Hard Cash (2 page)

Breen swallowed, wondering why he was alive.

Then he looked to his right, looked over to where old Sam had swung the shotgun.

Looked over in the thankfully shadowy corner of the back room where the plump body of the barmaid had been tossed, flung, like a life-size inflatable doll with the air slowly seeping out of it. He looked at yellow hair and blood and the rest of what used to be a head with a pretty face on it, dripping down the side of the wall.

“Where’s Nolan?” old man Comfort said.

2

“I KNOW WHO
you are,” the man said, sitting down. He was an executive type, in his mid-forties, wearing a powder-blue pinstripe suit with matching vest and soft-yellow shirt and powder-blue tie, none of which had been ordered out of a Sears catalog. His hair was dark, untouched by gray (or retouched by something else) and had been cut—no, styled—by a barber who considered himself an artist. His eyes seemed the same color as his suit, but in the dim light it was hard to tell, exactly; maybe they were gray. A handsome man, in a cold, sterile, dull sort of way, like an aging male model or over-the-hill pretty boy actor who would never make it in character roles.

Nolan said nothing. He just folded his hands and looked out across his knuckles at the man across the table.

They were in the Pier, a seafood restaurant on the banks of the Iowa River, in the cocktail lounge, a long, rectangular dark-paneled room with lots of black vinyl-covered furniture and some oil paintings of steamboats, ship captains, and Mark Twain at various stages of life. The main floor, above them, was a tribute to the ingenuity of Nolan’s friend Wagner, who had bought the building left vacant when the Fraternal Order of Elks, Iowa City Lodge, moved to newer, larger digs out in the country; the big dining room, with several other, more intimate rooms off to either side, was given a twenty-thousand-leagues-under-the-sea atmosphere via black light and other other-worldly lighting effects that played tricks with Day-glo wall murals. An oddly-illuminated aquarium built into and running the length of one wall furthered the underwater feeling, while menus printed in fluorescent ink glowed the various seafood and steak selections to customers who had by now completely forgotten they were sitting in the old, mostly unremodeled Elks Lodge. The upper floor, a ballroom, was rented out occasionally but otherwise went unused, and the lower, which housed the cocktail lounge, was pretty much the same as it had been when the Elks were loose in it, except for the nautical oil paintings.

The two men had the lounge almost to themselves. It was a cold, snowy Wednesday night, and nobody was there who didn’t have to be: just the help; Nolan, the Pier’s new co-owner and manager; and this man in the powder-blue pinstripe suit, who’d come to see Nolan.

The man leaned across the table, smiling, his teeth so perfect and white, they were either capped or a miracle, and said, “I said I know you.”

Nolan shrugged with his eyes.

“And you know who I am, too, don’t you?”

Nolan nodded.

“Don’t you wonder why I’m here?”

There was something in the man’s voice—what it was, Nolan couldn’t quite pin down . . . smugness maybe, maybe nervousness.

“Doesn’t it . . . bother you, my being here?”

Both. It was both.

“No,” Nolan said.

“No? Why not?”

“Because,” Nolan said, leaning forward himself now, returning the smile, whispering, “when you leave here, a friend of mine is going to shoot you, toss you in the trunk of his car, and dump you in a ravine.” And he leaned back and stopped smiling.

A tic got going at the left edge of the man’s right eye, and they were gray eyes, not blue, Nolan decided.

“I . . . don’t believe you.”

Nolan shrugged again, this time with his shoulders. “Do what you want. All I know is I saw you come in, twenty minutes ago. You sat down and started staring at me. I left the room, used the phone. My friend’ll be outside now. And there’s only the one exit, you know.”

All of that was bullshit, but the man didn’t know it. There had been no phone call. Nolan had left the room—to go up to his office and get a .38 snub out of a desk drawer. The gun was stuck in his belt, under his sport coat, but he of course had no intention of using the thing in a public place like this, even if it was a slow night. And the only friend he had in town who could conceivably help him was Jon, who was as unlikely an assassin as Nolan could think of. Even the bit about the exit was crap: there were three, as a matter of fact.

Not that Nolan wouldn’t kill this man if he had to. And he was starting to think maybe that’d be the case.

Nolan was fifty years old and did not look it, particularly, though at times like this he certainly felt it. He was a big but not huge man, lean but deceptively muscular with a slight paunch one of the few visible signs of his middle age. His hair was dark, slightly shaggy, widow’s peaked, graying at the temples; he had had the permanently dour countenance of a western gunfighter and the thick, slightly droopy moustache to go with it; at the same time he had high cheekbones and narrow eyes somehow suggestive of an American Indian. It was as if somewhere in his ancestry there’d been a Cochise and Doc Holliday both.

He was a professional thief, recently retired but with no pretense of having at last joined the “straight” world. He had been a thief too long to ever think of himself as anything else, and he’d be fooling himself if he tried. He had heard a supposedly true story about a guy named Levitz, who was a very smooth, very successful con man back in the thirties, but who had a complex about being Jewish. One day Levitz was walking down the street with another successful con artist of the era, a hunchback named Lange, and as they went by a synagogue, Levitz said, “Did you know I used to be a Jew?” And Lange said, “Did you know I used to be a hunchback?”

Nolan knew better than to try and con himself; he was a thief and had no pretensions otherwise. Besides, the money he had invested in the Pier was heist money mostly, and if you’re going to build a new, socially acceptable life for yourself on that kind of money, you’re wise never to forget where the foundation came from.

Because forgetting who you were—who you are—could be dangerous as hell.

Take this situation, for instance.

The man in the pinstripe suit, sitting across the table from Nolan, was the president of a bank: the First National Bank of Port City, Iowa, a town of twenty thousand just forty miles southeast of Iowa City. The man’s name was George Rigley. A little over two years ago, the two men had sat across from each other in a similar manner. At George Rigley’s desk. In George Rigley’s bank.

Two years and a month or so ago, Nolan, his young friend Jon, and two others had robbed George Rigley’s bank. Nolan, Jon, and a guy named Grossman had posed as examiners to gain after-hours admittance to the bank, and therefore hadn’t had the luxury of wearing masks. And so it was possible, perhaps inevitable that bank president Rigley would recognize Nolan.

Nolan had considered the possibility, when he chose to live and work in Iowa City just two short years after that robbery, that a problem like George Rigley might crop up. He’d known it was possible for employees of that particular bank to wander into the Pier now and then, and since Nolan had worked extensively in the rural Midwest (where banks were relatively easy pickings, oftentimes not even insured by the FDIC, meaning no FBI), veterans of other Nolan robberies could have possibly turned up as customers at the restaurant and lounge. But he’d been counting on several factors to take care of any such problems—for one thing, the generally lousy memory of most people; people often have trouble recognizing even a familiar face in an unexpected context. And Nolan had been twenty pounds lighter at the time of the robbery, and had been disguised for the occasion: his hair and mustache had been powdered white, and he’d worn tinted glasses. Later, he’d seen the drawings that appeared in the papers, based on the descriptions of the witnesses, and hadn’t recognized himself. So why should any of the witnesses do any better two years later in Iowa City, in an unexpected context?

It was a total fluke, of course, that Nolan had ended up in Iowa City at all. Or a series of flukes, anyway. His connection to Iowa City had been Planner, an old guy who used an antique shop in town as a front for doing what his name implied: planning jobs for guys the likes of Nolan. Planner had been a middleman, a heist broker—an oldtime heist man himself who hadn’t liked the tension and danger of the life but who didn’t know any other so continued dabbling in it into his semiretirement. Planner would use his guise of eccentric old antique dealer to travel around and scout up prospective targets, working out detailed packages to sell to Nolan and a few others like him—that is, a suggested method or methods for pulling the caper off. He also served as a line of communication through whom others in the heist trade could be contacted and with whose help you could assemble a first-rate string.

Two years ago, needing money, the Family hot on his ass and nobody in the trade wanting to share the heat with him, Nolan had turned to Planner for anything Planner could come up with for him. And Planner had given him the Port City job. Seemed that Planner’s nephew, Jon, a kid of nineteen or twenty, was in with a couple of other lads, one of whom was a pretty young bitch who worked as a teller at the Port City bank, which these kids were planning to rob. Nolan decided that having an inside person at the bank was an advantage that might offset the lack of experience and the immaturity of the kids, and out of sheer desperation, he went ahead with the robbery.

And so had begun his relationship with Jon. Jon was a somewhat naive, basically shy kid who had dreams of drawing comic books for a living some day; he was a smart kid, a strong little bastard who lifted weights and all that and had been a state wrestling champ in his high school days. Jon’s only (if overriding) eccentricity was this thing of being a comic book nut: drawing the things, collecting them, talking about them almost constantly. Nolan didn’t mind, figuring everybody had a right to a quirk or two, but in the beginning he certainly hadn’t pictured the boy as someone he’d be entering a long-term partnership with.

But after the Port City bank job, when some Family people caught Nolan with his pants down, it had been Jon who’d hauled Nolan’s ass out of the fire—and a bullet-riddled ass it had been, too. He’d taken Nolan to Planner’s and stayed by him like a damn nurse for six or eight fucking months. Nolan was not the sentimental type, but Jon was no longer just a silly damn comic book freak to him; Jon was a silly damn comic book freak who had saved Nolan’s life, and that was different.

A lot had happened since then. Planner had been killed, shot to death in the back room of the antique shop when some old “friends” of Nolan’s had come calling. Nolan and Jon had evened the score as best as possible, but lost a pile of money in the process. In the meantime, Nolan’s long-standing feud with the Chicago Family finally fizzled out when a new regime came into power; the new Family people even hired Nolan, and he ran a motel and restaurant complex for them for a while. But he soon got a bad taste in his mouth, working for people who were in his opinion just a bunch of pimps and pushers and killers come up in the world. So he’d quit, amicably, and had decided to take the offer made him by another of his old working cronies who was retired and living in Iowa City, a very close friend of Planner’s named Wagner, who was having some health troubles and wanted Nolan to take over his restaurant business for him. Thanks to a heist he and Jon had pulled in Detroit a few months back, Nolan had had the necessary capital to buy in, and now here he was: settled down perhaps too close to the site of a fairly recent bank job, which was a risk, yes, but a risk he’d decided was worth taking.

Now, however, as he stared across the table at George Rigley, president of the First National Bank of Port City, he wasn’t so sure.

And George Rigley didn’t seem so sure of himself, either, at the moment. Nolan’s blunt threat of death had undermined Rigley’s confidence, shattered that slick, obnoxious superiority so many bankers project. For thirty seconds now, the man had just sat there, quietly shaking in his powder-blue pinstripe, the tic at the comer of one bluish-gray eye revealing that he was close to panic.

“You better have a drink, Rigley,” Nolan said. “You look like you don’t feel so good.”

Rigley showed momentary surprise that Nolan remembered him by name, tried to cover it, then went on. “You don’t scare me. I know you won’t kill me or have me killed. Not right away. You’re not a stupid man. Don’t you think I left word where I’d be? Don’t you think someone knows where I am, and why?”

Well, Nolan certainly didn’t know why.

But one thing was becoming clear: Rigley had not just stumbled onto Nolan. He hadn’t just walked in, recognized Nolan, and come over on impulse to confront him. Evidently Rigley had spotted Nolan at the Pier some time earlier, last weekend maybe, when it was so crowded and Nolan wouldn’t have been as likely to notice Rigley as tonight, a slow, snowy Wednesday.