The Rock Island Arsenal was a major employer in the Quad Cities. I figured I was right-the Broker had a piece of this place, otherwise why the knee-jerk puff job?
I glanced around at the red brocade wallpaper; you could see people moving out in the kitchen through windows in steel doors. “This is a little public, isn’t it? Not exactly where I expected us to meet.”
He waved a hand heavy with gold and diamonds in Pope-like benediction. “There’ll be no dark alleys, Quarry. We’re business associates. No need for paranoia, discretion suffices. I have enough clout around here that we can meet in comfort and relative seclusion without having to resort to ridiculously surreptitious measures.”
“Yeah, that would suck.”
He was studying me. His smile went up and his white mustache drooped down. A hundred years ago, this was a man who’d have bought and sold slaves. But I wasn’t perfect, either.
He said, “Judging by your confident demeanor, I would say you’ve had no second thoughts about the direction of our business relationship.”
“I spent a bunch of the money,” I said. I worked the opener on one of the Cokes and it made a pop. I could say it sounded like a gunshot, for dramatic effect, but it didn’t, really. “So I’m in. There’s a job?”
“A first job,” he said, and he chuckled, as if he were about to tell his twelve-year-old son about the birds and the bees. “And the first job is of course the most important.”
“Really? I’d think the final job.”
His brow furrowed. “And I do wish, right out of the gate like this, that I had something… simple for you. Something straightforward and not at all complex. Although I admit seeing how you handle a challenge will be instructive all around.”
I frowned. “My understanding was that my role would always be pretty straightforward. And never complex.”
The Broker reached for the pack of cigarettes and selected one and lighted it up with the golden Zippo. “Life is inherently complex. The human organism itself is complex, with enough moving parts to make the inner workings of a Swiss watch seem about as complicated as a slingshot. And human relationships…my God, they are even more complex than that!”
“Death isn’t.” I sipped Coke. “It’s just a switch that gets turned off.”
A white eyebrow lifted in the tan face. “You are correct, Quarry. Unarguably correct. Each death, each killing, is inherently simple, a mere stoppage…but you will not be not dead, Quarry, after you’ve done your fatal work: you must live to kill another day, even though you are caught up in the complexities of the life that you’ve just taken, complexities that continue on after death-and I speak not of the decay of the flesh, rather the remnants of human relationships.”
Did I mention he was a pompous motherfucker?
He was saying, “A switch you turn off, you say, that’s what death is. Fine. Let’s accept that premise. So you turn off a switch on the second floor of a house with which you’re unfamiliar-what do you do? You stumble in the dark. Perhaps you fall down a flight of stairs to your own death.”
“You’re saying this is not about blundering in, pulling a trigger, and blundering out.”
“Correct.”
“Well, I know that.” I shrugged and poured some more Coke. “I learned this particular skill taking part in missions that were well-thought-out.”
“Really? How is that war going?”
Well, he had a point.
He exhaled smoke. Then he sipped coffee. And smiled. How could that fucking smile be so white with all the cigarettes and coffee he sucked down? Too complex for me.
“Quarry,” he said, damn near purring, “the act itself may indeed be simple-a trigger is pulled, a heart is ripped apart, a skull is shattered and the brain within turned to useless sludge. But what leads up to the act does indeed take care and precision and information. Not unlike a military operation, as you indicated.”
“Okay,” I said.
The blue eyes gave me a laser look. “In the future, you will be paired with another member of my little army.”
I shook my head. “Not what we talked about. I work alone.”
He turned a hand over. “Actually, this time you will work alone. You may do several jobs alone before I team you with another. That is, in part, a precaution on my part.”
“I don’t need protecting.”
“Perhaps not, but I do.” He sipped coffee, then gazed at me coldly. “I am not risking an employee into whom I’ve invested time and money and effort and energy on a…new recruit, shall we say. You will have to prove yourself in the field before I pair you up with a partner, a partner of my choice.”
I was frowning. None of this had come up in his sales pitch. “Why the hell would I need a partner?”
His eyebrows lifted in a facial shrug; we might have been discussing a sales campaign for this year’s model whatever-the-fuck. “The way our contracts are carried out is a time-proven technique and a painstaking approach that I am pleased to say has never yet resulted in either an arrest or death for any of my associates.”
Later I would come to question this assertion, but at that moment, I felt reassured by it, and I stopped fighting the notion of working with somebody else, at least long enough to let him explain himself.
Which he did: “Each contract initiates a two-pronged effort. First, a man goes in and quietly gathers information, primarily through established surveillance techniques. We will spend as much as a month getting down the pattern of a target, and never less than a week. We are preparing for a surgical strike, and we need to know when the time is right for getting in and getting out without any collateral damage.”
“That I like,” I admitted. “I don’t want to go around killing innocent people. I’m not some sick fuck.”
A smile twitched under the mustache, which itself stayed steady. “Good. You seem already to understand the basic tenet of this business, and of your craft- these individuals we target are…well, let me back up: we do not target them. Others target them, and once these individuals have been targeted, they are already dead. They are obituaries waiting to be written. We have nothing to do with their deaths, other than the trivial detail of how those deaths are carried out.”
“Because these are inevitable deaths,” I said.
A crisp nod. “Correct. These are terminal cases before we ever get on the scene. You’re a surgeon removing a tumor.”
“I just won’t have much of a recovery rate.”
That made him smile a little. “Not true-those whose lives our targets afflicted will be free from their misery. Our clients are the patients in this medical metaphor, not the targets, who would in this case be the tumors.”
“I get it,” I said. “I did okay in English.”
Did I mention he was a pretentious windbag?
“Normally, you would go in for the last few days of surveillance, and be briefed in person and in detail by your partner, who would remain to provide back-up in the event something might go less than smoothly.”
“By goes less than smoothly, you mean, gets fucked up.”
“Yes. But as I say, we have a flawless record.”
I sipped Coke. Studied him. “Only on this job, this first job, I go in alone?”
He nodded. “We’ve had a man on the scene for over a month-he’ll have left by the time you get there. You don’t have any plans for Christmas, do you?”
“Just singing carols at orphanages and old folks homes, why?”
As if I hadn’t been kidding, he said, “But you’ll be free on the day after?”
“Yeah. I should have all my good works polished off by then.”
His eyes seemed sleepy suddenly, half-lidded, though his tone was crisp, the mellow baritone taking on an edge: “You’ll go in on the twenty-sixth. Don’t drive your own vehicle. Never drive your own vehicle, always rent. You’ll fly out of Chicago.”
I was pouring myself more Coca-Cola. “You said this was complex. What’s complex about it?”
A jaw muscle twitched. “You have to do more than just eliminate the target.”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“Normally. But in this instance, the target has made a real nuisance of himself. You’ll need to find some documents.”
