“No kidding.”

“Yeah-they’re making some kind of Billy Jack rip-off. Some kind of biker movie where a good guy biker kills the shit out of bad guy bikers. This Boot Heel, it’s famous for bikers, you know.”

“I heard. But that was last month.”

“Yeah, but this isn’t real bikers, though they hired a few to do security on the set.” Jerry shrugged elaborately; it took some work. “So what does a movie director do to piss off the mob? But it must figure in somehow. Who knows?”

Mob money funded a lot of movies. And a low-budget biker flick could either be a cash cow, if it were successful, or a money laundry, if it flopped.

“So when does it go down?”

Hitting the director, I meant.

Jerry understood. “Not sure. Soon. But Nick, he doesn’t work like you, you know. He’s a real artist, and I don’t mean to put you down in any way, Quarry, you could take care of business just fine, it’s just…Nick doesn’t do straight, you know…” He made a pointing gun gesture, fairly steady for as blasted as he was.

“What does Nick do?”

He makes the kills look accidental.

“He makes accidents happen. Not vehicular, either, which is, you gotta say, relatively easy shit to pull off. No, I mean, he’s an artist…” Jerry leaned over and his bleary blue eyes widened behind the smudgy granny lenses, and he whispered, as if what we’d been discussing hadn’t already been taboo. “…he sets fires… he fixes balconies to give way…he packs overdoses into ’scription meds…he sends guys down icy stairways…he makes people drown… he even fed a farmer to a fuckin’ wheat thresher.”

“He is an artist. How’s the movie director gonna buy it? I hear film stock catches fire easy.”

Jerry shrugged. “Not my department. Nick and me, we’ll talk, later on-Nick takes a certain pride. Likes to share with his partner. But always after the fact.”