Before I left Milwaukee I traded my Opel GT in on a recent-model Buick, and on my way to the Quad Cities, where Ash was staying at a Holiday Inn, I got to thinking about the second of the three jobs I’d worked with him, the one where I’d saved his life.
At first glance, it was the sort of job you could pull in your sleep. We’d been provided with reams of information up front. We’d come up with a perfect, easy way to pull it off. I had the backup role and went in a week early, keeping an eye on the guy we were to hit, checking out the information we’d been given to see if the mark’s schedule really was as regimented as we’d been told. And it was. The mark had a timetable he didn’t vary from every working day of his life. His weekends were likewise regimented, but his working day provided that perfect, easy way I mentioned.
The mark was a real estate agent, a prosperous one. A congenial, well-dressed little man in his early fifties with a toupee and a weight problem. He had an office in the tallest building in the business district of a large Southwestern city, a hundred-thousand-dollar ranch-style house out in the country, a wife, no kids, three poodles, and mob connections.
Now, the Broker claimed not to be in the direct employ of the so-called Mafia or Family or whatever, and most of the people I helped kill had nothing to do with the mob, or, anyway, that’s what I was told. But some of what those of us who worked through the Broker did was unquestionably mob related, and this supposedly fell into the area of piece- work we did for them now and then, hits that for some reason or another would be better handled by outside people.
And there was no doubt that this Southwestern real estate agent had mob connections. Unless you don’t consider it a little unusual for your average real estate agent to be constantly accompanied by bodyguards.
Not that they looked like bodyguards, those two guys that were always at his side. They looked like real estate agents. They were not particularly big: one of them was a sandy-haired man in his thirties who was five-eight, solidlooking but no bruiser; and the other was of similar age and height, only with brown hair, a round face, and a paunch. Neither man looked especially sinister.
But they were bodyguards, all right. No mistaking that. For instance, both of them chose to wear their suit coats at all times, even when standing out in the sun while their employer spent three hot hours one afternoon showing some of his outlying land holdings.
In the mornings they drove him to work in his yellow Cadillac. At lunch they ate at a table close by him in the restaurant on the bottom floor of his office building; they even went in with him when he used a public toilet. And in the late afternoon they drove him back to his house in the country, where their employer provided them quarters over the four-car garage. The weekends had them playing golf with him, among other things, but never mind.
The point is, they accompanied him constantly.
Except for his long lunch hours, Tuesdays and Thursdays, when he spent 12:30 to 2:30 P.M. in a sleazy little room at the Tuck-a-Way Motel, in the company of a sleazy little blonde, while the bodyguards went across the street to have lunch at a sleazy little diner.
And that, of course, was the perfect, easy way of hitting him.
The girl would be no trouble. Just shove her out of the way before the shooting started, knock her out if she got physical or vocal or anything. It would mean Ash had to pull on a stocking mask or something before going in the back window of the room and doing his thing, and he’d have to take the time to tie the girl up and gag her before cutting out, but that was a small price to pay. We certainly had no intention of killing the girl, and if that surprises you, think about it a minute.
In the first place, I was no homicidal maniac and I assumed Ash wasn’t, either. The Broker didn’t take on people who took pleasure in killing; he took on people who could kill dispassionately, and well.
Furthermore, kill one guy and it’s a killing; kill two or more and all of a sudden it’s a mass murder. The papers and TV start hollering psychopath on the loose, or in this instance splashing “Love Nest Slaying” all over the place, and pretty soon an unnatural interest has been stirred up in what otherwise would have been considered a routine occurrence, buried in the back pages of the papers, unworthy of more than a mention on the tube.
So when I was hired, as part of a team, to kill somebody, that one somebody got it, and nobody else. Period. Anything else is just plain bad business.
If I thought life was cheap, I wouldn’t charge so much to take one.
Anyway, the stakeout had been uneventful. Working backup is always boring, and for that reason I avoided it whenever possible; but this guy was especially boring. A goddamn robot. No variety whatsoever, every day the same clockwork run-through.
But thank God for Tuesday and Thursday, and those long lunches at the Tuck-a-Way Motel. Seeing him duck into that motel room, a few minutes after that cheap little blonde had done the same, and catching a glimpse of an awkward but impassioned embrace, made him seem almost human.
We took a week and a half, a full week of stakeout, just me alone, checking out what we’d been told about the mark’s habit pattern, and another half a week with Ash, joining me on stakeout, even spelling me one evening so I could catch a movie and relax a little, and just generally getting filled in from me on the mark’s pattern and the overall lay of the land.
Came Thursday of that second week, an uncharacter- istically cool and overcast day for the middle of July in the Southwest, and we were ready to go. I’d taken a room directly opposite theirs (or as directly opposite as possible, considering the motel was L-shape) and from the window we watched the two bodyguards deposit the mark at the door of the room, saw a flash of blond hair as the couple embraced, watched the two bodyguards exchange weary grins, shake their heads, and walk across the street to the greasy spoon, leaving their car behind in a stall by the room.
We waited five minutes, and Ash took off. He was going in through that back window, which we’d already broken the lock on this morning, having been in the motel room for a look around and to prepare. We’d considered having Ash simply wait inside, just hide in the room, but we figured there was always the outside chance the bodyguards would step inside and check the room over first. They hadn’t ever done that, but we couldn’t be sure. The stakeout had lasted only a week and a half, and I’d witnessed the ritual at the Tuck-a-Way a mere three times.
I have no idea why the bodyguards came back. They didn’t come back in a hurry, so they apparently hadn’t got wind of what we were up to. They could hardly have received a phone message for their boss over at the greasy spoon, unless they were in the habit of letting it be known they could be reached there Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, which was possible, I guessed. The nearest I could figure was the mark had forgotten to take his heart medicine (did I mention he had a bad heart?) but that’s just a guess.
At any rate, as I watched from the window, I suddenly realized the two guys who had strolled calmly into my line of vision were heading for the door of the same room I was watching, and shit! Fuck, if it wasn’t the fucking bodyguards!
Somehow I got there at the same time they did. I don’t really remember how. I ran, but had the presence of mind not to wave my gun around as I did; I was carrying it under a folded raincoat, which I had over my arm, and I didn’t even drop the raincoat as I sprinted across the motel court and went through that motel room door right as they were opening it, right behind them, knocking both of them to the floor, kicking the door shut behind me, slapping first one, then the other on the back of the head with my automatic, then slapping each of them on the back of the head again, to make sure they were out, and when I looked up I saw Ash standing there, smoke coming out of his silenced nine-millimeter, the mark sitting up in bed, naked, top of his head gone, toupee and all, the girl in a naked, unconscious lump on the floor by the bed, and Ash said, “Jesus, Quarry. I guess I owe you one.”
I said I guessed he did, and suggested we get the fuck out of there.
But that was four years ago, and people have a way of forgetting. And if Ash hadn’t forgotten, he had a funny way of paying me back, sending people round to kill me and all.
Anyway, the situation had changed somewhat.
Now I owed him one.