Макс Коллинз: Spree

He bade her sit on the couch again, which she did, where he poured her Old Grand-Dad and she carefully, tactfully, explained her position. Lyle was watching MTV, in headphones. Rick James was on the screen, silently screaming, but this time Cole didn’t hurl a TV Guide . Maybe he was getting more tolerant.

Or maybe he was just preoccupied.

She withdrew from her purse an envelope of cash, which he riffled through, smiling absently; he usually gave her a thick packet of food stamps at this point. He was preoccupied tonight.

“This investigation,” Cole said, tucking the money away in a deep coverall pocket, “what have you heard, exactly?”

“Nothing,” she said, shrugging expansively.

“They ain’t even talked to you yet.”

“Just on the phone. It’s only an appointment.”

“Are you worried?”

“Sure I am. But I don’t see how they can prove anything.”

“Damn,” Cole said. His smile was as rueful as it was pretty. “This has been one sweet little scam — but I’m afraid its days are numbered.”

“This investigation is that serious, you think?”

“Hard to say. I can tell you this — they started registering the mail with the food stamps in it. Anything over ninety bucks gets registered. Recipient has to sign.”

“So your kids can’t go raiding mailboxes anymore.”

“Not like they could. It’s just too damn bad.”

She shrugged. Smiled. “It was fun while it lasted.”

“Sure was,” he said, and hit her on the side of the head with the Old Grand-Dad bottle. She heard the glass break against her jaw, felt her skin tear, a flash of pain, then darkness.

She came out of it, once, for a moment, hearing: “A girl, Pa? I don’t want to kill no girl. I was with her before.”

That was when, for the first time, dying violently occurred to her.

In Nolan’s life, right now, comfort was very important.

He’d lived hard, for fifty-some years, and it seemed to him about time to take it easy. This was the payoff, wasn’t it? What he’d worked for, for so very long: the good life.

Not that he wasn’t still working. He liked to work. His restaurant-cum-nightclub, Nolan’s, nestled in a nicely prosperous shopping mall, was doing a tidy business and he put in, oh, probably a fifty-hour week. He did all the buying himself, and kept his own books, did all the hiring and firing as well as playing host most evenings. No, he didn’t greet his patrons at the door — he had a hostess for that — but he did circulate easily around the dining room, asking people if they were enjoying their meals; and in the bar he’d move from stool to stool, table to table, chatting with the regulars.

Right now he was at home, though, in the open-beamed living room of his big ranch-style house, home on a Friday night (a rarity), a gaunt-faced, rangy man stretched out in a recliner, stroking his mustache idly, watching the reason for staying home on a Friday: a boxing match on HBO, a black guy and a Puerto Rican bashing each other’s brains out on a twenty-seven-inch Japanese TV screen. Nolan’s idea of world unity.

The room around him was cream-color walls and modern furnishings and soft browns. What he wore matched the room, though he hadn’t intended or even noticed it: a cream-color pullover sweater and brown corduroy trousers and brown socks and no shoes, vein-roped hands folded over a slight paunch.

The paunch bothered him, but not much. He’d been a lean man so long that in his mind he still was. Eating the food at his own restaurant had done it to him, and he’d taken up golf to halfheartedly work the budding Buddha belly off. Toward that end, he rarely rode in the cart, walking, trying to make it feel like a real sport.

He was enough of a natural athlete to break one hundred the first month he played, which frustrated the rest of his regular foursome, who, like him, were in the Chamber of Commerce, with stores in or near the Brady Eighty mall. Harris owned a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts outlet, a twenty-four-hour operation, and frequently handed Nolan a free dozen, which didn’t help his weight, either. Levine owned the Toys ‘R’ Us franchise in Brady Eighty. DeReuss, the wealthiest and quietest, was a Dutchman who owned a jewelry store in the mall. After eighteen holes, the foursome would go to the country club bar and drink and talk sports and women. Nolan liked the three men. He felt, at long last, as if he’d joined the real world. The legit world.

He sometimes wondered, in rare reflective moments, for instance between rounds tonight, what his friend DeReuss who owned the jewelry store would say if he knew Nolan had, in his time, heisted many similar such stores, albeit never in a mall. He didn’t know where his three golfing chums had got their financing; but Nolan had done it the good old-fashioned American way: he’d gone out and taken it.

For nearly twenty years, prior to this current respectability, Nolan had been a professional thief.

Jewelry stores — along with banks, armored cars and mail trucks — were his pickings, though not easy. He prided himself on the care he took; he was no cheap stick-up artist, but a pro — big jobs, one or two a year, painstakingly planned to the finest detail, smoothly carried out by players carefully cast by Nolan himself. Nobody got hurt, especially civilians; nobody went to jail, especially Nolan. He ran the show. He always had.

Well, not always. He’d started with the Family, the Chicago Family that is, but not in a criminal capacity. And certainly not in the heist game; in his experience, Family guys themselves rarely got into honest stealing, though they frequently bankrolled it. Unions and vice were where the Family was comfortable doing their stealing, and Nolan wanted none of either.

He hadn’t meant to go to work for the Family at all; he didn’t know that the Rush Street club where he was hired as a bouncer was Outfit-owned until he saw the manager paying off one of Tony Accardo’s cousins.

That same manager was stupid enough to short the Family on its piece of the proverbial action, and left in a nervous hurry one night. Nolan never knew whether the little man had made it to safety or the bottom of Lake Michigan, and he didn’t much care which. All he knew was it opened up a slot for him — soon he was managing the club himself, and still doing his own bouncing, making a name with the made guys, who eventually tried to get Nolan to join the Sicilian Elks himself, only he passed. They resented that, and tried to pressure Nolan into bumping off a guy he knew pretty well, and Nolan balked, and somebody else killed the guy, which somehow led to Nolan shooting (through the head) the brother of a Family underboss. Messy.

That had sent him scurrying into the underground world of armed robbery, which — with the exception of the aforementioned occasional bankrolling, a money source Nolan never sought — rarely touched Family circles. In that left- handed world he’d made his mark, and a lot of money. And, eventually, time cooled his Family problems — he had outlived the bastards, basically, and was now on more or less friendly terms with the current regime. He’d even operated a couple of clubs for them.

But he wanted to have something of his own. He didn’t like having Family ties; it wasn’t his idea of going straight, and straight was where he had always hoped to go, deep in the crooked years.

So here, finally, in the Quad Cities, a cluster of cities and towns on the Iowa/Illinois border, which is to say the Mississippi River, he had settled down and bought his restaurant and gone there: straight.

Funny. It all seemed so long ago — half a dozen guys standing around looking at maps and blueprints and photographs spread out on a motel-room bed or somebody’s kitchen table. Cigarette and cigar smoke forming a cloud. Beer and questions and arguing and bragging. Some really great guys — like Wagner and Breen and Planner. And once in a while a real asshole — like any one of that crazy Comfort clan. Well, Sam Comfort and his boys were all dead now, and their vendetta against him was just as dead. Nothing to worry about.