Quarry's Deal by Max Allan Collins Page A

money. I didn’t give him much. Hell, I didn’t give him any. I put a roof over his head, food on his fucking table, and it was a goddamn good roof and the food wasn’t leftovers by a long shot. I had a sixty-thousand-dollar home, there in Burlington, maid who cooked, kid had it easy. Too easy to suit me. I wanted him to work. He needed to know about that, that things don’t come easy in this life. I didn’t want him to be a lousy whore like his mother, if you know what I mean. You got to learn to earn your money, or at least fucking win it, you know what I mean? I tried to teach him that, and I think he came to learn it and maybe even respect me for it. He worked at a gas station and before you know it he had his own car and he dressed good and I was proud of the kid, really was. The only thing was I should’ve watched him closer. I just couldn’t keep him from that crowd he ran with, and about two years ago it all kind of came to a head.”
    He paused. Sipped, then gulped at his beer. Draining it.
    “I found this bag of grass in his room. Marijuana. Shit is what they call it, and I couldn’t agree more. I showed it to him. He admitted he’d tried it. His friends insisted, he said. It was a pretty good-size bag and I enjoyed emptying the motherfucker down the toilet and flushing it in front of him. I didn’t beat him or anything like that. I’m not that kind of father. But I had to do something.”
    He leaned forward.
    “I looked into it a little and found out the high school Frank was going to was a pusher’s paradise. . . . You could buy anything in that fucking place you wanted, anything you could buy in some fucking Chicago slum. I found out the junior high in town was the same, thirteen-year-old kids smoking grass and popping pills and I don’t know what. There was nothing to do but get Frank the hell away from there. Why not, I figured. What better way. People had been wanting to buy me out since the second week I opened, and business had slacked off a little since the looser drinking law passed in Iowa, so it wasn’t a bad business move getting out of there, either.”
    “So you came to Des Moines again,” I said.
    “Well, we moved to West Lake, that little town by the Barn, first. I bought a house. Frank Jr. enrolled at the new consolidated high school there, for his senior year. I got the Barn going and was making a profit before the dust settled.”
    “Sounds like a happy ending.”
    “I thought it was. Where I fucked up was I didn’t spend more time with the boy. I was busy getting the Barn off the ground, and he was still a little sullen about me pulling him out of high school his last year, away from all his lowlife friends, so I was just sort of leaving him alone. Thought he’d work things out for himself.”
    “How did he do?”
    He studied the flame in the glassed candle. “This time I didn’t find it in his room. He stopped hiding things in his room, after the first time. This was in his car. Another bag of stuff.”
    “Grass again?”
    “I wish it was. Grass isn’t white, though, is it, Quarry? White fucking powder?”
    “Christ,” I said. “Your kid was shooting smack?”
    “Evidently it hadn’t got that far, thank God. The way I reconstruct it, he must’ve got in with some peckerheads from Des Moines who make his friends back home look like goddamn choir boys. I know for a fact he was using marijuana, right along, talked to some kids his age who went to school at West Lake with him, and they all knew what he was into, everybody knew but me. His peckerhead friends must’ve convinced him to turn onto the hard stuff about the time I stumbled in.”
    “What did you do about it?”
    “Same as before, only this time I shoved his ass in the car and drove him to Iowa City and checked him into the Psychopathic Hospital and said, here, here’s my kid, help him, he’s got this drug problem. And later they told me he did . . . but not heroin. I found the goddamn stuff before he