Max Allan Collins
Quarry's ex
ONE
I guess the best place to start is with me getting lucky in a casino.
Which gets your attention, but is probably dishonest, since I am not really a gambler. Back in Wisconsin, at Paradise Lake, I played poker with a little group of locals once a month, young professionals in their thirties, two lawyers, a dentist, a doctor. I was a young professional, too, but of a different variety. We’d got to know each other at a health club in Lake Geneva, and started up our regular game maybe five years ago, but that’s not terribly relevant except to say that my idea of gambling was nickel/dime/quarter.
What had brought me to the big noisy casino in the little thriving town of Boot Heel, Nevada, was business, though you’d take me for another tourist. I was in a yellow polo shirt and chinos and loafers, and had a nice tan going, picked up over the month I’d just spent in Las Vegas, sixty miles north, also not gambling.
I was 32, five ten, one hundred sixty pounds, with shortish brown hair, a fairly anonymous sort, if passably presentable to the fairer sex. I based this on the many smiles I got from waitresses in little buckskin outfits, fringed vests over white blouses and fringed miniskirts; they were circulating, offering free drinks, as I threaded through the slots and poker machines and blackjack and roulette tables, heading back to the bar.
Boot Heel had six casinos, but this one-at the Four Jacks Hotel-was by far the largest, sporting a showroom that hosted the likes of Jerry Vale (this week) and Vikki Carr (next week). The little town’s claim to fame as a sort of second-string Deadwood or Tombstone was based on Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday having lived here for a time. Holliday even killed somebody. Wild Bill Hickok gunned somebody down on Main Street, too, it was said.
The town of ten thousand had one other claim to fame, an annual biker blow-out that attracted a lot of media every year, giving Boot Heel a certain modern-day outlaw reputation. The last such event had been three weeks ago, and currently no bikers were to be seen, at least within the Four Jacks casino.
Which catered to strictly middle-class tourist trade that found Vegas either too expensive or crowded for their collective taste. Lots of people in their forties and fifties, with scads of Reagan For President buttons on display and not a single Carter, not that I saw, anyway. Who said Jerry Vale and Vikki Carr couldn’t draw anymore?
Back to me getting lucky-while I was in Boot Heel for business, my presence at the Four Jacks casino was happenstance. I’d skipped lunch, due to following a guy here from Vegas, and having to shadow his every move. I had established the guy had checked in to a motel on the far side of Boot Heel, and he hadn’t come out after two hours, so now I was looking for some place to sit and eat a sandwich and maybe figure my next move. Someplace well away from that motel.
An open parking space just down the street from the Four Jacks had called to me. I swung in-no meters in this friendly little burg-and was about to cross the street to check out the restaurant in the Golden Spike, the smaller casino/hotel opposite, whose marquee-not having Jerry Vale and Vikki Carr to brag about-promised a $5 steak sandwich with “all the trimmin’s.”
But traffic was momentarily thick, so I’d strolled down my side of the street instead, up to the half dozen glass doors of the Four Jacks. One casino restaurant was as good as another. I asked one of the liveried doormen where to get the best food in his place of employment, and he recommended the bar at the rear of the main floor. I went on in, experiencing a vaguely irritating symphony of sounds that included country western music, chattering gamblers, and slots digesting coins. Whirring, dinging, ringing.
Outside it had been as dry as unbuttered toast, but in here the air conditioning stopped just short of a meat locker. Closed off from the casino, the bar seemed a little less cold; it had its share of Dodge City trappings-rough wood paneling, reproductions of ancient wanted posters for Billy the Kid and John Wesley Hardin, bartenders in string ties, waitresses in those same buckskin outfits.
At least the music piped in was not god-awful country western (with the exception of Patsy Cline, there is no other kind) and right now “One Way or Another” by Blondie was cranking. I smiled. I liked this New Wave music- reminded me of the ’60s stuff I grew up on back in Ohio.
The bar was underpopulated. It was mid-afternoon and, even in a world without clocks, that meant tumbleweed was blowing through the old watering hole. You could get free drinks out on the casino floor, so who needed a bar? And nobody was hungry right now, except me.
I settled into a rustic booth, which thankfully had padded seat and back; it was off to one side and nicely isolated. I ordered a cheeseburger and fries and Coke from the little redheaded waitress who smiled at me in a promising way.
It wasn’t that I was irresistible to young women. I wasn’t even irresistible to old women. But I was one of the youngest males at the Four Jacks. It was a Jerry Vale crowd, remember.
Still, this isn’t about me getting lucky with a barmaid. Just like it isn’t about me getting lucky at blackjack or even a poker machine. And at first it didn’t seem to be me getting lucky at all.
“ Quarry! Is that you?”
The voice was midrange male and husky and just a little bit slurry.
I looked up. I had just finished my food, already pushed the plate aside, and was sipping the last of my Coke through a straw like a high school kid. I’m sure my reaction seemed casual, just an upward glance, but in my brain, those submarine sirens, the aahhh-ooogah ones, were blaring.
“Jerry?” I said. I didn’t use his last name, because I doubted he’d be using that name here, and anyway what I knew him by wasn’t his real one. Just like Quarry wasn’t mine.
Quarry was a name very few people ever called me by-and then only occasionally, in business-related situations. Now and then I used it myself, as a last name, because I grew kind of used to it. It had been given to me by the Broker, over ten years ago now, more a code word than an alias; he’d laid it on me when I first went to work for him, taking on contracts he arranged. The Broker, who was a pretentious Brooks Brothers type, found the “appellation” amusing-a quarry was hollowed-out rock, he said.
And maybe an irony was in there somewhere, since what I did was seek quarries myself-people I’d been hired to kill. That kind of contract.
So, anyway, Jerry.
He looked like an old hippie, and the Jerry fit him, since the first thing you thought of was Jerry Garcia, right down to the granny glasses. Not that his clothes were overtly hippie-ish-he had on a green plaid button-down shirt, open at the throat, and nice blue jeans, his salt-and-pepper facial hair full but nicely trimmed. Gabby Hayes spruced up for the prom. Since I’d seen him, maybe nine years ago, he’d lost some hair up top and had a sidesaddle comb- over going.
Without asking, he joined me, sliding in across the way in the booth. “Sorry,” he said, almost whispering, and made an “eek” face. “You aren’t on a job, are you?”
I shook my head. “Just a tourist. How you been, Jerry?”
He had very light blue eyes that would have looked great on a sixteen-year-old baby-doll blonde. This assumes the blonde wasn’t a heavy drinker and her baby blues hadn’t gone bleary and spidery red behind granny glasses. His face was pale and splotchy, like he had radiation poisoning, his nose a bulbous vein-shot affair.
“Doin’ okay, Quarry. Hunky fuckin’ dory.” He frowned, apologetic again. “Okay I call you that? Prefer something else?”
“Quarry’s fine. Is ‘Jerry’ okay, here? Are you on a job?”
But I knew he was.
He ignored the last question and answered the first: “Call me anything but late for lunch.” He laughed, pleased with his own wit. His teeth were white, and he had a nice smile, friendly as hell, but the best bet at the Four Jacks right now was that Jerry kept that smile in a glass overnight.
“Speaking of lunch,” I said, “I just had a late one. You want to order something?”
“I do,” he said, “but not lunch.”
He waved the redhead over, and ordered a double Scotch, straight up. She nodded dutifully, and went off in a
