Quarry in the Black
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Authors: Max Allan Collins
Acclaim for the Work of Max Allan Collins!
Also Available from Hard Case Crime Book
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 old-school, hardboiled crime fiction.”
—This Week
“A suspenseful, wild night’s ride [from] one of the finest writers of crime fiction that the U.S. has produced.”
—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.”
—Publishers 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
“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
“An exceptional storyteller.”
—San Diego Union Tribune
“Nobody does it better than Max Allan Collins.”
—John Lutz
“Would you have done it, Boyd?”
“Not for the kind of money
we
usually get. Not even for ten grand.”
“But if the money were right?”
“…I think so. Retirement money, yeah, you bet.”
“Martin Luther King. How about Bobby Kennedy? Or Jack?”
He thought for a few moments. “High six figures. Political hits are high risk in lots of ways, but sure, I’d take a flier.”
I finished my Coke.
“What about you, Quarry?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
That seemed to annoy him. “Why not? Yeah, yeah, I get you, they’re good people, decent men, maybe great men. But they’re like anybody else we take out—they
put
themselves there. They made enemies. If somebody’s gonna get rich, why shouldn’t it be us? You? Me?”
Rich like Oswald? Or Sirhan Sirhan? Or James Earl Ray?
Boyd said, “What makes you so holier than thou, all of a sudden?”
Going down the stairs, I thought
, Sure you’d have taken on King or the Kennedys. All
you’d
have to do is surveil the fuckers…
QUARRY
QUARRY’S LIST
QUARRY’S DEAL
QUARRY’S CUT
QUARRY’S VOTE
THE LAST QUARRY
THE FIRST QUARRY
QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE
QUARRY’S EX
THE WRONG QUARRY
QUARRY’S CHOICE
QUARRY IN THE BLACK
DEADLY BELOVED
SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT
TWO FOR THE MONEY
DEAD STREET
(with Mickey Spillane)
THE CONSUMMATA
(with Mickey Spillane)
A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK
(HCC-125)
First Hard Case Crime edition: October 2016
Published by
Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street
London
SE1 0UP
in collaboration with Winterfall LLC
Copyright © 2016 by Max Allan Collins
Cover painting copyright © 2016
by Laurel Blechman with Glen Orbik
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 978-1-78329-814-3
E-book ISBN 978-1-78329-815-0
Design direction by Max Phillips
www.maxphillips.net
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
For Quarry’s friends
Graham Gordy
& Michael D. Fuller
“Man was born into barbarism, when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence.”
M
ARTIN
L
UTHER
K
ING
“Look who’s protesting! Shoot first is my motto.”
F
EARLESS
F
OSDICK
ONE
You may think, reading this one, that I’ve gone soft. Let me assure you that the only time I go soft is after fucking. Then I suffer an understandable physical reaction as well as a sleepy emotional affection for the female, whoever she might be, that lasts a good thirty seconds.
Now soft in the head, that’s another matter altogether. For me to take on a contract like the one the Broker proposed to me at my A-frame on Paradise Lake that crisp fall evening, I had to be stupid or half-nuts or maybe completely greedy since it did, after all, involve a lot of dough.
In my defense, I was fairly new to the game. I had been killing people for money for less than two years, so maybe my relative inexperience played a role. Of course,
really
I’d been killing people for money a number of years longer than that, if you counted Vietnam; but the targets were “gooks,” as we used to inelegantly put it, and the employer was Uncle Whiskers, not the Broker, who paid better—much better, in this instance.
With his rich man’s tan and perfectly coiffed white hair with matching mustache—and his blue-plaid sportcoat, white pointed-collar sportshirt, navy slacks, and blue-toed white loafers—the Broker might have been a bank president or the dean of a small college on his day off. But he wasn’t. Not a banker or a dean or on his day off, either.
This was a business call. And this distinguished-looking man’s business was brokering contract killings, serving as the buffer between the respectable people who wanted someone dead and the disreputable types who made them that way. For money.
I might have been a college kid—grad student maybe—in my gray long-sleeve
WISCONSIN
sweatshirt, blue jeans and sneakers, though I’d never been to college (including the University of Wisconsin). What I really was was one of those disreputable types I mentioned above.
The Broker’s age I could only guess at—forty? Fifty? As for me, I was in my twenties with thirty still seeming abstract, a fairly average-looking guy at five ten and one-hundred-sixty pounds, fit from frequent swims at the Lake Geneva YMCA, with brown hair longer than it used to be. But that was true of Broker’s generation, too, wasn’t it? Parents were wearing hair that they’d abhorred on their kids just a few years ago.
Having the Broker inside my A-frame home was unusual—during the years I worked with him (which would eventually total five and change) he had done that maybe three or four times. More normally we met at the hotel he co-owned in Davenport, on his home turf of the Iowa/Illinois Quad Cities. Or we met at some out-of-the-way spot halfway or so between here and there, a truckstop on an Interstate or a bar in some city or town.
But right now we were sitting each on his own side of a dark brown overstuffed modular couch that made an L arranged around a metal fireplace in the midst of my living-room, itself part of a big open area overseen by a loft and shared with a kitchenette. Only a few lights were on.
It was evening and a fire was going. The Broker had enough angles in a face out of a
Playboy
liquor ad that the flicker of flames turned him into a good subject for a charcoal sketch, if I were a fucking artist, which I’m not.
“Quarry,” he said, resting his bottle of Coors on a coaster on the low-slung glass-topped table between him and the fire, “I want you to understand that you are free to take a pass on this one. No harm, no foul, as they say in the sporting world. But if you
do
say yes, keep in mind:
volenti non fit injuria
.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I was just thinking that.”
Quarry was, by the way, the name the Broker had tagged me with—all of us in his network of mostly war-bred assassins had what I considered cutesy monikers. According to the Broker—who as you’ve already seen was one pretentious son of a bitch—mine signified that I was hollowed out “as if from rock.” As for my real name, you don’t need it.
“Decline this opportunity,” he said, with a magnanimous gesture, flames turning his tan orange, “and it will in no way reflect badly upon you.”
“Wouldn’t want it on my permanent record.” My legs, crossed at the ankles, were on an ottoman. My bottle of Coke was on the little table. I am not a heavy drinker, even if I had been on a bender when the Broker first looked me up.
My guest lifted two palms toward me. “I would completely understand were you to say no. This assignment—strictly volunteer—is quite outside our usual methodology.”
He used words like “methodology” a lot. I wasn’t kidding when I said he was pretentious. Also pompous, if there’s a difference.
“Well,” I said with a shrug, “the job in Biloxi wasn’t usual. But it paid well. Does this?”
He nodded. “Very well indeed. And there
are
similarities to that assignment, although you would not be on your own this go-round—rather, you’d be working with Boyd, as is the norm.”
I’d been partnered with Boyd for some months now. He generally worked the passive side, going in early and collecting intel on the target, while I handled the active role, coming in a week or so before the hit and carrying it out. The passive role sometimes included providing back-up and escape support.