection of several others. A year later, I combined Jeffrey’s film into an anthology of short films written (and otherwise directed) by me, entitled “Shades of Noir,” and that did well in several festivals, also. That anthology film eventually expanded to include my documentary “Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane,” and this novel is officially a tie-in to the Neo-Noir DVD release of the feature-length version of “Shades of Noir.”

But this book would not exist if Hard Case Crime
editor Charles Ardai hadn’t been kind enough to contact me about contributing to his first slate of books—he specifically wanted to reprint my Nolan novel
Blood Money
, which was the direct sequel to another of my Iowa City college-era books,
Bait Money
(both were published in 1973 by the now long-defunct Curtis Books). I suggested the two novels be published as one longer book,
Two for the Money
, and Charles generously agreed to put it out in that form.

Then Charles asked me to do an original novel for Hard Case—specifically, a Quarry. My previous commitments made that tough, but—knowing that Charles had lured the master of paperback painters, Robert McGinnis, into doing a cover or two for Hard Case—I said, “Sure, I’ll do an original book, Charles...
if
you get me McGinnis for the cover.”