Max Collins - Hard Cash

“Maybe Rigley and company’ll change their mind when I explain something funny’s going on.”

“ Is something funny going on?”

“I don’t know.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I think I better try to talk Rigley out of it. The back of my neck is starting to tingle on this thing, and I think we better get out, if we can.”

“And if we can’t?”

“Go ahead with it, I guess. I think we better forget about bringing in another man. That okay with you? Breen would’ve been perfect, but he’s dead, and with what I got in mind for the heist, there really isn’t the time to recruit anybody else. Or the need either. We can get by, just the two of us. Don’t you think?”

Jon rubbed the lump over his temple. “Maybe I will have another beer.” He got up and went after the beer, then came back and said, “Santa Claus suits?”

She got back to the cottage at five-thirty. She was bushed. Fridays at the beauty shop were always busy, but today had really been a bitch; she’d worked all morning without a break and straight through lunch and fought hunger pangs throughout the long and hectic afternoon. And now, home finally, she was so tired, she wasn’t even hungry anymore. Take a bath and get rid of the smell of hair spray and customer (and her own) perspiration and just flop in bed. She unlocked the door, stepped inside, and George was there.

Sitting at the table with glass of booze and accompanying bottle in front of him.

Terrific.

“Hi, baby,” he said. A little sheepishly. A little drunkenly. Sitting in his shirtsleeves, his coat and vest and tie tossed on the couch the way a kid tosses off his jacket after coming in from school. George was a handsome man, in that slick executive way of his, but when he got the least bit drunk, his eyes started drooping, and he began getting a rather stupid look to him. She hated him when he looked stupid like that, which was, unfortunately, a way he’d been looking more and more lately.

She closed the door, slipped out of her cloth coat, hung it on the rack. She was still wearing her white beautician’s uniform. After nine solid hours of doing her best to make other women’s hair look presentable, her own was matted from sweat and generally a mess. She didn’t smell good. Or feel good. And George was here.

Terrific.

She walked over to the table and stood over him as he sat fiddling with his half-drained glass of bourbon. She looked down scoldingly and said, “I thought we agreed not to get together. Until tomorrow, when we meet with your robber friends.”

“Well, baby, I...”

“I thought we agreed you’d spend some time with your wife.”

“Baby, you know I can’t stand being around her when she’s drinking. You don’t know what it’s like being around somebody who’s drinking all the time.”

“Don’t I?”

He looked down into his bourbon, then hung his head. “I... guess I deserve that, don’t I? I have been drinking a lot myself lately, haven’t I?”

She thought, why don’t you shape the hell up, you self-pitying son of a bitch?

She said, “It’s okay, honey. You’ve been under terrible pressure. I understand.”

And as she said that, she patted his head, twisting some of his slightly curly dark brown hair in her fingers playfully, affectionately.

He touched her arm. “Sit down, baby. I’ll get you a glass, if you’ll just sit down and have a drink with me, and we can talk.”

She didn’t sit down. Instead she plucked the bottle off the table and put it behind the bar on a shelf with all the rest of the bottles and came back and kissed his neck, nuzzlingly, and then took him by the elbow, saying, “Now, come on. Be a good boy and shoo. Go home. I want you out of here.”

And he looked at her with tearful eyes, still slightly stupid eyes, but compelling, too, in their way. “Julie. I need you. Let me be with you.”

Goddammit, he was almost whimpering . Seeing him act like this made her want to slap him silly, in a way, and in another, want to hold him.

She did neither.

She went and got his coat, vest, tie, and topcoat and put them on the table in front of him and said, “Go home, George. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“I need you tonight.”

“Tonight I need for myself, George. I need some time to rest, some time to get myself together for what’s coming up. Please.”

“Julie... surely you understand how I feel, how I’m... I’m shaking inside, Julie. How I’m scared out of my mind thinking about... about what we’re going to do and... how I need you. To hold me.”

Shaking inside, he said. And outside, too. He was a wreck, a nervous damn wreck, and she had to do something.

She sighed.

“All right,” she said. “Go on into the bedroom.”

“Baby... it’s not that... We can just talk... I just need to be with you right now, I don’t...”

“Go on in the bedroom and wait for me. I have to take a bath. I have to relax a minute. I’ll be in in a while. Now scoot.”

She drew a hot bath. So hot her skin turned lobster red as soon as she dipped into it. She liked a hot bath. She liked to burn away the dirt, burn away the thoughts. Just settle into a steaming-hot tub. Hot bubble bath — millions of bubbles; she liked the smell of the soap, the bubble bath smell, the slickness and smell of the perfumy bath oil. It was a peaceful experience, the way sleep was supposed to be.

She luxuriated in the tub, sliding her hands over her oil-sleek body, the globes of her full breasts bobbing above the surface of the bubbly water, nipples erect. And she stroked them, soaped them, her breasts, nipples, pussy, thick soapy-silky triangle of hair, sliding hands over firm, muscular oil-slippery thighs. She leaned back and enjoyed herself.

She honestly got more pleasure, more sexual, sensual pleasure out of a good hot bath than the act of sex. Fucking had never been much more to her than a way of pleasing and controlling a man. And she’d gotten even less pleasure from her experimental couple of flings with other women.

But this was pleasurable. Soaking and soaping herself. Indulging that fine body of hers. And it was a fine body; she knew it was. She didn’t really blame men (or anyone) for wanting her.

Conceit? No, not really — at least she didn’t think so. She had an ability, she felt, to assess herself in a detached, realistic manner. She saw her body, for example, as a tool, even a weapon. Nice tits, nice ass, but like all tools (weapons), meaningless without the brains to put them to use.

Take her high school years, for instance. She’d blossomed rather late, well into her teens, and consequently had that muted contempt for her admirers that all former wallflowers feel. She used her good looks to be popular, to date the cutest guys from the wealthiest families, to be a cheerleader and homecoming queen candidate and generally overcome a somewhat poverty-stricken background. (Her father had worked for the railroad and earned a decent wage, but not decent enough to properly feed, house and clothe six kids, a wife, and mother-in-law. As the oldest, Julie had all but raised her two sisters and three brothers, as her mother had had enough to do just to cook, keep house, and look after her own ailing mother.) The highlight of her climb out of the lower middle class muck came shortly after graduation, when she won the home-town beauty pageant that could have led to Atlantic City and beyond, if it hadn’t come out about her and the one judge.

They let her keep her scholarship money (held in trust for use in educational pursuits only), and she eventually used it, to go to beauty school, but first she got knocked up by one of the few nonwealthy guys she’d ever gone out with, a sandy-haired football hero who she figured would probably go on to make a fortune playing pro ball someday. She began to think she’d figured wrong when he flunked out of school the first year, trying to study, play football, hold a job, and be a husband/father simultaneously. He got drafted. Sent to Vietnam.