Hard Cash (4 page)

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?”

5

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.

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.”