Quarry in the Black Read Free

close-up photo on top of the paper-clipped documents was from the AP wire service; so were a few others, taken at speaking events. Still others were surveillance shots. The latter had various individuals circled and identified, obviously people on the target’s staff. He had the kind of handsome, well-carved features you find on an African tribal mask or the hero of a blaxploitation flick. No major Afro or sideburns, though, and no flashy threads—dark suit, dark tie, like an undertaker.
    Or a preacher.
    “I’ve seen this guy,” I said, “on the news. Don’t remember his name.”
    “The Reverend Raymond Wesley Lloyd,” the Broker said, enunciating each word as if I were taking notes. Mentally I was.
    “Civil rights activist,” I said, in a thinking-out-loud way. “Kind of getting to be a big deal.”
    “Many think he’s the next Martin Luther King,” the Broker said, nodding, smiling again, pleased that his slow student had some smidgen of knowledge. “But Reverend Lloyd stays unaffiliated with any major activist groups, whether traditional like the NAACP or the more radical SNCC. He’s his own man with his own organization.”
    I flipped through some materials that provided background well beyond what Boyd might have gathered; this was clearly a job that had been in the planning stages long before either Boyd or I had been brought in.
    The Broker sat quietly, sipping his beer, while I skimmed the materials, which included magazine and newspaper clippings. All I knew going in was what I’d picked up from the nightly newscast, when it happened to be on while I ate a TV dinner or something. I vaguely remembered that Lloyd had come up through the St. Louis slums and been involved in drug dealing, but had got religion in prison.
    Upon his release, he became pastor of a small church in St. Louis and built a following; after the church was burned to the ground, Lloyd did not rebuild, at least not the church itself. Instead he struck out as an activist leader.
    According to a
Time
magazine piece, former dealer Lloyd of all the black leaders of our day was the one who spoke out most forcefully against illegal narcotics on ghetto streets. They were “genocide,” he said. Heroin was “a plague upon our people.”
    I put the materials back in the envelope, and tossed it back on the little table.
    I said, “I know I pressured you into revealing who the subject was…but this isn’t for me.”
    His expression was placid. “Why is that?”
    “It’s just not what I signed on for. You made it clear in our very first meeting, going on two years now, that by the time I’d be called in on a job, the person targeted was already dead, in a way. That when somebody is willing to pay good money to have somebody else taken out, well, out that second somebody goes.”
    He’d begun nodding before I finished. “That’s correct. Another way to look at it is that if you don’t take a job, someone else will. The subject will die, whether you are the means or not.”
    One actor refuses a role
, he’d said in that first meeting,
and another steps in. Because the show must go on.
    I gestured to the manila envelope. “But you also said that any target in my crosshairs would be there as a result of their own actions. They screwed somebody’s wife, they embezzled money, they were criminals who got on the bad side of other criminals. Not…not somebody decent, for Christ’s sake.”
    He grinned. I finally made him smile. Really smile. In a coochy-coo of a voice he said, “Why, is that a sense of moral outrage I detect, Quarry?”
    The fire felt hot on my face. “I don’t know that I want to kill somebody because a client doesn’t like black people. Somebody in my crosshairs because they’re the wrong color? Not my deal. Even for twenty-five k.”
    The smile was fading but lingered; he leaned toward me. “That’s something I like about you, Quarry. Unlike most of the Vietnam veterans I work with, you returned home with some