The sky was full of stars with a nearly full moon that gave the outdoors a nice ivory tinge. I was floating on my back in the Wheelhouse Motel pool, feeling pretty mellow for a guy who had just killed somebody. A guy who before long would probably be killing somebody else.
I could even see my Sunbird from here, parked at Unit 28 on the same wing of the motel where Monahan’s Buick still occupied Unit 36’s slot. The adjacent slot yawned empty. I figured the blond kid had checked out before he went over to take his farmhouse stakeout one last time; with the job set for dawn, he would have had no reason to go back to the motel.
And yet he had come back in a way, because right now he was in the trunk of that Sunbird. But who could argue that-one way or another (to quote Debbie Harry)-he hadn’t already checked out?
In my mellow, floating state, I wondered if I was getting over-confident, even cocky. I had checked into the same goddamn motel as Monahan…with his dead partner in my trunk. Of course, my other choices would have been to stay across the river in River Bluff at a Holiday Inn or some shit, or risk the sperm-infused sheets of the Eezer Inn (and I was way too squeamish for that).
Even my only precaution-wrapping my nine millimeter in a towel, stowed poolside under a deck-style chair-was risky. What if somebody kicked or otherwise moved the bundle, and the damn automatic clunked out on the concrete? Went off, even?
You might even say it looked a little suspicious, because I’d draped another towel on the chair itself…
On the other hand, there were no other swimmers in the early evening at the Paddlewheel’s pool. An hour ago, I’d had a piece of pie (butterscotch cream) at the restaurant and an older gal named Marge had chatted with me, starting with answering my query about why the restaurant was so dead at supper time.
“The Paddlewheel opens at five,” she said.
“Also closes at five, I understand.”
She nodded. Brunette, brown-eyed, she was pushing fifty and just a little heavy, with a lined face and neck that weren’t enough to conceal how attractive she’d once been.
“We’re just a kind of annex over here,” she said. “We run an hourly shuttle over there and everything.”
“To the Paddlewheel? Really.”
“Really. Anybody staying with us is here for the Paddlewheel, and they almost all take supper over there. We make it on breakfast and lunch and really do pretty well right up to late afternoon.”
“How long has the Paddlewheel been around?”
“Going on ten years. It’s on its third management, British ‘bloke’ named Cornell, Richard Cornell-but everybody calls him Dickie. Real smoothie. He’s the boss here. He built the Wheelhouse, and he’s done wonders with the Paddlewheel. Oh, it was always nice, you know, always the respectable entertainment alternative in Haydee’s. But Dickie upgraded everything-food, entertainment, even expanded the gambling.”
“How can you be respectable running an illegal casino?”
She shrugged, refilling my iced tea from a pitcher. “Haydee’s has always been a wide-open little town. It’s like Reno or Vegas.”
“This isn’t Nevada.”
“No, honey, it’s Illinois.” She grinned like a female wolf; her bridgework could have been better. “And last I looked, Chicago was in Illinois, too, right?”
She had a point.
So I had the pool to myself. That I was feeling this mellow was either a testament to my self-confidence or my self-delusion. Still, it was nice knowing I could have that much caffeine (I’d consumed more than my share of Diet Coke and iced tea today) and still feel this laid-back.
Plus (as I say) I’d killed a guy, who was currently in my trunk in my line of vision, and it didn’t seem to faze me, though the ass of the buggy was thumbing its nose at me. Idly I hoped that trunk didn’t leak. Be a bitch if it were seeping red stuff the way the late blond kid’s Mustang had dripped oil.
I wanted to make sure I was relaxed before I went over to the Paddlewheel. No reason to go in right at five p.m.-last thing I needed, either for my own peace of mind or for staying inconspicuous, was to be a new patron who dropped in and stayed for twelve hours. I figured going over around nine should do it. Time would be required to make contact with Richard Cornell, but that should be plenty. And I could grab a late bite.
My mellowness took a hit, however, when a memory floated into the stream of my consciousness like a turd in the pool.
I had heard of Haydee’s Port before. And I’d heard of the Paddlewheel, too…
About eight years ago, the very first time I utilized the Broker’s list, I’d helped out a guy who ran a much smaller casino in the hinterlands near Des Moines. His name was Frank Tree, and he’d filled me in on his personal history, and part of it had been running the Paddlewheel in Haydee’s Port. He’d sold the place, and that was all I knew about it.
This had just been a stray piece of information that hadn’t been pertinent to the job at hand-which had been keeping Tree from getting killed-and it was a small miracle that this trivia occurred to me now.
I doubted this information had any current pertinence, either; but it troubled me that the synapses in my brain hadn’t sparked immediately. Christ, I was only in my mid-thirties. How could my memory let me down like that?
Physically, I felt up to whatever came along. I was no muscleman, but swam often, usually daily-it was the variety of physical exercise I preferred, and helped me relax, and allowed my thoughts to either fade or come into focus, as the case might be. Out here, on my back, staring at the stars and moon over Haydee’s Port, clarity was the result.
Maybe it was time to retire the Broker’s list. Maybe I was getting too casual about killing, or cocky or sloppy or whatever. After all, I had an investment opportunity back in Wisconsin, where I lived, and if I could make enough of a killing on this job-again, of the financial variety-it could be the last one.
Maybe a hired assassin has a natural working life, like an athlete or a rock star or a sex symbol…
For some time, I’d lived in an A-frame cottage on small, private Paradise Lake, which suffered few of the tourists that haunted the nearby Lake Geneva vacation center. The scattering of summer homes meant I had very few neighbors off-season, which was how I liked it, and even on-season was no problem.
One business did serve the year-round locals, and in summer attracted a small, tolerable number of tourists: Wilma’s Welcome Inn, a rambling two-story structure that had been a roadhouse back in Prohibition Days, converted in the only slightly-less-distant past to a restaurant, gas station, and hotel (a convenience store was a more recent touch, taking the place of a gift shop). Everything was under one rustic, slightly ramshackle roof.
Wilma had been a beautiful woman trapped in a tub of lard, and one of the few humans I ever really liked, in part because she made a great bowl of chili and also because she was pleasantly chatty without getting nosy. She was dead now, and her boyfriend/bartender Charley was trying to run the place, doing a fairly crap job of it. Her daughter was a curvy little babe in her late teens who wanted to sell the place before Charley ran it into the lake, so she could move to California and do drugs.
I apologize for all this extraneous shit, but the bottom line is, I had a chance to buy the place. As a kid back in Ohio, I’d tinkered with cars and worked in a garage, so the gas station part appealed to me. I’d be handy enough to whip the dump into shape with remedial repairs, plus I’d made the acquaintance of a woman in Lake Geneva who knew restaurants and hotels and was looking for a new position. The first new position I tried involved her getting fucked against a door, and screaming like she’d just won the lottery, so I thought she might make a reasonably interesting employee.
Maybe this was that crossroads moment you hear so much about. Maybe if I survived this job, and came out of it with a nice payday, I could go straight. After all, a lot about what I did had drawbacks-long travel hours, the endless surveillance, occasional shitty accommodations, inconsistent food. Sometimes the nine millimeter could jam.
I swam laps, once back and forth quickly, then just settled in at an easy lope. The pool was cool but not cold, heated but not too. If it’s like a bath, I get sleepy, and I never like to be that relaxed, unless I’m in my own home with the alarm system on. Back home, I swam in the lake, when weather allowed, and at the Lake Geneva YMCA, where I had a membership, staying clear of the steam room. On the road, the motel/hotel pools seemed evenly divided between indoor and outdoor. But on a warm night like this, with the water just a little crisp, nothing could beat the Great Out Of Doors.
I did some lazy laps on my back, so I could watch the stars and moon. For some reason, I thought about the Broker. Maybe it was because of the pool at the Concort Inn, a hotel in the Quad Cities the Broker worked out of, and while that pool was indoors, it had a skylight. Swimming indoors under the stars creates a dreamy sensation. Memorable one, too. I’d swum there a number of times, and again my memory was making odd connections.
When the Broker approached me, I’d been living in a fleabag hotel in Los Angeles. Drinking is not generally my thing, but it had been then. Still Coke, only with Bacardi. Lots of Bacardi-one Coke can to a bottle of rum, yo ho ho.
He was a handsome white-haired, white-mustached businessman who wore tailored suits and spoke in speeches, and he might have been forty or he might have been sixty-I never asked or bothered to find out. He thought I might be interested in doing for good money (for him) what I had previously done in Vietnam for shit change (for Uncle Sam)-namely, killing people.
I’d been good at it. I’d been a sniper most of the time in Nam, though I did make it through my share of firefights, and I probably caused a couple dozen yellow melons to splatter and send their bearers into whatever their idea of the afterlife was. In sniper work particularly, you find yourself picking off people like a game of Galaga, but with better effects.
None of that got me in trouble. In fact, it got me some medals. What got me in trouble was coming home, finding my wife in bed with a guy and killing the son of a bitch. Actually, that’s wrong-I didn’t kill him till the next day when I went over to the prick’s house to have it out with him, and he was under his car working on it, and said, “What the fuck do you want now, bunghole?”
And I kicked the jack out.
This made it look premeditated (if it had been premeditated, I’d have taken a gun) and made it harder for the unwritten law to kick in. But the papers took my side and I ended up not getting prosecuted, at which point the papers did not take my side. This is the only time I got any publicity for anybody I ever killed, incidentally, and it’s apparently what inspired the Broker to look me up.
I haven’t given you my name, and won’t, but Broker knew it all right (it was in his file), though he immediately gave me a one-name alias-Quarry-which he insisted on using. He had these kind of corny code names for all of us-Monahan was “Driver” in the file, I would later learn.
Anyway, I got comfortable with “Quarry,” and other people in the business called me that, too. Sometimes I even used it on the job with a first name stuck on. Right now, though, at the Wheelhouse, I was checked in as Jack Gibson.
I sensed someone had joined me, not in the pool but taking a deck chair alongside, and I stopped swimming except to stroke over and climb out and sit on the edge, water dripping off, catching my breath.
Across the pool, in the chair next to the one that had my towel draped over it (and my towel-wrapped gun under it), Monahan was sitting. Beyond him, just over his right shoulder, I could see the Sunbird.
“Lovely night,” I said.
He was smoking. On his left was a little glass table with his Chesterfields and room key on it and a folded towel. He was in a pair of navy swim trunks and a red t-shirt. His legs and arms were hairless, and he looked much younger than his forty or so years. He had dark eyes and pale skin and looked relaxed, head back, blowing smoke rings for his own amusement. He had the kind of nasty, smirky face that fraternity boys never grow out of.
“A little humid,” he said.
His voice echoed across the water.
“Could rain,” I admitted, mine echoing similarly. “But you can’t bitch about the temperature.”
“Sure I can.” He lowered his chin and grinned at me.
Was it just a dumb remark, or was there something in it?
I stretched, then walked around the pool-diving board was at the other end-and knelt to retrieve the two towels under my chair. One, of course, was rolled up like an ice cream cake with a nine millimeter center. I sat down, placed the bundle as inconspicuously as possible on the cement to my right-Monahan was seated at my left-and began toweling off casually.
“Looks like all the sweet pussy took a walk,” he said with a sneer.
I wasn’t sure I got that, but figuring he meant the bikini girls, I tried this: “Lotta nice stuff gettin’ strutted this afternoon, all right. I guess they’re all over at the Paddlewheel.”
He nodded. Smoked some more. No more rings. “This motel’s the loneliest place in town, after dark.”
“Rough little burg,” I noted.
“Paddlewheel’s safe enough. Games are straight. Good food. Decent entertainment.” He shook his head. Blew dragon smoke out his nostrils. “But you can get your ass handed to you downtown, brother.”
“Yeah?”
“Joint called the Lucky Devil, especially.”
“Rough?”
“Rougher than a cob.” He extended a hand. “Sam Mason. Insurance game.”
I shook it. “Jack Gibson. Veterinary medicine.”
“Really? Pets or farm animals?”
“Know much about farms?”
“Was raised on one.”
I gave him half a grin. “Me? Wouldn’t know a heifer from a hog. My line of meds is strictly the pet trade.”
He laughed and smoke came out. “You want to make a buck in this hellhole? Try selling penicillin.”
“Not at the Paddlewheel, though…”
“No! No. I don’t even think any high-class ass works out of there. Bluff City is too smalltown for call girls, and the kind of girls you meet on the Haydee’s side, you don’t take home to mother…unless mother is a doctor specializing in the clap.”
I shook my head, did a little shiver. “Since AIDS came around, Mrs. Gibson’s little boy don’t go out in the rain without his rubbers.”
“Ha! Don’t blame you. I’m a happily married man with a beautiful wife. Two healthy kids. I wouldn’t risk all that, fooling around with some trashy little cunt.”
I grinned at him, recalling the carry-out cutie back home. “What about the little beauties who were sunning themselves this afternoon?”
“I’m married,” he said with a grin, “not dead.”
Yet.
“I still have a pulse myself,” I said.
“You’re not tied down?”
“Nope.” I nodded toward the memory of the bikini girls around the pool. “What do you think, they’re college girls?”
“The ones today? They’re secretaries and office workers from St. Louis, on holiday.”
“You talk to ’em?”
“Maybe a little.” He grinned again. “No charge for looking. But there are some college girls from Iowa City checked in, too. This is nice, young, sweet pussy, my friend. Looking to be naughty. It’d be a sin not to help ’em out. Downright fucking unkind.”
Not only had he already forgotten the beautiful wife, the Chinese chickie was yesterday’s carry-out, too.
“Well,” I said, and reached down for the rolled towel, then slipped my hand inside, around the nine millimeter’s grip, “nice meeting you.”
The silencer wasn’t attached, but the towel would muffle a shot, though the cloth would likely catch fire.
He grinned again. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” he said.
“I think I can keep that promise,” I said.
I didn’t see where he could have a gun on him, not in swim trunks and t-shirt, but I took no chances, walking at an angle to my room, keeping the seated man in my eyeline.
As I reached my door, I saw him get up and slip off the shirt, his body ghostly pale in the moonlight. He dove in. He was doing his own laps as I went inside.
The bed cut the room nearly in half, and I sat on its edge facing the door with the gun in my hand, trained there. I was still in my trunks, which were damp, and I wasn’t completely dry myself. Then it occurred to me that if he was brazen enough to shoot through the door, he might get me.
So I moved down the bed, near the headboard, and sat and waited.
Nothing.
That had just been talk, right? Friendly talk? Guy stuff? He was staying here, I was staying here, two fellas taking a swim and striking up a conversation. He had a job to do but wouldn’t necessarily head over to the Paddlewheel till near dawn, when the time came to execute his plan. It was not at all unnatural for him to relax by the pool, to swim, to chat amiably with another guest. He had time to kill.
Could he have discovered his partner was dead?
I had the body, of course, but I hadn’t cleaned up after myself except to remove fingerprints. Blood was still on the refrigerator, and on the floor, and even on the back steps and driveway gravel-crusty and dark by now, but unmistakably blood, especially to a pro like Monahan. A clean kill in that the guy went quickly, but otherwise sloppy.
Like me?
Was I too sloppy and stupid to survive?
I showered and sat up on the bed in my shorts with a gun in my hand watching an old movie on Turner Classics. Monahan did not come knocking, and for that matter did not come not knocking…
This was what I got for staying at the same goddamn motel as my target. Perhaps I should just get in the Sunbird, dump the blond kid’s body along the road somewhere, and head back to Wisconsin. This was feeling like too much risk, with too much exposure. Sure, I had invested some time and money and spent a couple of nine millimeter slugs on Mike Love. But why chance it?
On the other hand, I was still about twenty grand short of what I needed to buy Wilma’s Welcome Inn. I wasn’t in a position to get a bank loan. I needed cash.
So I put on my Don Johnson duds and headed over to the Paddlewheel.