Free Quarry in the Middle by Max Allan Collins

fairly slick. Maybe two and a half minutes had passed between my asking for a ride and my climbing behind his wheel.
    After buckling up and getting all the windows down, to get some fucking air in and make the stench more tolerable, I pulled out and soon was on the old twolane highway along the river, which at this hour was deader than Monahan. The sun was still low when I pulled over where the curving road had just this little gravel apron where you could stop and get out and take in the beautiful Mississippi river view. I did this. The river was so orange with dawn, it was damn near red. I had a look at the drop-off into the trees that lined the riverbank—you couldn’t see the bottom. Must have been five, six hundred feet.
    I stood there waiting and listening but nothing human or mechanical touched my ears—just nature sounds, birds and the rush of water and maybe a distant dog bark. I got in the Buick and drove it to where the front tires were almost over. Then I got out again, reached in and shoved the gear shift into drive and ducked back before the vehicle took me with it.
    Then the Buick and Monahan and the blond kid in the trunk were flying faster than the motor was taking them. The first loud sounds were trees breaking up and leaves getting ripped apart but the explosion blotted that out, the balloon of orange and red and yellow jumping up above the trees, then immediately dissipating, which was good. I’d have hated to see all those trees go. There was another road down there, and with any luck some rural volunteer fire department would get there in time to help out Mother Nature. Monahan and the blond kid were past it.
    I walked down the bluff to the little picnic area where I’d been told to wait, and it felt longer, but only four minutes had passed before the sporty little red Subaru stopped to pick me up.
    I got in and looked over at the woman behind the wheel.
    “I heard it,” Angela Dell said, looking pale and older in the early morning light. “My God, it sounded horrible.”
    “It looked fine,” I said. “Take me to the motel. Want some breakfast?”
    She had coffee. We were in the same rear booth where Monahan and the kid had schemed, yesterday, though she didn’t know that. The irony was mine alone to savor, but I wasn’t bothering, being more interested in the scrambled egg skillet and pancakes.
    Back at the Paddlewheel, last night—or actually, this morning, but in the early pre-dawn hours—I’d asked Cornell if there was anyone he could trust.
    We were still in his bachelor-pad office.
    “I trust my wife,” he said.
    “I mean somebody reliable who wouldn’t mind getting their hands a little messy—second-hand, but messy. I want to get rid of this guy, who’s coming to run you down, in a way that won’t come back on you.”
    “What do you have in mind?”
    I told him if I shot the fucker, we’d have a dead guy—actually two dead guys, counting the blond kid—in the Paddlewheel parking lot to either explain or get rid of. I said that if I could stop the guy but leave him and his buddy in the remains of what seemed to be an automobile accident, that would be less likely to come back to him. With all the after-hours drinking going on in Haydee’s, there had to be the occasional drunkdriving death around here.
    “Yes,” Cornell said, nodding, eyes narrow in thought, “and I know just the place to stage it. You’d have to drive forty miles, but it would put it in the next county, far enough away to provide a cushion.”
    “Yeah, a cushy-poo would be good,” I said.
    “Are you making sport of me?”
    “Think of it as good-natured fun, and not meanspirited ridicule. What I need is a ride back, and I’d rather not have it be you. I wouldn’t think your wife would want to be part of covering up killings. Anyway, your marriage is on the skids, isn’t it?”
    He waved that off. “Our marriage is over, but our business thrives. And we’re heading into a whole new era for the