“And deliver them to you?”
“No, destroy them. You can burn them in the fireplace of the cottage where your target lives.”
“Good thing it’s the day after Christmas, then.”
“Oh?”
I grinned at him. “Would hate to singe Santa.”
He just looked at me. Then he smiled, big, taking the mustache along for the ride this time. “Very droll, Quarry,” he said. “Very droll.”
“That’s what it said in my high school yearbook, Broker-Most Likely to Be Droll. Now, who do I have to kill?”
THREE
That first night camped out in the split-level turned into morning-three in the morning, actually-before I decided that my non-Mouseketeer Annette would be spending the night in the cobblestone cottage with her favorite professor, tuckered out after her oral exams.
I admit that I had considered several scenarios designed to bring this assignment to its desired conclusion and right away. None of these, however, suited the Broker’s mandate of care and caution, and mostly included me going over there and somehow dealing non-violently (or anyway non-fatally) with the brunette, and then snuffing the prof, finding the manuscript pages Broker wanted destroyed, destroying them, and heading back to the lake and my A-frame to wait for money and praise to arrive from the Broker.
Some of these scenarios were pretty fanciful, involving chloroforming the girl (where would I get that stuff, exactly-a heist at the University hospital?) or knocking her out gently, like they do on TV, only in real-life that kind of blow kills you half the time. Pretty much all of these idiot plans had me shooting the prof multiple times, watching him shake, rattle and roll in Wild Bunch slow motion while I grinned maniacally. Somehow this didn’t seem in line with the Broker’s low-key wishes.
What was my problem, anyway?
What was the philandering Byron to me? Why did I care how many coeds blew and/or boffed him? I was generally in favor of girls blowing and boffing guys, although old farts like the prof (fucker was pushing forty) getting blown and boffed by young girls made me a little queasy, admittedly. I mean, there are limits.
So part of why I threw in the towel at three a.m. on my first stakeout was a sense that I needed rest and refreshment of my faculties, and anyway I did not want to fall asleep in this cold house where my pants could catch fire being too close to the space heater while the rest of me froze its nuts off.
By three-thirty I was in my Holiday Inn Room all snuggled up in my wee little bed. I didn’t need a lot of sleep and woke up around eight-thirty a.m. The window view told me that snow had fallen during my slumber and the world was a winter wonderland out there, thick fluffy stuff and evergreen trees plump with white, but the plows had been out, so you could go and enjoy Jack Frost’s handiwork without winding up dead in a ditch.
I showered, threw on a sweater and jeans and went down for breakfast. The motel was pretty dead-this was the Sunday after Christmas and the usual businessman clientele were not on the road and the other guests seemed to be made up of family members who were overflow from the homes of relatives who’d run out of spare rooms.
That meant that later, around ten, when I went down for a swim, I had to share the chlorine-scented echo chamber with squealing, splashing kids, whose shrill glee would have sent a guy with a hangover looking for a drill press to squash his head in. But I didn’t have a hangover, or a drill press for that matter, and anyway didn’t hate children any more than the next guy, so I settled into the whirlpool bath and let the hot, churning water soothe me.
A woman who presumably was the mother of at least one or two of the eight or nine turning the swimming pool room into a combination day care center and horror show padded over in a bright orange one-piece swimsuit. She’d put on a little weight having kiddies, but there was no doubt why somebody had wanted to have kiddies with her in the first place-she was a redhead with an Afro-ish tower of permed but tousled hair and a roundish pleasant face and displayed the kind of curvy frame that makes you really lenient about cellulite.
She settled in across from me. In ten years, she wouldn’t rate a second look. But right now the way her full breasts hit the top of the water and the crinkles around her dark blue eyes as she smiled at the pleasure the water jet at her back was giving her was giving me a hard on. The hard on was safely beneath the water, not causing anybody any trouble, not even me, but I wondered what the hell was wrong with my ass. A woman almost ten years older than me, tending her kiddies at a pool, had my dick throbbing.
I was supposed to be in control. Last night, or early this morning I guess would be more accurate, I had considered wild scenarios that had me behaving like a lunatic in carrying out a job that required cautious planning and detached professionalism. What the fuck was wrong with me?
The bubbling water and the kiddie shrieks played like dissonant modern music as I sat there with my arms winged on the concrete lip of the whirlpool, smiling at the redheaded mom, whose posture mirrored mine.
“Have a nice Christmas?” she asked.
“You bet.”
“Get everything you wanted?”
She couldn’t see my erection, could she? I had boxer-type trunks on that billowed with the water, so I should be safe, though when the bubbles turned off, I could be sitting here with a tent in my lap.
I said, “I guess no kid gets everything he wants.”
“Oh, so you’re a kid, huh?”
“Overgrown.”
“Like all men,” she said, and she grinned, nice white teeth, kind of big, a very real smile that wasn’t at all practiced.
“Which of these kids are yours?”
“What? None of them.”
“Oh.” Actually, more like: “Oh!” Not out of surprise (though everything I’d assumed about her had just gone poof), but the need to talk above the frothing hot tub and the screaming brats. Pretty much everything we were saying rated an exclamation point, only you’ll have to fill that in yourself.
She said, “So aren’t you going to ask me what a nice girl like me is doing in a place like this?”
“I didn’t want to pry.”
She slid around and sat next to me. Not right next to me, but a more intimate arrangement for sure, though still requiring shouted conversation.
“My name’s Dorrie,” she said, and she offered a hand with red-painted nails.
I froze for a second, wondering if I was supposed to kiss it; not being a fucking Frenchman, I just shook it. I was really nervous, because my erection had grown a heartbeat of its own by now and here she was right next to me, her considerable cleavage on display above the orange wet cloth at which her nipples were poking not helping any, either.
“Jack,” I said, with a nod. “I’m here on business.”
She arched an eyebrow, a dark, plucked thing that already had an arch. “Funny time of year to do business.”
“I won’t dig in till next week,” I said. I didn’t feel like going into my lingerie salesman routine.
“What do you sell?”
Shit.
“Things you’d look good in,” I said.
“Such as?”
“Lingerie.”
“Really? You don’t mean that Frederick’s of Hollywood type jazz?”
“Not that obvious. But sexy enough to get your husband’s attention.”
She looked toward the pool and the kids who weren’t hers. “What makes you think I have a husband?”
“The diamond ring.”
