Killing Quarry by Max Allan Collins

Author:Max Allan Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

Charles Vanhorn

is cordially invited

to a Seminar

by distinguished investment guru

Seymour M. Goldman—

“The Cayman Islands Plan”

Lake Geneva Golf and Ski Resort,

Lake Geneva, Wisconsin

The date below was this weekend, coming up.

I showed it to her and asked, “What do you make of that?”

“That’s not far from you,” she said, frowning, “is it?”

I admitted it. Then I said, “If these four names are Vanhorn’s fellow brokers…maybe I’m on the agenda of this seminar.”

“You could be, I suppose,” she said, eyes tight with thought. “But if they are Vanhorn’s peers, they’re ripe for the kind of offshore banking opportunities this seminar is about. So maybe it’s just a…”

“Coincidence? Right. Like the three dead assholes in this mausoleum are a coincidence.”

“We need to get out of here, Jack.”

“Maybe we should try to find a wall safe in here somewhere? Vanhorn’s list of hired guns is supposed to be in it.”

She smiled. “Why, Jack? Do you have safe-cracking prowess?”

“No. Do you?”

“No. We need to get out of here, Jack!”

We got out.

Got out the way we came, and then we were heading back to Wisconsin, the traffic even lighter now. This time I drove. We didn’t talk for the first ten or fifteen minutes, each sorting out this lunacy in the privacy of our own minds.

Finally I said, “Who wanted Vanhorn dead?”

“Could be a lot of people.” She shrugged. “Business he was in, ties he had. Could have been anything or anybody from that world.”

I shot a glance at her. “But it happened now, on the heels of him sending you and Simmons to cap my ass. What the hell, Lu? Would one of Vanhorn’s ‘peers,’ as you put it, want to take him out, to take over his business?”

“Possible,” she said. “If he had told the others about you, and what you’ve been up to, that might make somebody want to consolidate and take over and do things right. I mean, you got away with offering your particular…service, shall we say… for a damn decade. Much of it at Vanhorn’s expense, since most of the Broker’s people went over to him.”

“But all four of the seminar attendees took it in the teeth because of me, too, at one point or another. Not often enough to see a pattern maybe, but.…”

The almond eyes got as wide as they could. “Right. But that gets you killed, not Vanhorn. Any ideas?”

“Oh, well, sure. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to that seminar.”

I was wrong about those eyes—they could get bigger.

“You can’t be serious,” she said. “If they do know about you.…”

I grinned and it probably looked a little crazy. “They may know about me, but they don’t know me. They don’t know what I look like.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“I’m sure enough. I have two choices, Lu. I pack up my marbles and go running off to God knows where, to what? Find a new game? Hide out for the rest of my life? Or I can take in the seminar. Come with me. Don’t you want

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