“Who are you?” I asked. “I don’t mean your name. Why are you here? What’s your function?”
“Function? What the fuck—”
“Your job. You came here to do a job, right?”
He said nothing.
“Delmont, you came here to a job. Right?”
He sucked in breath. Let it out. Nodded.
I knew. Or anyway I thought I knew. At least one way that this, and some other things, would make anything close to sense had just occurred to me.
“Delmont, you don’t have to tell me why you came north. You don’t have to tell me what job you came to St. Louis to do.”
Boyd was frowning at me, not getting it.
I said, “You came to town to kill the nigger across the street. You’re here to whack the Reverend Raymond Wesley Lloyd.”
His bloody-cheeked astonishment was priceless. He had the same expression as a magician’s volunteer from the audience hearing, “Is this your card?”
Boyd was just slightly astonished himself. He said, “Jack... what the hell?” At least he’d had the presence of mind not to call me Quarry.
I gave him a look that said stay out of it.
Then I said to Delmont, “You know, some pretty strange coincidences happen from time to time.”
“Huh?” Now he was squinting at me. The blood from where I’d whacked him had dried and gone black and looked like a lace cap on his head. A lace cap sewn by a blind, brain-damaged seamstress. The blood on his cheeks wasn’t flowing anymore but the scarlet streaks that had been left still glistened.
“You see,” I said, “my friend and I are watching Reverend Lloyd because we’ve been hired to kill him.”
“What? But I... uh... uh...” Then he clammed up. His brain was overloading. In a cartoon, steam whistle sounds and engine gears grinding would have accompanied smoke coming out his ears.
“Jack!” Boyd said, and he came over and took me by the arm. Walked me to the doorway to his bedroom, and then pulled me in there. Delmont, tied to his chair, was trying very hard to think.
“What the hell’s the idea?” Boyd whispered. “Now we have to kill this guy.”
“Before we had to,” I said. “Now, maybe not. Look, it’ll be my responsibility either way. Just go along with me.”
Boyd swallowed hard. His face looked like he’d stuck his head in a beehive and it hadn’t gone well. But he nodded.
Back in front of our guest, his gun in my right hand, mine in my left, I said, “We were hired to kill the black bastard. Now I want to hear why you’re here.”
“I... I... I...”
Aye yai yai.
I said, “You were hired to kill him, too.”
“I was hired to kill him, too!”
Boyd’s eyebrows went up. His puffy eyes otherwise stayed put. They had no choice.
“Delmont,” I said, “my friend and I handle contracts. Is that what you do? Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Delmont swallowed thickly. “Maybe so. Maybe so.”
This was not one of Broker’s people. Not by a long shot. But there were other Brokers around, some not so sophisticated. Like Delmont wasn’t quite as sophisticated as Boyd and me.
“Popular guy, the Reverend Lloyd,” I said. “Looks like two people with money want him dead. Two separate contracts.”
Delmont was trying to make that work in his head. “That’s... that’s...”
“A coincidence, yeah, I said that before. It’s also possible that we were hired by the same party, and this is some kind of half-assed attempt to make sure the hit really goes down. Like we fail, you step in. Or vice versa.”
“But that don’t work,” Delmont said, goggling at me. “Not without us knowin’ about each other. Without us knowin’ about each other, somethin’ really bad could go down.”
“Right. Like you stumbling in on us and taking us for cops or feds or interlopers.”
“Right,” Delmont said, nodding, then he winced, because that hurt. “So... so what happens now?”
“Chances are,” I said, “though we’re not likely working for the same party, that those parties are aligned.”
“A what?”
“Well, allies. On the same side. Delmont, you’ve heard that expression, the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing?”
“I heard it.”
“That’s what happened here. I’m almost sure of it.”
He squinted in apparent thought. “I’m workin’ for one hand and you for the other.”
“That’s it. You got it.”
His eyes widened. “Well... where do we go from here? If we’re on the same job... sort of... could you maybe let me out of this here chair?”
“I like the way you think, Delmont. And there’s a good chance you’ll be getting out of that there chair. A good chance you’ll live through this and wind up in the black.”
“In what black? If you mean pussy, I ain’t interested, ’less maybe she’s high yellar or somethin’.”
“No, no, Delmont. I mean, you wind up with what you’re supposed to get paid, and we wind up with what we’re supposed to get paid.”
“But that nigger can only die once.”
“Nothing wrong with your math skills, Delmont. But the right hand, who hired you, and the left hand, who hired us, won’t know that. All our employers will know is that the hit went down successfully. Everybody wins. Except Reverend Lloyd.”
Smoke was threatening to come out his ears again. “Okay... but...”
“Delmont, what I’m saying is... I suggest we partner up.”
Boyd sighed. Applied the homemade ice pack to his face.
Delmont shrugged, as much as he could, duct-taped up like that, and said, “I’m willin’. How ’bout I kill his black ass, and we all get paid, and we all go our separate ways?”
“Close. I’m going to suggest much the same thing. I suggest that my partner and I do the hit. We get paid for doing it, and you get paid for doing nothing.”
He was starting to smile.
“And if we screw up,” I went on, “and wind up dead or something, with Reverend Lloyd still aboveground? Well, then you can come in and finish the job. And get paid.”
“Will you still get paid?”
“No, Delmont, we won’t — we’ll be dead.”
“You’ll be what?”
“Dead or in stir. This happens if we screw the job up, and you have to come in and do it after all. But right now you just sit back and wait to see how we do.”
“Not in this chair I won’t.”
“Just a figure of speech, Delmont.”
“Not to me it’s not. And anyway, this’ll all go tits up if I don’t get out of this chair and out of here, lickety damn split.”
“Why is that?”
He looked at me like I was really, really dumb. “The money drop is tonight. I pick up my share. That’s the way it works where I come from. Night or two before I do the job, they got to pay me. But I don’t have no direct contact. Everything’s done through a middleman.”
This all sounded a little too familiar.
I asked, hoping I wanted to hear the answer, “What do you call your middleman, Delmont?”
“Well, I call him Fred. That’s his name.”
That was a relief.
I said, “So the drop is tonight?”
“Right. I’m gettin’ payment straight from the guy who hired the job.”
“So, uh, you work alone?”
“Right. I come in and do recon, then bang bang, I shoot ’em down.”
Boyd was groaning softly.
I said, “Delmont, I’m confused. First you said no direct contact, then you said the guy who hired the job is paying you in person. Tonight.”
“Yeah, it’s at this meeting. If you saw, you’d understand.”