Quarry's Return E-Book

Max Allan Collins

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 295

Beschreibung

The hitman hero of the acclaimed Cinemax series comes out of retirement when his daughter, a true-crime writer, is abducted by the subject of one of her books. A nail-biting suspense thriller from the author of ROAD TO PERDITION. MWA Grand Master Max Allan Collins' longest-running series, which inspired the show on Cinemax, makes a ferocious return following the Edgar Award-nominated QUARRY'S BLOOD as aging hitman Quarry is forced to come out of retirement when his true-crime-author daughter is abducted by one of the killers she's written about. Perfect for fans of Liam Neeson thrillers and authors such as Lee Child.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

Quarry’s Coda

1

Acclaim For the Work ofMAX 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

I had just gone under when I heard the noise that woke me.

Though not immediately sure what exactly the noise was, I quickly decided it was somebody stopping in his tracks, perhaps surprised to see a man and woman sharing a bed in this house. We’d left the hall light on, because in tight spots, where you don’t want to go deep, it can be helpful in bringing you immediately awake, which is what it did now, for both of us.

And the figure in the doorway, just a silhouette with hallway light framing him, found himself facing two wide awake people sitting up in bed and training weapons onhim…

HARD CASE CRIME BOOKSBY MAX ALLAN COLLINS:

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

QUARRY’S CLIMAX

QUARRY’S WAR (graphic novel)

KILLING QUARRY

QUARRY’S BLOOD

QUARRY’S RETURN

TWO FOR THE MONEY

DOUBLE DOWN

TOUGH TENDER

MAD MONEY

SKIM DEEP

DEADLY BELOVED

SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT

DEAD STREET (with Mickey Spillane)

THE CONSUMMATA (with Mickey Spillane)

MIKE HAMMER: THE NIGHT I DIED

(graphic novel with Mickey Spillane)

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A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

(HCC-165)

First Hard Case Crime edition: November 2024

Published by

Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street

London SE1 0UP

in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

Copyright © 2024 by Max Allan Collins

Cover painting copyright © 2024 by Claudia Caranfa

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 978-1-80336-876-4

E-book ISBN 978-1-80336-877-1

Design direction by Max Phillips

www.signalfoundry.com

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

For my granddaughterLUCY COLLINSbut not for a while…

“Murder, like talent, seemsoccasionally to run in families.”GEORGE HENRY LEWES

“It takes a powerful motivation to lead to murder.That’s why people don’t usuallymurder comparative strangers.”ERLE STANLEY GARDNER

ONE

You would think a retired hitman would know better than to answer a knock at the door, on a snowy winter’s evening, without bringing his gun along.

Let’s stop right there. I rarely if ever heard anybody in the killing game use the word “hitman,” except in an arch manner. They would just refer to themselves as professionals, and the prior job as a piece of work they’d done. Anyway, I had no reason to think at this late stage of my existence that I might be the target of a contract killing myself.

While we’re at it, nobody in the business called the target a “target,” either. A “mark” maybe. But more often the “subject.” To be fair, we did use “hit” sometimes. It’s just that a lot of nonsense has been written about my former profession and I like to keep the record straight.

In my slight defense, I had only done contract killing for five years or so, a long time ago. Right after I got home from Vietnam and nobody except a pompous, well-dressed son of a bitch called the Broker (long dead now) had any work to offer me of any kind. I had auto mechanic skills but even the repair garages were fussy, after I kicked the jack out on a sportscar my wife’s boyfriend was working under. No, I did no time for killing the prick—I was back from the war and traumatized and they decided not to throw my ass in prison. Not that they had any work for me, either.

At least in stir I could have made license plates.

Now when I say I only worked as a contract assassin for five years or so—as if that takes the sting out—I am omitting that I wound up with what I called the Broker’s list. You’d call it a database today, but we didn’t have home computers yet, and it was actually a little metal recipe box with names and phone numbers and other info, which I used for a decade or so to track my fellow contract workers to their next jobs. I would then approach their marks and offer my services.

That included taking out the usual two-person team sent in to do the job, which of course I’d already surveilled, and tracking down who had taken out the hit, and removing that individual. The Broker had acted not only as agent for these professionals, but as buffer for his clients, meaning who had sent them was rarely known to the assassins. So determining who wanted the subject dead, and removing that party, was the tricky part, and I’d charged big for that.

Still, if you think about it, I’d only been in the killing business for fifteen or twenty years or so, and that was decades ago. Since then I’d run a couple of legit businesses, and had been married twice, first to a sweet simple soul who’d become collateral damage when my past caught up to me. Just last year my second wife, as smart as her predecessor wasn’t, fell prey to Covid. Janet had been a librarian who’d inherited a lot of money when I figured out why I’d been lured out of my previous retirement to kill her, and decided to wed her instead. Required removing a few assholes from the planet to do so, but nothing in life is free.

Anyway, generally I understand that my personal history is a rocky one, and you don’t answer the door without brushing back the curtain facing the deck, and checking to see who the hell had come calling.

Wasn’t like I didn’t take precautions. In the years since my killing people for Uncle Sam, and then in civilian life killing for profit, I’d had the past come hit me in the face now and then like a loose board. So I had guns salted all around the great room (as my late wife called it) of the two-story cabin-in-name-only that came along with Sylvan Lodge, where I’d been a sort of caretaker till Janet, my wife, inherited money and we bought the place.

It was a seasonal business, shuttered right now, so having somebody knock at my door would generally get my attention. I would reach my hand down between the cushions of whatever chair or couch I might be lounging in, in front of the field-stone fireplace over which my flat-screen TV perched, and be ready to rumble.

Of course I’m not as ready to rumble as I once was. But there were worse-in-condition seventy-one-year-olds around. I was slim and I worked out three days a week and swam daily in the fitness center across from the main resort building, where even the convenience store and its gas station were closed for the season.

True, I’d had double bypass surgery a few years ago, but I had lost my paunch after Janet died and my five-ten was strictly muscle and tendons and veins and the kind of steel-gray hair that had waitresses still giving me a come hither look even at this late date. Of course the Brainerd bunch all knew I had money, so that was probably it.

The knock was insistent but not obnoxious and I went right over to it, without checking out the glass of the double doors to see what car might be pulled in past the deck, without looking through the damn peek hole, not even digging one of those cushion-tucked handguns out. What an idiot.

In my pitiful defense, I have to say my daughter Susan had been staying with me over Christmas. I’d even put a tree up, an artificial fir from Wal-Mart—Sylvan Lake was ringed with the real thing and I was not about to buy one—and draped white lights were still twinkling even now. Past the double doors that overlooked the deck, the plastic pine stood in the corner like a naughty child.

Susan had just left in her silver Cadillac CT5, after sharing an awkward hug—neither of us comfortable with that kind of thing—and she’d been gone only fifteen minutes, give or take, and I figured she’d forgotten something and come back for it.

Only it wasn’t Susan.

The man on my doorstep, lost in a black topcoat with elaborate lapels, was rather small, perhaps five-seven, and he had the professional look not of an assassin but of perhaps an accountant. His hair was black mingled minorly with white, his eyes were blue and rather large behind wire-frame glasses, and he had the kind of trim mustache you used to see little guys wear trying to look like Clark Gable.

Of course he was maybe thirty-five and likely never heard of Gable.

“Mr. Keller?” he said, in a pleasant tenor. He had a toothy smile that went well with it.

Jack Keller was how they knew me around here. I’d had a lot of names, none my own, going all the way back to when I signed on with the Broker.

“I’m Jack Keller,” I said, friendly, keeping all the tightness inside, watching his hands, which were in black leather gloves, folded in front of him.

“I apologize for just dropping by,” he said. “I did leave several messages on your machine.”

“Oh. You’re Mr. Duval. I did get your messages. You didn’t say what you wanted, so frankly I didn’t bother responding.”

“Well, I can understand that.” He shivered. “Quite a cold snap, this evening. Any chance I could step inside?”

If this was a threat, if this small, pleasant individual was here to kill me, better to handle this now. Better to deal with him on my terms. On my turf.

“Sure,” I said, backing up, gesturing toward the two-story open-beamed great room, adjacent to a small modern kitchen tucked under the partial second floor. “Let me take your coat.”

“No, that’s all right,” he said. “I won’t take up that much of your time.”

Moving with confidence, but not quickly enough to cause alarm, he headed toward the nearest chair, a comfy leather number with cushions. And a .22 revolver stuffed safely away between the latter, which of course he did not know about. A glass-topped coffee table was in front of him and he caught the edge of the fire I had going, which cast some orange and blue reflections on him.

He got out of his gloves and tucked them in his pockets. I was a coiled spring waiting for him to come back with a gun. All right, a senior-citizen coiled spring.…

But his hands were empty, and he used them to quickly unbutton his coat, which he shrugged off and put behind him like a cocoon he’d crawled out of. He flickered with fire, some of it bouncing off the coffee-table glass. He lifted his right hand toward his jacket, also black, though his tie added some Christmas color, red-and-white slanting stripes like a candy cane that melted.

He was a festive undertaker in all that black.

Of course, I was in black, too. Black sweats, black running shoes. Nothing the color of a candy cane on me, though. I was standing there taking in my guest and his careful moves. At the moment that right hand near where his white shirt and black jacket met was frozen in mid-air, as if it hadn’t recovered from the chill yet.

“I’d like to interview you, Mr. Keller,” he said. “For the Star Tribune? Might I record us on my phone?”

I was ready for him, so I said, “Why not?”

He got his phone out, slowly, and tapped its face a few places, then set it on the coffee table. Nothing suspicious about it, except the care he took making it look like nothing suspicious.

My arms were at my side. Folding them would have been dangerous. Foolhardy, even. And I’d already been foolhardy enough.

“Why in the world,” I said pleasantly, serving up a smile, “would you want to interview me? I manage a tourist lodge. That’s the start and finish of it.”

“I’ve spoken to some folks here in Sylvan Lake,” he said, and he meant the nearby little town of Sylvan Lake, not underwater, “and you have a sterling reputation.”

Nobody had ever referred to my reputation as sterling before, not even in this straight life.

But I said, “Well, that’s good to hear.”

And that did sound like the kind of artificial tripe somebody writing for a newspaper might come up with.

“If I could make a suggestion,” I said casually, as I edged past the coffee table and came around and sat in the comfy chair adjacent (but not quite next) to him, “you’d do me a lot more good if your paper ran something after the season starts. My activities when we’re shut down could be summed up in a few lines.”

Duval turned in his chair so he could face me. Leaned forward, folded his arms and let them hang between his legs. “Meaning no offense whatsoever, Mr. Keller, you are not the subject of the piece.”

“Oh?”

“No. It’s your daughter.”

Not what I wanted to hear.

I gestured easily toward the lake. “Well, you just missed her. She spent Christmas with me. She’s on her way home now.”

“I’m aware of that,” he said, and laughed a little as if that were amusing. “My editor has already arranged for a stringer… that’s a journalist there in the Quad Cities, where your daughter lives…to do an interview with her.”

“I know what a stringer is,” I said, perhaps just a little testy.

“My editor wants pictures of her at home,” he explained, “in her work area. And I understand the house she’s in was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, so we’ll get some interesting pictures, I’m sure.”

“Actually it’s not by Wright. It’s a knockoff of one of his houses, but it is pretty cool. You’ll get some nice pictures. You’ve set this up with her already?”

He nodded, his smile settling on one side of his face, the skimpy mustache coming along for the ride. “We have. Or I should say my editor has.”

“She didn’t mention it.”

He frowned a little, mildly surprised, or pretending to be. “Would she generally share that kind of thing with you? Publicity of that sort?”

“Why wouldn’t she?”

“Why would she?” This was affable enough, followed by a shrug. “Mr. Keller, you should be a proud father. Your daughter is a very successful person. A writer of some renown.”

I was already on alert, but now the hairs on the back of my neck had come to attention.

“I am proud of her,” I said. “But I’m not much interested in true-crime stuff.”

“Surely she’s spoken to you about her book Sniper being optioned by the movies.”

“She may have mentioned that in passing.”

“It’s really a masterpiece of its kind.” His left hand painted a picture in the air. “Sniper—TheKiller Who Came Home. A normal Midwestern boy is twisted into a killing machine for his country. I understand Matt Damon is interested.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

He sighed, leaned forward even more. “Let me be frank.”

He could be Frank or Oscar or Harry, as far as I was concerned.

But I said, “Please.”

“Our research indicates you and your daughter had no known contact prior to a little over a year ago. Were you estranged? If I might ask.”

“You might ask, but I’m not inclined to answer. You’re wading into rather personal territory.”

He raised his palms in surrender. “Fair enough.” He leaned back in the chair. “Are you by chance aware of an article that appeared in a publication called Paperback Quarterly?”

“No.”

And I wasn’t. I had never heard of it.

His shrug was more elaborate this time. “Well, why should you be? It’s a minor publication. For fans of pulp fiction. Afficionados of literary junk food.”

“I like westerns myself.”

“I prefer cinema. Foreign cinema, actually.”

“I was including spaghetti westerns.”

He laughed. “Ah! Sergio Leone! The best. I knew we’d find some common ground.”

I was very close to killing him. My hand had slipped down between the cushions and was gripping a .22 semi-automatic. It wasn’t really what he had said, or what he was saying: it was that he was morphing into another person. He was letting the mask slip, whether on purpose or not I couldn’t tell you.

He raised a hand and waved it a bit, as if indicating he was moving on to another topic. Or in this case, back to one.

“Now, this publication for fans of old paperbacks. One of them did an interesting article about a series of books about a character called Quarry.”

Oh, he was going to die, all right. Unless I did.

“In these novels, Quarry was a sniper in Vietnam who came home and found himself cuckolded by his young wife. He killed the wife’s lover…dropped a car on him, actually…and went to work for someone called the Broker. A sort of agent for hitmen.”

Again, we rarely used that word.

“Now, the names in Susan Breedlove’s book, Sniper, were different. Quarry was something else, the Broker was something else. But this little article, this obscure little article, paralleled the books in that cheap series of novels that appeared way back in the mid-1970s, with your daughter’s true-crime account. An eerie coincidence, don’t you think?”

The .22 auto came out a little slow, caught by the leather of the cushion, and my slight fumble gave him time to rock back in the chair and take it with him, and after he and it went down, he had something to hide behind.

But he didn’t come up and return fire.

Of course, he didn’t know a gun was tucked away between the cushions of the very chair he was hiding behind. So what his thinking was, I couldn’t tell you. Every pro in the killing business has his own way of doing things. Some specialize in vehicular homicide. Others use their hands. Some plant explosives. To each his own.

But what was this guy’s jam, as the kids say?

“I researched you, Keller,” he said. From behind the chair, on its side now, he had a muffled sound. “You’re a rich man. You can buy me off. For the right price I’ll give you my broker’s name, and you can work your way back to whoever wants you dead. I don’t know who that is, of course. Things haven’t changed that much in the trade since you were in it. There’s still that buffer. Interested?”

“I might be,” I said.

I was on my feet, facing the chair on its side. The coffee table was off to my right slightly and the fire was cracking and crackling and throwing shadows and making shapes.

He crawled out and, with his hands high, stood.

Here’s where I went wrong. I should have shot him immediately. In a way, I got greedy—not the money kind of greedy, the greedy for information variety.

Some kind of rig on his wrist fed his right hand a knife, a stiletto switchblade that he clicked open and hurled at me and it caught my sleeve and some skin too but it was mostly the surprise that sent the .22 flying from my hand and onto the field-stone hearth.

So that was his fucking jam.

A blade man, one of the sickest kind of fucks in a business littered with sick fucks. And he had another damn stiletto switchblade, probably more than just one, in the pocket of his suit jacket, and that came out and clicked, too, as he charged at me with it in his fist, raised to stab.

We didn’t have much distance between us, but I jockeyed around to put the coffee table in the way of his assault, and he had to circle it before he could dive at me and I grabbed the cell phone he’d put on the glassed top and flung it, hard, and it caught him in the chest, knocking him back, back-pedaling into that chair on its side he’d been hiding behind.

But he still had the knife, and even as he bumped hard against that sideways chair he had the presence of mind and the dexterity to flip positions of the weapon, to go from a fist that was ready to stab downward to an upward blade held by tight curled fingers and a guiding thumb.

That gave me pause and I eyed the .22 on the hearth and went for it.

He was fast. No question. He was right there to kick the .22 away. He had the knife in hand, his fist still holding it in that upward manner, where he could guide it with surgical skill. In an eye blink he retrieved the .22 and was pointing it at me with his left hand while the blade in his right scolded me like a sharp finger.

“You’re him, aren’t you?” he said.

His voice was different now. The mustache—Christ, it was fake, it was hanging from his lip like a half-picked scab! And the hair was askew—a wig! This bastard really went all the way. Disguises, stiletto switchblades up the wazoo—I didn’t know whether to admire him or fit him for a straitjacket.

“Sure,” I said, looking up as the fire did its demonic dance on the hovering figure. “I’m him. But who’s him?”

“You’re Quarry! You’re fucking Quarry!”

“Well, you win the Powerball, dipshit.”

I kicked him in his balls, only they weren’t so powerful, because the pain doubled him over and he stumbled backward and I tackled him.

I’ll be honest with you. Like I said, I am in good shape for seventy-one. And this guy was smaller than me. But he was also younger, by a quarter century at least. That he had a gun in one hand and a knife in the other made wrestling with him tricky. He caught me with a few shallow stabs in the back and batted me a couple times with that .22, and then he squirmed out of my grasp and was standing over me with the automatic pointing down at me, the small black barrel looking bigger than anything I’d ever seen. Like it could swallow me.

Forever.

The gunshot that rang out in the high-beamed room made me shudder, like a kid fooled by a jump scare in a horror movie.

But the bullet flew over my head and thunked into a wall or somewhere, and my faux-journalist guest straightened, as if something above him had caught his attention. His candy-cane tie ribboned red, while the fireplace continued its devilish dervish. He joined in, dancing on dead feet, well just shuffling really, before tumbling onto his back as the twinkling white lights of the Christmas tree in the corner welcomed him to oblivion.

With him on his back, someone else was revealed, someone who had come in the door unheard, a beautiful woman of indeterminate age, in a white fur-collared parka over a black jumpsuit, her hair black now (it had been blonde), her high-cheekboned face with its Asian-cast features shockingly familiar.

I was still on the floor, leaning on my elbows.

“Lu,” I said. “Aren’t you dead?”

Her voice was familiar, too; throaty, sultry.

“Only on paper,” she said.

TWO

I either fell asleep or passed out and, when I woke up what turned out to be half an hour later, my first thought was that I’d imagined or dreamed Lu being there.

I had been told by what I thought was a reliable source that the lovely female assassin was dead, that she’d been killed in a robbery at the antiques shop in Minneapolis that had been a profitable front for her other business. That business was being a regional broker in the killing game, a position she’d risen to over the years.

We’d first met years ago when I used the Broker’s list to follow her to her next gig. She’d been Glenna Cole then. I had disrupted that job, but along the way we’d had a sort of affair and I managed not to have to kill her. She turned up a few decades ago and bailed me out of a situation not unlike this one: saving my life when I was under the gun.

The two times were similar enough that I might well have dreamed her presence before blacking out. But when I came around—positioned face down on a couch near the twinkling white lights of the Christmas tree—with some pillows under me and my head lower than my heart, which was good procedure for dealing with the kind of wounds I’d suffered—she was kneeling nearby, snapping off some latex gloves that might have been mine. Or maybe she traveled with them, should something come up.

Like it had here.

“Welcome to the land of the living,” she said huskily.

She was fucking beautiful and not just because she’d saved my life. With those Asian eyes, the almond cast with gold-flecked blue orbs, combined with the new hairstyle, jet black in a Bettie Page cut, she could have walked out of the old Russ Meyer flick, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! If you haven’t seen it, I can wait while you go off and correct that lapse. Google Tura Satana while you’re at it.

“What are you doing in it?” I said, craning my head toward her. “The land of living, I mean.”

“I paid a pretty penny to die and disappear,” she said, the eyes widening just a trifle. “You should try it. Might prevent people from coming around trying to kill you.”

I flicked a look toward my bare back, not seeing much of anything. I seemed to still be in the black sweatpants. “How bad?”

I remembered my visitor, in our wrestling match, stabbing me a couple of times with one of his stilettos.

“Not bad,” she said. “Two were a little deep, two others glorified cuts. I applied pressure for fifteen minutes on both deeper ones. I irrigated the wounds with tap water. Using Betadine, which you had in your medicine cabinet, or rubbing alcohol or peroxide, might have done more harm than good.”

“I notice you don’t use peroxide anymore.”

“Never did. I always used Nice ’n Easy.”

“You…you always were a nice and easy gal.”

“Be quiet. Rest.”

Something was going on, on my bare back. “What’s that you’re doing?”

“Just daubing on some bacitracin. Then I’m going to put band-aids on both lacerations. You want any pain killer? Any morphine around somewhere?”

“I don’t do opioids. I’m a very clean-cut boy. Get me three or four of those 500-milligram Tylenol. They’re on the kitchen counter with some other meds.”

“You old people and your meds.”

That was a joke and the slight curve at one corner of her lovely mouth said so. She was probably not far from my age, though she looked like a well-preserved forty-something. Probably worked out. Not a vegan, because they tend to pork up on pasta, and even in retirement she would need her protein.

She got me my Tylenol and a cup of water. Still on my stomach, I managed to take the pills and wash them down.

“My caller,” I said. “Dead, I assume.”

Her nod made the black scythe blades of her hair swing. “Yes. There’s enough blood on the floor that we’ll need luminol in clean-up.”

“I don’t…don’t keep luminol around. But there’s hydrogen bleach under the kitchen counter. That…that’ll do the trick.”

“It will.” She patted my butt. “You grab some sleep. I’ll wrap up our friend. Where do you keep your roll of plastic?”

Not, Do you keep a roll ofplastic—where.

“Front closet,” I said, “toward the back.”

She nodded and I nodded off.

*   *   *

Back in the latex gloves, Lu was just finishing the round-and-round duct-taping of the cylindrical package of plastic that contained the late Duval or whoever the fuck he was. Duct tape is something every household needs to have on hand.

She had moved the coffee table and my chair back somewhat to make room for the process. I noticed that the black topcoat my caller had worn was draped over my chair, which she’d righted. Kneeling now, she noticed me noticing that.

I sat up with a little difficulty, but sat up nonetheless. My black sweatshirt was folded neatly on the floor nearby. I started to reach for it and she said scoldingly, “Don’t get ambitious. Just sit there and get your shit together.”

“Okay,” I said. A woman wrapping up a corpse in plastic sheeting and duct tape is not to be argued with. I nodded toward the enshrouded remains. “Why didn’t you include the topcoat in that package?”

She ripped off a piece of duct tape; it was like a robot farting. “It’s a nice coat. I like it. Nothing identifying, no labels or laundry mark. Tried it on and it fits fine. Any objections?”

“No. Seems like the least of the indignities our guest is facing.”

Her shrug was dismissive. “He died quick. That’s the best people in our line can hope for.” She finished her work with that last silver strip, then got to her feet and said, looking a little embarrassed, “I, uh…he had two hundred bucks and change in his billfold. I’m keeping it for expenses. I drove from Billings.”

“Montana?”

“It’s the only Billings I know.”

“That’s ten hours easy.”

One skinny eyebrow went up. “It’s eleven and not easy at all. Required more coffee than any human being should endure.”

“You should try Diet Coke.”

“No. That shit can kill you.” She looked down at her handiwork; it was reflecting the fireplace glow on one side and the twinkling Christmas lights on the other, like an effect in a science-fiction movie. “I put his billfold back. He had three fake I.D.’s and enough random business cards to form a chamber of commerce. Nothing worth keeping. Nothing we could trace. Any thoughts about what we should do with him?”

I didn’t feel half bad. The Tylenol was doing its stuff. “The lake isn’t frozen yet, but I don’t like shitting where I eat.”

“Who does? Any water-filled gravel pits handy?”

“Quite a few, actually, around Brainerd.” I’d made use of one or two before. “That’s the best idea. Closer to home than I’d like, but not in my back yard.”

She strode over to me, tall and curvy in the black jumpsuit, snapping off the latex gloves again.

“You up to a nature excursion?” she asked. “After dark’s the best time to do something like this, and that would be right now. Or we could wait an hour or—”

“No. I’m fine. I had a hell of a nurse.”

That got a tiny pleased smile out of her. “We far from where you have in mind?”

“No. It’s a place the locals call Quarry Park.”

The small smile blossomed into a grin—rare for her. Plenty of sly smiles from this one, but a grin? Alert the media.

She said, “You wouldn’t kid a girl would you?”

I retrieved my sweatshirt. “Not one who just wrapped a corpse in plastic, I wouldn’t.”

*   *   *

Soon we were on our way to Quarry Park, an abandoned site that had been owned and operated by the Brainerd Crushed Stone Company. By the late twentieth century, when the firm went broke, they’d quarried out a thousand-foot-long, hundred-foot-high cliff of coarse-grained, dark-colored, intrusive igneous rock called black gabbo, an obelisk that loomed like a rough-hewn vertical tombstone above an unsafe body of water. Many a swimmer had drowned there, thanks to underwater growth that caught them by the ankles like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Quarry Park was scenic but it could be nasty.

Lu was behind the wheel of her black Lexus while I played navigator filling her in on where we were going down this ribbon of country road. Trees on either side of us edged plenty of sky. The night was cold and clear, a near full moon like a prison searchlight guiding the way.

“Since they shut down,” I was telling her, “the quarry has been an area where locals can walk their dogs and hike and picnic. There’s a nice view of the nearest lake to take in, too, if you climb to the top.”

“Summer mostly?”