Quarry's Deal by Max Allan Collins

Author:Max Allan Collins [Collins, Max Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, General, Crime, Mystery Fiction, War & Military, Noir Fiction, Quarry, Murder for Hire, Quarry (Fictitious Character : Collins), Quarry (Fictitious Character: Collins), Vietnam War; 1961-1975
ISBN: 9781935797036
Publisher: Perfect Crime Books
Published: 1986-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

22

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TREE PUSHED THE button and pretty soon somebody came to unlock the big iron doors from the inside and we went in and the doors were locked behind us.

Then we were in a vestibule that was really just a continuation of the corridor we’d been out waiting in. A television blared against the wall on the right, and on the left people were sitting on a couch and some chairs, and we were in the way.

So we moved on quickly, in the company of the lanky short-haired girl in untucked blouse and blue jeans who had let us in and was apparently a nurse. She had the expression of a disillusioned social worker: compassion slowly curdling to boredom and worse.

Everybody wore street clothes, except the doctors, and I only saw one of those, briefly. It was an attempt at creating an atmosphere of normalcy, I guess. The large, high-ceilinged room we were now in was another attempt at a normal, even casual environment: couches, coffee tables, easy chairs, lamps, all designed to make you feel right at home. The catch was the furniture seemed to have been picked up at a Salvation Army Store clearance sale, but what the hell. It was better than a snake pit.

Over to one side was a quadrangle of couches where patients lounged, some reading old magazines apparently imported from a doctor’s waiting room, one middle-aged lady writing a letter, a kid in his late teens or early twenties with a guitar in his lap that now and again he looked at but did not play, a gray-haired man doing a crossword puzzle, a woman about thirty with dishwater blond hair and a round face sitting watching the rest of them. Over by the windows were some cardtables, one of which was in use, three people playing Scrabble, a man and two women, all in their forties, the man and one woman playing silently, the other woman rattling on about her children.

The expressions on the faces in the room were mostly blank. Or full of happiness that was false, or sadness that was real. But mostly blank. Empty.

“This way,” the short-haired girl said, with the enthusiasm of a tour guide in a dog food factory.

She led us down a hallway, past a glassed-in office, past a small cafeteria, and into a dormitory area, doors on either side of the hall open and revealing rooms with six or eight beds each in them. We stopped at the last room on the right.

She squeezed out a smile, like that last bit of toothpaste, and said, “Frank’s alone today, Mr. Tree, except for Roger, of course.”

She left, and we went in. The overhead light in the room wasn’t on; it was like an overcast day in there. The beds were covered with dark gray blankets, the word PSYCHO in gray stencil letters across the pillowcases. There were desks wedged in between beds, and some other desks huddled together in the middle of the room, old, scarred wooden desks, but every patient had his own, and in a room that slept this many, that could be important.

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