Quarry's Blood by Max Allan Collins

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

TEN

I had those several fake IDs with me but no credit cards to back them up, while my Sylvan Lake identity had both. Nothing had made it to the national press about the killings up north, and why would it? And if on the very long shot that somebody in that neck of the literal woods decided I was a person of interest or even a suspect, why would that extend beyond Minnesota state lines? I’d been in Minnesota yesterday and nothing about any of it was in the media there.

This made me comfortable, or anyway comfortable enough, to avoid a twelve-hour car ride from Davenport to Biloxi by buying an airline ticket in my regular identity. A nonstop flight at 2:45 that afternoon would get me there by quarter after five.

This allowed time for a father-and-daughter lunch at Miss Mamie’s, a Cajun-style place near the airport. Susan brought her laptop along and I had her search some names. One was Luann Lloyd. That took a while because Lloyd was her maiden name and she was Luann Crawford now—seemed she was the owner and manager of the Fantasy Sweets, a honeymoon and trysting destination that had been on the Biloxi strip half a lifetime ago. The pictures on Yelp looked much the same and the reviews called the place a hoot. Good for her.

The Bottoms Up, the Net told me, had been in the same location since it opened in 1968. Very little turned up about its owner, Theodore Brunner, except the club itself, those few mentions representing probably half-hearted occasional efforts at raids by paid-off cops.

Susan dropped me off at the Moline airport at a quarter till two. She didn’t come in to see me off, avoiding an awkward moment. Hug? Kiss on the cheek? Handshake? Simple wave? Just turn and go?

Neither of us needed that kind of fucking pressure. So we settled for her giving me the show biz wish: “Break a leg.” And me saying, “I’ll try to make it somebody else’s.”

When I stepped outside the Gulfport-Biloxi International Airport, suitcase in hand, military jacket over an arm, the area’s inevitable muggy weather was waiting. It was in the fifties and should have felt cool, but it didn’t.

I caught a cab, making sure I got an older guy. He was black and grizzled and friendly, but didn’t ask any questions about why I wanted to be taken to the nearest used car dealer who might sell me an acceptable vehicle for under two grand.

It did make him laugh, though. “Didn’t think my damn drivin’ sucked that bad.”

“There’s a twenty buck tip in it,” I said, “if you don’t show me too much scenery.”

But scenery kicked in right away, with trees in and around various businesses, winter-skeletal but for the firs. We passed a Salvation Army thrift shop and a liquor store, then pulled in at a low-slung metal building on Tennessee Avenue that didn’t even bother to say what it was. Beater used cars with prices on the

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