Hard Cash

by Collins, Max Allan

  And Jon couldn’t believe what he saw.

  Nolan said, “Shut the door, kid. Rigley, sit down.”

  Jon shut the door.

  Rigley sat down on the couch.

  On the floor lay two men. Both of them wearing hunting jackets similar to Nolan and Jon’s. Roth of them dead. They were face up, arms asprawl. A shotgun lay between them. So did a common pool of blood. Jon knew it was gunfire he’d heard, but the wounds looked like something else: it looked as though each of the two men had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest with an ice pick. Their faces were twisted in surprise and, perhaps, disappointment.

  One of them was Sam Comfort.

  “The other one’s his son Terry,” Nolan said, in answer to the question on Jon’s face.

  Across the room, the girl, Julie, was sitting at the picnic table by the bar. She was wearing a red sweater and red slacks; the clothes clung to her lush figure. A shotgun was in her lap.

  “But . . . how?” Jon said, pointing at Sam Comfort’s body.

  “Who knows?” Nolan said. “You didn’t kill him after all, that night couple months back. That much is sure. And he’s dead for sure, too, this time.”

  Jon still couldn’t believe it, but managed to say, “What . . . what are . . . what were they doing . . . here?”

  “It’s obvious they’re the ones who killed Breen,” Nolan said. “And that Comfort and his boy were the ones who broke into the shop the other day, too. They came on a mission of revenge and got wind of this robbery somehow, and decided to wait till we’d pulled it off so they could have the money and their fun both. Our friends the Comforts being here explains a lot of things.”

  “They sure do,” Jon nodded, beginning to snap out of it but feeling as though he’d been struck a hard blow in the stomach.

  And Nolan looked pointedly toward the girl and said, “But other things remain a mystery.”

  “They came in and I shot them,” she said. Coldly. Calmly.

  “No kidding,” Nolan said.

  “You said it yourself . . . they were after the money. They thought they’d come in here and take care of me and wait for you. They didn’t expect me to have a gun.”

  Nolan smiled. Almost pleasantly. “Neither did we.”

  “You knew I had a shotgun here. You expected me to be ready in case something went wrong, didn’t you?”

  “Let’s just say I’m less surprised than the Comforts.”

  “I have no idea what you mean by that.”

  “I mean you were waiting for us. For Jon and me. The Comforts came in in hunting jackets, and in this nice, dim room you thought it was us and emptied your shotgun.”

  “That’s silly.”

  “Oh? Then explain one thing to me, and I’ll be happy. Well split the money and go our separate ways. Explain the sheet of plastic.”

  Jon hadn’t even noticed it, he’d been so dazed, but there it was: a plastic sheet, smoothed across the front half of the room. He wondered what in hell it could be for.

  And then he knew.

  He looked at the two Comforts oozing blood from their identical clusters of ice-picklike chest wounds, a puddle gathering between them on the plastic sheet, and all of a sudden Jon felt sick and he knew.

  Nolan turned to Rigley and said, “Tell me something, George. How’s the wife?”

  Jon had almost forgotten about Rigley. The man had been sitting on the couch, hands draped loose in his lap, looking less alive than the Comforts. But as Nolan spoke, something happened in the man’s face. Not much, just a tic, under the right eye. But a sign of life.

  “I’m just guessing, of course,” Nolan said. “But she wouldn’t happen to be dead, would she?”

  Jon had no idea what Nolan was talking about, but evidently Rigley did. The banker was staring into nothing, the tic jumping under his eye like a hand waving goodbye.

  Across the room, Julie was smiling. Her smile was white in the darkness, a Cheshire cat smile. She was smiling at Nolan, who was pointing his .38 at her head.

  Even when Nolan thumbed back the hammer, her smile didn’t fade.

  “Nolan . . . ?” Jon said.

  And Nolan looked at Jon. And sighed. He stuck the gun in his belt and said, “Come on, kid. Let’s get out of here.”

  Jon swallowed and said, “That’s a good idea,” and put his own .38 away.

  Nolan turned to go.

  The girl swung the shotgun up from her lap.

  Shit! She must’ve switched shotguns before Nolan came in, switched the one she emptied into the Comforts for the gun the Comforts brought with them. And while those thoughts ran through his head, Jon shouted, “Nolan!” and dove for him, knocked him out of the way as the blast of the gun cut the couch in half and chewed up the wall behind.

  And she still had a barrel left.

  “No!”

  Rigley.

  He’d been sitting on the couch before the shotgun cut it in half, and he was on his feet now.

  Which was more than could be said for Jon and Nolan, who were on their backs, like the Comforts, looking up into the infinite darkness of the shotgun muzzle, their own guns tucked snugly in their belts. The only thing keeping them from getting blown immediately away was Rigley, who had moved between them and the girl, saying, “No! No more killing!”

  And took the other barrel in the chest.

  A bunch of Rigley went flying over Jon’s head and splashed onto the wall, and the rest of Rigley, the bloody bulk of him, tumbled onto them, on top of them. But Nolan pushed the corpse aside and made a dive for the girl, whose shotgun was empty now. She swung the big gun at Nolan, and the heavy metal of those twin barrels caught him across the side of the head, and he went down, hard, at her feet.

  Jon had lost his gun somewhere in the scramble, but he got himself out from under the dead weight of Rigley and got the girl by the arm before she was out the door. But she still had that damn shotgun, and empty or not, she was making a weapon of it. She caught Jon in the belly with the stock of the gun, and as he doubled over, she caught him again with it, on the back of the neck. He went down, not unconscious exactly, but conscious of nothing but pain.

  It lasted maybe a minute, but he thought it was longer, thought it was an hour. He opened his eyes and looked into Sam Comfort’s ghostly pale countenance from a distance of a few inches. He gagged, reeled backwards, and got groggily to his feet. Nolan was over in the middle of the room, on his side, still out. Rigley was over by the bar, where the shotgun blast had blown him. The stench of gunpowder and shit filled in the room. As Nolan had explained to him once, “When people die, they sometimes shit their pants. Wouldn’t you, kid?”

  He saw his .38 on the floor, over by the half- couch.

  And he heard something outside.

  A car starting!

  He realized at once that his time perception had been screwed up and that the girl was probably still outside. He went over and scooped up his .38 and ran to the doorway.

  She was in her yellow Mustang. The sack of money was in back; he could see it there, behind her, a back-seat driver looking over her shoulder.

  He wrapped both hands around the stock of the .38 as Nolan had taught him and aimed and had her pretty face in his sights; all that was left was to squeeze the trigger and blow that pretty face away, in an explosion of windshield glass and flesh and teeth and bone and blood. . . .

  She saw him.

  She got an animal look in her eyes—a cornered, crazed animal look—and there was no doubt in his mind that had the .38 been in her hand, he’d be dead by now. But she was unarmed and couldn’t do a damn thing.

  Except hit the accelerator and back out of there, in a hailstorm of gravel.

  He jumped the steps, ran after her, firing, and fired at her tires; might have hit one. He ran into the cloud of her gravel dust and fired again, but she was gone.

  He lowered the gun and put it back in his belt.

  “Don’t just stand there trying to figure out whether to feel ashamed or pro
ud,” Nolan said.

  He was in the doorway, standing in the doorway at the top of the steps. He came down, slowly, rubbing the side of his head where the girl had struck him with the shotgun barrel.

  “I’m sorry, Nolan.”

  “Sorry you didn’t shoot the bitch? So am I. Get your ass in that van and let’s get after her. I think you got her tire. She won’t be going far.”

  18

  COMING DOWN the hill they could see the length of the several-mile-long straightaway beyond the Cedar River Bridge. There was no sign of the yellow Mustang. “Shit,” Nolan said.

  “Maybe she turned back toward Port City,” Jon said.

  “With that fat sack of money sitting in back? Not likely.”

  The van rolled across the bridge, and they followed the highway as it curved and straightened out again. Still no sign.

  “Maybe I didn’t hit her tire after all,” Jon said.

  Nolan said nothing.

  The West Liberty city limits were up ahead. The girl worked there, had friends there. If she was anywhere, Nolan thought, that was where she’d be.

  The speed limit dropped to forty-five, and Jon complied as the van took the crest of a slight hill and followed the highway as it snaked into West Liberty.

  “Maybe she took the Nichols turnoff,” Jon said. “Maybe she turned off on a side road. Maybe she stopped at a farmhouse.”

  “Maybe that’s her up there.”

  The Mustang was parked on the shoulder of the road, inside the city limits, but just barely—a meat locker was on one side of the highway, a junk yard on the other; ahead were some mobile homes and lower middle-class houses shuffled together as if a tornado had hit and nobody had bothered to put things back in order.

  Also parked on the shoulder of the road, pulled in in front of the Mustang at an angle, was a two-year-old blue Ford.

  On the side of the Ford, on the door, were big white letters: “WEST LIBERTY SHERIFF’S DEPT.” Nolan doubted those white letters would disappear if the car were pulled into a car wash.

  In the back seat of the Ford was the girl Julie. She was looking at the junk yard and either didn’t see Nolan and Jon go by, or pretended not to.

  Also in the back seat was the sack of money.

  In the front seat was a man of thirty-one or so who had a pudgy face highlighted by a weak chin, close-set eyes, and five o’clock shadow. There was nothing impressive about the man except the badge on his cream-color uniform and the smaller, matching badge on his cream-color western-style hat.

  What had happened was obvious: the smalltown sheriff had stopped the girl because she was speeding in a car with a flat tire, hardly the safest and most inconspicuous activity a person in the girl’s position might have done, and had stumbled onto something more than just your average case of reckless driving.

  “Jesus,” Jon said. “What do we do, Nolan?”

  If it had been out on the highway, Nolan might have chanced it. He might have stopped the van, put the sheriff to sleep, and gotten the money back. But this was in town. By now the sheriff could have radioed for a deputy or the state highway patrol or the Port City sheriff or police department. And there were homes nearby, and people standing out in front of them and out in front of the meat locker too. And there were some guys working in the junk yard, besides.

  The van rumbled across the railroad tracks, and Nolan glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that the sheriff’s car had pulled in behind them. Just beyond the tracks was an intersection with a flashing red light. The West Liberty business district, such as it was, was to the left; Iowa City was straight ahead. The sheriff’s car drew alongside the van, in the turning lane. The pudgy-faced sheriff was looking ahead, watching for an opening in the traffic, which was brisk for as small as the town was. Julie was in back. So was the sack of money. She looked over at Nolan and Jon, shrugged, and looked away.

  “Nolan?” Jon said again. Almost whispering. “What are we going to do?”

  “Go straight,” Nolan said.

  About the Author

  Max Allan Collins, who created the graphic novel on which the Oscar-winning film Road to Perdition was based, has been writing hard-boiled mysteries since his college days in the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. Besides the books about Nolan, the criminal who just wants his piece of the American dream, and killer-for-hire Quarry, he has written a popular series of historical mysteries featuring Nate Heller and many, many other novels. At last count, Collins’s books and short stories have been nominated for fifteen Shamus awards by the Private Eye Writers of America, winning for two Heller novels, True Detective and Stolen Away. He lives in Muscatine, Iowa with his wife, Barbara Collins, with whom he has collaborated on several novels and numerous short stories. The photo above shows Max in 1971, when he was first writing about Nolan and Quarry.