Quarry's Choice (20 page)

But at least everybody was giving me a little time to chew things over. Mr. Woody said I had a week to decide about this new employment opportunity. And Luann wasn’t pressing me at all about whether I was willing to do her that “favor” for the “gift” of the videotape she had of me drowning a guy.

Luann knew I had a lot on my mind, and said she’d watch a movie in her room while I “thought things over.” Which was as close to pressing me about it as she came. I suggested she could stay in my room and watch, since the TV was bigger and better, but she politely declined.

“Just knock if you want me,” she said, and slipped into her room.

So I lay back on the bed and I thought about my options.

And I did have them, options. But they were all messier than Sheriff Jefferson Davis Delmar eating a glazed doughnut.

For example.

If I took Mr. Woody up on his offer—and the money was goddamn good—where did that leave me with Luann? I’d have to somehow finesse those videotapes out of her, and then,
goddamnit
, get rid of her.

Or maybe, in negotiating the terms of my employment, I could ask Mr. Woody to let me have the girl—after all, he’d once upon a time bought her, so in his view she belonged to him. And, as part of the transaction, I could secure the release of her banked money as well as the severing of any ties between him and her.

That might be enough to get the girl to cough up those tapes. She was not really a blackmailer at heart and maybe, under those circumstances, I could even risk letting her walk around.

Maybe.

Another option was to come clean with Mr. Woody about Luann having Killian’s murder on tape, and let
him
handle her. He was in a better position to find the tapes and could dispose of her without me having to get my hands dirty. Of course, if he looked at the tapes, he’d see his wife fucking Killian, and who knew what kind of shit would hit the fan then?

Shit that would almost certainly include Wicked Wanda telling Mr. Woody that I’d fucked her. Which was bullshit. She fucked
me
!

And in that scenario,
Mr. Woody
would wind up with the tapes. . .and was I
really
any better off with him having the things than little Luann? Christ, leading Mr. Woody to those recordings was like handing your soul to the devil without bothering to get anything out of the deal.

Then there was the option that got me the hell out of Biloxi. Kill Mr. Woody and return to my life in the Broker’s world. . . after getting those tapes from the girl.

You remember the girl—the one who saw me commit three murders at the Dixie Club, and another at the Fantasy Sweets?

So. . .once I’d collected the tapes from her, I’d have to dispose of her. What, suffocate her in her sleep so she didn’t suffer much? I didn’t know jack shit about poison or setting up drug overdoses or anything. It’s not like anybody had ever asked me to do a humane hit. And now, ironically, I was asking it of myself.

I liked the kid. She deserved better than getting dumped on a roadside or in the Gulf. But survival was my only religion, and I kept the faith.

So where did all this leave me?

Kill Mr. Woody?

Kill the girl?

Kill them both?

Decisions, decisions.

* * *

Around eleven, I knocked on the connecting door.

A few seconds passed and she opened it halfway.

“Want me?” she asked.

She was in that large Led Zeppelin t-shirt again. No makeup and her hair tousled. She looked like a girl of thirteen, but a girl of thirteen who was blossoming nicely.

“Come in,” I said.

She did.

I shut the door. The only light on was the nightstand lamp on the side of the mirrored area with the hot tub.

“Sit,” I said.

She hopped up on the bed and sat like an Indian. I perched on the edge of the bed and twisted toward her, making eye contact. Her eyes were like pools of water you could jump into. If they were bigger or you were smaller.

“Look,” I said, “there might be ways around this. What if I could talk Mr. Woody into turning your savings over to you? And to essentially. . .turn
you
over to me.”

“You mean you’d buy me off him?” Very flat, nothing negative in it.

“No. He’d ‘give’ you to me. Not that one human being can do that with another, but. . .that seems to be his fucked-up thinking.”

She just nodded.

I went on: “Then I wouldn’t have to. . .deal with him, and you wouldn’t be an. . .accessory to anything.”

She raised a “hold on” finger.

I paused, and she got off the bed and turned the hot-tub faucets noisily on.

She held up the “wait” finger again.

When the hot tub was filled enough, she shut off the faucets, pulled off her t-shirt, tossed it, and crawled over into the steamy water, then curled a finger for me to join her.

I nodded. I understood. She’d expressed fear last night that the room might be bugged, and that wasn’t unreasonable. I got out of my t-shirt and jeans and shorts and shoes and crawled in with her. She started the Jacuzzi spray going, and then came over to me and I slipped an arm around her and we leaned back against the curve of the tub. Drowning her in this thing would be a cinch, but I didn’t want to make a habit out of that kind of thing.

The flesh of our naked sides kissed, though nothing terribly sexual was going on. She leaned her face up alongside mine and whispered in my ear: “Please kill him.”

Then I whispered in her ear: “You’re not a killer.”

The whispering continued, as she said, “
You
are.”

“But you aren’t. This makes you one.”

“I don’t care. He’s an evil man.”

“You could leave with me.”

“Where to?”

“Somewhere not here.”

“That sounds nice. But I know things about him.”

“What kind of things?”

“I already told you some. He’d come after me.”

Or send somebody
, I thought.
Somebody like me.

She was whispering in my ear, voice barely audible above the bubbling: “I saw things. If he thought I was. . .runnin’ free? He’d make me dead.”

“I could protect you.”

“You might not always be there.”

“. . .You really want him dead.”

“He has to be. You have to kill him.”

“Okay.”

She forgot about the whispering and squealed: “You
will
?”

It was like Daddy had just told her she could borrow the T-Bird. Fun fun fun.

“Yeah,” I said.

We got out of the tub, let it drain as we dried off with big fluffy towels and then got onto the bed, on the spread. She crawled between my legs like a cat sneaking up on a mouse and took me into her mouth with a whole new enthusiasm. This wasn’t a plumber cleaning your pipes. This was a young woman who wanted you to feel really, really good, and having a good time doing it.

I hadn’t been lying to her. But I hadn’t exactly been telling the truth, either. Really, I hadn’t made my mind up yet. But I did know the likelihood of me doing anything bad to this sweet child was nil. I did like her. I didn’t like that I liked her, because there are parts of me I don’t like having touched. This did not include my dick, obviously.

She got me good and hard, and then she stopped and said, “I’m gon’ to give you something better than a blow job.”

“This should be good.”

She scampered off the bed, bending over in a way that made both me and my hard-on drool at her, down there unzipping the canvas tote bag. She dug in it for a while, then came back with first one, then a second, thick rectangle of plastic. It actually took me a second to figure out that these were the tapes—video cassettes like TV stations used, with me doing murder on one.

She hadn’t really hidden the things at all.

“My gift,” she said. “For your favor.”

“But. . .”

“You’ll come through.”

“How can you—”

“I trust you, Johnny.”

Trust again.

I said, “Put them back for now.”

She stuffed them back in the bag and zipped it up and hopped on the bed again, very kid-like. As if a pillow fight might ensue.

“I wanna see if I can come on top,” she said.

“Be my guest.”

“So far I only came when I was on the bottom.”

“Well, give it a try.”

She climbed on top of me and inserted me into herself like a key and she moved herself while I moved in her, as if trying to unlock something inside her. Once again, we did not use a rubber, and the feel of it was wonderful, wet but with some nice friction, warm as the warmest kiss, and those pert breasts were in my face, begging to be nuzzled, and I wasn’t about to deny them. That she had learned some moves as a stripper became apparent when she did a bump and grind, forward, back, sideways, pumping, churning, and the door from outside burst open and slammed shut and I was trying to get out from under her when somebody came over in a blur and latched onto Luann and tossed her off of me like a Frisbee, flinging her into the porcelain side of the hot tub. She hit hard, hitting her head, sliding to the floor in an ungainly sitting position, head slumped, feet sticking out.

Somebody slapped the nightstand lamp and it crashed to the floor and before I’d got any kind of look at them, we were in darkness. Still, I sensed two of them on me. I shoved the guy nearest me away and dove for the other nightstand, where the nine millimeter rested, but somebody had me by the legs and pulled me onto the floor, and I landed hard next to the bed, near that canvas bag with the tapes in it. I was flailing, but it did no good. They dragged me out past the bed, the carpet burn making my skin scream, and then it began.

A guy hovering over me, I could not see a damn thing about him except that there was a lot of size, was battering me with his fists. My face took a lot of it, my eyes, my mouth, my ears, and there was blood all over my face but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. He worked over my chest and belly, too, while the other guy was kicking me and the only saving grace was my bare dick and balls took none of the kicks, just my legs and my side. This went on forever or maybe a minute, and then the door opened and somebody said, “That’s enough! Come on.”

One guy was on one side of me hauling me under my arm and the other guy was doing the same with my other arm, dragging me face down, and this time my dick and balls did get some rough treatment as they hauled me bare-ass out of my motel room across the narrow strip of cement sidewalk to a vehicle, its trunk lid up, in the parking slot by Luann’s room. The guy who’d spoken seemed to just be sort of directing things, making sure that trunk lid was all the way up, while all sorts of hands were on me, lifting me up as I was pulled toward the open trunk.

I never got a good look at them, though there was limited light outside, but before somebody hit me on the back of the head with a lead pipe or something, I realized I knew what car this was. What car my unconscious body was about to be dumped into the trunk of.

A two-tone green Fleetwood, last seen roaring through the parking lot of the Concort Inn in Davenport, Iowa, with a rider firing shots at the Broker and me shooting back.

Consciousness returned to me in fits and starts, the way you awaken in the middle of the night to the sounds of a storm that builds and builds, wind momentarily rousing you, then rain intruding, finally hail opening your eyes wide.

My storm was the jostling of the vehicle on a bumpy road, and when I was fully awake within the metallic womb, I knew at once where I was with a clarity that belied the pain of my throbbing head and the aches all over me where fists and boots had taken a toll.

I knew, for example, that this road must be fairly rough, because I’d been stuffed into a Fleetwood Caddy, and a Fleetwood Caddy was normally a smooth ride. Of course I’d never ridden in the trunk of one before.

I didn’t try to move at first. The fetal position I was in was oddly comforting if not comfortable, the Cadillac floor carpeted and my head resting on a spare tire with a carpet cover snugged over it. Very muffled country western music was playing on the car stereo and some intermittent unintelligible conversation was bleeding back to me.

Tire rumble and engine noise seemed very loud back here.

How long I’d been out was a mystery. A clue was that I was stiff in a way that suggested I’d been on my side with my legs tucked up for some time—the Caddy had a roomy trunk but not
that
roomy. Even motionless and prone like this, I could tell a few things about my condition. One eye was swollen shut and my lips felt puffy, the coppery taste of blood lingering. My tongue checked for missing teeth and came back with a full inventory. My nose hadn’t been broken. Despite the pervasive aches, I didn’t sense that
anything
had been broken—ribs the obvious possibility. This seemed to be bruises and contusions.

I spent maybe five minutes just breathing and getting used to being alive. My nakedness was disconcerting. I really was like a big baby who’d suffered a tough delivery. I was breathing heavily and some of that seemed to be anxiety, so I slowed it down. I hurt too much to allow myself to get worked up.

I started exploring my carpeted metal coffin. The jack in these vehicles was normally tucked toward the back, near a small ledge. The ledge was there, but not the jack. My chauffeurs must have prepared my travel quarters by removing the thing. A jack, of course, carried the most obvious potential for a makeshift weapon. But no.

The spare tire that was my pillow was the next best possibility—not the tire itself in any way, but there would be a wing nut as part of the hardware keeping the spare in place. That wing nut might be sharp enough to slash with, or maybe it could be rubbed on other metal into sharpness.

But with the trunk lid down, I couldn’t get that cloth cover off the tire to get at it. I worked my fingers around the bottom of the covered tire, all around its roundness, tugging, pulling, and got nowhere. Standing at the rear of the vehicle, with the trunk lid up, you could just lean in and remove that cover. With the lid shut, the only thing I could accomplish was the amplification of every pain in my body. And I had plenty of those.