Two for the Money (42 page)

The garage took up half of the lower floor; next to it was a large games room, dartboard still on the wall, chairs and tables covered, one of them big and round and obviously a poker table, with the back wall taken up by a bar, stocked with nothing. The outside door that led into this room was unlocked, and Nolan went silently in, taking his time, opening the door so that it hardly creaked a bit, even though it surely hadn’t had much use lately.

To the left of the bar area was a stairway. Nolan crossed the room like an Indian and started up the stairs, at the top of which was the light of an open doorway. As he climbed he noticed the tightness of his facial muscles, how tense his neck was, and consciously loosened himself, fanning his .38 out in front of him in a fluid, almost graceful motion. Nolan stepped into the hallway on the balls of his feet. The hall was narrow, three doors on each side, all of them shut tight. One by one he stood before the doors and listened, not opening any of them, only listening, pressing an ear tenderly against the heavy wood, searching for a sound. A dripping faucet behind one door told him he’d found the can, but he heard nothing else until he’d worked his way down both sides of the hall. This final door was to one of the rooms that faced the hill; the rooms on this side were more likely for holding a prisoner than those with views of the lake and a balcony running by. He listened and then he heard it, a voice, a man’s voice, a young man perhaps.

He stood to the left of the door, back to the wall, and reached across and turned the knob and nudged the door barely open. Then with a quick kick he knocked it open all the way and flattened back against the wall and heard the snick of a silenced gun and watched the slug splinter into the door opposite. Still flat to the wall, he peered around between fully open door and doorjamb, hopefully to fire through the crack into the room at whoever shot at him, and saw Jon standing there, holding an automatic in one trembling hand.

“It’s Nolan,” Nolan said softly, and stepped into the doorway.

“Nolan!”

“Quiet,” he said, walking into the room.

“I could’ve killed you.”

“Well, you didn’t.”

The room had pink wallpaper, a big bed with open springs and sheet-covered furniture. On the bed was a young guy in his early twenties, wearing a blue tee-shirt and white jeans and tied to the bed. One of his feet was bare; this was explained by the sock stuffed in his mouth, as a make-do gag.

“I bet that tastes sweet,” Nolan said. “Charlie’s kid?”

“Charlie’s kid. His name is Walt. God, am I glad to see you, Nolan.”

“Where’d you get the gun and the ropes?”

“From him. Those are the ropes I was tied up with for longer than I’d care to talk about.”

“How long you been in control here?”

“Five minutes maybe. Had a chance earlier, but I blew it. Anyway, he came around a while ago to see if I had to take a piss or anything and I kicked him in the nuts.”

“You’re learning.”

“He’s really a pretty decent guy, for a kidnapper. He was going to help me.”

“Then why’d you feel it necessary to kick his balls in?”

“He kept
talking
about helping me, but he never got around to doing it.”

“I see. Where’s Charlie?”

“Up on that hill there, I guess. In that house up there. You can see the place from the window.” He walked over to the window and Nolan came along. Jon pointed out and said, “See?”

This side of the hill was just as steep, but there was no row of pines blocking the view. The house was two stories of yellow stucco, like the boathouse, but was much bigger and of that pseudo-Spanish architecture so common in the twenties. With its turrets and archways, it was a genuine relic, the castle of latter-day robber barons, built during the blood-and-booze era by the father of Charlie’s late wife. Someday people would pay fifty cents to hear a tour guide tell about it. Maybe today would provide a sock finish for the guide’s line of patter.

“Somewhere down in those bushes,” Jon said, “is an underground elevator or something. Or maybe a hidden stairway. Over to the right of those cobblestone steps, see? I watched Walt last time he came back from the house and he came out of those bushes.”

Nolan scratched his chin with the hand the .38 was in. “Kind of figured there was some other, easy way up there, besides steps. There’s steps in front and back both, but with Charlie wounded . . . he
is
wounded, isn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Jon nodded, “his thigh. I saw him back in Ainsworth’s office, his thigh was all bandaged. That’s the last time I saw Charlie, was back there in Iowa City. Christ, that reminds me, how’s Karen? How the hell is she? Did you see her?”

“Yes. She’s fine. How about you? You all right?”

“I am now that you’re here. How’d you find me, anyway?”

“We can shoot the bull later, kid. Right now we got things to do.”

“Listen, why don’t we just . . . no. Forget it.”

“Something on your mind?”

“No, nothing, forget it.”

“You were going to say, why don’t we just take off while we got our asses in one piece?”

“Well, yes. Being alive sounds pretty damn good to me at the moment.”

“Do what you want. I’m staying.”

“Yeah, well, me too, of course. And I understand how you feel about this guy Charlie, it’s a real thing between you two, been going on a lot of years and . . .”

“Fuck that. The money’s what I care about. That son of a bitch has three quarters of a million dollars,
our
three quarters of a million dollars, Jon. And all that money sounds pretty damn good to me. That’s what I call being alive.”

“I’d . . . almost forgotten about the money . . . how could I forget that much money. Seems so long since yesterday . . . yesterday Planner was alive, Nolan, do you realize that?” Jon’s hand whitened around the nine-millimeter automatic. “I’m glad we’re going to do something about . . . about what they did to Planner.”

“Look. One thing we don’t need to be is emotional. We got no time for revenge. That’s for the crazy assholes, like Charlie. I want that bastard breathing, for the time being anyway. I got to shake our money out of him. God knows what he’s done with it.”

“The money,” Jon said, nodding, loosening up. “That’s what’s important.”

Nolan pointed at Walter, whose close-set eyes were big from listening intently to the conversation. “What about him? Have you gotten anything out of him?”

“We hadn’t got very far in our conversation when you got here. I was asking him yes and no questions so he could shake his head and answer, and he claimed he wouldn’t scream or anything if I ungagged him, but I wasn’t convinced yet.”

“It’s just the two of them, then, right? Charlie and the kid?”

“Far as I know. Why not ask Walt, here?”

“Take the sock out of his mouth.”

Jon did.

Walter tried to spit the taste out of his mouth, didn’t quite get the job done.

“This is Nolan,” Jon said. “The guy I told you about.”

Walter said nothing. He had a blank expression, as though he couldn’t make up his mind whether to be outraged or scared shitless.

“How about it, Walt?” Nolan asked. “Just you and your dad?”

Walter said nothing.

Jon said, “I don’t think he’s going to say anything.”

Nolan said, “Well. I’m going up the hill.”

“Wait,” Walter said. “Don’t hurt him! He’s just a poor old man!”

Nolan said nothing.

Jon said, “What do I do?”

Nolan stuffed the sock back into Walter’s mouth and said, “Stay here and guard Junior. If Charlie comes out on top, you’ll have good bargaining power.”

“Don’t talk that way! How could that old bastard come out on top over you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe shoot me, like the other two times.”

“Jesus, Nolan.”

“Come on, I’ll help you take him downstairs. Ground floor’ll be better for you and if you set up behind the bar you’ll have a decent vantage point, and you’ll be right by the garage. He didn’t have car keys on him, by any chance?”

“No.”

“Can you hotwire a car, kid?”

“My J.D. days pay off at last. Sure I can hotwire a car, can’t everybody?”

“Good man. Come on.”

They dragged Walter down the stairs into the gameroom.

“See you kid,” Nolan said.

“See you, Nolan,” Jon said. But he didn’t quite sound sure.

The elevator hadn’t seen regular use for years, having only recently been brought back into service for Charlie’s homecoming to Eagle’s Roost. Nolan stood inside the cramped, steel-frame cage, finger poised over a button that said UP. Should he press the damn thing?

He didn’t know.

All he knew was the elevator would deliver him
somewhere
inside that yellow stucco dinosaur up there. But
somewhere
covered a lot of unchartered territory. Still, it would be an easy, quick way inside the place; he would avoid that steep, out-in-the-open climb, wouldn’t have to worry about approaching the many-windowed house on all that flat surrounding ground. And there was surprise in it, too: no way in hell Charlie would figure Nolan for coming up the damn elevator.

But the cage was doorless, and gave him absolutely no place to hide, nowhere to shoot from behind, nothing to help him work out a defense in case he was dropped into a waiting Charlie’s lap. And as basic as this elevator system was, Nolan expected no sliding door to await him at the end of his upward ride.

Chances were good, however, that the elevator would open onto an entryway of some kind, with coatracks and such, a vestibule type of thing. Or perhaps somewhere in or near the kitchen, since anyone coming to a summer place like this for a stay would surely come bearing groceries. Neither kitchen or vestibule seemed highly likely places for Charlie to be hanging around.

He pressed the button.

The motor wheezed and coughed, the cable groaned as it
lifted the cage. That was okay. He had known there’d be noise, especially with an elevator as old as this. Charlie would be expecting his son to be coming back and the sound of the elevator wouldn’t surprise him. And if Charlie was waiting for Walter by where the elevator came up, no problem either, as long as the old man was expecting the kid and not Nolan, he’d be easy to overcome.

To get to the underground elevator, Nolan had had to shove his way through the brush and weeds that had overtaken what had once been a well-worn pathway, and sure enough, just in that area Jon had pointed out from the boathouse window, Nolan found an entrance. A heavy wrought-iron gate, which was being choked to death by ugly, clinging weeds, had been swung open to one side and a rock shoved against it to keep it open. He had then entered a narrow, low-ceilinged passageway, with plywood walls and a gravel floor; the air was dank and stale, the atmosphere falling somewhere between dungeon and cattle shed.

The passageway, and the elevator itself, said something about the mobster mentality, or at least first-generation mobster mentality, and this, as much as the obvious age of everything, dated it all back to Capone days, in Nolan’s mind. After going to the fantastic expense of tunneling a hundred feet down through a hill, and then out thirty or forty feet more through the side of the hill to make the passageway, the first owner of Eagle’s Roost had then spared all expense, getting the most fundamental, bare-ass elevator system he could, and putting in a passageway that could’ve been the gateway to Shanty Town. Those old mobsters betrayed their beginnings every time; they reverted to the penny-squeezing of poverty-stricken upbringings, whenever given half a chance. Those bastards knew how to suck up the money, Nolan thought, but they never learned how to spend it.

And that none of it had ever been extensively revamped said something about Charlie, a first-generation mobster himself, who hadn’t been born into the Family, he’d married
into it. Like his wife’s father, Charlie had known hard times, and like Nolan, he was a product of Depression years. While the elevator had apparently been kept in good working order and minor renovations made (electric motor replacing hydraulic, perhaps), Charlie had never put a new elevator in, or modernized the rustic passageway. Nolan could understand the psychology of it, because he shared Charlie’s inability to enjoy money, had never really been good at spending it, afraid somehow to get accustomed to luxury, as if getting ready for the next Depression. With it came a tendency to hoard your money for a rosy retirement, which wasn’t the best policy for men in high-risk fields, like Nolan and Charlie.

In fact, this wasn’t the first time Nolan had lost all his money in one fell swoop, wasn’t even the first time Charlie had been responsible. Not long ago Charlie had exposed Nolan’s well-established cover name and cost him his hoarder’s life savings. And Nolan had done the same for Charlie, hadn’t he? Exposing him to the Family and ending a lifelong career?

And so now they were down to this. Two men who hadn’t been young for a long time, who for reasons obscured by the years had done their best to wreck one another’s lives (and with considerable success), two men alone in a house, with guns.

Going up in that elevator, impressions of the long conflict with Charlie flashing through his mind, Nolan might have felt a sense of destiny, a feeling that here at last would be an end to the struggle, an answer to a question long ago forgotten, an end to the senseless waste of each other’s lives. But he didn’t. His mind was full of one thing: the money. He had squeezed the need for revenge out of his perception. Charlie was just a man who had taken Nolan’s money, and Nolan had to get that money back.

The elevator chugged to a halt.

Nolan had been right, on two counts: no door, sliding or otherwise, greeted him, just a metal safety gate that creaked
unmercifully when he folded it back, and yes, he was in a vestibule, to the right of which he could see the shelves of a pantry, to the left the white walls of a kitchen.

But he was wrong, too, on just about everything else.

Charlie was in the kitchen.

Charlie was sitting on one of four plastic-covered chairs at a gray-speckled-formica-top table in the surprisingly small kitchen, its walls crowded with appliances, sink, cabinets, with one small counter strewn with Schlitz beer cans and empty TV dinner cartons.