I look beyond his shoulder. Behind the counter, John transfers grubby stacks of bills from the register drawer into a green plastic sack. He moves reflexively: maximum cooperation, zero resistance, absolutely no eye contact.

  Watching him, you might get the idea he’s done this before. It makes sense. He works nights at the GitGo; he’s had practice being robbed.

  But I know more.

  I know, for example, that my friend John was hacked in the face by a machete when he was fifteen years old. His skin is dark black, the scar even darker, a worm of thick tissue from eyebrow to chin. I know that he’s been shot before. More than once. I know that his name isn’t John.

  The tall one snatches the sack of money. It can’t be more than a couple hundred bucks.

  “What, are you kidding me?” He checks the door, the empty parking lot, the security monitors. “Open the safe.”

  The short one seems to tense up. This isn’t the usual script.

  John lifts his hands higher, dips his head lower. “I do not know the combination.”

  “You don’t know the combination?” The guy mimics John’s speech: de comb bee naysun? “Bullshit. Grab some sacks, Moomba.”

  “He’s telling the truth,” I say.

  The short one jams his gun barrel into my cheek. “Man, what the fuck did I tell you?”

  I point to the sign taped up on the wall: BE ADVISED THAT OUR EMPLOYEES CANNOT ACCESS THE SAFE.

  The tall one checks the parking lot again. He knows I’m right, but it doesn’t make him happier with the take. He waggles the gun and says, “Gimme yours.”

  John doesn’t look up. “I do not understand.”

  “Ooga booga,” the tall guy says. “Fuckin’ spearchucker. Your wallet. Hand it over now.”

  John doesn’t have a wallet, but he reaches into the front pocket of his pants. He pulls out a roll of cash. The roll is big around as his wrist, tied with a frayed piece of twine.

  The guy looks at the roll, looks at John. He snorts and shakes his head. “Jesus, look at this pimp. Drop it in the sack.”

  No hesitation, no quick movements. John simply does as he’s told.

  The guy pistol-whips him anyway. There’s a fleshy smack; John grunts and sags to his knees.

  By now the tall one is halfway out the door. The bell jingles. Over his shoulder, he says, “Get his. We’re gone.”

  The short one smirks, still holding his gun to my face. He holds out his other hand and wiggles his fingers. Give it here.

  I give him my wallet.

  He gives me a push in the face with the gun.

  Then he hustles after his buddy, shoving the ramshackle pistol back into the waistband of his jeans.

  The bell jingles. Outside, car doors slam. An engine growls; tires bark. After they’re gone, I go behind the counter and help John to his feet.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Let me see.”

  He takes his hand away from a small cut on his cheek. It isn’t bad. A jot of pink tissue, a little blood.

  There’s a first aid kit in back, but it’s poorly stocked; I get some Band-Aids and a tube of ointment from the shelves. I fill a cup full of ice from the soda machine.

  While I fix him up, I ask the obvious question. “John, why were you carrying all that money around?”

  He shrugs. “The building where I stay is not safe.”

  I smile. “Bad part of town, huh?”

  My friend John just gave two stickup guys his entire savings account. But he smiles back at me. It could be worse. His teeth are white, and his eyes hide nothing. The scar tugs at his features like a badly sewn seam.

  I FIND THEM where they live: a shabby apartment in a rundown building near the meatpacking district on the south side of town.

  The light in the outer hallway is broken. I pick the lock in the dark. Inside, the flickering television throws blue shadows on the walls.

  The tall one is sitting on the edge of the couch. He’s shirtless, hunched over the coffee table, sucking the business end of a ceramic water bong.

  I close the front door behind me.

  His head snaps up. “What the fu. . .”

  I shoot him once in the chest. Once more in the head.

  The muzzle suppressor gulps down the noise. Two quiet hiccups, and that’s all. He sits up straight, then falls back. He sinks into the cushions, and then he’s still.

  The apartment smells like gunpowder, body odor, and cheap weed. In the light of the television, I can see tendrils of smoke trailing from the end of the suppressor. Smoke trails from the mouth of the bong.

  A toilet flushes; the short one shambles back into the room. He’s also shirtless, baggy jeans low on his hips.

  I place a red dot in the center of his chest. He stops in his tracks.

  “Keep walking,” I tell him. “Come over and sit down.”

  He sees his dead friend on the couch.

  He sees the fan of wet blood on the wall.

  But he’s stoned. I give him a moment to process the situation; I want us to be able to start on the same page.

  You can almost track his progress. I’m the old dude from the GitGo; forty minutes ago, he was pointing a gun at my face. Now I’m here. Pointing a gun at him.

  “Professional advice.” I reach over and turn down the television. “Before your next robbery, rub mud on your license plates.”

  He looks at me, eyes wide. “Man, what the fuck?”

  I nod him toward the couch.

  “Holy shit.”

  “Try to calm down.”

  “Jesus.” He edges around the coffee table. He sits as far from his friend as he can. He tries not to look, but he can’t help it. “You whacked Darryl.”

  “Was that his name?”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “What about you? What’s your name?”

  “What do you want, man?”

  I bend down and take what I want: John’s roll of cash. It’s sitting there on the coffee table, along with the sack of money from the register, the bong, a baggie of grass, two pistols, and my wallet.

  “You know the guy with the scar on his face?” I hold up the roll of bills. “The guy who gave you this?”

  “Jesus, take it. No prob.”

  “Last year, his father organized the bloodiest coup attempt in his nation’s history.” I nod. “It’s true. Small country, I doubt you’ve heard of it. It wasn’t even in the news. But it happened.”

  “Man, I don’t. . .”

  “His father and brothers were killed. His mother and sisters were jailed.” I lower my weapon. The red dot slides down his stomach, over his leg, across the floor, back to my side. “Raped, tortured. . .look, trust me, you wouldn’t even want to know.”

  “Then why are you telling me? Jesus, who are you, man?”

  “They eventually escaped.” I hold up the roll of cash again. “Thanks to money John sends home for bribes. One of his sisters made it to a refugee camp in a bordering province.”

  The whole time I’m talking, I can see his hand creeping toward a gap between the sofa cushions. I decide I’ll call him Mike.

  “His mother and his other sister were captured,” I tell him. “They were dragged behind Jeeps all the way back to the jail. A little over forty kilometers. Do you know how much forty kilometers is, Mike?”

  Of course he doesn’t.

  “About twenty-five miles,” I say. “Can you imagine what was left of them, after twenty-five miles?”

  I look at his hand. He stops moving it.

  “Don’t be an animal,” I tell him. “That’s the lesson I want you to take from this. Do you understand?”

  “Jesus.” He nods his head. “Yeah, man. Fuckin’-A.”

  Of course he doesn’t.

  The moment I turn, he goes for the gun stashed in the sofa cushions. When he looks up, he sees his mistake. Even if he can’t see the red dot between his eyes.

  I leave my wallet on the table. It contains fifty dollars in cash, a falsified driver’s license, two major credit cards issued under the name on the license, and pictures of kids I don’t have.

  I have five more like it.

  THE TRUTH IS THIS:

  My friend John and I aren’t really friends. We’ve known each other for about two days. Everything I know about John, I knew when I got here.

  Everything he knows about me, he knew the moment I walked into the store.

  Yet here we stand at the GitGo, John on his side of the counter, me on mine. The police are long gone, and the store is still open. Dawn is just around the corner. The world outside is beginning to stir.

  “Stop sending the money.” I press the roll of cash into his hand. “Your friends earn more by telling where you are.”

  He doesn’t ask me how I know this. He doesn’t ask how I found his money, or what I did to get it back. He doesn’t ask why I’m doing what I’m doing.

  I wouldn’t know what to tell him if he did. John is my job; I’m a professional. What’s happening hasn’t happened before.

  Very soon now, I’ll be asked to provide a status report to the people who paid me to execute this young man.

  For the third night in a row, I tell him:

  “Don’t be here when I come back tomorrow. Do you understand?”

  For the third night in a row, he says, “I understand.” We’re not animals.

  MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  MAX Allan Collins has earned an unprecedented fourteen Private Eye Writers of America Shamus nominations for his historical thrillers, winning twice (for the Nathan Heller novels TRUE DETECTIVE and STOLEN AWAY). He is one of publishing industry’s leading authors of tie-in novels, including the USA TODAY bestselling CSI series, and penned the New York Times bestselling graphic novel ROAD TO PERDITION and its prose sequels, ROAD TO PURGATORY and ROAD TO PARADISE. He is a leading indie filmmaker in his native Midwest, with a current boxed DVD set—BLACK BOX—collecting four of his five features and two of his documentaries. He lives in Muscatine, Iowa, with his wife, writer Barbara Collins; their son Nathan is pursuing post-grad studies in Japan.

  Collins’s hitman Quarry, created by Collins at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop in 1972, was the first series character of his kind, an innovation worth noting here, THE LAST QUARRY, the killer’s first full-length adventure in nearly two decades, was recently published by HardCase Crime.

  On inventing the hitman sub-genre, Al says: “In the late ’60s and early ’70s, antiheroes took hold, in response to the Vietnam/LBJ/Nixon era. Audiences for films and books had no trouble identifying with thieves like Westlake’s Parker, whose collective lead I followed into my Nolan-and-Jon pro-thief series. At the same time, Vietnam was playing out on the nightly news and we were eating off TV trays, watching body bags—seemed to me we were getting dulled by it all. I wanted to take the antihero the next logical step and see if (a) I could get the reader to identify as easily with a killer as with a thief, and (b) confront the reader toward the end of each tale with just-who-the-hell-am-I-identifying-with-here. Key to both was removing the safety of the distance of the Westlake/W.R. Burnett third-person and putting the reader directly into the first-person head of the killer.”

  Visit Quarry and Al at www.MaxAllanCollins.com

  GUEST SERVICES

  Max Allan Collins

  AN AMERICAN FLAG flapped lazily on its silver pole against a sky so washed-out blue the handful of clouds were barely discernible. The red, white, and blue of it were garishly out of place against the brilliant greens and muted blues of the Minnesota landscape, pines shimmering vividly in late morning sunlight, the surface of gray-blue Sylvan Lake glistening with sun, rippling with gentle waves. The rails of the grayish brown deck beyond my quarters were like half-hearted prison bars that I peeked through, as I did my morning sit-ups on the other side of the triple glass doors of my well-appointed guest suite.

  I was not a guest of Sylvan Lodge, however: I ran the place. Once upon a time I had owned a resort in Wisconsin not unlike this—not near the acreage, of course, and not near the occupancy; but I had owned the place, whereas here I was just the manager.

  Not that I had anything to complain about. I was lucky to have the job. When I ran into Gary Petersen in Milwaukee, where he was attending a convention and I was making a one-night stopover to remove some emergency funds from several bank deposit boxes, I was at the loosest of loose ends. The name I’d lived under for over a decade was unusable; my past had caught up with me, back at the other place, and I’d lost everything in a near instant: my business yanked from under me, my wife (who’d had not a clue of my prior existence) murdered in her sleep.

  Gary, however, had recognized me in the hotel bar and used a name I hadn’t used since the early ’70s: my real name.

  “Jack!” he said, only that wasn’t the name he used. For the purposes of this narrative, however, we’ll say my real name is Jack Keller.

  “Gary,” I said, surprised by the warmth creeping into my voice. “You son of a bitch. . .you’re still alive.”

  Gary was a huge man—six six, weighing in at somewhere between three hundred pounds and a ton; his face was masked in a bristly brown beard, his skull exposed by hair loss, his dark eyes bright, his smile friendly, in a goofy, almost childlike way.

  “Thanks to you, asshole,” he said.

  We’d been in Vietnam together.

  “What the hell have you been doing all these years, Jack?”

  “Mostly killing people.”

  He boomed a laugh. “Yeah, right!”

  “Don’t believe me, then.” I was, incidentally, pretty drunk. I don’t drink often, but I’d been through the mill lately.

  “Are you crying, Jack?”

  “Fuck no,” I said. But I was.

  Gary slipped his arm around my shoulder; it was like getting cuddled by God. “Bro—what’s the deal? What shit have you been through?”

  “They killed my wife,” I said, and cried drunkenly into his shoulder.

  “Jesus, Jack—who. . .?”

  “Fucking assholes. . .fucking assholes. . .”

  We went to his suite. He was supposed to play poker with some buddies but he called it off.

  I was very drunk and very morose and Gary was, at one time anyway, my closest friend, and during the most desperate of days.

  I told him everything. I told him how after I got back from Nam, I found my wife—my first wife—shacked up with some guy, some fucking auto mechanic, who was working under a car when I found him and kicked the jack out. The jury let me off, but I was finished in my hometown, and I drifted until the Broker found me. The Broker, who gave me the name Quarry, was the conduit through whom the murder for hire contracts came, and, what? Ten years later the Broker was dead, by my hand, and I was out of the killing business and took my savings and went to Paradise Lake in Wisconsin, where eventually I met a pleasant, attractive, not terribly bright woman and she and I were in the lodge business until the past came looking for me, and suddenly she was dead, and I was without a life or even identity. I had managed to kill the fuckers responsible for my wife’s killing, but otherwise I had nothing. Nothing left but some money stashed away, that I was now retrieving.

  I told Gary all this, through the night, in considerably more detail though probably even less coherently, although coherently enough that when I woke up the next morning, where Gary had laid me out on the extra bed, I knew I’d told him too much.

  He was asleep, too. Like me, he was in the same clothes we’d worn to that bar; like me, he smelled of booze, only he also reeked of cigarette smoke. I did a little, too, but it was Gary’s smoke: I never picked up the habit. Bad for you.

  He looked like a big dead animal, except for his barrellike chest heaving with breath. I looked at this man—like me, he was somewhere between forty and fifty now, not the kids we’d been before the war made us worse than just men.

  I still had liquor in me, but I was sober now. Too deadly fucking sober. I studied my best-friend-of-long-ago and wondered if I had to kill him.

  I was standing over him, staring down at him, mulling that over, when his eyes opened suddenly, like a timer turning on the lights in a house to fend off burglars.

  He smiled a little, then it faded, then his eyes narrowed, and he said, “Morning, Jack.”

  “Morning, Gary.”

  “You’ve got that look.”

  “What look is that?”

  “The cold one. The one I first saw a long time ago.”

  I swallowed and looked away from him. Sat on the edge of the bed across from him and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands.

  He sat across from me with his big hands on his big knees and said, “How the hell d’you manage it?”

  “What?”

  “Hauling my fat ass into that Medivac.”

  I grunted a laugh. “The same way a little mother lifts a Buick off her baby.”

  “In my case, you lifted the Buick onto the baby. Let me buy you breakfast.”

  “Okay.”

  In the hotel coffee shop, he said, “Funny. . .what you told me last night. . .about the business you used to be in?”

  I sipped my coffee; I didn’t look at him—didn’t show him my eyes. “Yeah?”

  “I’m in the same game.”

  Now I looked at him; I winced with disbelief. “What. . .?”

  He corrected my initial thought. “The tourist game, I mean. I run a lodge near Brainerd.”

  “No kidding.”

  “That’s what this convention is. Northern Resort Owners Association.”

  “I heard of it,” I said, nodding. “Never bothered to join, myself.”

  “I’m a past president. Anyway, I run a place called Sylvan Lodge. My third and current, and, I swear to God, everlasting wife, Ruth Ann, inherited it from her late parents, rest their hardworking souls.”

  None of this came as a surprise to me. Grizzly bear Gary had always drawn women like a great big magnet—usually good-looking little women who wanted a father figure, Papa Bear variety. Even in Bangkok on R & R, Gary never had to pay for pussy, as we used to delicately phrase it.

  “I’m happy for you. I always figured you’d manage to marry for money.”