Two for the Money

by Max Allan Collins

  “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.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Greer said, and shot Angello through the throat.

  Angello’s .38 went off, but Nolan had had sense to duck and roll as Greer fired, and Angello’s gun clattered to the floor and he clutched with both hands under his double chin and flopped onto his back and gurgled and died.

  Nolan said, “Jesus.”

  Greer came over and helped him up. “Where’s Charlie?”

  “Shit,” Nolan said, and headed for the kitchen.

  When he got there the elevator had gone to the bottom. Charlie had somehow found strength to punch DOWN. Nolan pressed the button and heard the elevator whine and moan and start its ascent. When it got back up, Charlie was still inside the cage.

  He was sitting against the steel wall, his lower tee-shirt and shorts soaked with red. His eyes were shut.

  Nolan crouched down beside the little man and yelled as though Charlie were a hundred yards away. “Charlie! For Christ’s sake, Charlie!”

  The close-set eyes flickered.

  “Charlie,” Nolan said, putting a hand on the little man’s shoulder. “Thank God you’re alive.”

  “Never thought I’d live to . . . hear you . . . say that, Nolan.”
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  “Where is it, Charlie? What did you do with my money?”

  “I won, Nolan. I beat you.”

  “You want me to help your boy, don’t you? Well, where’s the money, what’d you do with it?”

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

  “I’ll do whatever you want, just what did you do with my money!”

  “You’ll keep your word . . . if I tell you what I did with it?”

  “Yes, dammit! Don’t die on me, you son of a bitch!”

  “All right,” Charlie said, and he told Nolan what he’d done with the money. The look of dismayed surprise on Nolan’s face tickled Charlie’s ass and Charlie let out one big, raucous belly laugh and held his bleeding belly and died that way.

  8

  Nolan got to his feet unsteadily. He felt as if he, too, had been ripped into by Angello’s grease gun. He stepped out of the elevator and wandered into the kitchen, took a seat at the Formica-top table, sat and stared at the cluster of empty Schlitz cans in front of him, pressed his hands against his temples.

  Greer said, “What’s going on?”

  Nolan pointed toward the vestibule and Greer went over and saw Charlie and came back.

  “That’s a nasty gash on your forehead,” Greer said.

  Nolan said, “Get me a beer, will you? Should be some in that refrigerator.”

  Greer brought Nolan a Schlitz, got one for himself and sat with Nolan at the table.

  “You okay, Nolan?”

  “I don’t know yet.” He gulped down the beer. He belched. “That was nice shooting in there. I take back what I said about snub-nose .38’s.”

  Greer grinned. “How do you know I was aiming at Ange?”

  Nolan managed to return the grin, said, “Where’d you come from, anyway? I didn’t expect you to show up like the fucking marines.”

  “Came straight from Iowa City. Felix called me and said to get my butt up to this place.”

  It hadn’t taken Felix long to track down Eagle’s Roost. “How’d you beat Felix’s boys up here?”

  “I didn’t. Not the first wave anyway. Two Family guys, friends of mine, are lying back in those pine trees with their guts shot out of them. Didn’t you hear gunfire?”

  Nolan shook his head no. “Angello was using a grease gun with a silencer. You make more noise breathing than it makes shooting.”

  “What was he up to, anyway?”

  “Covering his tracks. He was in with Charlie.”

  “Shit. Wait’ll Felix finds out.”

  “That’s what Angello must’ve been thinking. He knew he was up shit crick when the Family got onto Charlie. I figure he killed Tillis and Harry because they were his fellow conspirators and could implicate him. Same goes for killing Charlie. He probably hoped to make it look like I was going around shooting the guys responsible for taking my money, and leave it looking like Charlie and me killed each other in a crossfire.”

  “Maybe he was after the money, too.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “What about the money?”

  “Gone. All of it. Gone.”

  “How, for Christ’s sake?”

  Nolan told Greer what Charlie did with the money. Greer shook his head, said, “Old bastard must’ve been crazy.”

  “Yeah,” Nolan agreed. “Like the rest of us.”

  Nolan told Greer to relay word to Felix about the money, told him he’d be at the Tropical waiting for Felix to come talk. There would be plans to cancel, new arrangements to be made.

  Jon had the Olds hotwired and ready to go in the boathouse garage, but it was unnecessary, because Nolan had found Charlie’s keys on the kitchen counter. Nolan and Jon laid Walter in the backseat; somewhere along the line the sock had been taken out of his mouth, but he wasn’t saying much anyway. Nolan didn’t answer any of Jon’s questions about what had happened or where the money was. Finally Jon asked if he could run upstairs and get something before they left, and Nolan said okay. When Jon came back with a box full of comic books, Nolan didn’t even say anything; he just opened the trunk for the boy and thought, well, at least somebody got something out of this.

  They drove out of the garage, stopped to unlock the gate, where Nolan told Jon to get in the backseat with Walter and untie him.

  Nolan started driving again and talked to Walter in the rearview mirror. “Your father is dead.”

  Walter made a move to grab Nolan and Jon stopped him.

  “Easy,” Nolan said. “I didn’t kill your old man, one of his own cohorts did. What I’m doing now is answering his dying request, God knows why, and hauling your ass away from that place before more Family people show up.”

  “Where . . . where are you taking me?” Walter said.

  “I’m going to drop you off at your sister’s apartment in Dekalb. She’ll be glad to see you, I think, if she isn’t off feeding the world’s hungry.”

  They were passing through the subdivision of summer homes now. Nolan slowed the Olds and let a little boy and girl in swimming suits cross in front of him.

  Walter said, “Won’t they . . . they be coming after me?”

  “I don’t think so. You’re no threat to anybody. I’ll do some talking for you.”

  “But . . . I’m supposed to be dead . . .”

  “It’s not your fault they mistook some poor bastard in a car crash for you.”

  “I don’t know . . . I don’t know . . .”

  Nolan glanced back at the kid. “It’ll work out. Get yourself a job in an office.”

  “Nolan,” Jon said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you going to say anything about the money, or aren’t you?”

  “Forget about it.”

  “What do you mean, forget about it?”

  “It’s gone, kid. Up in smoke. Let it go.” He pulled off the subdivision drive onto the blacktop. He was thinking about Sherry, about climbing in the sack with Sherry and forgetting things for a while.

  “Nolan,” Jon said, getting pissed, “what the hell happened to our money?”

  Walter knew. Walter was smiling.

  “Charlie burned it,” Nolan said.

  First And (Not) Last Time

  An Afterword by Max Allan Collins

  I’m grateful to Charles Ardai and Hard Case Crime for choosing these two novels—collected here as one book, for the first time—as part of their new noir line. I believe Charles would have put them out individually, but I see them as one big novel now, and requested their publication in this manner.

  Bait Money was my first published book, written during 1969 and ’70, when I was attending the University of Iowa. Its sequel, Blood Money, was actually written several years later, in between two other novels of mine (No Cure for Death, the first Mallory—though the second published—and The Broker, in which hired killer Quarry was introduced). When Curtis Books bought Bait Money (the news came on Christmas Eve, 1971), I almost immediately began a sequel. I did Blood Money so quickly, and it sold so quickly, the books came out simultaneously, as a matched pair.

  Two interesting things about the Curtis Books publication, both having to do with names.

  The books had been submitted as by Allan Collins. As a “junior,” I grew up using my middle name, to avoid confusion with my father (Max), which is why if you see me at a mystery or comic con, you may hear me called “Al” or “Allan” by my closer pals and my wife Barb. But when I signed the contracts with Curtis, I used my full legal name: Max Allan Collins Jr. Then, when advance copies of the books arrived (around Christmas of ’72), the byline was suddenly MAX COLLINS. No one had told me of this decision (later I heard an editor correctly thought “Max Collins” sounded more like a mystery writer) and I first learned of it when I saw the published novels. “Max Collins” was my father’s name, and he seemed delighted. I was not.

  Neither was mystery writer Michael Collins, whose real name is Dennis Lynds. He called and requested I stop using that name. I offered to use a pen name�
��Dennis Lynds—which he didn’t find very funny. A few years later, both of us wrote novels called The Slasher and the two “M. Collins” mystery writers caused all sorts of bibliographic nightmares. That was when I added “Allan” into the byline: to better set myself apart from the other Collins (who is now a good friend of mine), and to reclaim my byline, at least in part. I guess I’m the only writer in history whose pseudonym is his real name.

  The other name problem was with Nolan himself. Nolan was originally conceived as a pastiche of Richard Stark’s Parker, also a mono-named thief (more of this later). But again, someone at Curtis Books—an editor, or perhaps someone in the art department—decided that Nolan needed a first name. So they gave him one—Frank—in all of the cover copy.

  Frank is not Nolan’s first name. I don’t know what his real first name is, but it’s not Frank . . . though you’ll find “Frank Nolan” listed as one of my series characters in scads of reference books. Yet another bibliographic nightmare. . . .

  The Richard Stark “Parker” novels and the comic mystery fiction of Donald E. Westlake were the last two enthusiasms of my pre-professional life. Stark and Westlake were the final writers I discovered before turning pro, in the sense of authors who would influence me. I read both these guys for a good year or two before I found out these seeming opposites were one man (had their books side by side on the shelf already, and merely removed a bookend and slid them all together).

  My previous heroes had been Mickey Spillane, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson and James M. Cain . . . plus many writers of paperback originals for Gold Medal, Lion Books, and other pulp publishers of the ’50s and ’60s (I didn’t start reading this stuff till the early ’60s, but haunted used bookstores). My first novels, written in high school, were Spillane pastiches; I attempted to market these, and of course failed, but along the way learned to write. When I hit my late teens, the Richard Stark books hit me hard—the idea that a “bad guy” could be the lead character, that a man with a code could be a crook, not a cop.