Max Collins: Mourn The Living

George swigged the Scotch, looking out at the blank street, the naked benches by the courthouse cannons. He didn’t see anybody watching him; Nolan said he had three men taking turns watching George, only now George wasn’t so sure. The tower clock read three-fifteen, but George wasn’t tired. He was all worked up. And he was thirsty.

It had come to him tonight, how he could use Nolan to better his position. To make his brother Charlie reconsider his opinion of George; to have some responsibility again. To get rid of that smug bastard Elliot and have the last laugh...

If he could only remember that girl’s name! That girl who’d been with Nolan, it was her apartment they’d gone into!

He’d met her once in the drugstore below. She was a friendly little thing, she said she’d seen him and she guessed they were neighbors and how was he? But that was a long time ago, a year or so, and he couldn’t remember...

Vicki something.

More Scotch. It would help him remember, more Scotch...

Trask.

Vicki Trask.

He waddled to the phone book, a pregnant hippo in a nightshirt, and thumbed through the pages.

Sure it was late, and Nolan would be pissed, but that was just too bad. He couldn’t push a Franco! Why, George could have his brother and an army down from Chicago in a few hours, with just a snap of his fingers! He could erase Nolan, have him wiped out like a chalk drawing on a blackboard! It was that easy.

He dialed. Nolan would talk to him, he knew he would.

It rang a long while and a female voice answered. He asked to speak to Mr. Webb and she said just a minute.

He waited for Nolan to come to the phone. The female voice had been pleasant. Like his whore’s, Francie, only more sincere. He’d been mean to Francie today, edgy over the thing with Nolan, and she’d walked out mad. He’d called her twice and asked her to come back and let him try and make it up to her. She’d hung up both times, but he still hoped she’d show. Maybe could patch things up with dollars and Scotch.

Then Nolan was on the phone.

“Yes, I know it’s late, Mr. Nolan... sorry, Mr. Webb ... but I have to talk with you... I can help you take Elliot down...”

There was a soft rap at the door.

George said, “Just a second, Nolan, I mean Webb ... the door, I think my girl friend might be back, jus’ a second.”

George stumbled to the door, thinking to himself about how fine it would be to see his Francie at the moment, have a nice drink with her.

He opened the door and an orange-red blossom exploded in somebody’s hand and burst George’s head and he went down, a sinking barge.

Nolan reached out in the darkness and stroked the sleeping girl’s breast. She stirred in her sleep, a smile playing on her lips. He ran his hand under the sheet and over her smooth body, over her thighs to the flat stomach, across the soft rises of breast, nipples now relaxed, the tightness of passion a memory.

Vicki Trask’s eyes opened slowly; then blinking, yawning, she said, “Are you still awake? It must be after two in the morning—”

Nolan flipped back the sheet. He took a gentle bite out of her stomach, nuzzling her. His lower lip cradled the dip of her navel, his upper lip tickled by the tiny hairs on her flesh.

“Salty,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“You taste salty.”

“I ought to,” she replied. “You worked me hard enough.”

“It’s good for you.” He moved up to her breasts and nibbled. The tips, remembering, grew taut again.

“Ouch! Take it easy!” Then she laughed and looped her arm around his neck.

He looked into her little girl face and said, “You were good, Vicki.”

The faint light from a street lamp poured through a circular window into the balcony and gave her skin a glow, an almost mystical look, like a textured photograph. She sat up in bed and propped her knees up and rested her chin on them, locking her hands around her legs. She stared at him, her smile slight.

“You were wonderful,” she told him. “I... I never felt so much a woman before.” She leaned over and brushed her lips across his cheek.

“You’re a woman all right,” he said. Not entirely true, but she had been a lot less girl than Nolan had expected.

Boredom from the so far sleepless night mixed with the infrequency of sexual activity in his life of late tempted Nolan to go another round with the girl. She’d admitted she wasn’t a virgin, but she’d been close to one, and he didn’t want to press her unduly.

But then her lips were on his chest and her fingers had found their way to his back, where they were digging in. She looked at him, resting her head against his chest, her expression one of sweet shame, asking him if...? He reached his arms around her and covered her mouth with his.

Twenty minutes later Nolan was sitting in the dark smoking, his back against the headboard, his mind adrift. His left arm was around her shoulder, his hand cupping a breast. The other arm rested on the nightstand by the bed, where he’d laid his un-holstered .38. Vicki had floated into sleep a few minutes before, but he remained awake beside her, thinking and smoking, smoking and thinking...

Around three a.m. Vicki awoke suddenly and found Nolan still sitting back against the headboard with the fourth, maybe fifth cigarette tight in his lips. His grey eyes were open, two dead coals in the darkness.

“What’s the matter? What is it? Why are you still up?”

He didn’t look at her. “Have to be leaving soon.”

“Is it getting to be dangerous for you to stay around Chelsey, or what?”

“No, that’s not it... it’s always like that for me. It’s just that I got a feeling there’s nothing here that needs to be found out about Irene Tisor.”

Her hands played with the blanket. “When do you have to leave?”

“Soon, I said.” He had to figure a way to hit the Chelsey operation first — he had to get his hands on this Elliot guy and make his hit for the cash on hand and the hell with Chelsey and Sid Tisor’s dead kid.

“Will I see you again? After you leave Chelsey?”

“Sure.”

“You’re not telling the truth.”

There was no answer to that.

She buried her head in his chest and he felt her tears on his flesh.

He smoothed her hair. It was soft and fragrant. “Don’t pretend to yourself that you want me to stay.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m one or two nights in your life and that’s all I am. Accept me that way.”

She studied him, her eyes moist. “You know something, Nolan? No, don’t object to me calling you Nolan, you’re not Earl Webb you’re Nolan and in my bed I’ll call you Nolan if I damn well please. I have you pretty well figured out. You walk around like a mobile brick wall. So cold, the ice forms on your shoulders. And you know what you are under all that ice, Nolan?”

“You tell me.”

“You’re all the emotions you despise to show. You’re like that gun over there. You’re a hunk of metal until you get in a demanding situation, then you explode. I’ve been with you only a few hours, but I’ve seen you kick a man in the head and later come out of your motel room looking like you just wrestled a grizzly and won. And I’ve shared my bed with you, and you were tender enough, I guess, but that damn gun of yours remained on the nightstand beside you all the while. Anybody as violent as you, and as passionate, is a fire-bomb of emotion. Now... what do you think about that?”

He was silent for a moment. Then said, “I think you talk too much.”

She laughed her warm laugh and nodded that she guessed he was right and leaned her head against his shoulder.