Hush Money (7 page)

There was a reason, he knew, for his going at the project with such manic intensity. Every time something went haywire in his life, he turned to his hobby, to comics, spending more than he should, both time and money. Collecting old comic books was no kiddie game; it was a rich man’s hobby, roughly similar to the restoration of old automobiles but potentially more expensive. He’d gotten in the habit as a kid, when he was living with first one relative and then another, while his mother (who liked to call herself a chanteuse) toured around playing piano and singing in cheap bars. He’d never lived in one town long enough to make any friends to speak of. The relatives he stayed with, for the most part, provided hostile quarters where his was just one more mouth to feed and not a mouth that rated high on the priority list either. So he’d gotten into comics, a cheap ticket to worlds of fantasy infinitely more pleasant than the drab soap opera of his reality. Ever since then, he had turned to comics for escape. He was, in a way, a comic-book junkie. He needed his daily dose of four-color fantasy just as a heroin addict needs his hit of smack and for similar reasons. And prices.

But who could put a price tag on escape, anyway? To Jon, comics were the only happiness money could buy, a physically harmless “upper” he could pop to his heart’s content.

Take yesterday, for example. He’d gone over to see Karen. Karen was the thirty-one-year-old divorcee he’d been screwing for going on two years now. She had brown hair (lots of it—wild and flowing and fun to get lost in) and the sort of firm, bountiful boobs Jon had always hoped to get to know first-hand. She was great company, both in and out of bed, and looked and acted perhaps ten years younger than her age, while at the same time being very together, very mature, mature enough to run a business (a candle shop below her downtown Iowa City apartment) that was making her disgustingly wealthy. Sounds terrific, right? A rich, fantastic-looking woman, with a beautiful body and a mind to match, as faithful and devoted to Jon as John Wayne was to the flag, a woman absolutely without a fault.

Or almost.

She did have one fault. The fault’s name was Larry.

Larry was her ten-year-old, red-haired, freckled-face pride and joy. Larry was the one thing about Karen that Jon didn’t like. Jon hated Larry in fact. Larry was a forty-year-old man hiding out in a ten-year-old’s body. Larry schemed and manipulated and did everything in his considerable power to break up his mommy and Jon.

And yesterday he had damn near succeeded.

Yesterday Larry had been sitting across the room in Karen’s apartment, staring at Jon with those shit-eating brown eyes, saucer-size brown eyes like the waifs in those godawful Keane paintings, and he gave Jon the finger. The goddamn kid just sat there and out of the blue thrust his middle finger in the air and waved it at Jon with a brazen defiance only ten-year-olds and Nazis can muster. Karen was in the other room making lunch. Jon glanced toward the kitchen to make sure Karen wasn’t looking. He got up and went over and grabbed the. finger in his fist and whispered, “Don’t ever finger me again, you little turd, or I’ll break your goddamn finger off and feed it to you.” Jon let all that sink in, then released Larry’s finger and returned to his position on the couch, proud of himself; he’d handled the situation well. Nolan would’ve approved.

Suddenly Larry began to cry.

Suddenly Larry began to scream.

And Karen came rushing in, saying, what’s the matter, honey? “He hurt me! He hurt me! He hurt my hand and called me a little turd, Mommy! He said he’d break my goddamn arm, Mommy!”

Well, Jon had insisted that he hadn’t said he’d break Larry’s goddamn arm, that he’d said he’d break Larry’s goddamn finger, and he had tried to explain his side of the story, but Karen hadn’t believed him; she’d gotten teary-eyed and indignant and ordered Jon out of the apartment, and that was yesterday and he hadn’t heard from her since. He had tried to call her, but every time he did he got Larry and Larry would hang up on him. So Jon had decided to let the scene cool, and he’d patch things up later.

For right now, he’d decided, the best thing to do was drown his sorrows in the comics. Escape to a brighter, more simple world. And so he found himself floating in a sea of Sunday funnies, his fingers dark with their ink, his butt cramped from sitting so long, his back aching from bending over so much, and it was time to get up and have something to eat and sack out awhile.

He made his way out of the room and into the larger outer room of the antique shop. It was getting dusty out there, and he would have to get around to cleaning up a little. He’d kept the shop closed since his uncle’s death a few months ago, and as he had no intention of maintaining his uncle’s antique-selling front, had been meaning to contact some buyers to sell out his uncle’s stock. But he hadn’t got around to that, either. In time, in time.

He went upstairs, to the remodeled upper floor and its pine-panelled walls and thick carpeting. (“I work all day downstairs with the old,” his Uncle Planner used to say, “so I live at night around the new.” Planner had remodeled the apartment-like upper floor four times in fifteen years.) It had taken Jon a while to be able to get some enjoyment out of the pleasant, all but plush upper floor. These rooms had been his uncle’s living quarters, and ever since his uncle’s murder he’d had a creepy feeling, a ghoulish sort of feeling, whenever he spent any time upstairs. But he was pretty much over that now. He went to the refrigerator, got a Coke and the makings of a boiled-ham sandwich, went into the living room and sat in front of the TV and watched and ate.

But TV was lousy, some phony cop show, so when he finished his sandwich and Coke, he switched off the set and stretched out on the couch and drifted off to sleep in a matter of seconds. He dreamed he was sorting and cutting and stacking comic strips, and pretty soon somebody nudged him awake.

“Uh, Nolan?” he said.

But it wasn’t Nolan.

Jon’s eyes came into slow focus, and he saw a mousy little guy with a mousy little mustache, wearing an expensive dark-blue suit that was a shade too big for him, tailor-made or not. The guy’s eyes were so wide set you had to look at one at a time, and his nose was long, skinny, and slightly off-center. The extensive pockmarks on his ash-colored, sunken cheeks were like craters on the surface of the moon, and his teeth were cigarette-stained and looked like a sloppy shuffle. Jon put that all together and it spelled ugly, but it was more than that. It was frighteningly ugly, a strange, sullen, scary face that more than offset the guy’s lack of size, a face calculated to give a gargoyle the shakes.

“I ain’t Nolan,” the guy said. “Where is Nolan?”

The guy’s suitcoat was open, and Jon looked in and saw that one of the reasons the suit was too big for the guy was that the guy didn’t want the bulge of the gun under his arm showing. It was a revolver—a long-barrel .38, like Nolan always carried—and it was in a brown leather shoulder holster that was hand-tooled, Western-style.

“Wake up, kid. I said, where’s Nolan?”

Jon hit tie guy in the nose. He hit the guy in the nose with his forehead. That was a trick Nolan had taught him. Nolan had said that one thing people don’t expect to get hit with is a head. Nolan had pointed out that your head—your forehead, anyway—is hard as hell, a great natural weapon, and it doesn’t hurt you much to use it as a bludgeon, and if you strike your opponent’s weak spots, like the bridge of the nose or one of the temples, you can mess him up bad before he knows what hit him.

The guy toppled backward, one hand clutching his nose, the other grabbing for the holstered gun. Jon was still only half awake, but he lurched at the guy and fumbled toward that holstered gun himself, still not entirely convinced he wasn’t dreaming all this.

The sleepiness beat him. Jon was still fumbling after the gun when he felt something cold and round and hard jam into his Adam’s apple. His hand was down in the empty holster before he realized the guy was jamming the gun barrel in his throat.

“Get offa me, you little fucker,” the guy said. “Get the fuck off!”

Jon got off.

“I got a fuckin’ nose bleed, thanks to you, you little cocksucker. Get me some fuckin’ Kleenex, for Christ’s sake.”

Jon was scared, but he knew enough not to let it show, thanks again to Nolan. He said, not without some difficulty as the gun barrel was still prodding his throat. “Try not to bleed on my carpet, will you? Try not to make a mess.”

The guy shoved Jon away and stepped back. “Fuck you, you little brat. Get me a Kleenex before I blow your fuckin’ balls off.”

“The Kleenex is in the bathroom.”

“Yeah, okay, I’ll be following you, you fuckin’ little shit.”

Jon led the guy into the bathroom, withdrew some Kleenex from the box on the john and handed them over. The guy held them to his nose and, with an orgasmic sigh of pleasure, of relief, lowered his guard just enough to give Jon an opening, which he used to do two things in quick succession. First, he reached up and latched onto the shower curtain rod and brought the whole works down around the little guy. Second, he brought a knee up and smashed the guy in the balls.

That was something else Nolan had advised him to do. When you fight somebody, Nolan had said more than once, you can’t beat hitting ’em in the balls—assuming, of course, they aren’t women.

This guy was no woman. He was on the floor tangled up with the shower curtain and rod doing an agonized dance, screaming to beat the band. The gun was loose and mixed up in the curtain somewhere, and Jon found it and retreated to the stool, where he sat and waited for the guy to get over it. It took a while.

The guy’s nose was still bleeding, blood getting all over everything, the curtain, floor, the expensive blue suit. Jon tossed him some Kleenex, but the guy thought Jon was trying to be a smart-ass and grabbed for Jon’s leg. Jon kicked him in the head. Not hard. Just enough.

When he woke up, the guy put hand on forehead as if checking for a fever and said, “Jesus shit. What makes a fuckin’ little punk like you such a hard-ass, is what I wanna know?”

Jon shrugged, enjoying the tough-guy role to an extent, but not completely past being scared.

The guy sat up, rearranged himself, got the shower curtain pushed off to one side and said, “Look, kid. I didn’t come lookin’ for no fuckin’ trouble.”

And Jon laughed. “Oh, you didn’t come looking for trouble. Well, I didn’t understand that before. Could you explain one detail for me? Could you explain why you didn’t just knock instead of breaking in and scaring the piss out of me?”

“Listen, I came to talk to Nolan, not some fuck- ass punk kid.”

“You should’ve thought of that before you let the fuck-ass punk kid take your gun away from you. Now why do you want to see Nolan? What do you want him for?”

“I don’t even know who the fuck you are, kid. What’s Nolan to you, anyway?”

“I’m a friend of his. What’s he to you?”

The guy shrugged. “He ain’t jack-shit to me, kid. I never met the guy.”

“So why do you want him?”

“Somebody sent me to get him.”

“Get him?”

“Fetch him, I mean. Jesus. Hey, give me some more Kleenex. This fuckin’ nose is still bleedin’.”

Jon did, then said, “So who sent you?”

The guy hesitated, thought a moment; his mouth puckered under the mousy mustache, like an asshole.

“Who?” Jon repeated, giving emphasis with a motion of the .38.

“Take it easy with that fuckin’ thing! You wanna kill somebody? Felix sent me.”

“Felix,” Jon said. “Felix, that lawyer for the Family?”

“That’s right.”

“Then we’re back around to my first question: Why the hell didn’t you just knock?”

“I knocked but you didn’t fuckin’ answer, that’s why! I saw the light upstairs and used a credit card to trip the lock and get in, and all of a sudden you’re hitting me in the fuckin’ nose with your fuckin’ head! Jesus.”

“Well, Nolan’s not here right now.”

“I got to see him. Felix’s got to see him.”