Max Collins: Mourn The Living

Tisor said, “I’m with you, Nolan. I don’t have any love for Lou or Charlie or any of the bastards.”

Nolan’s mouth formed a tight thin line, which was as close to smiling as he got. “Okay, Sid,” he said, and put the gun away.

Tisor turned the key in the ignition — it took a couple tries as the weather had turned bitter cold a few days before — and got the Tempest moving. He wasn’t mad at Nolan for the stunt with the .38; he’d almost expected it.

Nolan said, “I haven’t had much sleep, Sid. Take me to a motel, nothing fancy, but I want the sheets clean.”

Tisor said, “You’re welcome at my place. I got two extra beds.”

“No. I’ll stay at a motel.”

Tisor didn’t argue with Nolan. He drove him to the Suncrest Motel. He let Nolan out at the office and waited for three minutes while Nolan got himself set with a room. Nolan came back with key 8, which put him in a little brown cabin close to the end. There were ten cabins, stretched out in a neat row. Nolan walked to his and waved at Tisor to follow him.

Nolan started unpacking his clothes as soon as he got inside the cabin. Tisor said, “You want me to leave now?”

“Wait a minute. We’ll grab some food at the diner across the road. But no talk about your problem till I’ve had a night’s sleep.”

Tisor again didn’t argue with Nolan. He was used to putting up with the ways of the man. He knew Nolan’s mind was his own and it was no use trying to change him. He would just go along with him and everything would work out all right.

The diner was boxcar style, and the two men took a postage-stamp table by a window. The place was cheap but clean, which was all it took to please Nolan. Tisor ordered coffee, Nolan breakfast.

“You were smart to get scrambled eggs,” Tisor said. “Breakfast’s always the best thing a diner serves.”

“Right.”

Damn you, Nolan, Tisor thought. Why is conversation such a task for you, you goddamn hunk of stone?

“You care if I ask you what you been doing the last six years or so?”

Nolan lit a cigarette. “Go ahead.”

Tisor leaned over the table and whispered. “What’s this I been hearing about you robbing the Boys blind? I hear they can’t wipe their ass without Nolan’s stole the toilet paper.”

Nolan decided he might as well tell Tisor everything, so he’d have it out of the way — Tisor would hound him till he got it all, anyway.

“It started,” Nolan said, “with them chasing me. They sent guns wherever I went. Mexico, Canada, Hawaii. Didn’t matter.”

“You ran.”

“Sure I did. At first.”

“At first?”

“Running gets tiresome, Sid. The first month I ran. After that I took my time. I knew the Boys, knew how they thought. Knew their operations. So when my original bankroll of twenty G’s ran out, I went back for more. Looted any of the Boys’ operations that were handy.”

Their food came and they shut up till the waitress laid the plates down and left.

“How do you work it?”

“Huh?” Nolan said. He was eating.

“When you loot ’em. How do you work it?”

“Quick hit, planned a day or so in advance. Just me. Once in a while outside help, on a full-scale operation. Lots of pros working free-lance these days. Not even the Family controls professional thieves. Not many pros are afraid to help me, not with the money that’s in it.”

Tisor didn’t bother Nolan any more. Now that Nolan had his food and was eating, he wouldn’t like to be bothered.

Tisor sipped his coffee and thought about his cold, old friend. What balls the guy had! Nolan had some stones bucking odds like that. And the hell of it was, if he kept moving, Nolan just might be hard enough a character to beat the Boys at their own game.

When both had finished, they got up from the table, Nolan paid the check and Tisor tipped the waitress a quarter. The two men walked out into the raw night air and waited for an opening to jaywalk back across the highway to the motel.

Tisor stood with his hands in his jacket pockets, watching his breath smoke in the chill, while Nolan got his key out and opened the door to the cabin. Nolan did not invite Tisor in.

He said, “See you tomorrow, Sid.”

“Okay, Nolan... Nolan?”

“Yeah?”

“You mind if I ask you something else? Just one more thing, then I won’t ask you any more questions.”

Nolan shrugged.

“How much you made off the Boys so far?”

Nolan grinned the flat, humorless grin. “Don’t know for sure. It’s spread around, in banks. Maybe half a million. Maybe a little less.”

Tisor laughed. “Shee-it! How long you gonna keep this up?”

Nolan stepped inside the cabin. He said, “You said one more question, Sid, and you’ve had it. Goodnight.” He closed the door.

Tisor turned and headed for the Tempest. He got it started on the third try and wheeled out of the parking lot.

He knew damn well how long Nolan would play his little game with Charlie Franco.

Till one of them was dead.

When Tisor got out of bed the next morning and went downstairs to make coffee, he found Nolan waiting for him in the living room. Nolan was sitting on the couch, dressed in a yellow short-sleeved button-down shirt and brown slacks. He was smoking a cigarette and looking at the centerfold in Sid’s latest Playboy , a photo of a nude girl smoking a cigar.

“Hi, Nolan.” Tisor tried to conceal his surprise.

Nolan said, “Good morning,” and tossed Tisor’s Playboy down on the table. “Nice tits, but what can you do with a picture?”

Tisor said, “When you’re my age, looking’s sometimes all there is.”

Nolan grunted.

“Want some coffee?”

“I started some when I got here. Ought to be done.”

“I’ll get it.” Tisor trudged into the kitchen, the tile floor cold to his bare feet. He never ceased to be amazed by Nolan. He wanted to ask Nolan how he got in — Tisor had the night before locked the house up tight — but he knew Nolan had no patience with curiosity.

Nolan had risen at 6:30, after eight hours of sleep, and had taken a cab to Tisor’s place. He’d sat down across the street on a bus stop bench to watch, hiding behind a newspaper. He saw that no one, outside of himself, was keeping an eye on Tisor’s house. And it didn’t look like anybody besides Tisor was staying there, either. Sid looked clean, but over a single doubt Nolan would have frisked his own mother, had she been alive. Nolan sat staring at Sid’s white two-story frame house, one of those boxes they churned out every hour on the hour in the fifties, and didn’t get up from the bench till Sid’s morning paper was delivered at 7:30. By 7:34 he had entered the house, through a basement window, and by 8:05 he’d searched every room, including the one Sid was sleeping in. Then, satisfied that Sid was clean, he had plopped down on the couch and started looking at the pictures in the November Playboy . At eight-thirty Sid came down in his green terry-cloth robe, looking like a corpse that had been goosed back to life.

Tisor brought Nolan a cup of coffee, black, and set a cup for himself on the table by Nolan. “Be back in a minute,” Tisor said, and Nolan was on his second cup by the time Tisor came back down the stairs, dressed in a Hawaiian-print sport-shirt and baggy gray slacks. Tisor sat down in a chair across from Nolan and sipped his cup of coffee, which was too strong for him though he tried not to let on, since Nolan had made it. Nolan nearly let a grin out: he got a kick out of Tisor, who had been the most unlikely big-time “gangster” he had ever known.

Tisor was Charlie Franco’s brother-in-law — his wife’s maiden name was Rose Ann Franco — and had lived off Rosie’s relatives since the day they were married. He had been fairly respectable before that, a CPA keeping books for several small firms and embezzling just a trifle; but his wife had insisted he take part in her brother’s “business.” It was quite painless for Tisor, who had switched to bookkeeper for the Family — he was an efficient, overpaid little wheel. And it was just like the world of business, all numbers in columns, and the closest he ever got to violence was the occasional Mickey Spillane novel he read.