The Wrong Quarry (Hard Case Crime) Read online

  Raves For the Work of of MAX ALLAN COLLINS!

  “Crime fiction aficionados are in for a treat...a neo-pulp noir classic.”

  — Chicago Tribune

  “No one can twist you through a maze with as much intensity and suspense as Max Allan Collins.”

  — Clive Cussler

  “Collins never misses a beat...All the stand-up pleasures of dime-store pulp with a beguiling level of complexity.”

  — Booklist

  “Collins has an outwardly artless style that conceals a great deal of art.”

  — New York Times Book Review

  “Max Allan Collins is the closest thing we have to a 21st century Mickey Spillane and...will please any fan of oldschool, hardboiled crime fiction.”

  — This Week

  “Few people alive today can tell a story better than Max Allan Collins.”

  — Book Reporter

  “This book is about as perfect a page turner as you’ll find.”

  — Library Journal

  “Bristling with suspense and sexuality, this book is a welcome addition to the Hard Case Crime library.”

  — Publisher Weekly

  “A total delight...fast, surprising, and well-told.”

  —Deadly Pleasures

  “Strong and compelling reading”

  —Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

  “Max Allan Collins [is] like no other writer.”

  —Andrew Vachss

  “Collins breaks out a really good one, knocking over the hard-boiled competition (Parker and Leonard for sure, maybe even Puzo) with a one-two punch: a feisty storyline told bittersweet and wry...nice and taut...the book is unputdownable. Never done better.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

  “Rippling with brutal violence and surprising sexuality... I savored every turn.”

  —Bookgasm

  “Masterful.”

  —Jeffery Deaver

  “Collins has a gift for creating low-life believable characters ... a sharply focused action story that keeps the reader guessing till the slam-bang ending. A consummate thriller from one of the new masters of the genre.”

  —Atlanta Journal Constitution

  “Fantastic.”

  — Fear.net

  “For fans of the hardboiled crime novel...this is powerful and highly enjoyable reading, fast moving and very, very tough.”

  — Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Entertaining... full of colorful characters ...a stirring conclusion.”

  — Detroit Free Press

  “Collins makes it sound as though it really happened.”

  —New York Daily News

  “A great fast-paced read.”

  — Books and Writers

  “Collins tells his cynical little tale with plenty of tough wit [and] a knack for capturing period with a few succinct details; he also has a pithy way with violence...it’s every bit as mean as you want it to be.”

  — Seattle Post Intelligencer

  “Crisp and brisk, with an economy that doesn’t sacrifice creating an evocative world...fast, sharp and brutal.”

  — IndieWire

  “An exceptional storyteller.”

  — San Diego Union Tribune

  “Nobody does it better than Max Allan Collins.”

  —John Lutz

  What kind of makeup, I thought, requires a girl taking off her panties?

  She was naked as she walked over to the shelves with the sound system and picked out a homemade cassette tape and inserted it into the machine. “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple burst out of the speakers like the thunder had returned.

  Then she cranked it some more.

  She asked, almost shouting, “Could you switch off the bedside lamp?”

  I said I could, and did.

  “Can you watch me from there?” she yelled sweetly. “Does it hurt? I’m gonna work it over here.”

  I swung my body around, ribs complaining just a little, but the hell with them. Though darkness had returned, I could tell she was moving the coffee table to one side and making a little performance area out of the throw rug.

  Then she went over to a nearby wall switch and a click announced overhead black-light tubing coming on to make Jimi and the Fudge and Janis glow. Also her lips and her finger- and toenails and the tips of her breasts and the petals of flesh between her legs—all glowing red as she did a swaying dance to the thumping music, arms waving, feet shifting weight from leg to leg, the mirrored wall behind me echoing and multiplying her. Then she began to twist and grind in rhythm with the pounding guitar riff, a native dance that grew in intensity, lifting right fist and left knee, then left fist and right knee, swinging her arms, her torso, awkward, graceful, until finally she tossed herself on the couch on her back and spread her legs, summoning me...

  OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS FROM MAX ALLAN COLLINS:

  THE FIRST QUARRY

  THE LAST QUARRY

  QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE

  QUARRY’S EX

  DEADLY BELOVED

  SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT

  TWO FOR THE MONEY

  THE CONSUMMATA (with Mickey Spillane)

  SOME OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY:

  MEMORY by Donald E. Westlake

  NOBODY’S ANGEL by Jack Clark

  MURDER IS MY BUSINESS by Brett Halliday

  GETTING OFF by Lawrence Block

  CHOKE HOLD by Christa Faust

  THE COMEDY IS FINISHED by Donald E. Westlake

  BLOOD ON THE MINK by Robert Silverberg

  FALSE NEGATIVE by Joseph Koenig

  THE TWENTY-YEAR DEATH by Ariel S. Winter

  THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS by James M. Cain

  WEB OF THE CITY by Harlan Ellison

  JOYLAND by Stephen King

  THE SECRET LIVES OF MARRIED WOMEN by Elissa Wald

  The Wrong

  QUARRY

  by Max Allan Collins

  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-114)

  First Hard Case Crime edition: January 2014

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street

  London SE1 OUP

  in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

  Copyright © 2014 by Max Allan Collins

  Cover painting copyright © 2014 by Tyler Jacobson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Print Edition ISBN 978-1-78116-266-8

  E-book ISBN 978-1-78116-267-5

  Design direction by Max Phillips

  www.maxphillips.net

  Typeset by Swordsmith Productions

  The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

  Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen


  For John Mull

  who likes ’em down and dirty

  THE WRONG QUARRY

  “It’s frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America.”

  W. H. AUDEN

  “Someone once told me that every minute, a murder occurs. So I don’t want to waste your time. I know you want to go back to work.”

  ALFRED HITCHCOCK

  ONE

  For a guy who killed people for a living, he was just about the most boring bastard I ever saw.

  I had been tailing him for two days, as he made his way from Woodstock, Illinois, where he owned an antiques shop on the quaint town square, to...well, I didn’t know where yet.

  So far it had been every little town—on a circuitous route taking us finally to Highway 218—with an antiques shop, where he would go in and poke around and come out with a few finds to stow in the trunk of his shit-brown Pontiac Bonneville.

  If it hadn’t been for the explosion of red hair with matching beard that made his head seem bigger than it was, he would have been a human bowling pin, five-foot-eight of flab in a gray quilted ski jacket. He wore big-frame orange-lensed glasses both indoors and out, his nose a potato with nostrils and zits, his lips thick and purple. That this creature sometimes sat surveillance himself seemed like a joke.

  I was fairly certain he was on his way to kill somebody— possibly somebody in Iowa, because that was the state we’d been cutting down on the vertical line of Highway 218. Right now we were running out of Iowa and the flat dreary landscape was threatening to turn into Missouri.

  Soon there would be fireworks stands—even though it was crisp November and the Fourth of the July a moot point—and people would suddenly speak in the lazy musical tones of the South, as if the invisible line on the map between these Midwestern states was the Mason-Dixon.

  Some people find this accent charming. So do I, if it’s a buxom wench with blonde pigtails getting out of her bandana blouse and cut-off jeans in a hayloft. Otherwise, you can have it.

  Right now my guy was making a stop that looked like a problem. Turning off and driving into some little town to check out an antiques shop was manageable. No matter how small that town was, there was always somewhere I could park inconspicuously and keep an eye on Mateski (which was his name— Mateski, Ronald Mateski...not exactly Bond, James Bond).

  But when he pulled off and then into the gravel lot of an antiques mini-mall on the edge of a town, I had few options. Pulling into the lot myself wasn’t one of them, unless I was prepared to get out and go browsing with Mateski.

  Not that there was any chance he’d make me. I had stayed well back from him on the busy two-lane, and when he would stop to eat at a truck stop, I would either sit in my car in the parking lot, if that lot were crowded enough for me to blend in, or take a seat in the trucker’s section away from the inevitable booth where Mateski had set down his big ass.

  This time I had no choice but to go in and browse. Had there been a gas station and mini-mart across the way, I could have pulled in there. But this was a tin-shed antiques mall that sat near a cornfield like a twister had plopped it down.

  Mateski’s penchant was primitive art and furniture—apparently it was what sold well for him back in rustic Woodstock. He didn’t have his truck with him (a tell that he wasn’t really out on a buying trip), so any furniture would have to be prime enough to spend shipping on; but he did find a framed oil that he snatched up like he’d found a hundred-dollar bill on the pavement—depicting a winter sunset that looked like your half-blind grandmother painted it.

  I stopped at stalls with used books and at one I picked up a few Louis L’Amour paperbacks I hadn’t read yet, making sure I was still browsing when he left. Picking him up again would be no problem. He’d be getting back on Highway 218 and heading for somewhere, probably in Missouri. Hannibal maybe. Or St. Louis.

  But when I got back on the road, I thought I’d lost him. Then I spotted his mud-spattered Bonneville at a Standard pump, said, “Fuck,” and took the next out-of-sight illegal U-turn I could to go back.

  When I got there, he was inside paying. I could use some gas myself, so I turned my dark green Ford Pinto over to the attendant and went into the restaurant side of the small truck stop and took a piss. Mateski was gone when I got out, which was fine. I paid for my gas, bought gum and a Coke, and hit the road again, picking him up soon, always keeping a couple cars between us.

  This is just how exciting yesterday and today had been. Not the Steve McQueen chase in Bullitt. But despite his fat ass and his thing for lousy art, Mateski was a dangerous guy. That he usually worked the passive side of a two-man contract team didn’t mean he hadn’t killed his share himself. The Broker had always insisted that the passive side of a duo had to take the active role once out of every four jobs. Keep your hand in. Use it or lose it.

  The Broker had been the middleman through whom I used to get my assignments. I much preferred the active role, coming in for a day or two and handling the wet work, rather than sitting for a couple of weeks in cars and at surveillance posts taking detailed notes as to habits and patterns of a target.

  Don’t get me wrong. I don’t enjoy killing. I just don’t mind. It’s something I learned to do overseas, as a sniper, where I developed the kind of dispassionate attitude needed for that kind of work. Killing is a necessary evil, as they say, although I don’t know that it’s all that evil in a lot of cases. War and selfdefense, for instance.

  On the other hand, there was one notorious asshole in the trade who specialized in torture. I mention him in passing now, but eventually it will have some importance. File it away.

  As for me, my name is unimportant, but when I first started killing people for money—not counting Vietnam—I worked through the Broker. This tall, slender, dapper, distinguished-looking man of business, who might have been a banker or a CEO, recruited people like me, who had unwittingly learned a trade in the employ of Uncle Sam. He was something of a pompous ass—for example, he called me Quarry, which was a sort of horseshit code name, derived from my supposed coldness (“Hollow like carved-out rock,” he said once) and also ironic, since the targets were my quarry.

  So Broker’s people that I worked with called me “Quarry” and I got used to it. On occasion I even used it as the last name of a cover identity, and as it happens, this was one of those occasions. John R. Quarry, according to my Wyoming driver’s license, Social Security and Mastercard. So for our purpose here, that name will do as well as any.

  I should probably clue you in a little about me. I was closer to thirty than forty, five ten, one hundred-sixty-five pounds, short brown hair, but not military short. Kept in shape, mostly through swimming. Handsome enough, I suppose, in a bland, unremarkable way. When was this? Well, Reagan hadn’t been president long enough for his senility to show (much), and everybody was hurting from the recession.

  Well, actually, I wasn’t. Hurting. I lived quietly, comfortably and alone in an A-frame cottage on Lake Paradise near Geneva, Wisconsin. I had no one woman, but the resort area nearby meant I was rarely lonely. I had a small circle of friends who thought I sold veterinary medicine, but really I was semi-retired from the killing business.

  “Semi” because I still kept my hand in, but not in the old way. After the Broker betrayed me and I got rid of him, I sort of inherited what today would be called a database, but back then was just a small pine file cabinet. Within it was what was essentially a list of over fifty names of guys like me, who had worked for the Broker—detailed info on each, photos, addresses, down to every job they’d gone on.

  Since I was out of work, after killing the Broker, I’d had an intriguing idea. I could see how I could use the Broker’s file, and keep going, in a new way, on my own terms. After destroying the information on myself, I would choose a name and travel to where that party lived and stake him or her out (a few females were on the list), then follow said party to their next job.

  Through further surveillance, I would determine the
ir target’s identity, approach that target, and offer to eliminate the threat. For a healthy sum, I would discreetly remove the hit team. For a further fee, I might—depending on the circumstances—be able to look into who had hired the hit done, and remove that threat as well.

  The risks were considerable. What if a target—approached with a wild story from a stranger claiming to be a sort of contract killer himself—called the authorities, or otherwise freaked out?

  But I was well aware that anyone designated for death was somebody who had almost certainly done something worth dying over. Targets of hitmen tend not to be upstanding citizens, unless they are upstanding citizens with down-and-dirty secrets. And weren’t they likely to be aware that they presented a problem to some powerful, merciless adversary? The kind of adversary who would be capable of such an extreme solution...?

  From the start, I felt confident that such people would welcome my help. After all, their other option was to take a bullet or get hit by a car or have one of those accidental long drops off a short pier. And the fee I could charge—most people value their own lives highly—would mean I’d only have to take on these risky tasks perhaps a couple of times a year.

  On the other hand, those “couple of times” required a huge amount of spec work. First, I always chose from the Broker’s list names whose preference was passive, meaning I was guaranteeing myself a considerable amount of surveillance—but this was necessary, because if I followed the active participant to a kill, the passive half might already be in the wind, leaving a dangerous loose end. Both halves needed removal.

  I had been lucky a few times, and staked out parties who within a few weeks had gone out on a job, minimizing my layout of time. But professionals in the killing game—again, because of the risk and the high fees—seldom take more than three or four jobs a year. At least the teams working for the Broker didn’t.

  That meant I could sit stakeout—renting a house across from a subject, for example, sitting in car like a damn cop drinking coffee after coffee from paper cups—for literally months. This had happened several times. So I had begun to take measures to limit my expenditure of time.