Max Collins: Hard Cash

And the old man — who had always seemed eccentric, even to his sons — hadn’t been right in the head since Billy died.

Anyway, that was what Lou had told Terry, Lou being the Detroit pawnbroker who fenced what the Comforts stole. Lou was short, chubby, mustached, and dependable. He was the one who had found Terry’s father the night Billy was killed. The one who had come out to the house to talk to Sam Comfort and found the aftermath of a shooting and robbery and managed to get the old man to a doctor and into a private hospital that specialized in publicity-shy (and police-shy) patients.

It seemed a guy named Nolan, and some other, younger guy that hung around with him, had come to the Comfort homestead one night a few months back and tossed in some smoke grenades and made it look like the place was on fire; old Sam had of course grabbed his strongbox of cash — the old man didn’t believe in banks, having spent a good portion of his life span emptying them — and Nolan and this lad were waiting outside to relieve him of it. But brother Billy had caught on to the ruse, and was in the process of doing something about it when Nolan shot Billy in the chest, killing him, and Nolan’s young pal shot old Sam in the chest too, but higher, not fatally.

Only it had looked fatal to Nolan and the kid, who exchanged some bits of conversation (the kid calling Nolan by name) that the semiconscious Sam had heard before blacking out completely. Since the pair had worn stocking masks, this slip was a big help; but the really big help was Lou, who had come along a few minutes later and found the badly bleeding Sam Comfort, left to die by Nolan and company. And he would have died, too. Like Billy had died.

Terry and Billy hadn’t been close. Terry was three years older, and Billy had always been the favored one, the baby, and so had stayed kind of immature. Like, for instance, Billy was into dope — not just smoking it, either, but cocaine, speed, everything but heroin, Terry guessed. Billy had also been into that crazy music that went with the dope thing, instead of country-western, like any sensible person. The brothers hadn’t gotten along, and Terry was sorry his brother was dead, but he was probably more upset about that two hundred thousand bucks of theirs Nolan had stolen.

Terry’s father didn’t share that sentiment. Old Sam, for once in his life, didn’t seem to give a damn about money. He wanted to kill Nolan, and kill Nolan’s kid friend, too. “And that was al. That was all the still-weakened Sam Comfort had on his mind. Kill Nolan. Kill the kid. Kill them both.

Terry had spent the better part of the few days he’d been out trying to reason with his old man. “Killing ’em’s fine, Pop, I’m for that,” he’d say. “But what about the damn money? We gonna just kill the peckerheads and let some damn bank keep our two hundred thousand? That’s all the money we got in the world, Pop.”

And old Sam would say, in a voice soft with traces of the Georgia accent he’d never lost, though he’d only lived there as a child, “We still got the farm. We can work it, if we have to. Don’t give a shit about the goddamn money. We’re going to kill those bastards. Kill ’em slow.”

Work the farm? That was crazy. They’d never worked the farm in their lives. Besides, they just owned a few acres and leased them out to a neighboring farmer and used the farmhouse as their home base. The old man just wasn’t thinking.

Anyway, he wasn’t thinking where the money was concerned. Where revenge was concerned, he was doing fine. Old Sam had figured out that a guy named Breen, who owned a bar in Indianapolis, had been in on the job with Nolan. Not on the scene, probably, but fingered the job. Breen had been working with Billy and the old man, filling in for Terry while he was inside. Sam and Billy double-crossed Breen at a rented farmhouse just outside of Iowa City, Breen’s usefulness having run its course since Terry was getting out soon; but Breen had gotten away, shot-up, but alive. Evidently Breen had gotten to his friend Nolan for help and then told him about how the Comforts had all this money, and given him an inside-and-out description of the Comfort place (where Breen had been several times) and generally helped set the heist in motion. Sam’s deductions were based on Breen and Nolan having worked together a lot of times, and on the fact that Breen, who’d been in debt up to his ass with gamblers and had thrown in with the Comforts to take care of those snowballing debts, was back in Indianapolis, in his bar, with no apparent money problems.

So Terry and his old man had gone to the Indianapolis bar and found Breen humping some plump blonde bitch, who old Sam had shotgunned to make the point of how serious he was. Then he found out from Breen where Nolan was and shotgunned Breen, too.

And of course it had turned out Nolan was in Iowa City, and the old man had cussed himself for not figuring it. It only made sense that Breen, shot up and in Iowa City, would run to Planner’s antique shop, Planner being the old guy who had planned most of the jobs Breen and Nolan had pulled together.

That night, the night they’d double-crossed Breen and let the bleeding man get away from them, the old man and Billy Comfort had gone to the antique shop. The old man had thought of Planner immediately, but when he went there, to the shop, nobody was around except some damn kid about Billy’s age. Planner’s nephew, the kid said he was, and didn’t seem to know anything about the darker side of his uncle’s activities. Sam had chalked that one up as a blind alley, and it wasn’t till he held a shotgun in Breen’s face and heard about Nolan being in Iowa City that the old man linked the kid at the antique shop with the kid who’d been with Nolan that night at the farm, when the air was full of smoke and blood.

Yesterday, when no one was there, Terry and his father broke into the antique shop, to wait for Nolan and the kid and kill them. At least that was the elder Comfort’s concern. Terry convinced him they should make some attempt, anyway, at finding out if any of the money was in the antique shop. Old Sam said that was nonsense. Breen had told them Nolan was running a fancy restaurant/nightclub place, and all the money was probably sunk in that. But Terry had insisted there might be some money in the shop somewhere, as it wasn’t like a thief to keep all his money in a bank, and so they got into the safe, but there was nothing in it; they looked upstairs for a wall safe and couldn’t find one. Terry did find a little notebook, in a drawer in what was apparently Nolan’s room, with a rough sketch of what seemed to be the floor plan of a bank, and a list of “projected expenses” that included the entries “costumes, $100,” “jackets, approx. $60,” “van rental, $1,000,” and other equally confusing items. Terry showed the book to his father and said, “I think they’re planning something,” and his father said bullshit, the man’s retired, and Terry said, “A retired thief? Don’t kid me, Pop.”

He’d gone on to try to convince his father that if Nolan was getting a heist together, it’d be wise for Terry and his father to wait it out, wait till the heist was over and take the proceeds off Nolan’s hands before killing him. But revenge was still foremost in die old man’s mind, and he rejected the notion.

And then the kid had come home, and they knocked him out before he’d seen either of their faces, which was a lucky break. But then Sam wanted to kill the kid then and there, which was stupid, and Terry told his father so.

“You want to kill this kid and sit here waiting with a corpse God knows how long before Nolan shows up? How do we know Nolan is even in town? We got to deal with these two both at the same time, Pop, or else you kill one, and the other finds out and knows something’s up and comes looking for us instead of the other way around. Come on. We’ll leave now and they’ll just think somebody came in off the street and tried to rob them.”