Hush Money

by Collins, Max Allan

  Suddenly Larry began to cry.

  Suddenly Larry began to scream.

  And Karen came rushing in, saying, what’s the matter, honey? “He hurt me! He hurt me! He hurt my hand and called me a little turd, Mommy! He said he’d break my goddamn arm, Mommy!”

  Well, Jon had insisted that he hadn’t said he’d break Larry’s goddamn arm, that he’d said he’d break Larry’s goddamn finger, and he had tried to explain his side of the story, but Karen hadn’t believed him; she’d gotten teary-eyed and indignant and ordered Jon out of the apartment, and that was yesterday and he hadn’t heard from her since. He had tried to call her, but every time he did he got Larry and Larry would hang up on him. So Jon had decided to let the scene cool, and he’d patch things up later.

  For right now, he’d decided, the best thing to do was drown his sorrows in the comics. Escape to a brighter, more simple world. And so he found himself floating in a sea of Sunday funnies, his fingers dark with their ink, his butt cramped from sitting so long, his back aching from bending over so much, and it was time to get up and have something to eat and sack out awhile.

  He made his way out of the room and into the larger outer room of the antique shop. It was getting dusty out there, and he would have to get around to cleaning up a little. He’d kept the shop closed since his uncle’s death a few months ago, and as he had no intention of maintaining his uncle’s antique-selling front, had been meaning to contact some buyers to sell out his uncle’s stock. But he hadn’t got around to that, either. In time, in time.

  He went upstairs, to the remodeled upper floor and its pine-panelled walls and thick carpeting. (“I work all day downstairs with the old,” his Uncle Planner used to say, “so I live at night around the new.” Planner had remodeled the apartment-like upper floor four times in fifteen years.) It had taken Jon a while to be able to get some enjoyment out of the pleasant, all but plush upper floor. These rooms had been his uncle’s living quarters, and ever since his uncle’s murder he’d had a creepy feeling, a ghoulish sort of feeling, whenever he spent any time upstairs. But he was pretty much over that now. He went to the refrigerator, got a Coke and the makings of a boiled-ham sandwich, went into the living room and sat in front of the TV and watched and ate.

  But TV was lousy, some phony cop show, so when he finished his sandwich and Coke, he switched off the set and stretched out on the couch and drifted off to sleep in a matter of seconds. He dreamed he was sorting and cutting and stacking comic strips, and pretty soon somebody nudged him awake.

  “Uh, Nolan?” he said.

  But it wasn’t Nolan.

  Jon’s eyes came into slow focus, and he saw a mousy little guy with a mousy little mustache, wearing an expensive dark-blue suit that was a shade too big for him, tailor-made or not. The guy’s eyes were so wide set you had to look at one at a time, and his nose was long, skinny, and slightly off-center. The extensive pockmarks on his ash-colored, sunken cheeks were like craters on the surface of the moon, and his teeth were cigarette-stained and looked like a sloppy shuffle. Jon put that all together and it spelled ugly, but it was more than that. It was frighteningly ugly, a strange, sullen, scary face that more than offset the guy’s lack of size, a face calculated to give a gargoyle the shakes.

  “I ain’t Nolan,” the guy said. “Where is Nolan?”

  The guy’s suitcoat was open, and Jon looked in and saw that one of the reasons the suit was too big for the guy was that the guy didn’t want the bulge of the gun under his arm showing. It was a revolver—a long-barrel .38, like Nolan always carried—and it was in a brown leather shoulder holster that was hand-tooled, Western-style.

  “Wake up, kid. I said, where’s Nolan?”

  Jon hit tie guy in the nose. He hit the guy in the nose with his forehead. That was a trick Nolan had taught him. Nolan had said that one thing people don’t expect to get hit with is a head. Nolan had pointed out that your head—your forehead, anyway—is hard as hell, a great natural weapon, and it doesn’t hurt you much to use it as a bludgeon, and if you strike your opponent’s weak spots, like the bridge of the nose or one of the temples, you can mess him up bad before he knows what hit him.

  The guy toppled backward, one hand clutching his nose, the other grabbing for the holstered gun. Jon was still only half awake, but he lurched at the guy and fumbled toward that holstered gun himself, still not entirely convinced he wasn’t dreaming all this.

  The sleepiness beat him. Jon was still fumbling after the gun when he felt something cold and round and hard jam into his Adam’s apple. His hand was down in the empty holster before he realized the guy was jamming the gun barrel in his throat.

  “Get offa me, you little fucker,” the guy said. “Get the fuck off!”

  Jon got off.

  “I got a fuckin’ nose bleed, thanks to you, you little cocksucker. Get me some fuckin’ Kleenex, for Christ’s sake.”

  Jon was scared, but he knew enough not to let it show, thanks again to Nolan. He said, not without some difficulty as the gun barrel was still prodding his throat. “Try not to bleed on my carpet, will you? Try not to make a mess.”

  The guy shoved Jon away and stepped back. “Fuck you, you little brat. Get me a Kleenex before I blow your fuckin’ balls off.”

  “The Kleenex is in the bathroom.”

  “Yeah, okay, I’ll be following you, you fuckin’ little shit.”

  Jon led the guy into the bathroom, withdrew some Kleenex from the box on the john and handed them over. The guy held them to his nose and, with an orgasmic sigh of pleasure, of relief, lowered his guard just enough to give Jon an opening, which he used to do two things in quick succession. First, he reached up and latched onto the shower curtain rod and brought the whole works down around the little guy. Second, he brought a knee up and smashed the guy in the balls.

  That was something else Nolan had advised him to do. When you fight somebody, Nolan had said more than once, you can’t beat hitting ’em in the balls—assuming, of course, they aren’t women.

  This guy was no woman. He was on the floor tangled up with the shower curtain and rod doing an agonized dance, screaming to beat the band. The gun was loose and mixed up in the curtain somewhere, and Jon found it and retreated to the stool, where he sat and waited for the guy to get over it. It took a while.

  The guy’s nose was still bleeding, blood getting all over everything, the curtain, floor, the expensive blue suit. Jon tossed him some Kleenex, but the guy thought Jon was trying to be a smart-ass and grabbed for Jon’s leg. Jon kicked him in the head. Not hard. Just enough.

  When he woke up, the guy put hand on forehead as if checking for a fever and said, “Jesus shit. What makes a fuckin’ little punk like you such a hard-ass, is what I wanna know?”

  Jon shrugged, enjoying the tough-guy role to an extent, but not completely past being scared.

  The guy sat up, rearranged himself, got the shower curtain pushed off to one side and said, “Look, kid. I didn’t come lookin’ for no fuckin’ trouble.”

  And Jon laughed. “Oh, you didn’t come looking for trouble. Well, I didn’t understand that before. Could you explain one detail for me? Could you explain why you didn’t just knock instead of breaking in and scaring the piss out of me?”

  “Listen, I came to talk to Nolan, not some fuck- ass punk kid.”

  “You should’ve thought of that before you let the fuck-ass punk kid take your gun away from you. Now why do you want to see Nolan? What do you want him for?”

  “I don’t even know who the fuck you are, kid. What’s Nolan to you, anyway?”

  “I’m a friend of his. What’s he to you?”

  The guy shrugged. “He ain’t jack-shit to me, kid. I never met the guy.”

  “So why do you want him?”

  “Somebody sent me to get him.”

  “Get him?”

  “Fetch him, I mean. Jesus. Hey, give me some more Kleenex. This fuckin’ nose is still bleedin’.”

  Jon did, then said, “So who sen
t you?”

  The guy hesitated, thought a moment; his mouth puckered under the mousy mustache, like an asshole.

  “Who?” Jon repeated, giving emphasis with a motion of the .38.

  “Take it easy with that fuckin’ thing! You wanna kill somebody? Felix sent me.”

  “Felix,” Jon said. “Felix, that lawyer for the Family?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then we’re back around to my first question: Why the hell didn’t you just knock?”

  “I knocked but you didn’t fuckin’ answer, that’s why! I saw the light upstairs and used a credit card to trip the lock and get in, and all of a sudden you’re hitting me in the fuckin’ nose with your fuckin’ head! Jesus.”

  “Well, Nolan’s not here right now.”

  “I got to see him. Felix’s got to see him.”

  “Something urgent? You want Nolan to go to Chicago right away, then?”

  “More urgent than that, kid. Felix came himself. He’s waitin’ out at the Howard Johnson’s. Something’s come up that can’t fuckin’ wait, kid, so shake it, will you?”

  “I know where Nolan is. I can call him.”

  “Then call him, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Okay. You can get up now, if you want. If you can.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I can get up, all right. You ain’t that fuckin’ tough, you little punk.”

  “I thought we were on friendly terms now. I thought you weren’t looking for trouble.”

  “Friendly terms, my fuckin’ ass. You best keep your balls covered when you see me comin’, kid. I like to even my scores.”

  “Then you better not forget to give me a nose bleed, too, while you’re at it.”

  “Fuck you. Give me my gun, why don’t you, before you shoot your dick off or something?”

  “When Nolan gets here. Let’s go out and call him. Come on, get up. This time I’ll be following you, remember.”

  And Jon, gun in hand, followed the guy into the living room, deposited him on the couch. Jon pulled a chair up opposite the guy so he could face him, keep an eye on him, and used the phone on the coffee table between them. Jon’s hand trembled around the receiver. He was acting tough, as Nolan would’ve wanted him to. He’d handled himself well, he knew that. But he was trembling just the same.

  7

  NOLAN PULLED the Eldorado in next to a Lincoln Continental and got out, confused.

  The Eldorado, which was gold, and the Continental, which was dark blue, took up all three of the slantwise spaces alongside the antique shop. Nolan’s Eldorado was actually the Tropical’s. His ever owning a Cadillac was unlikely, because he saw them as the automotive equivalent of an alcoholic, swilling gas with no thought of tomorrow. As far as he was concerned, a Cadillac was just a Pontiac with gland trouble. Still, being behind the wheel of one for the past couple of months had given him a feeling of—what?—prestige he guessed, and seeing the Lincoln Continental was somehow a sobering experience.

  Neither car made much sense in the context of the old antique shop, which was a two-story white clapboard structure bordering on the rundown, whose junk-filled showcase windows wouldn’t seem likely to attract even the most eccentric of wealthy collectors. In fact the shop looked more like a big old house than a place of business, which was only right because, other than the Dairy Queen and grade school across the way and the gas station next door, this was a residential neighborhood, a quiet, middle-class Iowa City street lined with trees still thick with red and copper leaves. The inhabitants of this shady lane would’ve been shocked to know of the different sort of shadiness attached to various activities centered for some years now in the harmless-looking old shop. This thought occurred to Nolan as he opened the trunk of the Eldorado, reaching behind the spare tire for the holstered Smith & Wesson .38 stowed there. Not that the thought worried him. It was late now, approaching midnight, the street was empty, no one at all who might notice him. Even the gas station across the alley was closed. He shut the trunk, slung on the shoulder holster, grabbed his sports coat out of the back seat, slipped into the coat.

  He’d immediately recognized the Lincoln Continental as Felix’s, but that only served to confuse him further. What in hell was Felix doing in Iowa City? The answer to that was obvious enough: he was here to see Nolan. But why? No obvious answer there.

  No pleasant one, anyway.

  The side door to the shop wasn’t locked. Nolan withdrew the .38 and went in, cautious to the point of paranoia. There was always the chance that Jon had lost control of the situation since calling or, worse yet, that Jon had been forced to make the call in the first place. Nolan doubted the latter, as he felt pretty sure Jon would’ve sneaked a warning into his words somewhere, some indication, implication of trouble, and Nolan had been over Jon’s words and their inflections a dozen times in the course of the ten-minute drive from Wagner’s house out on the edge of town.

  But being careful never hurt, and when the footing wasn’t sure, Nolan was the most careful man alive. Because alive was how he intended to stay.

  “Nolan?” Jon called from upstairs. “Is that you, Nolan?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Come on up.”

  Nolan leaned against the wall at the bottom of the stairwell. He said, “How you hanging, kid?”

  “Loose, Nolan. Nice and easy and loose. Come on up.”

  That convinced him. Jon’s voice had nothing in it but relief Nolan was there.

  And once upstairs he found that Jon did indeed have things well in hand. Sitting on the couch was a rat-faced little mustached man, his blue suit cut large in the coat to accommodate shoulder holster and gun, though the latter was presently being trained on its owner by Jon, and the way the suit was rumpled it was apparent the guy had been on the floor a couple of times lately and not making love, either. Also the guy was holding some Kleenex to his nose and had a generally battered look about him. Nolan put his gun away and Jon said hello.

  “You’re getting better all the time, kid,” Nolan said, unable to repress a grin. “I got to learn to stop underestimating you.”

  Jon, too, was unable to suppress his reaction, getting an aw-shucks look, which faded quickly as he said, “I’m not so sure you did underestimate me, Nolan. The first time I fouled up. I hit him in the nose—” Jon bobbed his head forward to indicate what he’d hit the guy with—”but he bounced back and it wasn’t till I kicked him in the balls that I finally got him.”

  Nolan nodded. “That’ll do it.”

  The rat-faced guy lowered the Kleenex and said, “You two fuckers gonna gloat all night, or can we get over to the Howard Johnson’s and see Felix? He’s been waiting half an hour. What do you say?”

  “Felix sent you?” Nolan said, acting surprised. “I don’t believe it. And you say he’s waiting to see me out at the Howard Johnson’s? I don’t believe that, either.”

  “I wouldn’t fuck around, I were you,” the guy said. “You think Felix came all the way from Chicago just to check out the fuckin’ Howard John son’s.”

  “Maybe he likes the clams,” Nolan said.

  “I’m laughin’,” the guy said. “I were you, Nolan, I’d shake a fuckin’ leg.”

  “Don’t call me Nolan,” Nolan said.

  “Oh? Why the fuck not?”

  “Because,” Nolan said, “I don’t know you and you don’t know me, and it’s an arrangement that’s worked fine ’til now, so leave it alone.”

  Jon said, “Nolan, I had no idea he works for that Felix character. I mean, the guy broke in the house and came up on me when I was asleep, and I saw his gun and . . .”

  “You did the right thing. It’s just a little surprising Felix would send such low-caliber help around. I didn’t know the Family was hurting so bad.”

  “Hey, Nolan,” the guy said, “tell you what. How ’bout you suck my dick and choke on it?”

  Nolan went over and grabbed the guy’s ear and twisted. “Be polite,” he said.

  “Christ! Awri
ght, awright! Christ almighty, let go my fuckin’ ear! Here on out, I’m Emily fuckin’ Post!”

  “Okay,” Nolan said and let go of the ear.

  The guy sat with one hand on his ear and the other covering his nose and eyes with Kleenex; if he’d had another hand to cover his mouth, he could’ve been all three monkeys.

  Nolan reached over and picked the phone off the coffee table and tossed it on the guy’s lap.

  “Make a call,” Nolan said. “I want to talk to Felix.”

  “Call him yourself, motherfucker!”

  “I thought I told you to be polite.”

  “Okay, okay! Shit. Jesus.” The guy stopped to look at lie Kleenex and decided his nose was no longer bleeding. He composed himself. He dialed the phone and when he got the desk clerk he asked for Felix’s room.

  “This is Cotter,” the guy said. “Well, I’m here with Nolan now is where I am. . . . Yeah, at the antique shop. . . . Well, I had a little trouble. . . . No, just a little trouble. I guess you might say I didn’t handle this the best I could. . . . Yeah, I guess you could say that too. Look, Nolan wants to talk to you.” Cotter covered the mouthpiece and said, “Hey, I was supposed to bring you out to see him right away, and now I’m calling up and you’re wanting to talk to him and it’s making me look bad. Give me a goddamn break and don’t go into the, you know, little hassles we been havin’. I mean I come out on the shitty end of the stick anyway, right? A fuckin’ half-hour nosebleed, you twistin’ my fuckin’ ear off my head, and I’m sittin’ here with my balls needin’ a fuckin’ ice pack or something, so give me a goddamn break, what do you say?”

  “Sure,” Nolan said and took the phone.

  “Nolan?” Felix said. “What’s going on there?”

  “Hello, Felix,” Nolan said. “Say, are you missing an incompetent asshole? One turned up here.”