Hard Cash (3 page)

No, not a chance meeting, but a planned confrontation, contrived for some special, specific reason.
But what?
Nolan wondered.

So he asked, “What do you want, Rigley?”

Rigley smiled his unreal smile. The tic at the edge of his eye stopped.

“I want you to rob my bank again,” he said.

3

TWO WEEKS AGO
, after the first real snowfall, Jon had gone out and bought a Christmas tree. An artificial one, a two-foot-high affair that was an aluminum tube with holes you stuck plastic piney branches in, but a Christmas tree. Then, when he got home, he got embarrassed thinking about how Nolan would react to any such deck-the-halls bullshit, and he tossed the thing, still packed away in its cardboard box, unassembled, into a closet and forgot about it.

But today it had snowed again, and it was beautiful snow. He had looked out the window, and the world was a damn Christmas card. It had snowed yesterday too, but that was slushy, messy stuff. Today was colder, the snow dry, like a fine white powder, and he had gone straight for his sketch pad and grabbed his winter coat and gotten in the car and driven out into a wooded area and began drawing. At dusk he headed back, with half a dozen detailed sketches under his arm (some in the styles of cartoonists whose winter scenes Jon admired—Milton Caniff, George Wunder, Stan Lynde) and stopped downtown at the Airliner to warm up over something alcoholic. By the time he got back to the antique shop and inside and upstairs in the living quarters that had been his uncle Planner’s and were presently being shared by Nolan and himself, Jon was full of Christmas cheer, and soon he was hauling the artificial tree out of the closet and putting it together pine by plastic pine.

Jon was twenty-one, short but powerfully built, with a headful of curly brown hair and the sort of pleasant, boyish blue-eyed features that made girls want to cuddle him. Which was an asset, of course, but Jon himself didn’t much like the way he looked, and didn’t much care, either, his wardrobe running to sweatshirts with comics characters on the front and old worn-out jeans with patches on the ass.

He was a cartoonist, or anyway wanted to be. He’d loved comic books since he was a kid, and had been trying to write and draw them himself as long as he could remember. He’d kicked around from relative to relative and from school to school while his mother (a third-rate nightclub “chanteuse”) was on the road, and fought the trauma of his fatherless, all but motherless childhood by escaping into the four-color, ten-cent fantasy world of the comics. It was a hobby that grew into a way of life, and would, hopefully, one day become a livelihood.

So far he was unpublished, but he was getting pretty good, so it shouldn’t be long now. But drawing comics was a risky field to try to go into. Right now, with comic books suffering because of distribution problems, and underground comics having run out of steam after the goddamn Supreme Court’s obscenity ruling, and newspaper comics being shrunk down to the size of postage stamps, he’d do better going into blacksmithing.

But what the hell—he loved the comics. He would stay with it.

He put the assembled tree on top of the television set. It looked naked.
Pretty girls
, Jon thought, still full of Christmas spirit,
look good naked; plastic trees do not.
He had neglected to buy any decorations or tinsel, but guessed he would get around to that tomorrow. Maybe some gifts under the tree would improve things.

“Yeah, gifts,” he said out loud, tinning on the television. (Some cop show was on—he couldn’t tell which, as they all looked pretty much the same to him, especially the ones with helicopters flying around constantly.) He flopped onto the couch by the wall and watched without watching.

The artificial tree, barren of gifts, made him think how absurd it was of him to decorate the living quarters of a man like Nolan with the sentimental ornamentation of the season. It was equally absurd to think of buying gifts to put under the tree. What did you buy a tough guy for Christmas, anyway? Maybe wrap up a box of .38 slugs in a bright red bow and put it in his stocking mask?

Yes, it was a real problem, buying a bank robber a gift.

And then Jon remembered.

Hey
, he thought.
Those days are over.

It hit him, perhaps for the first time, and he had the strangest damn feeling: a mingling of glad and sad, loss and gain.

Nolan was retired.

Nolan wasn’t a thief anymore. Nolan had put his long-barrel .38 Colt and shoulder holster away in moth balls, hadn’t he? To help an old buddy run a restaurant. Retired.

Which meant Jon, too, was retired. From that particular precarious life-style, anyway. Heists and guns and bullets and blood were back in the paperbacks where they belonged, back in the movies and comic books, back on the tube, like that mindless cop show he wasn’t paying attention to, and Jon was relieved. The game was over, and he was relieved.

And vaguely sorry.

But mostly relieved,
shit
, when he thought back on it, on
two years of breaking the law and having people shooting at you and, Christ, sometimes shooting back. He
shuddered, wondering how he’d ever let himself get mixed up with somebody like Nolan in the first place.

He liked Nolan. He admired him. But he did not worship the man, even if at one time he’d come close to doing so; in the very beginning, he’d seen Nolan as a living personification of the strong, silent heroes of popular mythology—the supermen of the comics, the gunfighters and private eyes of the movies. Nolan was like somebody who’d walked right out of Jon’s fantasy world, and it had been exciting.

Now, however, Jon knew there was a fuck of a lot of difference between fantasy and fact; now he knew the reality of seeing people he cared about—Planner, for instance, and Shelly, a girl Jon’d made love to—die, brutally, cruelly, with hands cupping their own blood, as if they were trying to catch and hold onto the life that was gushing out of them and dripping through their fingers. Jon had known the terror of having the police after you, and he had known what it was like having people far worse than police after you, trying to kill you. And you trying to kill them back.

It wasn’t that he’d grown moral all of a sudden. He still felt being a thief wasn’t any worse than being a politician or a business executive, although he felt thieves were generally more honest. And insurance companies were
dens of damn thieves, dealing with customers, trying to screw
them
like thieves, and who were at least partially dependent on the self-admitted thieves like Nolan to keep in business. No, all of the old rationalizations held up for him.
In a corrupt society
, his uncle Planner had once told him,
a thief at least has a chance to be an individual, to be honorably corrupt
. The idea of being a thief didn’t bother Jon.

The idea of killing did. Jon valued human life. He had respect for it, did not believe in hurting people. He did not enjoy seeing people suffer, could hardly
bear
to see someone suffer.

On the heist in Detroit, two months ago, he had killed a man.

A crazy old man named Sam Comfort, who was pointing a shotgun at Nolan, getting ready to let loose that shotgun straight into Nolan’s guts.

And Jon had shot Sam Comfort.

A man who was a double-crossing, probably psychopathic and wholly corrupt thief, in the worst sense of that word, who had betrayed his compatriots time and time again. Killed time and again. A man who, in the opinion of many, deserved to die anyway.

In this case, however, Jon couldn’t make the rationalizations work for him. He hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since Detroit.

And Detroit wasn’t all He would lie awake and think back to the earlier heist the very first one, the Port City bank job, and realize that that time the same thing could have happened: guns could have started going off. He and Nolan had been holding guns on innocent people at that bank, innocent people who could have gotten in the way of guns going off and been killed.

It was hard enough living with the thought of killing a Sam Comfort. But the thought of even the possibility of causing the death of an innocent person, a “civilian,” as Nolan would put it, was something Jon could not bear.

So he was glad the game was over. He would miss the positive side of it, the excitement, the heady rush brought on by the presence of danger, the satisfaction of working well under pressure, and of meeting Nolan’s high professional standards; but as for the dark side, the blood and killing and all of that, good riddance.

The cop show on the tube seemed to be ending, a shootout in progress. People were dying in that sterile, bloodless way people die on television. He got up and switched the channel and the same thing was going on, but with slightly different faces. He turned it off, got his sketch pad, and began to doodle, finally roughing out a graphic story idea he’d had in the back of his head a while. He lost himself in the drawing, and the upsetting thoughts of death and violence left him.

Around nine he heard Nolan coming up the steps.

“How come back so early?” he asked Nolan as he came in, not looking up from the sketch pad.

“Here,” Nolan said, and Jon looked up.

Nolan was tossing something at him.

“You’re maybe going to need that,” Nolan said.

Jon looked down at what he’d caught: a gun.

Nolan disappeared into the bedroom.

Jon stared at the snubnose .38 as if he couldn’t remember what it was for. In a moment Nolan was coming out of the bedroom, getting into his shoulder holster.

“I had a visitor at the Pier tonight, lad,” Nolan was saying. “George Rigley.”

“Uh, George
who
?”

“Rigley.” He was loading slugs into the long-barrel .38 now. “President of the Port City bank.”

“Port City. . . Jesus. Did he . . . ?”

“Recognize me? Like a long-lost identical twin brother.”

Jon didn’t say anything. He was having trouble just thinking. Talking was out of the question.

“He wants us to rob the Port City bank again,” Nolan said

Jon felt his mouth drop open, but nothing came out

“We got two choices, kid. The guy’s evidently been doing some book-juggling, and wants us to rob his bank for him so he can cover, and we can do that. That’s one choice. The other choice is obvious.”

The other choice was to kill the bank president.

“Well, Jon,” Nolan said, shoving the gun down snug in the underarm holster. “What’s your preference? Choice A or B?”

“How . . . how about ‘none of the above.
’
”

“That’d be my choice too . . . if it was a choice.”

“Then . . . then I suppose we rob his fucking bank. Christ.”

Nolan sat on the edge of the couch. Jon was sitting up now; it wasn’t the land of news you took lying down. Nolan said, “There are some things we have to do tonight. Kid? You listening?”

Jon let out the breath he’d drawn in and had been holding for forty seconds or so. “Yeah. I’m okay. Go ahead with what you were saying, Nolan. Shoot.”

4

RIGLEY’S COTTAGE
was little dif
ferent from any of the others along the Cedar River. Like most of them, it looked more like a small house than a cottage: an unassuming white clapboard high on a bank that sloped down gently to the river.

Nolan shrugged out of his heavy leather coat as he came in, tossing it on a plaid upholstered couch. Rigley followed, got out of a gray, fur-collared coat, and hung it on the rack by the door; he hung Nolan’s there too.

This front room—which apparently took up at least half the floor space of the cottage—had a comfortable masculine look to it. The walls were paneled in pine, and big pine-shuttered windows faced the river and flanked either side of a central fireplace, a massive affair of rust-color brick with a healthy blaze going in it. The furniture was lived-in looking, and there was no overhead lighting, just a standing lamp here and there. Rigley was an outdoorsman, evidently, or anyway fancied himself one; a mounted fish hung over the fireplace, and some pictures of ducks in flight flew above the couch. And down at the far end of the room, a small but overstocked bar was watched over by one of those big, lighted-up beer signs of an animated outdoor scene—a stream running through lush green woods. A masculine-looking room, all right, but a woman lived here. Nolan could see her in the neatness of the housekeeping; the dazzling polish of the hardwood floor, which was reflecting the glow of the fireplace like a huge mirror; the floral centerpiece of an otherwise rugged-looking picnic-type table. She was here now: Nolan could feel her presence. He could smell her.

But Rigley said nothing about a woman being here, or anyone else, for that matter.

Which didn’t explain why the fire was going when they got there.

The conversation between Nolan and Rigley at the Pier had been a brief one. Rigley had wanted to continue the conversation elsewhere, out of the public eye, a sentiment Nolan couldn’t have shared more. Rigley mentioned this cottage of his as a possible meeting place and Nolan accepted, but suggested that the two of them not be seen leaving the restaurant together. So they’d agreed to meet at ten in the parking lot of the Target store on the way out of town; Nolan would then follow Rigley to the cottage on the Cedar River, between Iowa City and Port City. Which had given Nolan time to stop at the antique shop and fill Jon in.

And now here he was with Rigley, at the cottage, with someone—some woman—listening on in another room.

Rigley was behind the bar, fixing himself something. “What can I build you, Mr. Logan?”

Logan was the name Nolan was using at the Pier.

“Nothing,” Nolan said.

“Come on, now,” Rigley said, with patronizing smile and tone to match. “I see no reason why we can’t be sociable. We’re going to be working together rather closely for the next few weeks, after all.”

Nolan sighed. He plopped his ass down on the couch. The couch was close to the door. He unbuttoned his jacket and folded his arms to prevent the gun under his arm from showing. Between Rigley’s phony pleasant attitude and knowing somebody was in the next room, Nolan felt pretty uncomfortable. Rigley hadn’t turned on any lights yet, so there was just the light from the fire, which was short on illumination and long on creating a sinister, shadow- throwing atmosphere. Nolan said, “Make it a beer then.”

Rigley brought Nolan a beer, pulled a straight-back chair from somewhere, and sat facing him. Looking down at him.
All he lacks
, Nolan thought,
is his goddamn desk
.

“Before we begin, I think I should explain something,” Rigley said, sipping his drink, a Manhattan. “I have everything worked out. I know just how we can bring this off . . . simply, efficiently, safely and, most importantly, profitably. Extremely profitably. All you will have to do is follow my instructions explicitly, and everything will . . .”

Nolan stood.

He walked to the fireplace, leaned against it, made Rigley turn to look at him. Looking down on Rigley, he said, “Make all the suggestions you want. But no instructions.”

“Mr. Logan, I . . .”

“You’re a banker. You know everything there is to know about banks. Except one thing. How to rob them. That’s my department.”

“You don’t understand—you see, I have everything worked out. . . .”

“You’re the one who doesn’t understand. Either I’m in charge, or I’m out.”

Rigley thought that over for a moment, then shrugged his acceptance of Nolan’s terms. “You’re right. I came to you because you have expertise in this particular area of endeavor. I wanted a professional on the team . . . otherwise I could have just as well settled for some lowlife out of a riverfront dive. So I must agree. You are the one most qualified to make the decisions in our forthcoming venture.” He made a toasting gesture, drained the remains of his Manhattan, and rose and fixed himself another.

But when he came back from the bar, he had more with him than a fresh drink: he was carrying a manila folder, which he handed to Nolan, saying, “I think you’ll find this of interest.”

Nolan emptied his beer in two long swigs, set the empty can on the hearth, took the folder. He was getting more and more irritated with Rigley’s constant barrage of bullshit, and was wondering if the guy was a little drunk or was just naturally a pompous ass. With a bank president, it was hard to tell. He looked in the folder.

It contained photographs of Nolan and Jon, separately and together, taken at the Pier, outside the antique shop, and elsewhere around Iowa City. There was also the newspaper clipping that included the composite drawings of both Nolan and Jon (neither very good, but a resemblance could be seen, if you tried hard enough) and a Xerox copy of a signed statement by Rigley in which he stated his belief that “Logan” and Jon were two of the three men who had robbed the Port City bank two years ago.

“My lawyer has a duplicate folder,” Rigley said. “Sealed, of course. He won’t open it unless anything should happen to me, in which case . . . well, I’m sure you can guess where the contents of the folder would go.”

Nolan said, “I don’t like blackmailers.”

“I don’t mean it to be blackmail. This is simply a matter of business. If it was blackmail, I wouldn’t be offering you money, would I? And there is a great deal of money to be made here for you and that young friend of yours. There were four of you involved when you took three quarters of a million dollars from my bank two years ago. This time, there would be only a three-way split, a third for me, a third each for you and your young friend. The purpose of the folder is one of leverage—to convince you to help me, join me in this undertaking. And to remind you that while I may, in the execution of said undertaking, choose to defer my position of leadership to you, I am
still
, in reality, in the overview, in charge.”

Nolan folded the folder lengthwise several times and walked over to Rigley and swatted him in the face with it a few times.

“You,” Nolan said, “are in charge of shit.”

And he hit him a few more times with the folded folder.

“Stop it, stop it!” Nolan had stopped slapping him with the folder, but Rigley was cowering anyway, holding his hands in front of his face like a man trying to keep out the sun.

Nolan grabbed a handful of Rigley’s expensive suit coat and lifted him off the couch and shook him a little. “Listen to me, asshole. You’re in so far over your fucking head, you can’t even tell you’re drowning.”

“Don’t . . . don’t hurt me.”

“Don’t hurt you?” He thrust him back against the couch, and Rigley bounced limply, like someone already dead. “I’m probably going to kill you, you stupid, smug son of a bitch! Can’t you even see that?”

“You’re not . . . going to kill me,” Rigley said. It was assertion, question, and plea all at once, but mostly the latter; he had seen the gun in the holster swinging under Nolan’s shoulder.

“That remains to be seen,” Nolan said, pacing, deciding.

“You don’t really think I’d be fool enough to bring you out here to a . . . remote spot like this without having . . . having someone to back me up, do you, Logan?”

“I think you’re a fool—period.”

“We’re not alone, Logan. I’m warning you. Don’t try anything. We’re not alone; I can have you at my mercy at the drop of a hat.”

Nolan laughed, and the laugh sounded harsh even in his own ears. “It’s too bad you don’t have a hat, then, Rigley. At your mercy, Jesus.”

“Julie,” Rigley called. “Julie, get in here, quick!”

Nolan shook his head and said, “Well, you’re right about one thing, Rigley. We aren’t alone. Come on in, Jon.”

Jon came in through the doorway opposite the fireplace, with Rigley’s partner in tow. He flicked on a standing lamp by the couch, where he deposited his pretty P.O.W., from whom he’d taken a double-barreled shotgun, which was cradled over his left arm, making the snubnose .38 in his hand look like a toy. Meanwhile, the girl was angrily removing the slash of white tape Jon had forced over her mouth a few minutes earlier.

“I hope you don’t mind Jon coming in the back way, Rigley,” Nolan said.

Rigley said nothing. He sat motionless, except for that facial tic that had started up again.

But the beautiful young woman in her mid to late twenties sitting next to Rigley didn’t seem the least bit shaken. Pissed off, yes; shaken, no. She was tall, probably five-ten or more, with dark brown hair that curved around her face in a way that reminded Nolan of the way women wore their hair in the forties, the what was it?—page boy. She had big eyes, huge damn eyes, as brown as her hair and as beautiful; all of her features were beautiful in an exaggerated way. Her mouth was overly large, but nicely so—a sensual mouth that seemed to Nolan designed for any number of erotic pastimes—and her nose was nearly too small and put together so perfectly, it seemed unlikely God could have done it without help. She was full-breasted, small-waisted, lavishly hipped. She wore a matching sweater and pants outfit the color of the rusty brick fireplace; the shadows from the fire were licking her, and he didn’t blame them.

Nolan went over and took the shotgun from Jon, and it was in his arms as he looked at Rigley and said, “There are two alternatives for dealing with blackmailers. Go along with them. Or kill them. I can’t see going along with you, Rigley. For one thing, I don’t think I can stomach your pompous fucking bank president attitude. And I don’t think my temper will last long around stupid goddamn stunts like that folder full of threats you shoved under my nose, or having your busty girl friend cover me with a shotgun from the next room while we talk. I just cannot see getting involved in a heist with irrational, incompetent amateurs the likes of you two. And so I’m left with that other, unpleasant alternative.”

Rigley was pale and looked almost dazed, but the girl, Julie, said, “He’s bluffing, honey. Don’t pay any attention to him.”

Nolan went on, still talking over the twin barrels of the shotgun. “I’m willing to offer you a third alternative, Rigley. I’m willing to let this end right here. Quietly. Without violence. I’ll forget about you, your embezzling, your pipe-dream robbery. And you do likewise where I’m concerned.”

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.”