Quarry's Deal by Max Allan Collins Page A

it.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    15
    _______________________________________________
    _______________________________________________
     
     
    MY EYES PEELED slowly open and she was right in on top of me, leaning over me, fingers plucking at my face, her oriental eyes narrowed like I was something interesting to look at.
    “What are you doing?” I said.
    “Picking glass out of your face,” she said.
    “Oh.”
    “You’re not too badly cut. Lot of little nicks is about all, really. But we better get this glass out.”
    “Be my guest.”
    “Ouch!”
    “What?”
    “Little fucker nicked me.” She held a half-inch sliver of glass up by a thumb and forefinger for me to see. When I had, she dropped the sliver, sucked the forefinger a second.
    I sat up on the couch. “How’d you get me back in your apartment?”
    “I walked you over here.”
    “You mean dragged me? I was unconscious, wasn’t I?”
    “Not entirely. More like drunk.”
    “I think somebody hit me with a lamp.”
    “I think so, too. Anyway there’s a busted bulb all over the floor next door. All but the pieces of it I been picking out of your face, that is.”
    “That’s where you found me?”
    “The door was open, you were on the floor, against the wall, glass all over your face. I thought you were dead for a minute.”
    “No such luck. Who’s your new neighbor? The guy that wrote Psycho ?”
    “Nobody lives next door. Not that I know of.”
    “Help me off this couch. I want to go see for myself.”
    She did.
    The door was still ajar. I went in carefully, reaching a hand around to switch on the light before going in all the way.
    And saw an apartment exactly like Lucille’s, with one exception: it was unfurnished.
    Some shattered, bloody glass lay near one wall; so did the screw-in socket of the bulb with its claw of red-flecked glass shards sticking out.
    “Let’s go back,” she said, a hand on my shoulder.
    “Let’s.”
    She locked the door and nightlatched it. A lot of doors in the Midwest don’t have nightlatches. I was glad hers did, though I had no reason to feel safer locked in here with her than I’d been next door with the guy who’d used my face to switch off the lights.
    Did I say “guy”? No. There were two of them: the one who came up behind me; and the one who opened the door. Of course the one who opened the door could’ve been a woman.
    “Listen, I think there’s some mercurochrome in the bathroom cabinet. You better let me dab some on.”
    “Go ahead.”
    She went and got the stuff, and I had a sip of the Sanka she’d found time to make.
    “This’ll hurt,” she said, and began daubing it on.
    It did hurt. I felt a tear roll down my cheek and she made a concerned face and with her free hand brushed the tear away. Then she put little bandaids over each cut. Pressed them gently into place.
    When she touched my face like that, it bothered me. When she looked at me concerned like that, it bothered me. The way she’d been in bed the other night bothered me, too. Responsive. Giving. Loving.
    The bitch was a killer. More importantly, so was I. How could she seem so genuine? Why did she strike a chord in me, even when I knew she had to be faking?
    This was only the second night I’d been with her.
    I’d left her apartment Friday morning before she got back, and spent the afternoon watching her window from the parking lot below. I was at an angle she couldn’t easily spot, and I was sitting in a car she wouldn’t recognize as mine, a Ford I rented for the occasion. I didn’t need a particularly good vantage point. A good look wasn’t what I was after. I just wanted to see the glimmer of circular glass. I just wanted to see the binoculars at the window. And I saw them, all right.
    And I saw Frank Tree drive down the curved lane of the Town Crest apartment building around four-thirty in the afternoon, and the reflecting binoculars disappeared in the window, and I pulled the Ford