Quarry's Deal Read Online Free PDF Page A

long distance call: West Lake was one of a number of smaller towns in the surrounding area included in the Des Moines phone system.
    The voice on the other end of the line was female, pleasantly so, and answered this way: “Red Barn Club, Lucille.”
    I bluffed. “Excuse me . . . I was calling the Red Barn restaurant.”
    “We are a restaurant, sir.”
    “Oh, well, I’m from out of town, in Des Moines for the night, and they tell me the Red Barn’s a good place to eat, so . . .”
    “Where are you calling from, sir?”
    And I told her, and she gave me directions, which I followed, and now I was driving along a gently rolling black- top road, looking idly at farms and farmland, wondering where the hell this place was, anyway, and saw it.
    And almost missed it.
    The Red Barn was, of all things, a barn, a reconverted one to be sure, but driving by you could miss it easily, take it for just a freshly painted building where cows lived and hay was kept.
    After the pleasant female voice on the phone, eagerly dispensing directions to the place, I hardly expected such a painstakingly anonymous establishment: The wide side of the barn facing the road had no identifying marks, no sign decorating that expanse of red-painted, white-trimmed wood: No lighting called attention to the structure, and there weren’t any cars around. The only tip-off was the white picket fence gate, which was open and did have a small sign saying RED BARN CLUB. Why the low profile? I wondered. What was this a place where rich guys came to pay to fuck sheep?
    Whatever the case, I was joining the fun. I eased the Opel GT down a wide paved drive beyond the gate, followed around to a large parking lot in back, large enough for several hundred cars, and presently about half full, and on a week night, no less. I parked as close to the door as I could, pulling in between a Ford LTD and a Cadillac. Mine was one of the few cars in the lot without a vinyl top. This place had something, apparently, that attracted a money crowd. Good-looking sheep, maybe.
    There was some lighting back here, subdued, but lighting; and over the door, which was in the middle of the barn side, was a small sign, red neon letters on a white-painted wood field, just the initials: R B C. That was either class or snobbery, I wasn’t sure which. I wasn’t sure there was a difference.
    The interior was a surprise. The lighting was low-key, as I’d expected, but it was a soft-focus sort of thing, gold-hued, glowing, not unlike the sunset I’d just witnessed.
    The girl who greeted me at the door was glowing, too. A honey-haired young woman with a bustline you could balance drinks on. She was wearing a sleeveless clinging red sweater and high-waisted denim slacks and a beaming smile. The smile was phony, but she was good at it. And the bustline was real, so who cared?
    “Are you a club member, sir?”
    I said I wasn’t. I said I was from out of town. Which was a little moronic, since the Red Barn Club wasn’t in a town.
    “Will you just be dining with us, then, sir?”
    “I guess so,” I said.
    And was led up some stairs into the dining room. I hadn’t had time to absorb the entryway I’d been standing in, having been confronted with all that honey-colored hair and teeth and tits, but I did have time to notice a closed door at the bottom of a short flight of steps off on the right from the entry landing.
    But I was going upstairs, not down, and I was in a dining room, a surprisingly folksy one, at that. The decor was western and about as authentic as a Roy Rogers movie. Like the exterior, the walls were painted red with white trim. The dining room was separated into four rows of booths, a row against each wall, two rows side by side down the middle of the room, each booth made out of bare rough wood, picket-fence sides, crosshatched beams for roofs. The rustic effect was offset by plastic flowers on plastic vines twined around the front roof beam of each booth.
    I was in one of the