like Reno or Vegas.”
“This isn’t Nevada.”
“No, honey, it’s Illinois.” She grinned like a female wolf; her bridgework could have been better. “And last I looked, Chicago was in Illinois, too, right?”
She had a point.
So I had the pool to myself. That I was feeling this mellow was either a testament to my self-confidence or my self-delusion. Still, it was nice knowing I could have that much caffeine (I’d consumed more than my share of Diet Coke and iced tea today) and still feel this laid-back.
Plus (as I say) I’d killed a guy, who was currently in my trunk in my line of vision, and it didn’t seem to faze me, though the ass of the buggy was thumbing its nose at me. Idly I hoped that trunk didn’t leak. Be a bitch if it were seeping red stuff the way the late blond kid’s Mustang had dripped oil.
I wanted to make sure I was relaxed before I went over to the Paddlewheel. No reason to go in right at five p.m.-last thing I needed, either for my own peace of mind or for staying inconspicuous, was to be a new patron who dropped in and stayed for twelve hours. I figured going over around nine should do it. Time would be required to make contact with Richard Cornell, but that should be plenty. And I could grab a late bite.
My mellowness took a hit, however, when a memory floated into the stream of my consciousness like a turd in the pool.
I had heard of Haydee’s Port before. And I’d heard of the Paddlewheel, too…
About eight years ago, the very first time I utilized the Broker’s list, I’d helped out a guy who ran a much smaller casino in the hinterlands near Des Moines. His name was Frank Tree, and he’d filled me in on his personal history, and part of it had been running the Paddlewheel in Haydee’s Port. He’d sold the place, and that was all I knew about it.
This had just been a stray piece of information that hadn’t been pertinent to the job at hand-which had been keeping Tree from getting killed-and it was a small miracle that this trivia occurred to me now.
I doubted this information had any current pertinence, either; but it troubled me that the synapses in my brain hadn’t sparked immediately. Christ, I was only in my mid-thirties. How could my memory let me down like that?
Physically, I felt up to whatever came along. I was no muscleman, but swam often, usually daily-it was the variety of physical exercise I preferred, and helped me relax, and allowed my thoughts to either fade or come into focus, as the case might be. Out here, on my back, staring at the stars and moon over Haydee’s Port, clarity was the result.
Maybe it was time to retire the Broker’s list. Maybe I was getting too casual about killing, or cocky or sloppy or whatever. After all, I had an investment opportunity back in Wisconsin, where I lived, and if I could make enough of a killing on this job-again, of the financial variety-it could be the last one.
Maybe a hired assassin has a natural working life, like an athlete or a rock star or a sex symbol…
For some time, I’d lived in an A-frame cottage on small, private Paradise Lake, which suffered few of the tourists that haunted the nearby Lake Geneva vacation center. The scattering of summer homes meant I had very few neighbors off-season, which was how I liked it, and even on-season was no problem.
One business did serve the year-round locals, and in summer attracted a small, tolerable number of tourists: Wilma’s Welcome Inn, a rambling two-story structure that had been a roadhouse back in Prohibition Days, converted in the only slightly-less-distant past to a restaurant, gas station, and hotel (a convenience store was a more recent touch, taking the place of a gift shop). Everything was under one rustic, slightly ramshackle roof.
Wilma had been a beautiful woman trapped in a tub of lard, and one of the few humans I ever really liked, in part because she made a great bowl of chili and also because she was pleasantly chatty without getting nosy. She was dead now, and her boyfriend/bartender Charley was trying to run the place, doing a fairly crap job of it. Her daughter was a curvy little babe in her late teens who wanted to sell the place before Charley ran it into the lake, so she could move to California and do drugs.
I apologize for all this extraneous shit, but the bottom line is, I had a chance to buy the place. As a kid back in Ohio, I’d tinkered with cars and worked in a garage, so the gas station part appealed to me. I’d be handy enough to whip the dump into shape with remedial repairs, plus I’d made the acquaintance of a woman in Lake Geneva who knew restaurants and hotels and was looking for a new position. The first new position I tried involved her getting fucked against a door, and screaming like she’d just won the lottery, so I thought she might make a reasonably interesting employee.
Maybe this was that crossroads moment you hear so much about. Maybe if I survived this job, and came out of it with a nice payday, I could go straight. After all, a lot about what I did had drawbacks-long travel hours, the endless surveillance, occasional shitty accommodations, inconsistent food. Sometimes the nine millimeter could jam.
I swam laps, once back and forth quickly, then just settled in at an easy lope. The pool was cool but not cold, heated but not too. If it’s like a bath, I get sleepy, and I never like to be that relaxed, unless I’m in my own home with the alarm system on. Back home, I swam in the lake, when weather allowed, and at the Lake Geneva YMCA, where I had a membership, staying clear of the steam room. On the road, the motel/hotel pools seemed evenly divided between indoor and outdoor. But on a warm night like this, with the water just a little crisp, nothing could beat the Great Out Of Doors.
I did some lazy laps on my back, so I could watch the stars and moon. For some reason, I thought about the Broker. Maybe it was because of the pool at the Concort Inn, a hotel in the Quad Cities the Broker worked out of, and while that pool was indoors, it had a skylight. Swimming indoors under the stars creates a dreamy sensation. Memorable one, too. I’d swum there a number of times, and again my memory was making odd connections.
When the Broker approached me, I’d been living in a fleabag hotel in Los Angeles. Drinking is not generally my thing, but it had been then. Still Coke, only with Bacardi. Lots of Bacardi-one Coke can to a bottle of rum, yo ho ho.
He was a handsome white-haired, white-mustached businessman who wore tailored suits and spoke in speeches, and he might have been forty or he might have been sixty-I never asked or bothered to find out. He thought I might be interested in doing for good money (for him) what I had previously done in Vietnam for shit change (for Uncle Sam)-namely, killing people.
I’d been good at it. I’d been a sniper most of the time in Nam, though I did make it through my share of firefights, and I probably caused a couple dozen yellow melons to splatter and send their bearers into whatever their idea of the afterlife was. In sniper work particularly, you find yourself picking off people like a game of Galaga, but with better effects.
None of that got me in trouble. In fact, it got me some medals. What got me in trouble was coming home, finding my wife in bed with a guy and killing the son of a bitch. Actually, that’s wrong-I didn’t kill him till the next day when I went over to the prick’s house to have it out with him, and he was under his car working on it, and said, “What the fuck do you want now, bunghole?”
And I kicked the jack out.
This made it look premeditated (if it had been premeditated, I’d have taken a gun) and made it harder for the unwritten law to kick in. But the papers took my side and I ended up not getting prosecuted, at which point the papers did not take my side. This is the only time I got any publicity for anybody I ever killed, incidentally, and it’s apparently what inspired the Broker to look me up.
I haven’t given you my name, and won’t, but Broker knew it all right (it was in his file), though he immediately gave me a one-name alias-Quarry-which he insisted on using. He had these kind of corny code names for all of us-Monahan was “Driver” in the file, I would later learn.
Anyway, I got comfortable with “Quarry,” and other people in the business called me that, too. Sometimes I even used it on the job with a first name stuck on. Right now, though, at the Wheelhouse, I was checked in as Jack Gibson.
I sensed someone had joined me, not in the pool but taking a deck chair alongside, and I stopped swimming except to stroke over and climb out and sit on the edge, water dripping off, catching my breath.
Across the pool, in the chair next to the one that had my towel draped over it (and my towel-wrapped gun under it), Monahan was sitting. Beyond him, just over his right shoulder, I could see the Sunbird.
“Lovely night,” I said.
He was smoking. On his left was a little glass table with his Chesterfields and room key on it and a folded
