Max Collins: Hard Cash

It had been a solid month of six-days-a-week hard work, and when he went to the Comforts’ rented farmhouse in Iowa City to collect his share of the nearly fifty thousand bucks that the unofficial meter maintenance team had taken in, Breen had discovered that all the bad things he’d heard about the Comforts were true, and more. Old Sam paid Breen his share by shooting him.

Once in the side, once in the leg.

But Breen had managed to get away, despite the pain and inconvenience of the two wounds. The Comforts, in their quaint, folksy manner, had gotten drunk before Breen showed up, which made evading them no great trick. The trick had been not getting killed by those first unexpected blasts.

Breen had scrambled to his car and got it going, while behind him the back windshield had turned into a big lacy glass doily, thanks to the hole punched in its middle by Sam Comfort’s handgun. He had driven the car to Planner’s, Planner being an old heist guy who was a good friend of Nolan’s. It turned out that Planner had died not long ago, and Nolan and a lad named Jon were presently staying in Planner’s place, getting the estate settled or some damn thing.

Anyway, Nolan helped Breen get on his feet, or rather on his back, providing a bed and patching him up and letting him stay there and heal a while. Furthermore, it turned out that Nolan’s troubles with the Family were really over this time, and Nolan was evidently thinking about getting back into circulation. On hearing of the Comforts and the double-cross, Nolan offered to get the money back for Breen.

Breen hadn’t been too hot on the idea. He was never one for revenge, placing his ass first on his priority list. Fuck, he was grateful just to be alive. Let bygones be bygones. He didn’t hold any grudge against those goddamn fucking asshole Comforts. But at least , he had told Nolan, if you do rip them off, kill them too. If you don’t, he’d told Nolan, you might as well kill me now, because the Comforts are going to figure me for this and come around and feed my balls to me, à la fucking carte.

But Nolan was hard to sway once he got an idea in his head, and Breen stayed behind, resting up in bed, while Nolan and Jon went off to the Comforts’ home territory — a farm in Michigan, near Detroit — and got the parking meter money back. Breen’s share and all the rest of it, too.

And the really nice thing was the Comforts — Sam and Billy anyway — had been killed in the process.

It wasn’t Nolan’s style, killing people, or anyway, it wasn’t his style to kill people needlessly. But here there’d been a need: the old man and his son got wise to the heist and came out with guns. So Nolan and this kid Jon had killed them both.

Or anyway, that was what Breen had been told.

Because now, several months later, as he sat naked on the floor of the cramped, closetlike back room, on the soft carpeting he’d installed with cute, plump barmaids in mind (a German-looking, yellow-haired example of which was next to him, huddling in wide-eyed fright against stacked boxes of booze, a young girl as naked as he was and trying to hide behind an inch or so of black cloth), after he’d laughed momentarily at the thought of being caught with his pants down, of being a professional thief about to be robbed by some petty cheap-ass punks, Breen wondered if there was such a thing as ghosts.

Because one of the men aiming the ugly round, hoglike nostrils of a shotgun at him was a white-haired, gray-eyed old man with sardonic smile lines worn into his face, an ambiguously evil/innocent-looking old man named Sam Comfort. The other man, the one with the .45, wasn’t a man at all — he was a boy. At first Breen thought it was Billy Comfort. He thought both dead Comforts had come back from the grave after him. But it wasn’t Billy; it was Terry. Thin-faced, fair-haired Terry. The sole surviving Comfort, Breen had thought.

Till now.

And the laugh, that ironic laugh at the thought of man bites dog, caught in Breen’s throat like a chicken bone, and he felt naked. Naked as hell, more naked even than he was.

“No,” old Sam said. “I ain’t dead. But you are.”

And the old man swung the shotgun, firing, noise and smoke and fire exploding out one barrel, and the sound was a sonic boom in the little room, rattling the boxes of liquor, breaking bottles, shaking everything.

Breen swallowed, wondering why he was alive.

Then he looked to his right, looked over to where old Sam had swung the shotgun.

Looked over in the thankfully shadowy corner of the back room where the plump body of the barmaid had been tossed, flung, like a life-size inflatable doll with the air slowly seeping out of it. He looked at yellow hair and blood and the rest of what used to be a head with a pretty face on it, dripping down the side of the wall.

“Where’s Nolan?” old man Comfort said.

“I know who you are,” the man said, sitting down. He was an executive type, in his mid-forties, wearing a powder-blue pinstripe suit with matching vest and soft-yellow shirt and powder-blue tie, none of which had been ordered out of a Sears catalog. His hair was dark, untouched by gray (or retouched by something else) and had been cut — no, styled — by a barber who considered himself an artist. His eyes seemed the same color as his suit, but in the dim light it was hard to tell, exactly; maybe they were gray. A handsome man, in a cold, sterile, dull sort of way, like an aging male model or over-the-hill pretty boy actor who would never make it in character roles.

Nolan said nothing. He just folded his hands and looked out across his knuckles at the man across the table.

They were in the Pier, a seafood restaurant on the banks of the Iowa River, in the cocktail lounge, a long, rectangular dark-paneled room with lots of black vinyl-covered furniture and some oil paintings of steamboats, ship captains, and Mark Twain at various stages of life. The main floor, above them, was a tribute to the ingenuity of Nolan’s friend Wagner, who had bought the building left vacant when the Fraternal Order of Elks, Iowa City Lodge, moved to newer, larger digs out in the country; the big dining room, with several other, more intimate rooms off to either side, was given a twenty-thousand-leagues-under-the-sea atmosphere via black light and other other-worldly lighting effects that played tricks with Day-glo wall murals. An oddly-illuminated aquarium built into and running the length of one wall furthered the underwater feeling, while menus printed in fluorescent ink glowed the various seafood and steak selections to customers who had by now completely forgotten they were sitting in the old, mostly unremodeled Elks Lodge. The upper floor, a ballroom, was rented out occasionally but otherwise went unused, and the lower, which housed the cocktail lounge, was pretty much the same as it had been when the Elks were loose in it, except for the nautical oil paintings.

The two men had the lounge almost to themselves. It was a cold, snowy Wednesday night, and nobody was there who didn’t have to be: just the help; Nolan, the Pier’s new co-owner and manager; and this man in the powder-blue pinstripe suit, who’d come to see Nolan.

The man leaned across the table, smiling, his teeth so perfect and white, they were either capped or a miracle, and said, “I said I know you.”

Nolan shrugged with his eyes.

“And you know who I am, too, don’t you?”

Nolan nodded.

“Don’t you wonder why I’m here?”

There was something in the man’s voice — what it was, Nolan couldn’t quite pin down... smugness maybe, maybe nervousness.

“Doesn’t it... bother you, my being here?”

Both. It was both.

“No,” Nolan said.