The Last Quarry Read Free Page A

variety, only with a satellite dish. Probably two bedrooms, a living room, kitchenette and a can or two. Only one car—the brown rental Ford.
    My footsteps were lighter now; I was staying on the balls of my feet and the crunching under them was faint. I approached with caution and gun in hand and peeked in a window on the right front side.
    Harry Something was sitting on the couch, eating corn curls, giving himself an orange mustache in the process. His feet were up on a coffee table. More food and a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun were on the couch next to him. He wore a colorful Hawaiian shirt; he looked like Don Ho puked on him, actually.
    In the nearby kitchenette, which was open onto the living room, Louis was fussing as he put the food away—a small, skinny, bald ferret of man, who wore jeans and a black shirt and a white tie. I couldn’t tell whether he was trying for trendy or gangster, and frankly didn’t give a shit.
    Physically, all the two men had in common was pockmarks and a desire for the other’s ugly body.
    And neither one of them seemed to need a tampon, though a towelette would’ve come in handy for Harry Something. Jesus. Imagine having a Burberry topcoat like that and a Hawaiian shirt underneath; they can make gay marriage legit if they want to, but that should be fucking illegal.
    I could hear them talking—muffled but audible through the window, the sound of the television, some old movie, underneath.
    From the couch Harry said, “Chip me!”
    From the kitchenette Louis said, “With your cholesterol? Isn’t a bag of cheese curls enough ?”
    “Don’t mama me!...I wanna Coke, too.”
    “I thought you were off caffeine!”
    “Not when you expect me to sit up all fuckin’ night.”
    Louis was in the living room now. “ I’m the one dealing with her—what a spoiled little cunt she is!”
    Harry laughed; the laugh was like Uncle Fester, too. “That’s why daddy’ll pay up, sweet cheeks!”
    I peeked at them—Louis was delivering barbecue chips and Harry took them with a “Thank you,” and they interrupted their bickering to exchange fond expressions. Then Harry worked at adding a new shade of orange to his junk-food mustache.
    Me, I huddled back down beneath the window, wondering what I was doing here.
    Boredom, for sure.
    Curiosity, maybe.
    I shrugged. Time to look in another window or two.
    Because Harry and Louis clearly had a captive, and a female one at that. That’s what they were doing in the boonies. That’s why they were stocking up on supplies at a convenience store in the middle of night and nowhere. That’s why there were in the market for Tampax.
    And through a back window, I saw her.
    She was on a single bed in the small rustic room, naked but for white panties—a wrist cuffed to a nearby bedpost, sitting on the edge of the bed, bending over in obvious discomfort, crying...a darkhaired, creamy-fleshed beauty in her early twenties, suffering menstrual cramps.
    Obviously, Harry and Louis had nothing sexual in mind for this captive; the reason for her nudity was to help prevent her fleeing. The bed was heavy with blankets, and she’d clearly been keeping under thecovers, but right now she was sitting and doubling over and crying. Right now was a bad period for her any way you sliced it.
    Thing was, I recognized this young woman. Like Harry, I spent a lot of hours during cold nights like this with my eyes frozen to a TV screen. And that’s where I’d seen her: on the tube.
    Not an actress, no—an heiress. Jonah Green’s daughter—“Daddy” was a Chicago media magnate whose name you’d recognize if I was using his real one, a guy who inherited money and wheeled-and-dealed his way into more, including one of the satellite super-stations I’d been wasting my eyes on lately. The Windy City’s answer to Ted Turner, right down to sailboating and baseball teams and womanizing.
    His daughter was a little wild—seen in the company of rock stars (she had a tattoo of a