Max Collins - Scratch Fever

Only when she went upstairs to do it, she was gone too long, and Julie followed up after her.

Ron was alone in the room. She was busy undoing handcuffs that were hanging on the bedposts. Her gun, a long-barreled revolver, was on the nightstand. The window was open; cold air was coming in.

Ron seemed startled when she noticed Julie in the doorway.

“Little bastard got away,” she explained.

“I see,” Julie said.

“I don’t know how he got out of these things,” she said, taking the handcuffs over toward the dresser, turning to lay them on top of it, facing a mirror all but obscured by taped-on pinups of Elvis Presley and others.

“Neither do I,” Julie said, and picked up the revolver and shot Ron through the head.

She put the gun in Ron’s hand; with some luck, it would pass for suicide. Ron would just be that sullen lesbian who finally ended it all.

And now Julie was pulling her Porsche into the unlit Paddlewheel lot. Harold was already there; his Phoenix was over by the front door. They were closed Sundays, so there was no problem with staff or customers being around. There was no sign of Nolan, though that didn’t mean anything. She got the little automatic out of her purse. Her suitcase was in the trunk; she was ready to go. All she needed was her money, and no Nolan.

She walked to the front door and unlocked it, glad Harold hadn’t left it open. At least he was thinking. She went in, locking the door behind her. Harold had turned on a few lights, just enough to for her to navigate, and to get a look at some of what she was leaving behind.

She walked through the entryway, past the hat check area and the rest rooms, and stood for a moment at the top of the few steps that led down into the dining room. It was a big room, full of tables with red cloths and candles; a mural of a paddlewheel boat extended along the wall at left; and a huge picture window stood across a room from her — with a magnificent river view — though with this rainy, murky night you couldn’t see much of it now. The room otherwise had been left the natural (though sandblasted) brick of the warehouse it had been; the kitchen was off to the left.

She was proud of what she had accomplished here. When she took over a year ago, the restaurant had barely been breaking even, though of course the casino downstairs (which then as now was open on Friday and Saturday nights only) had been doing a good business. If she hadn’t seen the potential of the place, that time Harold brought her here to eat when she was staying with him after the Port City robbery, she wouldn’t be in this mess, she supposed; she wouldn’t have settled so dangerously close to where she lived before. But she’d seen the potential, all right. And found from Harold that the original owner — a guy named Tree, with mob connections — had moved to Des Moines to open a similar place, leaving this one to be run, rather incompetently it seemed, by hired hands. So she’d approached Tree and his Family friends with an offer to buy controlling interest in the place, and she had really made a go of it. She was, it turned out, a natural businesswoman.

And that was the surprise, really; all those years she was working in a beauty shop, waiting for some rich fucker to come along and make her life easy, it never occurred to her that she might want to work, that a life of luxury was a bore and the challenge of making money was almost as good as spending it.

Oh, she liked eating well and living well; she liked her fancy house and her antiques.

But what she really liked was her role as owner of the Paddlewheel; she liked that as much as the money that came with it. And she wasn’t going to give it up. She’d be back. She would be back.

She headed down the stairs, a stairway enclosed only from the railing down, and crossed the small casino room, with its card tables and several craps tables and one roulette wheel, and slots off to either side, and walked toward the bar, off to the right of which was Harold’s cubbyhole office.

He was sitting behind his desk; the money was on top of it. Stacks of money packets, still in their bank wrappers.

“Put that in something,” she said.

His eyes looked sad, like a basset hound with glasses. “I don’t have anything.”

“There’s a paper sack lining your wastebasket. Use that.”

He nodded, emptied his wastebasket on the floor, removed the sack, and started filling it with the packets of money; he looked like a bag boy at a supermarket.

“What about Ron?” he asked.

“Dead,” she said.

He flinched, but he kept dropping packets in the sack. “What happened?”

“The kid got away. I don’t know how he managed it. He killed her before he left. Put the gun in her hand to try to make it look like suicide.”

“My God. So they’re both loose?”

“I wouldn’t sweat the kid. He’s probably wandering around a cornfield somewhere. It’s Nolan who’s the threat. Okay, that’s good. Hand it here.”

He handed her the sack. The desk was between them.

“I have to go,” she said.

“I’ll miss you,” he said.

“I’ll miss you, too,” she said. Meaning it.

“You will be back?”

“I’ll be back,” she snapped. “I’m no idiot. This is a good gig.”

“Yes. Right.”

She leaned across the desk and gave him a big, long kiss on the mouth. She smiled at him. She really did hope he could live through whatever Nolan might do to him. “I’ll be back before you know it, lover.”

He mustered a pathetic, self-pitying smile. “Do that,” he said.

“Are you going to stay here for a while?”

“Yes. I’m going to work on the books.”

“He’s liable to show up any time. Nolan, I mean.”

“Okay.”

“You have a gun?”

“No.”

“Good I don’t want you to. I don’t want you getting into it with him. You have to be just some poor innocent sucker I involved in this, as far as he’s concerned, understand?”

He nodded.

“Okay, then. Take care of yourself.”

“You too.”

He was still standing behind the desk when she left him.

Approaching the stairs, she heard the sound of footsteps above. Faint, but definitely footsteps. She ducked around the side of the stairs, knelt so that the enclosed part of the stairway hid her. She put her sack of money down. She still had the automatic in her hand.

Somebody was coming down the stairs.

It seemed like a year before the figure emerged at the bottom. He’d been looking around the room, slowly, as he came down, apparently.

It was Nolan, of course.

She wished she had a bigger gun, but the automatic would have to do. She grabbed it by its short barrel and clubbed him on the back of the head with the butt, and he went down.

NOLAN EASED into the Paddlewheel lot. Over to the left a Porsche was parked; a Pontiac was parked up near the front door. No one in either car, apparently. Nolan put the Datsun in park, leaving the motor on, the car turned sideways so that it blocked the exit of the lot. The rain wasn’t coming down hard, but it was insistent, pattering the roof of the car as if the sky was slightly leaky.

“I’m going in,” Nolan said.

“I’m going with you,” Jon said.

“No.”

“Nolan...”

“I know. You’re pissed. You been put through the mill, and you’re pissed. That’s just what I need right now: you — acting like a psychopathic nut.”

Jon didn’t say anything; he affected a sort of scowl; it came off more like a pout.

It was deceptively peaceful, sitting in this car in the rain, rain shadows from the streaky windshield throwing abstract patterns on their faces. Rain dancing on the car roof. Contemplative. And underneath it, a current of something not at all peaceful.