Quarry’s Blood

One

The Biloxi Strip hadn’t cleaned up its act at all in ten years. I’d been here in chilly early spring that time too, which meant the other strip — the white-sand one between shimmering Gulf of Mexico blue and four-lane blacktop — was mostly tourist free now, barely a bikini in sight. But on the north side of Highway 90, titty bars, cheap motels, tattoo salons, and massage parlors proliferated like mushrooms, the kind you can’t trust.

What had been Mr. Woody’s was emblazoned now with neon script across the face of a former warehouse:

The neon letters were switched on 24/7, but what you saw by day were the painted white letters behind buzzing pink electric ones. Two glass-brick windows in a facade of alternating vertical stripes of pink and black had on their either side angled announcements in red on a field of white:

Backing into a place, almost up to a wire-mesh fence, I parked the chocolate-brown 1973 LeSabre, which I’d bought for a grand-and-a-half cash at a low-end used car lot near the airport. I strolled from lazy sunshine shy of warmth into a cold smoky artificial night where “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” was booming. A bouncer at the door — a big black guy in a black shirt and a gold dollar-sign necklace, his eyes hooded but not sleepy — told me there was no cover. That meant the drinks would be steep.

Nothing had changed much — the small round tables still were black, the padded faux-leather chairs red, a main stage erupted from the facing wall, a secondary stage (just a pole and a little platform) lurked at left. At right was the expected full bar with a female bartender in tuxedo shirt and string tie and tons of red permed hair; a few waitresses in the same uniform but with black minis and mesh stockings circulated flirtatiously. The late afternoon crowd had begun to pick up, the place half full, if you were an optimist, which you were if you thought the girl giving you a table dance was having fun, too.

The clientele divided itself in thirds — enlisted men, junior execs, and college boys, always in groups of at least three. A decade back, I’d have fit into either the first or third categories. Now — in my sportcoat and pastel shirt and skinny (but not too skinny) tie — I probably looked more like I belonged to the middle bunch.

The place seemed vaguely spruced up but not remodeled in any significant way. I hadn’t changed radically either. I was 31, five ten, 170 pounds, my brown hair longer than the GIs and middle managers, yet shorter than the frat boys. Handsome enough to get laid occasionally but no stranger to a strip joint.

I drifted through the fog of smoke like a tramp steamer and docked at the underpopulated bar. The Coke with lime I ordered cost five bucks, which was no surprise; the Annie-afro bartender had a fetching smile and really seemed to dig me. Or maybe it was my keep-the-change ten-spot.

The girls on stage had worked bottomless ten years ago. Whether their g-strings meant the city was cracking down, so to speak, or rather reflected the current management’s sense of decorum, I couldn’t say. If I had to bet, it would be on the latter, as the owner was a former pole dancer who might have come to consider gynecological exhibitions demeaning. The latter may seem unlikely, but not as unlikely as the city of Biloxi growing a conscience.

The dancer on stage — a very pretty Asian girl with pert, real boobs and cascading brown hair — was strutting around to “Slow Ride,” a garden of green growing out of her g-string; she would harvest it when her set was up. College boys sat ringside with their mouths open, baby birds wanting to be fed. The girl on the secondary stage was voluptuous if rather plain, though her overdone makeup strove mightily to overcome that. She had admirers, too. Boob men are a dedicated lot.

I’d been in town two days and inside this club four times. I had spotted the manager — the Lolita of the marquee — only one time per visit. Petite and looking younger than her twenty-eight years or so, she’d been a blonde and was now brunette; she wore pantsuits here, which played down her curves. Even so, it remained obvious the proprietress could have, had she felt like it, still worked the main stage.

She’d emerge from the door marked PRIVATE to talk to whatever bartender was on duty briefly before disappearing behind that door again. Another black harem-style guard was posted there, arms folded with beer-keg biceps.

Even after four visits, she hadn’t noticed me. Each time, I’d seated myself in back, at a small table, in sunglasses, which cut the glare of the red and blue revolving lights in the ceiling. I’d spent a good deal of time outside, as well — in the LeSabre in the parking lot, working surveillance. No, I’m not a cop.

When she’d come out for a chat with the bartender on my previous four visits, no time pattern had revealed itself. Early afternoon once, late afternoon twice, mid-evening once. Tucking away my sunglasses, I was just figuring I’d have to ask the bartender to send my name back to the manager — who, a decade ago, had known me as John Quarry — when the PRIVATE door opened and Luann came out, wearing a purple pantsuit.

She saw me at once.

And froze.

For a moment, her lovely baby-doll features were as blank as a honeydew, if a honeydew had big blue eyes that could widen twice their size. Then she smiled, before going blank again. Apparently her latest trip for a word with the bartender could wait, because she immediately nodded at me — despite all the time that had passed since our last meeting — and curled her finger, summoning me like a child to a spanking.

She pushed open the PRIVATE door and paused, her back to me, waiting while I caught up. The harem guard eyed me suspiciously as I followed her through, but Luann didn’t even glance back as I tagged after her down the cream-color cement-block hall. Behind us, somewhat muffled, “I Love Rock and Roll” began just as the next pair of strippers passed pleasantly by in a cloud of perfume that didn’t quite disguise a secondary aroma of weed. At the end of the hall was a door marked MANAGER, where Luann went in and I followed.

The office hadn’t changed much either, which was a surprise. Framed posters of famous strippers who’d appeared here in the Mr. Woody’s era (Carol Doda, Candy Barr, Fanne Foxe) still crowded the modest space, looming over a metal desk, a few file cabinets, black-leather visitor chairs, and a matching couch, as well as a small fridge. No liquor cart now — she’d never been a drinker, something we had in common.

The last time Luann and I had been in this office, I had killed the previous manager as well as his wife. That is another story, but they were monsters so don’t shed a tear. That information is pertinent only because it explains why my normally unflappable self was pretty fucking flapped.

It’s also noteworthy that the only change Luann seemed to have made since we were both in this office last was to clean the blood off the furniture and walls.

The little doll of a woman, her complexion pale as milk, her pantsuit purple as grape juice, pointed to the couch and I obediently sat. She shut the door, locked it, came over, and sat on my lap.

She put her arms around me and kissed me, as if I were a serviceman returning from Vietnam to a loving wife’s warm welcome. This was ironic in my case, since when I’d returned from Vietnam, my warm welcome had been to find my wife in bed with a guy, which led to my killing him a day later, but never mind. Anyway, I held up my end of the kiss, though it didn’t go anywhere because we both had too many questions.

Her first one, after sliding off my lap into a sideways position on the couch, was: “What are you doing here, Johnny? I didn’t expect ever to see you again!”

“You don’t seem to mind,” I said, smiling as I wiped lipstick off my mouth with a wrist.

“You don’t either,” she said, with a nod toward my tented trousers.

I said, mildly reproving, “I thought I told you to keep a low profile for a few months, then book it the hell out of Biloxi.”

She nodded. “That was the plan. But I got the opportunity to buy this place cheap. And with all that money I had, why not? Anyway, Johnny, back then strip clubs was the only business I knew.”

Which implied she knew more than that now.

I said, “You do seem to be doing all right.”

Another nod. “None of my girls hook. No drugs allowed, not using or selling or anything. Well, grass, backstage, but that’s all. On stage, my girls keep their pants on. Bet you noticed that.”

“I don’t know that I’d call those ‘pants.’”

“They’re called g-strings.”

Luann had never had much of a sense of humor.

I fluffed some of the dark brown hair riding her shoulders. “And here I thought you were a natural blonde.”

“No. I just use to dye it. Pussy hair, too.”

“Guess I never noticed the roots of your evil.”

She frowned. “I did my roots all the time.”

See what I mean? Not that I’d managed much of a joke.

“Well,” I said, “I have to say you do make a mean brunette.”

“I’m not—”

“I know,” I said, lifting a palm, “you’re not mean. It’s an expression indicating you make a good-looking brunette.”

“I never heard that expression.”

“You can make it through life without it. But to me, you’ll always be a blonde.”

She waggled a finger. “If you come back to hang around, Johnny, don’t look for me to get a dye job for you. That caused too much trouble when I took this place over!”

“Why’s that, Luann?”

She smirked in disgust. “Customers would hit on me all the time. Particularly if they knew me from before. They would ask me when was I gonna get up on that fuckin’ stage and do my thing. But that’s not my thing anymore.”

“Well,” I said with a shrug, “you’re as beautiful as ever. And, hey, the club is named ‘Lolita’s,’ and that is the name you danced under.”

She made a face. “That’s just a name. It’s an old movie about an old guy who screws a teenager. I thought you knew movies. Anyway, just because a place is called McDonald’s doesn’t mean Old McDonald is flipping burgers in back.”

I just looked at her. She had a gift for merging smart and dumb in a fashion second to none. And, Christ — that last had been damn near a joke! I felt a warmth about her. She had turned up in my memories more often than most. She was the kind of girl you remember in the shower.

The muffled sound of “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” filtered in.

I asked, “Anyone helping you run this place? Any partners?”

“No. It’s all me.”

Those light blue eyes looked fantastic with the dark eye-shadow and all; when she turned those orbs loose on me, I felt like she was seeing through me, not in the figurative sense, but the literal.

She folded her arms. “I got my GED, Johnny. I took night classes and got an Associate Degree in business. I’m not stupid anymore.”

Really she never had been. But her drug addict mother had sold her to the man whose office this had once been. Luann had been twelve.

“There’s a difference between ignorant and stupid,” I said, “and you were always smart, honey. And now you aren’t even ignorant.”

She smiled. It was a lovely thing. Perfect little teeth white as a toothpaste ad. I could damn near fuck her on this couch right here in this office where she witnessed me killing two people. But even after ten years, I couldn’t quite get past the surroundings — on the wall, Carol Doda was looking at me with a sexy smirk. And this visit was, at the root of its evil, business.

Luann sensed that.

“Johnny, what are you doing here?” She was frowning, but in thought, nothing negative. “Are you still a hitman?”

The girl had always watched a lot of TV. That phony world was where she’d escaped when she was first pressed into whoring.

“No, I quit after about five years,” I told her. I gave it to her matter-of-fact and she took it the same way. “I was kind of fucked in the head after Vietnam.”

She nodded sagely. “Things you did there. Sniper, you said. And your wife screwing that guy. I remember. So you aren’t doing that anymore? Killing people? For money?”

I winced. “Not exactly.”

Frowning in thought again, she asked innocently, “How does somebody not exactly kill people?”

She was not stupid, as I hope you now can see, and she had acquired some education. But I still needed to keep it simple. Too much detail would just overwhelm her. And me.

From the club came a muffled “Thriller.”

“There was a man called the Broker,” I said, skipping Once upon a time, “who gave me assignments.”

The frown was confused now. “School assignments?”

“No. Like — jobs for me to do.”

She nodded slowly, the once-blonde hair bouncing on her purple shoulders. “Oooh. What people to kill. Got you.”

I gestured casually. “He betrayed me and I had to handle it.”

“You killed him.” She was still nodding.

I gulped in air and let it out slow. She was buying what I told her, but somehow I wasn’t — and, shit, I’d lived it!

I said, “I got hold of this sort of list the Broker had of other people like me... other ‘hitmen.’ I thought of a way I could help the people who these hitmen were hired to kill. I had the addresses...”

“Of the victims?”

“No. Of the contract killers. For a while now, I’ve been using the list to select hitmen to follow to their assigned targets... the persons they’re hired to kill... and then I quietly approach those targets and offer my services.”

She closed one eye and stared at me with the other; closing the eye pulled her mouth up on the same side. It was like she’d stopped mid-wink. “You tell them somebody’s been hired to kill them, and then offer to stop it?”

She was skeptical, but had grasped the concept right away.

I shrugged, threw open my hands. “Yeah. That’s pretty much exactly it.”

“How do you do it?” she asked. Both eyes were open now, but the skepticism hadn’t faded completely.

“Well, there’s usually two people assigned to each job. One does surveillance.” She would know that word from TV. “The other, working from information the surveillance guy provides, comes in and does the job.”

“The hit.”

“Yeah. It’s called passive and active — one gathers intel...” She would know that, too. A lot of TV, this girl. “...the other executes the, uh, execution.”

God.

She studied me. I wasn’t sure whether she thought maybe I was lying to her, or possibly putting her on. Or that I’d gone insane. But, interestingly enough, the one thing I didn’t sense in her was any fear.

And the skepticism seemed gone.

Finally she said, very quietly, hands folded in her purple lap, “You’re doing this to make up for what you did before. To settle up. Redeem yourself, like they say in church.”

I touched her folded hands, gently. “No, honey. I do it for money. The intended victims pay me to get rid of the hitmen and then find out who hired it. Try to find out, anyway. That last is the tricky part.”

The blue eyes peered at me out of slits and this nod was barely perceptible. “You have to be a kind of detective.”

“That’s right.” I shrugged a shoulder. “I haven’t always succeeded. But usually? I do.”

“When you find who hired the killing, you kill them?”

“That’s it.”

Luann just nodded, accepting all of it at face value.

“So,” she said, as she sat sideways on the couch, “why are you here? Not to look at the girls shake their booty or get a great big kiss from me.”

“No. I was glad to get that kiss, Luann... but no. I’m here because I followed somebody here.”

Not fear exactly, not even alarm, but the eyes got very big. In surprise. This she hadn’t seen coming.

She said softly, “A hitman.”

“Yes.”

“Followed a hitman here. To me.”

“Yes. To you. To this place. And to that nice house of yours. The passive guy has been on stakeout, watching you.” She’d know “stakeout” from TV, too.

Luann was nodding again. It was as if she’d been told her business needed fumigating or her roof needed re-tiling.

“Well,” she said, “I need your help, don’t I?”

“You do.”

I stood.

She looked up at me with those big light-blue eyes, though they weren’t alarmed or frightened. They trusted me. What next, Daddy?

I held my hand out to her and said, “I need to show you something. In the parking lot.”

She took it, nodded dutifully, and rose.

She led me out into the corridor and back into the club, where “You Shook Me All Night Long” was echoing. Outside, the song became distant. Dusk’s gentle blue had settled itself onto the world. Four college guys went in, laughing, jostling.

I guided her to the LeSabre, backed up against a fence, no car parked on either side. About a dozen vehicles were in the lot but no other Lolita’s patrons were out here, not at the moment anyway.

I walked her around behind the Buick, with only a foot or so between the fence and the trunk. I used the key and the lid rose to reveal two bodies, stuffed in there like clothes in a laundry bag. They didn’t seem like people, just askew limbs and split-open heads, and the edges of the clear plastic tarp under them rose around them like the petals of a ghastly blossoming flower. They smelled bad, coppery blood and piss and excrement.

She regarded them unflinchingly; she did not even say “Ooow” or “yuck.”

What she said was, “How did you get them both in there?”

I shrugged. “Took some doing. I had to put the spare in the back seat. That was the easy part.”

“Putting the spare in the back?”

I shook my head as I shut the trunk lid. “Killing those two pricks.”

I elaborated as we stood there in the darkening blue, the smell floating mercifully away on an ocean breeze. “I had to do it one at a time, at different places, over several days... but it’s done. And I’ll dump this car tonight on some back road.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“But like I said... that’s the easy part. Figuring out who sent them is where it gets difficult.”

She shrugged, shook her head, the breeze taking the brown locks gently. “Not really.”

“No?”

“I know who sent them.”

We went back inside where the strippers who’d passed us in the hall were working the two stages to “What I Like About You.” In her office, we discussed the details, including that I didn’t expect her to pay me for my services but would appreciate having my expenses covered.

“I can do better than that,” she said.

Two

The Biloxi HQ of the Dixie Mafia hadn’t changed much, either. Several blocks from Lolita’s, the pale pink brick tower still announced itself in pink neon—

—next to the winking green neon outline of a palm tree. A tower among dinky, dingy neighbors, the Tropical had a corner double lot all to itself on the four-lane blacktop beyond which Gulf waters glimmered with the ivory of a nearly full moon.

The parking lot, as befitting off-season, was nearly empty. The windows onto the motel restaurant, the Dockside, betrayed only a handful of diners in booths. I parked the LeSabre, which still contained its trunk of two corpses and no spare. I had come straight from Luann’s. Under my sportcoat was something I hadn’t taken with me into her strip club: my nine-millimeter Browning automatic in a custom shoulder holster that allowed the weapon to ride with a noise-suppressor that doubled the length of its barrel. The jacket had been specially tailored for me as well. I was the shit.

Or was I just a shit? I was flying by the seat of my pants, improvising perhaps out of affection for Luann.

I went into the lemon-and-lime pastel lobby with its wicker furniture and potted palms and ambled to the front desk, where an attractive young blonde in a jacket that matched the lobby and lipstick that matched the jacket, smiled and asked me if I was checking in.

“Not just yet,” I said. “I need to talk to Mr. Brunner. Alex Brunner? I believe he’s in the penthouse.”

She stiffened just a little, the smile turning brittle. “Are you on the list, sir?”

“Depends on the list. We’re doing business. I’m from Atlanta, just got in. Do you have any vacancies, by the way?”

Judging by the parking lot, they had nothing but vacancies.

“We do, sir. But as for Mr. Brunner, if you could give me your name...?”

“I’ll check in after my meeting, but for now, do you have any stationery I could use? To send a note up to Mr. Brunner?”

Her frown was barely perceptible as she passed me a pen and a sheet of Tropical letterhead with an envelope. I wrote on it:

I didn’t sign it, just folded it and inserted it in the envelope, on which I wrote “Alex Brunner” and sealed it shut. I handed it to her.

“Send it up, would you?”

“Of course,” she said.

This is where, in a James Bond movie, she would have smiled at me promisingly and maybe licked her lips. But that didn’t happen and, by the time she’d handed my note off to a bellboy, I’d entered the restaurant and she’d forgotten my existence.

I was assigned a booth, where another good-looking young woman who didn’t give a diddly damn about me took my order for a Diet Coke. It came right away — the place really was dead — and I sat and sipped occasionally and studied the ocean, enjoying its shimmer, thinking about how good it would feel to dive into, if it weren’t so fucking cold out.

Beyond a description given me by Luann, whose verbal skills were limited, Alex Brunner was a cipher to me. But he fit what she’d told me: “Big. Big belly, big head, black hair, bushy eyebrows, bushy mustache, ugly.” She hadn’t been wrong.

Brunner likely operated out of an office in the penthouse digs that took up the entire top floor — anyway, his predecessor had, a guy I drowned in a hot tub in a hotel, but not this hotel. Again, another story, and another monster. Just call me Van Helsing.

This guy looked like another monster, too. Features kind of blown out, like that guy in the old creature features they hired because he had acromegaly. Not quite that gross, but gross enough, tiny eyes, bulbous nose, thick lips, wealth of pockmarks. His jaunty red-with-white floral-patterned Hawaiian shirt and baggy tan surfer pants didn’t make up for it. Hey, it was after business hours.

He spotted me right away. The restaurant opened off the lobby and he stood on the borderline with a couple of bodyguards, also in Hawaiian shirts and surfer pants. It was like Don Ho and his backup band.

He raised a hand to them, as if he were about to take a solo, and moved past the hostess at her station without a nod or a look. She had a look for him, though, if behind his back — like this guy was a spoiled kid who had the run of the house and could get away with murder. Maybe literally.

“The fuck are you?” he asked. His voice was breathy and high, and it kind of spoiled the effect.

“You really want a name, Mr. Brunner?”

He slid in on the other side of the booth. His eyes were the only small feature on his big face, little black things like buttons sewn on a rag doll.

“Well?” he said.

We were in the first booth. The booths behind us were empty except for one, way down. No tables. The counter was home to a GI flirting with the waitress leaning over it on an elbow.

“I’m well aware,” I said, “that I’m not supposed to contact you.”

“Are you.”

“But like I said in my note — there’s been a hitch.”

“Tell me.”

“Do you know how this works?”

“How what works?”

“How somebody comes in and looks things over, and then somebody else comes in and does the job?”

His nod was slow. The sewed-on buttons became black slits.

“And how,” I continued, “the somebody who looks things over, in advance, hangs around sometimes, as backup? In case help is needed?”

Another slow nod.

“Well, help was needed,” I said. “Really, everything went to shit. Normally, I would just get the fuck out of Dodge. That’s S.O.P.”

“Is it.”

“But we have a situation here. But also an opportunity.”

“Do we.”

“The guy I work with? Somebody on staff with the woman got wind. He and the guy I work with kinda... got into it.”

“What the fuck?”

I made a face. “I’d rather not talk in here.”

“It’s just a restaurant, for fuck’s sake.”

“I hear certain people own it. Which means who knows what’s wired for sound in this place? That GI over there, hitting on the cute waitress? Is he really a GI or somebody else who works for Uncle Sam? How ’bout that honeymoon couple toward the back? Are they really head over heels or maybe looking to fuck some heel over?”

The small black eyes had traveled to both my topics of conversation, fairly subtle about it. Now the big ugly head began to nod again, but something had changed.

“Talk about this upstairs,” he said.

I wasn’t anxious to do that. That penthouse would be home to those two bodyguards and, likely, more. I had something else in mind.

“Let’s go out to the parking lot,” I said. “Something you should see.”

“Is there.”

I shrugged. “You got your boys handy. It’s the great out-of-doors. What’s to fear?”

“I look afraid?”

“I don’t know. With some people it’s hard to tell. Shall we?”

He took in a bushel of air and held it a while, and when he exhaled, it was like a foul wind had come up.

“Show me,” he said, sliding out and immediately looming.

Forget what I said about the high breathy voice. Actually, it came off kind of scary. This big man, big in size, big in the Dixie Mafia, might himself be the answer to, “What’s to fear?”

I finished my Diet Coke, left four dollars, and led him through the pastel lobby out of his own hotel into the parking lot. The two bodyguards lingered like a bad smell as we exited into a cool night where the moon was a high-wattage affair, higher than the parking lot lighting, anyway, which seemed designed for necking and drug deals.

Just as I had with Luann, I walked him behind the LeSabre and opened the trunk and gave him a gander.

“Jesus,” he said with no emotion at all.

“Here’s the thing,” I said, like a used car dealer demonstrating how much you could stuff in a trunk. “I wasn’t the shooter. I was the stakeout dude.”

He was staring at the tangle of dead men in the trunk, the plastic tarp’s edges sticking up around them like frozen flames. His eyes traveled to me. “No trigger work?”

“I done my share. We’d trade off, Jimmy and me. That’s Jimmy there, with the crewcut and Gandhi dot in his forehead. This other guy worked for the woman. Maybe you know him.”

Brunner shook his head. He didn’t. Of course he didn’t.

I picked up the thread: “So, yeah sure, I can work active, which is why I’m showing you this and you aren’t just hearing about it on the phone from my middleman.”

“I’m listening.”

I put a chummy hand on the bony boulder of a shoulder. “When I was gathering intel, I spent time in that woman’s poon palace. I met her. Talked to her. Got up close and personal.”

“How close? How personal?”

“Not that close. Not that personal. But enough of both for our purposes.”

His forehead clenched. If he’d been thinking any harder, it would have hurt both of us. “She don’t know about this?”

“No. Her man stumbled onto Jimmy and they tangled asses, permanent. I don’t figure she knows anything about it, has no idea she’s a target, unless she’s wondering what became of her employee here, and it’s only been a few hours.”

The eyes were tiny, tiny black slits now. “You could take her out?”

“You mean, would she date me?”

He just looked at me. Even Luann had a better sense of humor.

So I said, “Yeah. No problem. She thinks I’m cute. Still... it’s kind of a mess.”

He glanced down and grimaced, as if the smell had just registered. “Shut that thing.”

“Not what I meant,” I said, but I closed the trunk lid. “Look, the job got interrupted. The final payoff hadn’t been made yet, as you know.”

This was a bluff. Back in the Broker days, Broker would get a down payment, and — with no contact between the hit team and the client — a money drop would be arranged for a day or so before the job. Again, no contact. The client was guaranteed a refund if for some reason the job didn’t go down as promised.

Brunner didn’t contradict me. In fact, he said, “I have the money upstairs. I can pay you now.”

“Cash?”

He nodded. “Five thousand.”

“You go on up and get it. I’ll wait here.”

Which was my plan, part of it anyway. What I wanted was to talk this prick into fetching the money, then get him in the LeSabre and supposedly go and help dispose of the bodies. Making that part of the price of doing business. Brunner and the two in the trunk winding up a trio in a ditch in the boonies was the goal. Three peas in a blood-soaked pod.

But that wasn’t coming together. And it had been a little half-assed, admittedly, and in any event Brunner wasn’t playing.

“You come up,” he said.

Goddamnit. This was what I got for trying to think on my feet. If I’d taken the time to dump the two bodies, I might have filled that trunk with Brunner by now. But with two dead guys in there already, there wasn’t room for his fat ass.

So suddenly Brunner and I and his two bodyguards were in the elevator heading up to the eighth-floor penthouse — doing so required a key — with my expectation being to find hot-and-cold-running gun thugs. To my pleasant surprise the wood-paneled vestibule where ten years ago two hoods had been posted was empty of humanity, even of a questionable variety. Maybe these two bodyguards were the missing sentries.

But for now, at least, they followed my host and me into the suite, down a doorless hallway and into the high-ceilinged spacious living room with its walk-in kitchen off to the right. Nothing had changed, including the modern furnishings that turned their nose up at the Tropical’s pastels, substituting various shades of wood and touches of dark red and dark blue.

A big-screen TV was going — Remington Steele was on — and the two bodyguards wandered over and took comfy chairs in front of it while that red-and-white Hawaiian shirt led me down the hall to what had once been his precursor’s office.

Finally something had been remodeled, the walls a high-end dark-wood paneling now with several framed hanging items, predominantly a big watercolor of the Tropical Motel facing a Godfather poster. These wiseguys loved to romanticize their stupid-ass selves. Looming over a huge mahogany desk was a framed cover of Gulf Coast Living displaying Brunner at the wheel of a cabin cruiser, showing off a big smile that hadn’t come up in our conversation so far.

He turned away as he lifted the framed magazine cover off from its hook, set it on the floor, and began working the dial on the small wall safe. He started extracting packets of money, which he tossed on the desk, five of them, each banded $1,000. Twenties, fifty per packet.

I said to his back, “Kind of a pity, dusting such a nice little piece of ass. She’s no raging bitch or anything. But I suppose you got your reasons.”

“She wouldn’t sell out,” his back said.

Then he turned and finally shared that big smile. He tossed another grand on the desk, the door to the safe still yawning open, its round mouth looking surprised by the invasion.

“For your trouble,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said and shot him in his left black-button eye. It took just long enough to let him register surprise before flopping onto the desk, shaking it like the deck of his cabin cruiser when he bagged a big fish. Or anyway so I supposed. I live on a lake but I don’t fish.

The two bodyguards out there wouldn’t have heard the cough of the silenced Browning, so I took my time looking around, though of course I kept the nine mil in one hand. I found an empty briefcase in a closet and loaded in the six packets of money, then brought out another fifteen identical $1,000 packets from that clown car of a little safe. I helped myself to some documents just because they were there. You never knew.

I left the dead man and the open safe behind, to make sure the cops read this as a robbery, and went back up the hall to the living room, where Pierce Brosnan was on the TV being debonair.

“Good show?” I asked them.

One, sitting in a Barca Lounger, shrugged, while the other in a comfy armchair, with a beer can in his fist, said, “Kinda corny.” I shot them in that order, in the head. They were close enough to the picture window onto the beach to splash the windows like two big bugs had flown into it.

The same blonde was at the front desk as I exited.

I didn’t rate a glance.

Three

Luann lived on Father Ryan Avenue, one block from the beach highway, in a cozy area of small homes dating to the Depression and just before and after. Live oaks arched over sidewalks and streets, lending a spooky charm, particularly in the dead of evening. When we rolled by cross streets, the Gulf and its moon-tinged shimmer tickled the eye.

“Who was Father Ryan?” I asked her.

She was at the wheel of her brown Toyota Corolla sports coupe, which went well with that brunette hair. “A Confederate priest, my neighbor said. And a poet, too.”

There was something poetic about her house, as well, when we pulled into the drive of a Spanish Mission-style place that looked like Zorro’s summer cottage or anyway Don Diego’s. The cream-color stucco exterior had the usual red-tile roof, parapets and carved stonework, and was taller than any one-story house had any right to be.

I have no intention of boring you with the unpleasant details of how I called Luann from a convenience store and she, expecting the call, joined me right away, leading me into the countryside to a properly secluded area to deposit the LeSabre and its surprise package in the trunk. I will only say that she pitched right in and didn’t worry about getting anything unpleasant on her purple pantsuit.

Anyway, now we were entering her 1920s-era home with its plaster walls and vaulted ceilings and leaded glass windows and new furniture that ran to overstuffed chairs, Tiffany-style lamps, red-and-black flocked drapes, and other accouterments whose vaguely San Francisco whorehouse flavor might seem appropriate to someone raised as a teenage prostitute.

“I need a shower,” she said, and disappeared somewhere.

I put the briefcase of money on the floor by a chaise and did the same with my overnight bag retrieved from the LeSabre. Then, like Ponce De Leon looking for the Fountain of Youth, I discovered the kitchen, a small and serviceable space all but filled by a round Formica-top table. Only a few staples were in the small refrigerator, but that included several cans of Coke, and I helped myself to one.

I sat listening to the shower drumming somewhere nearby and remembered what she looked like naked. I have a very good memory for that kind of thing. When she walked in, barefoot in an oversize emerald Chenille bathrobe, her head was lost in the big pink towel she was rubbing her hair dry with.

“You want a shower?” she asked.

“I could use one.”

“You’ve got clean things with you, don’t you?”

“I do.”

She stopped toweling and looked at me with her wet hair in ropy strands, making her look like a lovely Medusa. “Go on then.”

I did. I took a nice warm shower, bordering on hot, with the watery needles having their way with my aching muscles. I washed my hair and was toweling it, otherwise naked, when she stepped into the bathroom, with its art deco fixtures and subdued lighting, but she didn’t have a towel.

The hourglass figure hadn’t changed at all, nor the creamy complexion, not the tip-tilted handfuls with only the teasing triangle of hair different, brown now, not honey blonde. I forgave her. Visibly.

She had a crooked smile going that said maybe she did have a sense of humor after all, or maybe she was working on one.

She said, “Let’s get this out of the way, shall we?”

I won’t describe the bedroom to you, beyond the giant mesquite Mediterranean headboard with its forged iron straps and iron clavos. The rest is mostly a blur, though I do remember asking her if she wanted me to use something and she said no. She was on the pill. I realized birth control wasn’t the only concern, well aware she’d been a hooker at an age when I was still watching The Mickey Mouse Club, wondering why Annette appealed to me.

But sometimes I don’t play it safe and this was one of those times.

She sat me on the edge of the bed, then knelt before me as if she were praying in this mission of a house, but she wasn’t. She was expert at it, starting slow and going deeper and faster and deeper, but sensing just when to stop.

Then she crawled up past me onto the bed on her back and spread her arms and her legs and the pink flower between her legs wanted plucking. I spent some time down there and she was moaning to where it almost sounded like pain.

“Enough?” I asked, looking up at her.

“Little more please. Been a long time. Gonna be tight.”

“I’m okay with that.”

“Little more please...”

Who was I to argue?

“Okay!” she said after a while. “Oh-kay. Should be fine. Come on, baby. Come on...”

She was tight all right but smooth and we took it slow and tender before the build-up. While I’d remembered her body, I’d forgotten how taut her nipples got and how flushed her cheeks became and how her eyes rolled back when she neared climax, and just how shudderingly, completely she would come.

I rolled off and we lay on our backs, out of breath, staring at the ceiling.

“You’ve been practicing,” I said.

“No I haven’t. I... I tol’ you it was a long time.”

“How long?”

“Since us.”

I frowned at her. “What do you mean, since us?”

“Since we did it. In that room at the Tropical with the hot tub.”

I rolled on my side. Leaned on an elbow. “You’re kidding.”

She stayed on her back. “You said I don’t have a sense of humor. How could I kid?”

“Why on earth would you not...? Lovely girl like you.”

She shrugged. Her nipples were soft again, nicely puffy. “Because I had my fill of fucking. I had to, for years and years, because that son of a bitch Mr. Woody owned me.”

“But I’m different?”

“You made me come,” she reminded me.

That’s what she’d told me in that hot tub room after she’d been provided to me by her boss as a fuck bunny. That I was the only man who had ever made her come. I told you I was the shit.

“Baby,” I said, “you don’t... don’t love me or anything, do you?”

“Don’t be so full of yourself!”

I also said, if you’ll recall, I might be a shit.

“It’s just, I had my fill of staring at ceilings,” she said as she stared at the ceiling. “And in my business now? All I see is how awful men are. How they think with their dicks. And paw the girls. You have any idea how many customers I’ve had to have my boys beat up in the parking lot?”

“I’m going to assume that’s a rhetorical question.”

“I don’t know what that is.” She glanced at me. “You want some eggs and bacon? It’s all I got in the house.”

I cooked the bacon and she scrambled the eggs. She was in a purple Victoria’s Secret nightie she threw on, and I was in my underwear, which was Fruit of the Loom. We were comfortable with each other. A decade ago, we spent a lot of time together. Almost a week.

“How much money you bring back in that briefcase?” she asked, not sounding like she cared all that much. All she’d asked me about Alex Brunner was, Is he dead?

“Twenty grand,” I said.

“You take ten.”

“Deal.”

We ate at the Formica-topped table.

“You could stay on,” she said.

“Probably not a good idea.”

“Why?”

“I was seen tonight. Someone might recognize me. I was here for over a week, ten years ago. Too risky, and anyway, I don’t see a strip club in my future, except maybe as a customer.”

That amused her. She didn’t laugh, but she smiled a little and made an unidentifiable sound at the back of her throat.

“Nobody’s gonna recognize you,” she said.

“Why not?”

“You’re just too average.”

“Thank you.”

She spooned scrambled eggs. “No, really. I see a hundred like you every month.”

“I can’t take all this flattery.”

A smirk. “I know about sarcastic now. And you are one sarcastic son of a bee.”

“So I’ve been told. But you’re right. It’s part of why I’m still alive.”

“What is?”

I shrugged. “That I don’t look like anybody special. If a police sketch artist drew a description of me, from an eyewitness? It would look like your goddamn next-door neighbor.”

“My next-door neighbor is a bald old fat guy.”

“You know what I mean.”

She nodded. She actually did. She’d made progress over time.

“You’ll stay the night?” she asked.

“Pretty much have to. I don’t have wheels. I’ll have you drop me at a used car lot, someplace sleazy, in the morning.”

That sounded reasonable to her.

In the living room, we went through the contents of the briefcase. She perched on the chaise and I sat, Indian-style, on the hardwood floor.

“I miscounted,” I said. “It’s twenty-two thousand.”

“That’s eleven each.”

“You did get a GED.”

That made her laugh. Actually made her laugh!

I was going through the documents I’d scooped up from that safe. A will, a couple of deeds, some bonds, but also two floppy disks.

“You have a computer?” I asked.

She nodded and led me to a spare bedroom that had been set up as a modest home office. She did the books here, she said. Some things couldn’t get done in a backroom with a strip club out there wanting attention.

I took the chair at a little desk and she leaned in and booted the computer. Then I looked at the first floppy and brought up a list of addresses.

“I think I know what this is,” I said, eyes wide, mouth yawning but in no way tired.

“What is it?”

“Jesus. These are names and addresses and, fuck, income tied to specific businesses... like Mr. Woody’s.”

“So?”

“Let me look at this other one.” I got the other floppy going. “These names mean anything to you?”

“Cops and local politicians,” she said, shrugging a little.

“Oh boy. Payoffs are listed. Names and dates and figures... shit fuck hell.”

I ejected the floppy. I was seated and she was looking over my shoulder. I felt like I was a passenger in a car driven by somebody who didn’t know a truck was bearing down.

“What?” she asked.

I looked at her, hard and direct. “This could put dozens of people in the slammer, my little dove. That floppy is the Dixie Mafia in all its glory. This floppy is local corruption a la mode.”

“What’s ice cream got to do with it?”

I stood and I held her by the biceps, gentle but firm. “You have a choice,” I said.

“Like you did, when you had to decide whether to kill me or not, that time?”

I shook my head. “That choice was nothing compared to this. These computer disks can get you killed or they could make you rich, or anyway get you killed trying to get rich. So you have options.”

Her face remained blank. I might have told her the grass needed cutting. “What are they?”

“You could give them to the FBI.”

She frowned, just a little. “That’s what would get me killed.”

“One of the ways. You could sell them to whoever’s the most powerful person on each disk — there’s no overall Dixie Mafia boss, but you probably know which one or two or three hold the most sway.”

“But they might say they’d pay me and then kill me instead.”

“Right. Or you could destroy those fucking floppies and forget all about them. I forgot about them already.”

“No you didn’t.”

“You’d be surprised.” I nodded toward the disks. “I want nothing to do with the things.”

Her frown deepened. “You think I should just get rid of them?”

“Blackmail is always a bad idea. The worst idea is blackmailing those people individually.”

“Why?”

“Some would play along, but all it would take is for one to say the hell with it, and torture you till you give the disks up and then...”

She nodded. “Kill me.”

“Right. And I don’t have to tell you that there are some terrible people out there willing to kill other people for money.”

We didn’t speak of it again. In the morning we skipped breakfast — we’d already had bacon and eggs last night — and she drove me to a different used car lot where I spent a grand and change from my share of the briefcase money on a green 1975 Mustang with enough tire tread to get me back to Wisconsin. I kissed her, and it was kind of sweet, but as I headed out of Biloxi, I was afraid for her.

But I didn’t find out what choice she’d made until much later.