Two for the Money (43 page)

In front of Charlie, on the table, was a silenced nine-millimeter automatic. Also in front of him were six more Schlitz cans. Charlie was wearing his underwear, a sleeveless tee-shirt and gray boxer shorts. The flesh of his limbs looked as gray as the shorts, a tan that had sickened, and flaccid; his right thigh was bandaged; on his upper left arm was a tattoo of a rose, nicely done. Charlie had a new nose; it was pink, unlike the gray-tan skin surrounding it. He was sleeping.

He was, in fact, snoring, quite loudly, contentedly, even drunkenly. His head was resting on folded arms and he looked both very young and very old.

Nolan took a chair next to him at the Formica-top table. He picked up the gun and stuffed it in his belt. Charlie didn’t stir. Nolan sat and studied his old enemy, the adversary who’d given him so much hell for so many years, tried to see the maniac he’d come looking for, and saw only a frail old sleeping drunken man.

It was all disappointing somehow. An anticlimax that turned years of running, hating, fighting into an absurd, unfunny joke. He felt foolish, a little. And vaguely sad.

But this wasn’t a time for reflection; there was money to find, and Nolan grabbed the tattooed gray arm and shook the sleeping man and said, “Come on, Charlie, wake up.”

Like the curtain of a play, the lids on the close-set eyes raised slowly, and Charlie lifted head from folded arms and gradually got himself into a sitting position. He yawned. He smiled. He said, “Hello, Nolan.”

“Well, hello Charlie.”

“It’s been a long time.”

“Yeah. We got to quit meeting like this.”

“I see you took my gun, Nolan.”

Charlie’s speech was thick but clear, each word let out after careful consideration.

Nolan shook his head. “Why’d you have to get drunk on your ass like this, Charlie?”

He shrugged, looked almost embarrassed. “A hell of a thing, I know. I guess I wanted to be numb for the goddamn bullets.”

“I won’t kill you, Charlie, not if you give my money back.”

The laughter came rumbling out of Charlie’s gut and he touched his forehead to the Formica top and cackled. When he looked up at Nolan he had tears in his eyes from laughing. “You stupid goddamn asshole, you think I’m afraid of you, afraid you’re going to kill me? Get away, get away, you silly bastard.”

“Charlie.”

“You can’t kill
me,
Nolan. Not you or the whole goddamn fucking Family. Nobody can kill me, I died a long time ago; don’t you read the goddamn papers? How can you kill a goddamn dead man? You tell me! I’m getting another beer.”

Charlie got up and weaved toward the refrigerator and Nolan was up and on him, latched onto his arm and dragged him out into the adjacent room.

They were in the big main room of the lodge now, a high-ceilinged hall with open beams and much dark wood and lots of doors and windows. The bulk of Eagle’s Roost was right here in this one big room, the ceiling coming down on the back third, indicating the partial second floor; everything but sleeping and cooking had been done in this hall, or so the covered furniture all around would indicate; a few pieces were uncovered, the sofas, the long dining table that was over to the left, as you faced the black-brick fireplace with its elk’s head above. In spite of the coolness of the day, it was rather warm in the hall, almost as if the fireplace had
been going or the heat’d been on. Nolan dragged Charlie over to the semicircle of sofas facing the fireplace. Nolan tossed the little man onto one of the sofas, sat opposite him. Between them was a large round marble coffee table with a radio on it. Charlie had started to laugh again and was rocking side to side, holding his stomach, buckling with laughter.

Charlie’s laughter subsided and he looked at Nolan and grinned. “I won, Nolan. I beat you. For years I’ve hated your fucking guts, for months all I’ve done is think about seeing you die. And now I don’t even hate you anymore. I forgive you, Nolan. I forgive you for shooting my brother eighteen years ago and stealing my money and making a fool out of me in the Family. Yeah, that’s right, I told you before, remember? How you wrecked my goddamn life, how I never moved an inch with the Family after you killed my brother Gordon and made me look stupid. But, Nolan, I forgive you. No shit, I forgive you. I even forgive you for passing me those marked bills, and look what
that
did to me. I don’t hate you, anymore, Nolan, now that I’ve won. Now that I’ve won I can look at you and just not give a goddamn.”

“Where’s my money, Charlie? I’ll knock it out of you if I have to.”

Charlie waved his hands at Nolan, gave him a Bronx cheer. “No way, I’m too far gone to feel it, you’d have to knock me out before you hurt me and
then
what would I tell you?”

Nolan closed his eyes. Well, Nolan thought, he wants to talk, so humor him, sneak up on him that way.

“Did you kill Harry, Charlie? Did you kill Tillis?”

“Hell, no. Did you?” Charlie’s grin disappeared and he got suddenly somber. He rubbed his cheek. “I shouldn’t talk lightly of that. Harry was . . . he was my friend and he was my wife’s brother, you know. I liked him and he helped me. He did a lot. He’s the one who helped me get the bead on you, for one thing, he was bankrolling jobs for people like you, ripoff guys, and had the connections it took to run
down your friends and the people you work with. We even knew you stayed with that guy Planner for a while, but we weren’t sure that was where you left the money, not until I heard you were going to go to Iowa to move it.”

“How did you find that out?”

“One of Felix’s boys was working for me. Right under that goddamn pimp lawyer’s nose. We knew all about you planning to switch the money to a Family bank, but you were pretty goddamn careful about telling where you were hiding it, weren’t you? Waited until the last minute to tell Felix where it was, and even then all you said was ‘Iowa,’ though it wasn’t any goddamn trick figuring out
where
in Iowa.”

Charlie glanced slowly around the high-ceilinged hall. “Walter and me were just waiting at the lodge here to get the word where the money was, to know where to go to get it. It was good staying here with my boy, Nolan. I wish now he wasn’t involved in this, but just the same it was good being with him, in this place. This place has a lot of memories for me, a lot of my good hours were spent at the Roost, and I don’t mind ending it here, even though I always wanted to keep that part of my life outside. But you can’t do that, can you, Nolan, you can’t get away from what you are and you might as well come face to goddamn face with it.”

He slammed his fist down on the marble of the coffee table in front of him. “Jesus! It was so fucking perfect, had it all worked out, just come back here with that money and hop on that goddamn plane to Mexico and fly down to Argentina like we had set up and Walter and me, we could’ve built a new life together . . . Walter’s so goddamn smart, I can’t believe it, you know he’s a college man . . . but then I got hit in the leg, that old bastard Planner hit me in the goddamn leg and made me kill him, and we got stuck in goddamn Iowa City and lost time there and messed up the flight and had to put it off till today and then Jesus, you were onto me and the Family was onto me, and then I hear on the radio they’re killing off everybody who helped me . . . Harry . . . Tillis . . . Jesus.”

“You think the Family killed those guys?”

“Who else? I knew they’d be on me, when that kid, that friend of yours Jon, told me back in that doctor’s office, told me
you
knew I was the one that took the money, told me
you
were coming after me. I knew about you and your new ties with the Family. That if you knew I was alive, so did they. They’re coming today, aren’t they? Are they outside now, Nolan?”

“If they are, they got here on their own. They know you’re alive, yes, but they gave me two days to find you and get my money back.”

“Don’t shit me, not with Harry and Tillis shot all to shit.” He bent over and looked very sober. “Nolan, I want to work out a trade with you. Listen to me. You take care of Walter, get him out of here before the Family comes. You see that he stays alive.”

“What do I get in return?”

“That kid friend of yours, that Jon. Walter’s holding him down at the boathouse right now. Why the hell else would I take that kid Jon with me? I knew you were coming after me, that if you caught up with me, I could use the kid as a buffer. He’s your friend, saved your life once, I know, I was there.”

“Sorry. Jon is holding a gun to your son’s head right this minute. You don’t have the edge you thought you had, Charlie.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t have time to lie to you, Charlie. We got to get on with this before those people you mentioned start showing up.”

“No, no,” Charlie said, whimpering, his eyes filling with tears. “Walter’s got to get out, nothing to happen to Walter, not Walter, he’s the only thing left. Please God.”

“Tell me what you did with the money, Charlie, and I’ll help your kid get out of this.”

“Do . . . do I get your word on that?”

“Sure.”

“You always called me a melodramatic bastard, remember?”

“I still do, Charlie.”

“Well, that’s true, I guess it’s true but you . . . you got your own quirk. You’re straight, in your crooked way. You give your word and you keep it. So I know if you give me your word, you’re going to stand behind it, Nolan. I’m sure of it.”

That wasn’t particularly true, but Nolan let it slide by. Charlie was saying all that in order to convince himself he could trust Nolan, and Nolan knew it.

“What did you do with the money, Charlie?”

“You
promise,
you
promise
you’ll help Walter?”

“Sure.”

Charlie let out a relieved sigh. He smiled on one side of his face and said, “A funny goddamn way for us to finish it up, Nolan. Me turning to you to save my kid’s ass. My God. You know something else funny? I didn’t even
need
that goddamn money of yours. I got all kinds of money, in this guy’s account and that one, money to live a couple goddamn lifetimes, if I had ’em. No, I took that money because I hated you, I wanted you to bleed, I wanted to hurt you the one place you could feel it, in your goddamn pocketbook. It was for blood, not money, and now neither one means a goddamn thing. Why’d we do it to each other? What the hell was the goddamn point?”

From behind them came a sound—
bup bup bup bup bup bup
—no louder than someone giving a deck of cards a hard shuffle, and Charlie screamed, “Mother of God!” and jumped behind the sofa. Nolan dove under the coffee table, turned it on its side and held it in front of him like a shield, while the slugs ate up the room, tearing into the dark wood walls, ripping apart the leather sofas, knocking down furniture, their white sheets flying in the air, like dancing ghosts. Charlie went scrambling over to the dining area, got behind the big long table and tipped it over with a crash, got sheltered behind its thick wood while the slugs splintered away at its surface,
bup bup bup bup bup.

Silence.

Nolan peeked out from behind the table and the
bup bup bup
started in again, but not before Nolan saw the gun and the man behind it. The gun was a grease gun, a submachine gun that fired .45 slugs and looked as if it had been put together with discarded tin cans; the barrel had been screwed off and a tubular silencer put on its place; two magazines had been taped together so the guy could flip it around and shove in a fresh round without missing more than a half-second of action.

The guy behind the grease gun had a chubby face and a skinny body and all of a sudden Nolan knew who Charlie’s pipeline to Felix was. All of a sudden Nolan knew who killed Tillis and Harry and why.

Nolan had his .38 in one hand and the silenced automatic of Charlie’s in the other and started firing at Angello, shooting haphazardly, firing both guns like some two-gun kid in a Western. With that grease gun out there, aiming was out of the question, even though the guy was standing out in the open, over by a side door directly behind where Nolan had been sitting.

Charlie dove from behind the table, pitched himself into the kitchen, caught one in the gut just as he went through the doorway. Nolan could see the little man in underwear crawling off through the kitchen, out toward the elevator. Somehow Nolan sensed that Charlie was not so much trying to get away as making an attempt to get to Walter and warn him. Well, luck to you, Charlie, Nolan thought.

Angello yanked the magazine out, flipped it around and shoved it in place and Nolan blew Angello’s kneecap apart with a .38 slug. Angello fell on his face, like a pratfalling clown, but much harder, and on his side started in firing the grease gun again and the room was splintering, chunks of the marble top started to fly and Nolan held his breath, hoping Angello’s pain and rage and reflex would empty that damn, damn gun.

It did. The
bup bup bup
trailed away and Nolan spun out
and pointed the .38 at Angello’s head and Angello threw the empty grease gun, whipped it at Nolan. The metal of the gun smashed into his head, slashed a red crease across his forehead, and he fired the .38 wildly, missed, and blacked out.

When he came to a second later, he looked up, blinked the blood from his eyes, saw Angello kneeling on his good knee in front of him. “Are you awake, Nolan?”

Nolan nodded.

“Good,” Angello said. “I want you awake, you overrated bastard. Some fucking tough guy,” and Angello lifted the Bodyguard Smith and Wesson .38 and let Nolan look into its short snub-nose, let him wait for the blossom of fire and smoke.

“Hold it!”

The voice came from behind them.

“What the hell’s happening here?”

It was Greer.

The babyfaced man was standing in the doorway over where moments before Angello had been firing the grease gun. Greer had his own snub-nose .38 in his right hand.

“Greer,” Angello said, his eyes moving back and forth.

“What you doing, Ange?”

“I’m going to kill this son of a bitch, Greer,” Angello said. “He tried to pull a cross, tried to team up with Charlie and cross the Family.”