“Not unless I see you again.”
He nodded, sighed, extended his hand for me to shake. I ignored it.
Withdrawing the hand, he smiled gently and said, “No hard feelings, Mr. Quarry. It’s too bad. I think you’d have been the right man for the job.”
I didn’t say anything.
His smile disappeared and, shortly, so did he, in a cloud of gravel dust; the BMW’s back license plate was covered with mud as well.
I went inside and started a fire.
I sat before the glow of it, by the metal conical fireplace in one corner of the A-frame’s living room, and waited for Linda, wondering if I should’ve killed the son-of-a-bitch.
3
I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d made a mistake. A week crawled by, my every moment filled with a sense I’d fucked up. No way I should’ve let that guy walk away from my place. He knew too much about me: where I lived, who I was, who I used to be. I should’ve followed the old instinct and iced him on the spot and dumped him in a gravel pit.
But my caller in the London Fog raincoat didn’t exist in a vacuum, and he wouldn’t die in one, either: he was clearly just a messenger, a fancy one maybe, but a messenger. Which meant somebody else-your classic person or persons unknown-had sent him; knew as much, or more about me, as he did.
So killing him would still have left somebody out there knowing more about me than was healthy.
There were options. I could’ve dropped everything and followed the messenger home, and done what needed doing, to all concerned.
But I didn’t.
I could pack up and disappear. Walk out of Linda’s life and leave her and the child inside her and the Welcome Inn and the comfortable life I’d somehow managed to contrive for myself forever behind me. Go and start over somewhere. I had money stashed under several names, including my real one back in Ohio; I had buffers built in to allow this sort of contingency.
Or I might risk taking Linda with me. She loved me. She was as loyal as Tonto, or anyway Pocahontas. And, with the exception of her brother, she had no ties, family or otherwise, to prevent her from disappearing with me, the two of us starting up and over somewhere, under new names.
She would probably go along with that. It wouldn’t even be necessary to tell her the truth about my past; she would, most likely, accept it when I told her that something in my past required it. Something “bad” that she didn’t need to know.
So why hadn’t I sprung it on her?
Because, goddamnit, I liked my life. I liked it just fine the way it was. I was fat and comfortable and, fuck! I didn’t want to start over. Why should I start over if I didn’t want to?
I had turned these people down. They knew I wasn’t interested, and if I wasn’t interested, what was I to them? Certainly no threat-what could I say to anybody about what they were up to? Nothing, without risking seriously screwing up my own life.
They would simply go elsewhere for their hired help. I was retired, they asked me to come out of retirement, I declined, their messenger in the London Fog tipped his figurative hat and went. No hard feelings, he’d said.
So why shouldn’t I go on about my business, go on with my life?
And, so, I had, but I still couldn’t shake the thought, the feeling, I’d made the wrong decision. The visit, from the man’s smooth but nervous manner to his muddy license plate, lingered like a bad dream, leaving a mental aftertaste and not a pleasant one.
The days themselves had been ordinary enough-I divided my time at the Inn between the garage, where for the hell of it I helped work on cars from time to time, and making sure the restaurant and hotel operation was operating smoothly. That was slightly weird, because half the time I’d been in greasy coveralls, the other neatly attired in suit and tie, an executive with a wrench in his back pocket.
I’d spent some time with Linda, quiet evenings, watching the tube, curled by the fire. We were both readers-I stuck with my westerns, while she read these dismal sappy romance novels, sitting there lost in them, smiling dreamily. The girl saw the world through rose-colored glasses- prescription rose-colored glasses, at that.
Another week passed, and the unsettling feeling that I’d fucked up began to fade. It didn’t disappear; but it did fade. Nonetheless, I took precautions. I owned three nine-millimeter automatics, and was carrying one, a Browning, with me everywhere I went now, instead of just in the glove compartment of our sporty blue Mazda, and the drawer of the nightstand next to the bed.
Early on, Linda had wondered about why I owned so many guns, particularly handguns, keeping them stashed about.
“I’m just a little paranoid,” I said. “Both my parents were killed by an armed robber.”
Her eyes had gone wide and round; that, added to their light blue color, made her look impossibly innocent. “Jack… I knew your parents were… gone… but I never…”
“They ran a little neighborhood market,” I said. “You know, mom-and-pop kind of deal. And they were both killed.”
“Oh, Jack,” she’d said, eyes full of tears, holding me tenderly.
It was all lies of course, but it led to some immediate great sex and some long-term understanding. She never asked me about the guns again, until just recently, when I started carrying the nine-millimeter around with me.
“Why are you wearing that?” she asked, concerned, as I was slipping my sportcoat over the shoulder holster, on my way up to the Inn.
“There’ve been a few robberies in the area,” I said. “It’s been in the papers.”
And there had been, but so what? That was almost always true.
“I understand,” she said, nodding sagely, and came over and hugged me, gun and all.
The girl’s new insight into me apparently came from her adding the truth that I’d been in combat to the lie about my sainted mom and pop being shot down in their grocery store. I was just a poor, sensitive, traumatized soul, wasn’t I?
I wasn’t packing the gun when we drove down to Chicago for the day, however, though one of the three automatics was in the glove compartment. We were picking up her brother Chris at O’Hare early that evening-he was coming in from Atlanta, Georgia-and Linda suggested we go in early, spend a day in the city Christmas shopping. Even mid-week, the city was jammed with traffic, sidewalks packed with people, and was a good reminder of why I lived on a quiet lake.
She shopped at Water Tower Place, six floors of trendy expensive nonsense, equal parts marble, glass, plants and people; it was the sort of shopping center where women in mink coats rode escalators. I quickly found my way to the theater complex and parked my butt in a fairly comfortable seat and watched Clint Eastwood pretend to be a marine for a couple of hours. I met Linda for lunch at a cafe next to the theater-where two people could have pie and coffee and get just enough change back from a twenty to leave a tip-and she was bubbling over about the things she’d bought, including several hundred bucks worth (using the word “worth” loosely) of metal signs, replicas of vintage advertisements for Coca Cola, Crackerjacks, Heinz pickles and so on, for decoration in the Welcome Inn’s rustic dining room. She’d also bought some presents for me, which she was dying to tell me about but managed to contain herself. She was a sweet kid. I didn’t deserve her, but then who does deserve what they get in this life, good or bad?
We walked to Gino’s East a few blocks over and shared a medium pepperoni pizza, the best deep dish pizza (so they said) in a town famous for deep dish pizzas. The walls were carved up with graffiti (it was encouraged-it gave the place atmosphere, and having your customers provide the decoration made more sense than buying little tin advertising signs yourself) and she coaxed me into carving our names there. Too many romance novels. What the hell, I did it, using the serrated part of a table knife, a heart with Jack and Linda in it, squeezed between THE BOSS FOREVER and BON JOVI SUCKS.
