“What about that Mavis broad?”
“Don’t know. Didn’t come up.”
“She say what kind of vehicle they were in?”
“Yeah. A panel truck, a Ford, dark green.”
“Late as we’re running,” Boyd said, “keep an eye out for that Ford, coming our direction. We may have to improvise.”
“No argument.”
A few minutes went by with nothing but the sound of those wipers and more pattering on the softtop.
Then Boyd said, “This could still be the hit, Quarry. Just because your little hooker-stripper seems to be telling the truth, they might be using her, helping to set Climer up for the kill.”
“I know it.”
Even with the rain trailing off into drizzle, things got trickier for us, because now we were dealing with unmarked backroads and lanes. After a while, I was thinking we’d screwed up till I saw the sign beside a graveled byway that said, TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT AND EATEN. This tallied both with Max Climer’s dark, rustic sense of humor and with the most bizarre part of his cousin’s typewritten directions.
We rolled slowly up the slight gravel incline so as not to crunchily announce our approach. Halfway along what Vernon’s notes said was a quarter-mile lane, we pulled over. I had insisted that Boyd take my spare nine mil as his primary weapon, because it had a silencer. He’d traded me his spare .38 S & W, and of course I had the little .25.
Boyd was in ninja black, assuming his red-and-yellow Peter Max jockey shorts didn’t ride up in back, and I was in the black windbreaker and jeans. We would blend into the night well enough. The rain had done us a favor, because I wanted to angle through the trees, an approach that would have been an even noisier one than on the gravel, before the rain wetted down the leaves under our feet.
The walk seemed longer than it was, as we moved through trees that still had plenty of leaves to rustle and flick droplets at us. It was damn near cold. Finally we came up onto the promised clearing where the cabin perched above a river view we couldn’t see. A few lights were on in the two-story log-wood structure, the front of which faced us across a leaf-strewn gentle slope and a gravel apron that opened up from the lane to provide some parking. The pink Cadillac was off to one side as was a blue-and-white Dodge Charger that probably belonged to the security guys, or one of them anyway, who followed Max, Mavis and their driver out here. Another vehicle was pulled up right along the front porch.
A dark-green Ford panel truck.
We approached quickly, cautiously, staying low, moving across the damp, not noisy leaves, heading toward the near side of the structure, by the gas tank and some windows. Along the way we noted no one through the windshield of the van, and nobody standing outside or on the porch with its tiled overhang, pine posts and rocking chairs. Apparently those who’d arrived in that vehicle were inside.
The cabin was not the rustic affair that I had pictured when Vernon Climer spoke of his cousin’s moonshine roots and need to get back to nature. This was a log cabin, all right, but two sizeable stories of one, and — peeking through a window onto a fully outfitted kitchen — I could see a knotty-pine-paneled world that included a cozy living room with chocolate leather sofas and chairs arranged around a stone-facade gas fireplace. Open pine-wood stairs to the second floor demarcated the two big downstairs areas.
At a cedar log table in the kitchen, three big men wearing Climax Magazine polo shirts (pink) sat, slumped on their elbowed arms, sleeping or otherwise unconscious. Playing cards were scattered toward the center of the table, filled ashtrays here and there, with a coffee cup near each slumbering man.
One of these men may not have been sleeping. He might be named Larry, and he might have prepared the bodyguards for the evening’s scheduled activity by drugging their coffee. He may have done the same thing for Max and Mavis, presumably upstairs in a bedroom, although possibly with hot chocolate or an alcoholic beverage, since people getting ready for sleep might not drink coffee. Whether he had drugged his own coffee (or whatever was in the bodyguards’ cups) to better seem a victim himself, or was simply pretending, I’d yet to establish.
I felt Boyd’s hand squeeze my arm as he drew my attention through the window away from the men at the table and toward three other men, who were coming down the open pine stairs. Two were big boys in running suits and dark stocking masks with only their eyes showing; they had what looked to be .357 Magnum handguns in their gloved right fists.
One big man was dragging down those stairs a groggy-looking Max Climer, wearing a flung-on black silk robe, his legs and feet bare; the other was following, brandishing his Magnum.
I gave Boyd a head wag and he followed me around front. We could hear them moving inside. They’d be across to the front door and onto the porch in seconds. I indicated the van and Boyd trailed after as I headed back behind. The rear van doors were unlocked. We got in, closing ourselves in, moments before we heard the cabin’s front door open and the two big men come out, dragging Max Climer.
Climer was objecting but in a slurry manner, befitting a guy who’d been doped.
“Fuck’s going on?” he was saying. “Outa your fuckin’ skulls.”
And so on.
We waited. Footsteps on gravel. Muffled voices spoke to their captive (muffled because of the masks, not distance).
“Behave yourself, everything gonna be cool. This is just a money deal. You don’t gotta die.”
“Yeah,” the other one said, “you just go along and we get along, everything be fine and jim dandy.”
One van door swung open, and then so did the other. Apparently both abductors were going to help their captive up and in. I was at right against a van wall and Boyd was backed to the left wall, each of us with a silenced nine millimeter Browning in hand, and the two big men in ski masks froze momentarily upon seeing us — Max, I don’t think, saw us at all — and Boyd put a bullet in the head of the one nearest him, and I put a bullet in the head of the one nearest me. The two clouds of blood mist created by our nearly simultaneous shots mingled and dissipated.
The two silenced-gun reports made small raspy coughs, reverberating a little in the van but not making it outside, where the two men were tottering on feet that had stopped receiving signals from their brains, organs that had never been that impressive in the first place. The last decision those minds made was a reflexive one, which was to dump their owners on their dead asses, leaving Max Climer standing there, with wide glassy eyes, tottering a little himself.
“Inside,” I told Boyd. “One of those three at the table could be faking.”
Boyd quickly jumped down out of the van, landing at the feet of the man he’d killed, and hustled inside. A second later I followed, taking Climer by the arm and guiding him along.
“Max, you’ve been drugged,” I said. “Take it easy and you’ll come out of it.”
“You... you killed those pricks.”
“Yeah, that was a kidnap try. They didn’t make it.”
Inside, Boyd was standing a few feet away from the log table where the three security guys were slumped like kids in school at nap time.
“Larry!” I said.
One of the three made an involuntary twitch. I hadn’t known which one was Larry, but I did now. I went over and dragged him out of the log chair. Like all of these guys, he was big, big shoulders, big arms, big belly. But I had adrenalin on my side, and a silenced nine mil in his neck, so we were more than evenly matched. I walked him, shoved him, back into the pine counter that housed a sink and dishwasher and other things that probably weren’t in the cabin of Max Climer’s childhood.