Quarry

Books
by
Max Allan Collins

QUARRY

QUARRY’S LIST

QUARRY’S DEAL

QUARRY’S CUT

QUARRY’S VOTE

from
Perfect Crime Books

QUARRY

MAX ALLAN COLLINS

With an Afterword by the Author

P
ERFECT
C
RIME
B
OOKS

QUARRY. Copyright © 1976, 2010 by Max Allan Collins. This book was first published under the title THE BROKER. Afterword © 2010 by Max Allan Collins. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored by any means without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Dominick Abel Literary Agency Inc., 146 West 82
^nd
Street 1A, New York, NY 10024.

Printed in the United States of America.

Perfect Crime Books is a registered Trademark.

Cover Design and Illustration © 2010 by Terry Beatty.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters and institutions are products of the Author’s imagination and do not refer to actual persons or institutions.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Collins, Max Allan

Quarry/Max Allan Collins

Kindle Edition: November 2011

To Donald E. Westlake

thanks for writing

“Violence is as American as cherry pie.”

H. Rap Brown

“I had gotten a taste of death and found it

palatable to the extent that I could never again

eat the fruits of a normal civilization.”

Mickey Spillane

1

I CLOSED MY
eyes and saw the face of the man I would kill. Back at the Howard Johnson’s, in the restroom, the Broker had showed me the photograph and asked me if I wanted to take it with me; I said no, just let me look at it for a minute. Now, ten minutes later, I thought of the face: a soft fleshy oval with a fat Jewish nose sticking out of it.

I opened my eyes and saw the complex of brown brick buildings up ahead. The main building was a pair of long two-stories that joined a central tower. From where I was walking I could just make out the words “Quad City Airport” on the tower. The afternoon was just trailing into dusk and they hadn’t turned on the lights yet.

Before I’d started across the grassy field between the Howard Johnson’s and the airport, the group of buildings with the several hangars looked good-size, no O’Hare, but
good-size. By the time I approached the parking lot, the place looked smaller, as if I’d been walking toward a scale-model. Tiny gardens of red and white and purple flowers were stuck here and there around the parking lot, lip service paid to nature in the midst of bricks and cement and jet fumes. The flowers didn’t belong here, and neither did I; I wanted to be in a T-shirt instead of a suit, and I wanted to be relaxing in the sun somewhere instead of on a job.

Especially this job, this pain-in-the-ass job.

Going in I almost got my briefcase knocked out of my hand as two guys in dark suits came rushing out the front door like their luggage had bombs inside and they were the Bomb Squad. Which was airport-typical: half the people in a hurry rushing around acting important; half the people in no hurry strolling around acting important. Assholes.

Inside was wine-color marble and blue-green plaster. There was a sweep to the way the building was put together that probably seemed futuristic in 1950. Now it was a fucking dinosaur. Like that elevator stuck in the middle of everything, housed in a cylinder with a staircase curved around, the cylinder covered in garish red plastic that had bubbled in places.

The first thing I did was check the downstairs cans. They were all pretty big (four stalls—three pay and a free) but even with the airport in a kind of lull right now, it was clear none of them would do. Then I climbed the staircase that circled the elevator and before I got started in on the upstairs cans, I saw him.

There was a priest and a young couple in their twenties and a soldier and a sailor and two old ladies and a businessman, all sitting around the indoor observation deck on the black-cushioned seats, looking out the big picture window at the runway. He was the priest.

All in black, of course, except for the white clerical collar. And a gray putty face, gray except for where some burst veins roadmapped his nose. He was wearing a black toupee that looked like one. He had on dark sunglasses.

A priest. With that Jewish nose and sunglasses at dusk, no less, he’s going to pass for a priest. With some guys you might just as well stand to the side and wait for them to kill themselves, they’re that stupid.

He didn’t catch me looking at him so I went on ahead and checked out the cans on this floor. I took in both halls that branched off the central tower building and found a can apiece and a lot of empty offices. One hall had activity in the end office, so I settled for the can down the other, completely deserted hall. That was fine because it was the best in the building, the other one on this floor being like the downstairs johns, big and designed with airport cattle in mind. Mine was for the paid help, with a single free one-seater but lots of room to stand and smoke. Also, every other can in the airport had a push door with no lock; this one had a firmly closing door with locking knob.