Quarry's Choice
Authors: Max Allan Collins
Contents
Acclaim For the Work of Max Allan Collins!
Free Sample of The Wrong Quarry by Max Allan Collins
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“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
“One supremely satisfying example of a classic, twisty hard-boiled tale.”
—Criminal Element
“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
“An exceptional storyteller.”
—San Diego Union Tribune
“Collins makes it sound as though it really happened.”
—New York Daily News
“Quarry is among the most fascinating and complex anti-heroes on the scene today. And that’s why having him back again is cause for celebration.”
—Bookgasm
“Collins, a superb storyteller with several series under his gunbelt, is never better then when narrating a new Quarry story.”
—Pulp Fiction Reviews
“Mr. Collins does his always superb job of building his story and surprising the reader. . .most excellent.”
—Big Daddy’s Place
“An engaging read that you can’t put down. . .gritty, hard-boiled.”
—Geek Hard
“Collins is the reigning master of this genre and he creates such entertaining and interesting characters that it is a pleasure to read his novels.”
—Mystery Maven
“A great slice of pulp fiction.”
—The Bookbag
“Nobody does it better than Max Allan Collins.”
—John Lutz
The slice of moon was painting the overgrown area behind the buildings a deceptively peaceful ivory. Forming a semicircle, they were in the ankle-high grass, but a thicket of weeds and kudzu and God knew what else was waiting like an all too penetrable wall just a few yards away.
So pale he almost glowed, Dix was smoking, grinning, his mustache riding his sneer like a surfboard does a wave. He had a gun in one hand, a snubby .38. He stood near Dixie, who faced the bouncer and his prisoner. The captor had a roundish head, a stupid face, long brown stringy hair with sideburns, and was beefy verging on fat. His chin sat on another one and his little eyes peeked out from piggy pouches. For a big guy, he didn’t look like much trouble to me.
But he was plenty of trouble for the salesman, whose arms he held pinned back. . .
. . .if not as much trouble as the big-boobed beehive redhead in the black waitress uniform and the white apron, which was already splashed with blood.
The three places where she had hit him in his bald skull with the hammer were easily visible, ribbons of red trailing from each. The little guy was woozy from pain but the mercy of unconsciousness hadn’t come his way yet.
She snarled, “What do you think, Dix? Has our guest learned his lesson. . .?”
THE FIRST QUARRY
THE LAST QUARRY
QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE
QUARRY’S EX
THE WRONG QUARRY
DEADLY BELOVED
SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT
TWO FOR THE MONEY
THE CONSUMMATA
(with Mickey Spillane)
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
ODDS ON
by Michael Crichton writing as John Lange
BORDERLINE
by Lawrence Block
BRAINQUAKE
by Samuel Fuller
EASY DEATH
by Daniel Boyd
A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK
(HCC-118)
First Hard Case Crime edition: January 2015
Published by
Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street
London
SE1 0UP
in collaboration with Winterfall LLC
Copyright © 2015 by Max Allan Collins
Cover painting copyright © 2015 by Robert McGinnis
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 978-1-78329-084-0
E-book ISBN 978-1-78329-085-7
Design direction by Max Phillips
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 my old musical comrade
Joe McClean—
like Quarry, a road warrior.
“Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled ‘enemy?’ ”
SYLVIA PLATH
“I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”
JOHNNY CASH
APRIL 1972
I had been killing people for money for over a year now, and it had been going fine. You have these occasional unexpected things crop up, but that’s life.
Really, to be more exact about it, I’d been killing people for
good
money for over a year. Before that, in the Nam soup, I had been killing people for chump change, but then the Broker came along and showed me how to turn the skills Uncle Sugar had honed in me into a decent living.
I’ll get to the Broker shortly, but you have to understand something: if you are a sick fuck who wants to read a book about some lunatic who gets off on murder, you are in the wrong place. I take no joy in killing. Pride, yes, but not to a degree that’s obnoxious or anything.
As the Broker explained to me from right out of the gate, the people I’d be killing were essentially already dead: somebody had decided somebody else needed to die, and was going to have it done, which was where I came in.
After
the decision had been made. I’m not guilty of murder any more than my Browning nine millimeter is.
Guns don’t kill people
, some smart idiot said,
people kill people
—or in my case, people have some other person kill people.
There’s a step here I’ve skipped and I better get to it. When I came home from overseas, I found my wife in bed with a guy. I didn’t kill him, which I thought showed a certain restraint on my part, and when I went to talk to him about our “situation” the next day, I hadn’t gone there to kill him, either. If I had, I’d have brought a fucking gun.
But he was working under this fancy little sports car, which like my wife had a body way too nice for this prick, and when he saw me, he looked up at me all sneery and said, “I got nothing to say to you, bunghole.” And I took umbrage. Kicked the fucking jack out.
Ever hear the joke about the ice cream parlor? The cutie behind the counter asks,
“Crushed nuts, sir?
” “
No,”
the customer replies,
“rheumatism.”
Well, in my wife’s boyfriend’s case it was crushed nuts.
They didn’t prosecute me. They were going to at first, but then there was some support for me in the papers, and when the DA asked me if I might have
accidently
jostled the jack, I said, “Sure, why not?” I had enough medals to make it messy in an election year. So I walked.
This was on the west coast, but I came from the Midwest, where I was no longer welcome. My father’s second wife did not want a murderer around—whether she was talking about the multiple yellow ones or the single-o white guy never came up. My father’s first wife, my mother, had no opinion, being dead.
The Broker found me in a shit pad in L.A. on a rare bender—I’m not by nature a booze hound, nor a smoker, not even a damn coffee drinker—and recruited me. I would come to find out he recruited a lot of ex-military for his network of contract killers. Vietnam had left a lot of guys fucked-up and confused and full of rage, not necessarily in that order, and he could sort of. . . channel it.
The contracts came from what I guess you’d call underworld sources. Some kills were clearly mob-related; others were civilians who were probably dirty enough to make contacts with the kind of organized crime types who did business with the Broker—a referral kind of deal. Thing was, a guy like me never knew who had taken the contract. That was the reason for a Broker—he was our agent and the client’s buffer.
Right now, maybe eighteen months since he’d tapped me on the shoulder, the Broker was sitting next to me in a red-button-tufted booth at the rear of an underpopulated restaurant and lounge on a Tuesday evening.