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.
8
I looked up and saw Ash.
It was midafternoon, and I was in a phone booth. The booth was in the lobby of the Holiday Inn who’d sent “Raymond Drake” a room confirmation. The Holiday Inn was on the out- skirts of Davenport, Iowa, which is part of the Quad Cities, a half-million-plus metropolitan area straddling the Mississippi River; last time I was here I’d been on the Illinois side, at a Howard Johnson’s in Rock Island, meeting the Broker.
I was calling Ash’s room to see if he was in or not. And if not, planned to go find a maid to bribe, so I could get in the room and poke around. While I was sitting there letting it ring, he walked right by me.
He didn’t see me. He was walking toward the coffee shop, glancing at a newspaper, and he didn’t see me.
I slid out of the wandered over to the check-in desk, and leafed absently through free-take-one brochures detailing fun things to do in the Cities. Ash was hanging his overcoat on a rack just inside the coffee shop. The doors were spread open and I could see him clearly. He took a stool at the counter, ordered from the menu, returned to reading his paper.
Something was different about him. What was it? He was wearing a more expensive-looking suit than he used to, and that fur-trimmed brown leather overcoat alone must’ve cost an arm and a leg, or at least an arm. But that wasn’t it, nor was it the slight gut he’d put on that on anybody but a slender type like him would be nothing.
It was the hair.
His curly red hair. He’d had it straightened. And styled, covering up his little bald spot. Ash had come up in the world, it seemed, and it had gone to his head. Straight to his head.
Having the overcoat with him meant one of two things: either he was on his way out, and stopping off at the coffee shop for something before he left; or he was just getting back from somewhere, and stopping off at the coffee shop for something before going back to his room.
Either way, his room would be empty for a while.
So I went into the coffee shop myself, head lowered, scratching my forehead, keeping my face obscured. I went straight to the coatrack. It was not a busy time of day, and the nearby register was, for the moment, unattended. Ash was drinking coffee, reading the paper; his back was to me.
I pretended to be looking above the coats, where hats were stowed, as if I’d lost something, keeping a low but aboveboard profile as my left hand dug into the right-hand pocket of Ash’s expensive overcoat, from which I took his room key, gave up my search for the imaginary item I’d lost among the hats, and left.
I did glance back, well out into the lobby, but Ash hadn’t noticed me, and neither had any of the coffee shop help, apparently.
I’m not going to waste time describing what Ash’s room looked like. If you’ve never seen a room in a Holiday Inn, you’re either from another planet or lucky. I looked in the closet, found four suits hanging, all of the same well- tailored, costly nature as the one I’d seen him wearing. Also a raincoat, several pair of shoes, several empty suitcases. His shaving gear was in the john. I poked through the bureau drawers, found nothing. Nothing that told me anything special, that is: shirts, shoes, ties, underwear, box of ammo. The ammo was no great surprise. After all, I didn’t figure he was here on vacation.
But then, I didn’t figure he was here to kill anybody, either. He had sent others to do that, in my case; and he was now supposedly in the process of moving into the bloodless end of the killing business, into the role of assigning jobs, not carrying them out. Still, Ash was in the habit of carrying a gun, and why should he be expected
