Collins Quarry's Return

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-80336-877-1
Verlag: Titan Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

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.

Max Allan Collins was hailed in 2004 by Publishers Weekly as 'a new breed of writer.' A frequent Mystery Writers of America nominee in both fiction and non-fiction categories, he has earned an unprecedented eighteen Private Eye Writers of America nominations, winning for his Nathan Heller novels, True Detective (1983) and Stolen Away (1991). In 2002, his graphic novel Road to Perdition was adapted into an Academy-Award winning film, starring Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, Jude Law and Daniel Craig. He lives in Iowa, USA.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Collins, Max Allan

Leseproben

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...