Quarry's Return by Max Allan Collins

Author:Max Allan Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781803368771
Publisher: Titan
Published: 2024-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

NINE

As Lu drove, I used her cell phone to call ahead to the Hampton Inn & Suites in Bolingbrook, to see if a room was available; one was.

The dashboard lights continued to bathe us in ghostly green. Traffic on the freeway at this post-midnight hour on a weeknight was relatively light, the landscape a gray thing under low cloud cover, though icy sparkles glimmered in roadside snow accumulation. Somehow it was as if we were moving through a world where only we were real and everything, everyone else, an illusion.

The silence, but for the engine purr and tire hum (we’d tired of the Oldies station), began to feel oppressive. Lu was lost in thought and so was I, but neither of us had turned any of that into words.

Finally I asked, “What the hell could make someone in Susan’s homey hometown hire her murder?”

Lu didn’t reply; she had an exit to take.

Turning onto Remington Boulevard, she said, “We don’t know that anyone hired her murder. She’s presumably still alive. Someone hired your murder. And someone—someone else?—kidnapped her.”

I winced, trying to make sense of it. “Hired her kidnapping? Hired it through Conlon?”

“Could have.”

“No, I think he’d have copped to it.”

Her mouth flinched in the otherwise impassive face. Hands tight on the wheel, she said, “Say what you were thinking—I screwed up.”

“I wasn’t thinking that.”

“I held him under too long. Shit. I meant to ask him a few more questions.”

Shrugging, I said, “You just wanted him to take you seriously. And he should have. It got away from you, a little. These things happen.”

“Thanks for saying so, anyway.” Her face swung toward me for a moment, highlighted by dashboard green. “But why take Susan?”

I opened my hands. “My little girl’s a true crime writer. A somewhat famous one, who was researching an unsolved crime or crimes. That much I gathered from her.”

“So what crime or crimes? And again—in Port fucking City? Really? Aren’t there a dozen innocent reasons, having nothing to do with her research, that could take her home? In which case, what could’ve stirred up the need for somebody to grab her, not to mention hire a hit on her father? What, did she run into a bitter old beau at a class reunion, wanting revenge for not getting a little after the prom?”

My laugh was more a grunt. “Is that the best we can come up with?”

“Seems to be.…Here’s the motel…”

We pulled into the Hampton lot; less than half an hour ago we’d been in Naperville. A twenty-buck bribe to the desk clerk got us into the business center after hours.

We were pretty wasted after that eight-hour car ride from Brainerd to Naperville, not to mention our assault on an unfriendly mansion and the mess we left behind. But those words Port City, Iowa, were burning in my brain and Lu understood. She had a smart phone we could have used to look things up, but having a normal-sized computer screen to share would be much better.

I had a

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