Max Collins: Hard Cash

Rigley seemed to be thinking it over, when the girl said, “If they were going to kill us, honey, they would have by now.”

Smart girl. The brains of the outfit. And the balls too, most likely.

But she was still talking. To Nolan now. “Are you going to shoot that thing or not? Or were you planning to talk us to death?”

And for a moment Nolan was ready to kill them both and screw the consequences. He felt his hand tighten around the shotgun stock and was a hair away from it, and it must have showed, because he saw Jon cringe.

He broke open the shotgun and spilled the shells onto the floor. “You’re right,” he told the girl. “I’m not going to kill anybody.” He tossed the empty shotgun on her lap, hard. “Tonight.”

He put the .38 away, sat in the hard-back chair facing the couch. “Okay, then, Rigley,” Nolan said. “What did you have in mind?”

It was still snowing, but the roads were clear; the wind was keeping them that way. Jon sat and stared out at the snow swirling in the beams of the headlights and let himself be hypnotized, not wanting to think.

Then he realized Nolan was saying something.

“Uh, what, Nolan? I wasn’t listening.”

“I just said are you okay, kid?”

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

“What did you think of what Rigley had to say?”

“His plan, you mean? It’s all right. Couple rough spots, maybe. How come you didn’t question any part of it? I know you weren’t satisfied with it completely.”

Nolan yawned, sat up in the driver’s seat, leaned over the wheel. “I guess I figured I put him through enough strain for one night. He isn’t the strongest guy I ever saw. So I figured ease off for now, let things ride. We’ll wait till we get together Saturday with them, when he brings that stuff I asked for: timetable of employee activity, photos of the interior and exterior of the bank, the floor plan, and so on. I don’t remember the place all that clear.”

I do , Jon thought. He remembered it all, every sweaty second. To Nolan, the Port City bank job had been just another heist, to Jon it had been the first and, he’d thought at the time, only one he’d ever be involved in.

“Little did I know,” Jon mumbled.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You know,” Nolan said after a while, “I think I had Rigley pretty well bluffed out. Rigley I think I could’ve handled without much trouble. But that bitch. Shit. I wouldn’t want to play poker with her.”

Jon managed a smile and said, “Not even strip poker?”

“And freeze my bare ass off in this snow? No thanks. But I admit she’s something to look at. Looking at her, I begin to understand how a straight the likes of Rigley could get mixed up in something like this. Better men than our bank president have sold their souls for a lot less woman, believe me.”

“Men like you, you mean, Nolan?”

“Well, I’m out of the question,” Nolan said, smiling a little. “I lost my soul at a carnival when I was twelve years old, to considerably less beautiful a Mata Hari than Rigley’s. How about you, kid? She get a rise out of you? Bet you copped a nice feel wrestling with her back at that cottage.”

“Yeah, well, the shotgun she had kind of took the fun out of it.”

“Would you rather been out front getting your ass bored off by Rigley?”

“I don’t know — he doesn’t seem like such a bad guy to me. Victim of circumstances, looks to me.”

“Victim of circumstances, my ass. We’re the damn victims, and he’s the blackmailing little son of a bitch who’s screwing us in the ear with his goddamn circumstances.”

“Come on, Nolan. You know who’s screwing us in the ear, and it isn’t Rigley.”

Nolan yawned again, then said, “Yeah, you’re right. It’s the bitch doing it. Christ, you’d think getting screwed by her would be more fun.”

They drove in silence for a while. Soon the trailer courts on the left-hand side of the highway signaled Iowa City’s closeness, and as they came into town, the clear highway gave way to snow-packed, icy city streets. Then they were turning down the quiet residential lane at the end of which was the antique shop. It was a street of double-story homes with modest, well-tended lawns and lots of trees — a beautiful, shade-bathed street in summer, equally beautiful in winter, with the bare branches of the trees catching handfuls of snow and holding them, occasional white strokes of an artist’s brush in a scene predominantly gray. But right now only the gray seemed apparent to Jon: skeletal, dead branches on skeletal, dead trees, the houses themselves dark and cheerless. Energy conservation was leading to less brightly lit Christmas seasons than those of the recent past: the bright colored lights were at the moment unlit, the nativity scenes on lawns and Santas climbing in chimneys were minus spotlights, and only for a few hours each evening would the seasonal glow be switched on at all. The world still looked like a Christmas card to Jon, but a gloomy one, sent by an atheist.

Nolan pulled the Buick into one of the spaces alongside the antique shop, and they got out. The shop was a two-story clapboard building that looked more a part of the residential area it bordered than the business district it began, with a Shell station next door and various chain restaurants (like the Dairy Queen across from the Shell) nearby. Jon had kept the shop closed since his uncle’s death, and had no intention of continuing in the antique business. There was a guy — a friend of Planner’s — set to come next month and make a bid on all the antiques and junk in the place, and after that Jon was considering turning it into a candle shop, to be run by Karen Hastings, his on-again-off-again girl friend (off-again at the moment, though he felt he could patch things up, if he decided he wanted to) and running a mail-order business himself in old comic books and related items. Actually, things were beginning to settle into place in Jon’s life: he had invested his money in the Pier with Nolan, and it was a good investment that should keep both of them solvent for untold years to come; and he had inherited the antique shop and its contents, which would provide more cash and a place to live and do business out of; and he had Karen, if he got around to patching up their relationship; and his artwork was getting better all the time and getting close to where he really thought he might actually be able to make a living drawing comic books. And a fresh, new year was coming up in a matter of days.

And now this.

Another robbery.

He and Nolan went in. Nolan went upstairs, Jon to the room in back on the first floor, where he slept and kept his studio. It had been a storeroom when his uncle Planner turned it over to him, a dusty, dirty oversize closet that Jon had converted into a shrine to comic art, plastering the gray wood walls with colorful homemade posters of Dick Tracy, Batman, Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and half a dozen other comic heroes, drawn by Jon unerringly in the style of their original artists. A few splashes of bright color in the form of throw rugs transformed the cement floor into something livable; a few pieces of furniture — the genuinely antique bed and chest of drawers given him by Planner — turned storeroom into bedroom. A drawing easel and a file cabinet containing his rarest comic artifacts, and boxes of comic books lining the walls made the room a cartoonist’s studio. He had consciously decorated and organized the room so that it would be a cheerful, constant visual reminder of who he was.

There was also a poster of perennial movie bad guy and sometime spaghetti western hero Lee Van Cleef, wearing his black mustache and dark gunfighter’s outfit, fondling the six-gun on his hip, looking a hell of a lot like Nolan. The six-gun, and the .357 Magnum Dick Tracy was brandishing, and Flash Gordon’s ray gun — these and other implements of the fantasy violence he’d so enjoyed for so many years — irritated and disturbed him tonight, and he thought, What a bunch of bullshit , and left the room.