Two for the Money (11 page)

Only it was Charlie’s laugh: if Nolan fucked up, and died, or ended in stir, Charlie would just love it; and if Nolan did pull this off, Charlie would be a hundred grand ahead and would have saved face with the Family. Nolan would’ve appreciated the joke, but for the dull ache in his side from Charlie’s last attempt to kill him.

The lighter popped out, and he yanked it free and lit his cigarette. Okay, he thought, on the surface it looked pretty bad, but at least he would have complete control. In the past, working with pros, he’d always been forced to compromise over certain points in the planning, because every individual pro has his own thoughts on how a heist should run. Nolan usually preferred Nolan’s ideas, and when a job did go bad, he almost always could trace the failure to faulty, compromise planning.

Here he would be in charge, complete charge. Or else he’d just have to look for something different even if that something different was putting a bullet in Charlie.

The kid, Jon, seemed to have a good head. On the way to Junction from Iowa City they’d refrained from talking about the job, both of them thinking it best to wait for the other two. Nolan’s initial scare over the boy’s passion for such a triviality as comic books was gone now. A lot of people in the trade had crazy ideas; the business was full of unconventional dreamers who supplemented their dreams with heist money.

Jon had told Nolan of his plan to acquire a bookstore, where he would deal in rare comic books and strips while working on the side to get his start as a freelance cartoonist. His uncle Planner had heard of such a store in Waterloo, operated by an old guy whose health had started to fail. Jon wanted to buy the place and build it into a mecca for comic collectors.

It was a goal, and that reassured Nolan, because the best men in the business were men with goals. Cheap heisters, the kind who wanted a quick lift to an easy life, were bad risks; men like that spent as fast as they stole, could not be
trusted. And it seemed like most of them lived life on a conveyer belt moving in and out of prisons. An intelligent heist artist would pick his jobs carefully, select co-workers carefully, and use his capital carefully.

Nolan had had a goal, too: he wanted to reach a state of financial independence by age fifty, so he could go through the rest of his years at a walk instead of a run, maybe operating a club or something to occupy his time. Now it looked like this job would be his last shot at fulfilling that goal.

The car door jumped open and Jon was there, saying, “This is Grossman, Nolan.”

Standing beside Jon was a slouching figure of slightly under six feet, with a faint look of sour skepticism on his face and, hovering over his shoulders, matted, greasy hair that hadn’t been washed any more recently than his faded jeans. At his side but behind him a little was a young girl of medium height, age nineteen or twenty, her face a strange but appealing wedding of innocence and sensuality. She was dressed in pink, her skirt tight, and she was slenderly but nicely built, her breasts tilting upward under her fuzzy pink sweater.

“And that’s Shelly,” Jon said, “behind Gross there.”

Nolan nodded to her and she smiled hello, her eyes a warm and penetrating blue.

“Climb in,” Nolan said, pointing his thumb toward the backseat.

Jon got in and sat behind the wheel as Grossman and Shelly slid in back. Nolan swivelled around in the seat and extended his hand to Grossman. The kid’s handshake was sullenly limp.

“Why don’t you pull the car off the highway and into the parking lot behind the tavern,” Nolan said to Jon. “We don’t want to attract undue attention.”

“Okay.” Jon started the engine and drove around the corner into the bar’s cramped parking area.

“Leave the motor going,” Nolan said. “It’s cold, we can use the heat. Anybody want a smoke?”

All three accepted his offer, and after he’d fired everybody’s cigarettes, Nolan said, “Who’s going to fill me in?”

“Hold it a minute.” Grossman leaned forward, his upper lip curling. “First I want to know just why the fuck
you
should be filled in at all.”

Nolan said nothing. He could feel the eyes of the girl on him.

Jon jabbed at the air with a finger. Around him the windows were fogging up fast, and the car was already filled with smoke. “Look, Gross,” he said, “this is
my
job. Mine. I talked it over with my uncle and he said we needed help to do this right, so he suggested we call in Nolan here. And I happen to think we’re pretty goddamn lucky to have a professional like him willing to work with us.”

“I suppose Captain America wasn’t available.”

“That isn’t necessary, Gross.”

“Oh?” Grossman did a little jabbing at the smoky air himself. “I think it’s goddamn good and necessary, so we can cut through this pretentious bullshit and ask some questions. Such as, first off, why’s Super-robber here want anything to do with an inexperienced bunch like us anyway? Why isn’t he out hitting a mint with Willie Sutton or something?”

“Gross, I warned you about . . .”

Nolan said, “Jon, it’s a legitimate question. Let me answer it.”

Jon shrugged. “You shouldn’t have to, Nolan.”

“I want to.” Nolan turned toward Grossman. “You’re right. I’m not thrilled over the idea of working with virgins like the three of you. But I don’t have any choice.”

Grossman tapped Jon on the shoulder and said, “See?”

Nolan said, “Grossman, ever hear of the Family?”

Grossman shrugged, not understanding.

“How about the Syndicate? Cosa Nostra? Any of those ring a bell?”

Grossman nodded, slowly.

“About sixteen years ago I worked for the Family, which is the same thing. I ran a nightclub for them. I had a run-in
with a brother of one of the Family higher-ups, and I killed him.”

Grossman tried not to act impressed, but a twitch at the lower right corner of his mouth betrayed him. The girl was trying to keep her demure facial expression intact, but Nolan got a glimpse of her pink tongue flicking out over dry lips. Nolan continued, telling them briefly of the situation he was in with Charlie, but naming no names or particulars. He explained that the Family’s interference with him while on a job had caused the word to get out in the trade that it was dangerous to work with him. And he told them of his need to make another hit to settle his Family differences by way of cash payoff.

Jon, who supposedly had heard the same story from Planner, gave Grossman a tense look and said, “Does that sound reasonable enough to you? Or does anything said by anybody other than yourself
ever
sound reasonable to you?”

Grossman shrugged.

“How many men,” the girl asked Nolan, “have you . . . had to kill?”

Nolan turned to look at her and her blue eyes locked his in; where they’d been warm, they were now hot.

“A few,” he said.

“How the hell do we know,” Grossman said, courage regathered, “that this dude isn’t just some washed-up stum-blebum pal of Planner’s, looking for a meal ticket and trying to snow us with his big Godfather fairy tale?”

“You don’t,” Nolan said.

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

The girl touched Grossman’s arm and said, “I think he’s leveling with us, Gross.”

The long-haired youth slipped an arm around her shoulders and gave her a smile which was, Nolan felt, remarkably soft and obedient, considering what a rebel Grossman obviously pictured himself to be. “You think,” he said, “we should give gramps here a chance?”

She nodded. “That I do.”

“Anything you say, babe. Okay, old man, where do we go from here?”

“Where I suggested we go,” Nolan said, “before you went into your tantrum. Somebody fill me in.”

Grossman clenched his teeth and talked through them. “Now look, old man, only so much am I willing to take . . .”

“Hey, Gross, cool it, huh?” The girl touched his cheek with a pink-nailed hand. “You’re the one dishing it out, right? Let’s give him the chance you said you’d give him.”

Grossman withdrew his arm from around her shoulders, folded his arms across his chest, and leaned back. “Okay, babe.”

Jon said, “All right. I’ll tell Nolan what’s been going on.”

Their plan, as Jon outlined it to Nolan, was fairly simple. Shelly had been working at Port City Savings and Trust for nearly three months now, using the name Elaine Simmons and false credentials courtesy of Planner, and was well trusted and liked at the bank. Jon’s plan was to hit the bank, “kidnap” teller Shelly and, by having this ready-made “hostage,” be able to make a clean, unhampered getaway.

“No,” Nolan said.

The three kids looked at him, shocked. Jon started to say something and Nolan cut him off.

“No,” he repeated. “It’s lousy . . . the hostage idea is okay, but you’re using it all wrong.”

“I say dump the old man here and now,” Grossman said, “and to hell with him! We don’t need any fucking fourth wheel anyhow.”

“Quiet,” Jon said. “What’s so lousy about the plan, Nolan?”

“You got in mind what’s called a ‘smash and grab.’ That’s a type of job a pro tries only when he’s down and desperate for a stake, and with little or no planning, let alone this elaborate hostage thing you’re setting up. You have an inside agent, a valuable asset on a job, which you plan to use in a next-to-useless way.”

The girl moved forward in the backseat and said, “Why is that?”

“Look at it like this,” Nolan said. “You’ll already have pulled the FBI in on it, since the bank is covered by federal funds. Next you want to add a needless kidnapping charge which will just get everybody all the more upset, and probably get national coverage.”

“But it isn’t a
real
kidnapping!”

Nolan shook his head, smiling. “The FBI won’t know that. Your object is to make everybody think the kidnapping’s real, isn’t it?”

Jon borrowed Nolan’s cigarettes for a fresh smoke. “We figured with a hostage from the bank they would leave us alone, not wanting the girl to get hurt.”

“No,” Nolan said again. “Oh, you’d get away, all right. Tracked by more cars and helicopters than you ever knew existed. They’d know where you were at every moment, and they’d wait you out. You’d never shake them.”

“Are you suggesting,” Jon asked, “that we abandon the hostage angle? That’s why we went to all the trouble of having Shelly establish herself at the bank as a clerk.”

“Not abandon it,” Nolan said. “Reshape it. There
are
a lot of advantages in taking hostage a person who’s actually in on the hit, all of which I won’t go into now. But . . . the getaway must be clean. You see, once you—or we, if you’ll allow me to speculate—are safely away from the bank, we could split up in separate cars and, suitably disguised, make it away easy. Why? Because at roadblocks they’ll be looking for three men and a woman, and they’ll expect the woman to seem ill at ease since she’s being held prisoner. Not, for example, two men on their way home from a hunting trip, or a married couple on their honeymoon. Which is what the four of us could easily become.”

“It’s good,” Jon said.

The girl nodded and Grossman was silent.

“And there’s still another reason,” Nolan told them, “why you shouldn’t handle this job smash-and-grab.”

Jon’s eyebrows arched. “Oh?”

“The half-assed way you had this planned is the way banks are hit all the time by semi-pros and amateurs. You read the papers. How much do you see banks usually get taken for?”

“I don’t know,” Jon said.

“A couple thousand at the most,” Nolan said. “Four, maybe. And always marked bills.”

“Bait money,” Shelly said.

Jon wrinkled his face up. “What?”

“Bait money,” Nolan said. “Banker jargon for the packets of marked bills each teller has at her window.”

“That’s still a thousand apiece,” Grossman said.

Nolan crushed out his old cigarette in the dashboard ashtray, took his time getting a new one going. Finally he said, “Shelly, how much money would you estimate is in your bank on a Monday, in the afternoon, before the Brinks men come around Monday night to pick up the old bills and excess cash?”

She lifted her shoulders and put them down again. “Oh, offhand I’d say between five and seven hundred thousand dollars.”

The mouths on Grossman and Jon dropped.

She stroked her chin with pink-nailed fingers. “Or maybe eight hundred thousand, on the right Monday.”

Nolan said, “Like the first Monday in the month?”

She nodded. “Maybe a little more, even.”

“November is less than two weeks away,” Nolan said. “Anyone interested in doing some planning between now and the first Monday of the month?”

Jon laughed and seemed to be relaxed for the first time since the smoky dialogue had begun. “I sure am. What do you say, Gross?”

Grossman’s head bobbed up and down.

“Shelly?” Jon asked.

“I’m with Nolan,” she said, “all the way.”

“Fine,” Nolan said. He turned to Grossman. “I hear you’re good with cars. Jon says you used to be a driver.”

“Yeah,” Grossman said, “I raced stocks when I was in high school and junior college, but gave it up a few years ago when I hit the road.”

“But the car he’s been hitting the road with still goes pretty good,” Shelly said, rubbing the window beside her to clear a viewing spot in the moisture so Nolan could see the yellow Mustang a few spaces down from them in the tavern lot.

Nolan looked at Grossman. “That right?”

Grossman said, “It’ll go.”

The girl looped her arm in his and looked up into his face. “He handles it great, don’t you, Gross? No matter how tough things have gotten, he’s managed to keep it in shape. Souped up the engine himself, and tinkers around with it when he gets the chance.”

“That’s good,” Nolan said, “we can use a driver-mechanic. But that’s just one of a lot of details we have to work out. I got things to do to get ready before we start our planning sessions. I’ll have Jon get in touch with you, Grossman, in a couple days.”

Shelly leaned up and touched Nolan’s hand. “What do you have to do?”

“Rent a house, with a barn or garage or something. Buy a car. Won’t hurt me to do some thinking.”

“Where’s the bread going to come from?” Grossman asked him.