Max Collins: Hard Cash

He went upstairs. The lights were off, but he knew his way around. Nolan was already sacked out. Snoring. Jon stretched out on the couch. He just didn’t want those fucking fantasy faces staring at him, even in the dark; he couldn’t sleep in that room tonight. He didn’t know why exactly, he just couldn’t.

But he didn’t have trouble getting to sleep. It should have been a sleepless night, the way his state of mind was, but he was just too goddamn tired to be an insomniac, after his afternoon of running through the woods with a sketch pad up his butt, and an evening that included riding/hiding on the floor in the back seat of Nolan’s car and sneaking in back of that cottage and wrestling a shotgun away from that damn amazon, and shit... too tired to do anything now but sleep...

And dream.

He dreamed he was on a heist. Not the Port City bank heist, past or future. Nolan wasn’t in the dream, either. And it wasn’t a bank at all. It was a museum. He was trying to steal a diamond. It was like some movie he’d seen once. He was in a museum, trying to steal a diamond, and he had people helping him, people he’d gone to junior high and high school with, people he hadn’t seen in years. One was a kid with greasy black hair and a bad complexion, who’d shared a joint with Jon in the john at a high school dance and Jon had gotten nauseous and afraid of being caught. And now here this kid was, years later, helping him steal a diamond from a museum. And there was a girl, that sluttish girl Jon had taken behind the bleachers at a football game in junior high and gotten his hands in her pants, and a week later, when some skin started peeling off his fingers, he’d wondered if he could have caught some awful disease off her or something, she was here too, with the greasy-haired kid, and they were stealing this diamond. And then cops. Cops came rushing in. The museum was dark at first, just a big pool of black with a circle of light on the display case where the diamond was. But now cops were rushing in, and it was a huge white room, full of light. There weren’t any walls in sight, just blinding white light and cops in blue with guns, rushing at them. He knew some of the cops: one of them was the art professor he’d argued with at the U of I before dropping out — the professor who had told him comics were junk and to whom Jon had said, Who are you to say, with your crappy fucking abstract pretentious art. And another cop was a guy his mother had lived with for a while, an ex-army sergeant who’d hated Jon and got drunk one night and tried to beat Jon up and Jon had cleaned his clock — he was there, a cop, shooting. And old Sam Comfort, the man Jon had killed. He was a cop too. Shooting. And the sluttish girl and the greasy-haired kid, they turned into other people all of a sudden, they turned into Shelly and Grossman, the two friends of Jon’s who’d been in on the Port City heist, who had died in the bloodbath aftermath of that heist, and who were dying again, as the cops, the prof and the ex-army sergeant and Sam Comfort were shooting .357 Magnums at them while Jon tried to run but his legs were rubber and there were no exits anywhere, just smooth white walls, and Shelly and Grossman were dying again, spurting blood in slow motion like the movies, Grossman screaming Jon’s name, Shelly flopping onto the display case with her blonde hair streaked with blood...

“Kid.”

“Uh, what, uh...?”

“Hey. It’s okay.”

“Nolan?”

“You were dreaming.”

“Dreaming?”

“Yeah, dreaming, and making a hell of racket at it. Like to wake the dead.”

He sat up. It was daylight. His mouth tasted foul.

“What the hell time is it, anyway?”

“About ten o’clock.”

“That’s impossible, I just fell asleep here a...”

“Yeah, you just fell asleep. Nine hours ago.”

“Shit,” he said, rubbing his eyes, “I don’t feel like I slept at all. I’m tired as hell.”

“You wore yourself out dreaming and making noise.”

“Goddamn nightmare.”

“I didn’t figure it was a wet dream.”

“Not the one I remember, anyway. I was dreaming all night, I think, but I only remember that last one I was having.”

“Yeah, well, I never dream.”

“Everybody dreams, Nolan. You just don’t remember yours.”

“I don’t dream. You want breakfast? I’m fixing myself some.”

“What, eggs?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll have a couple, over easy.”

“You’ll have them scrambled.”

“Scrambled’s fine. And bacon.”

“Sausage.”

“Sausage. Just what I wanted anyway.”

They sat in the kitchen and ate.

“Kid.”

“Yeah, Nolan?”

“This is really bothering you, isn’t it.”

“What?”

“The idea of hitting that bank again.”

“No. I’m okay. Really.”

“I don’t like it any better than you do.”

“Yeah, sure, I know that, Nolan. Forget it. It’ll be a snap.”

“Look. I think maybe we better call a man in.”

“The way Rigley has it mapped out, just the two of us is plenty.”

“No, I think an extra man would be better.”

“What for?”

“Somebody ought to stay behind and keep an eye on the bitch. I don’t trust her.”

That was bullshit, and bullshitting wasn’t Nolan’s style. Jon didn’t know how to react. “Me, you mean? I should stay behind and watch her?”

“Yeah. We’ll call in somebody else to help on the job itself.”

“You don’t... don’t think I’m up to it, Nolan?”

“You’re up to it. You done fine every time so far, and we been through some rough weather the last couple years.”

“What, then?”

“Nothing. I just don’t trust the bitch, is all.”

“It’ll mean less money.”

“Well pay the guy a flat rate. Anyway, I don’t care about the money so much. The money is fine, sure. A person can always use more money. But I’m more interested in protecting our interests here in Iowa City, seeing to it the job goes smooth so we can come back home and go on with our happy retirement.”

“Whatever you think is best, Nolan.” Jon was ambivalent toward Nolan’s suggestion — relieved to be off the line of fire, hurt that Nolan might not feel him up to the pressure.

“So who you got in mind, Nolan?”

“Well, I pretty well kept a lid on my retirement. Lots of people in the trade think I’m dead, think the Chicago boys got me. And it’s nice being dead, if you know what I mean. Nobody to come ’round tempting me with prospective heists — except for an occasional bank president, of course — and nobody to come ’round looking for a handout. Besides, I don’t have that many friends left. Most of the people I worked with in recent years are punks, present company excepted, who I’d just as soon stay dead to. Most of the good people are dead. It’s that kind of business. So anyway, I’ll call in Breen, since he knows I’m here already and is a good enough man and can probably use the money.”

Jon nodded. “Breen would be fine. Unnecessary, but fine.”

After breakfast they went out in the front room, and Nolan stopped a moment and looked at the Christmas tree on top of the television set but said nothing. Then he sat on the couch and used the phone on the coffee table.

Jon wasn’t paying attention to the conversation at first, but it didn’t take long for it to become apparent something was wrong on Breen’s end. When Nolan hung up, Jon asked him what the deal was.

“Breen’s dead,” Nolan said. “Somebody blew him apart with a shotgun last night.”

Nolan had never been to Breen’s house before, but he didn’t have trouble finding it. Indianapolis was an easy town to get around in, for all its size, a town whose streets crisscrossed like a big checkerboard. And anyway, he’d been to Breen’s bar a number of times, and the house was in the same neighborhood.