This caused DeWayne to brighten with hope. “You, too…? Where’d you serve?”
“In a real war…Now get out and open the trunk.”
He swallowed, nodded, and within seconds he was crawling up inside the Taurus trunk, a big ungainly fetus making a tight fit. The overflow lot was empty, except for us, and the windows on this end of the restaurant were vacant. So we were cool.
His expression was pitiful when he said, “Thanks.”
“What for?”
“Not…not killing me.”
“It’s early yet,” I said.
And slammed the trunk shut.
Super soldier.
Jonah Green’s face was in his booth’s window when I pulled out casually in DeWayne’s rental vehicle. Julie Green’s face was in the window, too. She was laughing her ass off.
“ Goddamnit! ” her father yelled.
Didn’t take a seasoned lip-reader to make that out.
Five
And that should have been the end of it.
I’d left DeWayne in the trunk of his rental at the rest stop where my Jag waited. The kid’s glock and belongings I left in the front seat-no call to take them and, anyway, I’m not a fucking thief.
I’d cleaned up after myself, disposing of Harry’s brown Taurus in the gravel pit, and doing further clean-up at the cottage, and put the money in a safe deposit box at Brainerd.
Rationalization is a seductive bitch, and I’d pretty much convinced myself that if Harry and Louis turned into floaters on that lake after the thaw, their mob credentials would get the killings written off as Chicago fun and games.
Almost a month had passed when, on an afternoon so overcast that the northwoods were more blue and gray than green and brown, I was lounging in the hot tub in the barnwood-sided building that housed my personal off-season sauna and swimming pool. The world outside was cold as fuck, but my indoors universe was pleasantly muggy, the jet streams working on that chronic low back of mine like Spanish dancers minus the castanets.
I didn’t even have trunks on. Since I was the sole winter resident of Sylvan Lodge, except on the two days a week Jose came around, I would just jog across the private lane to the pool building without even my jacket, and go in and strip down and swim a few laps, sauna a while and wind up in the Jacuzzi. I liked the free feeling, but in retrospect, bare-ass was vulnerable.
And vulnerable is not a condition I like to put myself in.
I was nursing a can of Diet Coke, the tub’s jets feeling just fine, and the events of less than a month ago were nowhere in my mind. Even over the hot tub burble, I heard the sound of the glass doors opening-this was not one of Jose’s days-and my hand drifted toward my folded towel, under which was the nine millimeter.
Bare-ass is one thing; unarmed something else again…
Jonah Green appeared to be alone.
I could see another Lexus parked out front-this one sky-blue-and no driver was apparent. The millionaire was in a jogging suit the color of his name with running shoes and no jacket or topcoat, despite the cold; and his face was red with the weather because of it.
My first instinct was, he wanted me to know (or anyway think) he was not armed.
Very tentatively, he stood there with a glass door slid open, halfway in, and-with a deference I didn’t figure was usual coming from this man-asked, “May I come in?”
I just looked at him.
When he didn’t get permission, he came in just the same, closing the door behind him, and was goddamn lucky he wasn’t dead by the time he turned and said, “Don’t get your balls in an uproar, Mr. Quarry-I’m alone.”
Deference hadn’t worked, so he’d gone straight to hard-nosed.
He was moving cautiously my way, saying, “And if you kill me, you won’t know how I found you.”
I said nothing.
He nodded, as if I’d actually answered, then came over and pulled up a metal deck chair and sat at the edge of the Jacuzzi, nearby but not getting in my space.
“Don’t worry,” he said, patting the steamy air. His expression was soft, the grooves in his face at ease; but the money-color eyes were hard. “I didn’t waste my resources finding you to get… even, or some idiotic bullshit.”
I said nothing.
Sitting forward slightly in the chair, Green said, “Before you kill me-strangle me with that towel or whatever, I would-”
I showed him the nine millimeter from under the towel.
“There’s an elegant expression,” he said with admirable cool. “z‘Don’t shit where you eat’…You live here, you manage this place, you have a life… why risk that with a death?…Hear me out.”
I said nothing, but I lowered the gun a fraction.
He put his hands on his chest. “I really do appreciate what you did for me, and my daughter. I’m well aware that those mob fagellehs would’ve killed the little smartass.”
I said, “Our business is over.”
He shrugged, a tiny smile forming, pleased he’d finally drawn me out into at least speaking. “Our old business is over, Mr. Quarry-I really do admire your resourcefulness, your abilities. Take DeWayne, for example.”
“No thanks.”
He shrugged in an admission of his subordinate’s imperfection. “DeWayne isn’t brilliant, but he’s dangerous. You handled him as if he were a helpless child.”
“A couple thousand DeWaynes have died in Iraq.”
The millionaire sighed, nodded, slumping in his metal chair. He shook his head. “And a goddamned shame.”
I shrugged with one shoulder. “We spilled more than that.”
Picking up on my attitude, and instantly getting over his sorrow for the lost lives in Iraq, Jonah Green said, “I’m sure you did. Which is why I won’t make the mistake of sending a boy to do a man’s work again…I’ve asked around about you, Mr. Quarry. By the way, is that a first name or a last name?”
“Probably.”
That stopped him for a beat, then he moved on briskly, almost cheerfully. “At any rate, I did some asking around…I do business in all kinds of circles, you know.”
“You talk in circles, too. What do you want, Mr. Green?”
He semi-ignored that question. “Seems there’s a certain freelance assassin who dropped out of sight, a few years ago. He had a reputation as the best man in a tough game, sort of a killer’s killer. He wasn’t mob, although sometimes he did jobs for-”
“I’m impressed you found me. Trouble is, now I have to move.”
I raised the gun.
Finally he got it, or maybe my raising the nine just let out the nervousness that had been inside him all along. His hands flew up, as if this were a stick-up.
He was half a second away from dead when he blurted, “I want you to do a job for me! Another job!”
My finger froze on the trigger.
This was a lot of money seated near me, begging me to let him give me some. I’m not a greedy man; but I’m not a monk, either.
I said, “I’m retired.”
He knew he’d made a dent and something lively came into the green eyes. “That would’ve been just before the stock market went to shit, wouldn’t it? How are your investments doing, Mr. Quarry? Did you get out before the
