Макс Коллинз - Spree

The black boxer won, and Nolan was yawning through some situation comedy, of the cable variety — stale pointless jokes and naked female breasts, not pointless — when the phone rang. He used the remote control to turn down the TV sound and walked to the kitchen where the phone was on the wall.

“Nolan,” he said.

“Hi. Is the fight over, or am I interrupting?”

It was Sherry. The hostess at his restaurant. She lived with him, a beautiful twenty-two-year-old California blonde from Ohio, young enough to be his daughter. But she wasn’t.

“The fight’s over. You’re not interrupting anything. How’s business?”

“I love you, too. Business is fine. You wouldn’t want to come down and work a few hours, would you?”

“Need me?”

“I always need you. But at the moment I’m thinking of the bartender.”

“Crowded,” he said, smiling.

“There’s money in your voice,” she said. “You really love the stuff, don’t you?”

“What else is there?”

“Me.”

“You’re in the top two.”

“You really know how to sweet-talk a girl. Get down here, will you? The regulars are asking for you.”

“It’s nice to be loved.”

“So I hear,” she said, hanging up, but there was no real bitterness in her voice. It was just a game they played.

She knew he loved her, or at least he assumed as much. That is, assuming he loved her. He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure what love was, exactly, except something in movies and on TV, and on his TV right now, sound down, were some girls soaping themselves in the shower, which wasn’t love exactly, but was close enough.

He showered, too, alone, and shaved and splashed on Old Spice, an old habit, and put on a blue suit and a dark blue tie and a pale blue shirt, all of them quite expensive. He bought them locally, at the mall, where he got a discount; and he only wore such clothes to his restaurant, enabling him to deduct them.

Nolan loved money so much, he hated to spend it. He knew it was ridiculous — he wasn’t going to live forever, and these were the years where he was supposed to be enjoying himself, and, damnit, he was. He’d bought this fucking house (he only thought of it as a “fucking house” when he remembered what it cost him) and had expensive toys, like his silver Trans Am and several Sony TVs and stereo equipment and the sunken tub with whirlpool and like that. But he knew each one of the toys had taken Sherry’s nudging to get bought.

He smiled, thinking of her, slipping into a London Fog raincoat, twenty percent discount from the Big and Tall Men’s shop at the mall. He’d met her at the Tropical, a club he ran for the Family a few summers back. She was a waitress and he’d fired her for spilling scalding hot coffee in a customer’s lap. Then she sat on his, and they wound up spending the summer together. When she wasn’t in a bikini, poolside, she was in his bed and wasn’t in a bikini.

He pulled the silver sporty machine out of the garage, closing the overhead door behind him with a push of a button, wondering if some smart crook would come through the neighborhood trying various frequencies on some homemade open-sesame doohickey till he got it right and got in. More power to him, Nolan thought, and besides, my alarm will nail the bastard.

He glided down the hill — it was a cold clear November night — and turned left, toward Moline, coasting along a stretch that alternated between parks and commercial and residential, a Quad Cities pattern. He was still thinking about Sherry. Still smiling.

What had started, that one summer, as two people using each other — a cute lazy cunt who wanted to stay on the payroll and was willing to do it by screwing the boss, lecherous dirty old man of fifty that he was — had turned into something else. Something more.

They liked each other. The sex was good, and the summer was over too soon. He had asked her to stay on, and she almost had, but her mother had a stroke and she had to go home, so they parted company, reluctantly, and he promised her she’d hear from him again. A year ago or so, when he bought Nolan’s (which had been the name of the place even before he bought it, and she often accused him of buying it so he wouldn’t have to spend money on a new sign), he had thought of her and invited her to work for him and, if she liked, stay with him. Despite her scalding-coffee-in-the-customer’s-nuts past, he made her hostess. And she’d done very well at it. She was beautiful, of course, but she had that midwestern gift of making immediate friends out of strangers. She, more than anyone or anything else at Nolan’s, was responsible for the heavy return business, the regulars who haunted the place.

He crossed the free bridge at Moline. The river was choppy tonight; the amber lights of the cities on its either shore winked on the water. Did he love her? He supposed so. He liked her, and that somehow seemed more important.

He stayed on Highway 74 and curved around onto Kimberly, a wide street whose valleys and hills were thick with commerce; he glanced at the little shopping clusters, wondering how they were doing. He knew Brady Eighty was hurting everybody else — but it might be temporary. New kid on the block always got more attention — for a while.

He turned right on Brady Street, a four-lane one-way clear to the Interstate now, and enjoyed the almost Vegas-like glow of fast-food franchises and other prospering businesses. The Quad Cities economy wasn’t good — the farm implement industry, a major component of the area’s economy, was withering away, and other local industries were suffering as well. But Brady Street glowed in neon health: pizza and tacos and hamburgers; used cars, stereos and videotape rental. People always have money for the important things.

Like drinking, he thought, with a wry private smile, turning toward his club. At this point on Brady, the businesses began to give each other some breathing room, and the food wasn’t so fast — although Flaky Jake’s, for all its yuppie pretension, was still a hamburger joint, and Chi-Chi’s peddled tacos, even if they did slop guacamole and sour cream on them. This was motel country, too: Ramada, Best Western, Holiday Inn. At the left as he passed, in a valley of its own, lay the sleeping behemoth — North Park — the massive, sprawling shopping mall whose parking lot was an ocean of cement that even after closing was swimming with cars — movies and restaurants kept it so. North Park was Brady Eighty’s biggest (in every sense) competitor, and conventional wisdom had said a new mall nearby couldn’t hope to compete with its scores of shops, including four major department stores.

But Brady Eighty wasn’t exactly a new mall. It was a refurbished one. The Brady Street Shopping Center, an open-air plaza with two rows of shops facing each other, had opened back in the early sixties, one of the first in the Cities. Over the years it had fallen on hard times, and was almost a ghost town when a Chicago-based group, led by a smart operator named Simmons, bought everybody out but a few willing-to-stay stalwarts and remodeled the place into an enclosed mall. The Brady Street location — Highway 61, just a whisper away from Interstate 80 — made it the first shopping area you saw when you got off the Interstate; provided the easiest shopping-center access for half a dozen small towns outside of Davenport; and had a varied selection of shops, within a smaller, easier-to-deal-with area than North Park’s miles of mall. “Brady for the ’80s,” the slogan went, and Nolan wondered idly what would happen to the catch phrase now that the nineties were breathing down the decade’s neck.

Nolan pulled into the dimly lit, pleasantly crowded parking lot, admiring the glow of the green neon Nolan’s sign on the side of the mall wall, at the right of the front entry. The words “Brady Eighty” in silver-outlined-black art deco letters were along the long window over the bank of doors. And speaking of banks, First National’s outlet was opposite Nolan’s, at left, with a drive- up window. It amused Nolan to be doing business across from a bank.