Two for the Money

by Max Allan Collins

  Nolan said, “Why the file?”

  Jon said, “The top drawer is for my really rare comics. I collect them, uh, comics that is. It’s my hobby.”

  “What’re the other two drawers for?”

  “Pardon?”

  “In the file.”

  “Oh. The second drawer’s for other rare things, you know, Big Little Books and daily and Sunday strips from old papers, stuff like that.”

  “Leaves a drawer.”

  “Clothes. That’s where I put them, I put my clothes in the bottom drawer.”

  Nolan nodded. He looked around the room again, made an effort to suppress the gigantic sigh inside him wanting out, and reached in his pocket to get the white box Planner had given him.

  Nolan said, “Here you go, kid. For the second drawer. Your uncle sent this over.”

  The boy took the box, opened it, and his eyes lit up as if he had a candle inside his head, his outer shell staying passive. “Uh, thanks for dropping this off, Mr. Nolan, thanks a lot.”

  “Yeah. Well. I got to be going. Nice meeting you, kid.”

  “Hey . . . hey, wait a minute!”

  Nolan was opening the door. “What?”

  “What about the . . . the, you know . . .” he dropped his voice, to a conspiratorial whisper, “. . . the robbery?”

  “Forget it, kid.”

  “Bullshit. You came here to talk business. Now, now shut the door and come back in here and talk it.”

  Nolan hesitated and the boy reached over and slammed the door shut.

  “Wait, don’t tell me,” Nolan said, “I just figured it out. We hit the bank, I take the cash, you take the dimes and we drop you off at a newsstand.”

  “You show both your age and your ignorance, Nolan. It’s been years since comic books sold for a dime. I suppose you remember when they were a nickel.”

  “I remember when they drew them on cave walls.”

  “Listen, this is a big goddamn joke to you, isn’t it? A little boy and his games? Okay, maybe I got a childish habit that isn’t as mature and rewarding as booze or dope or something, but a cheap habit it isn’t. I paid a hundred thirty-five bucks for the first ‘Superboy,’ a hundred for the first ‘Captain Marvel Jr.,’ and two hundred for ‘Detective’ thirty-eight.”

  “Thirty-eight?”

  “That’s the first appearance of Robin in ‘Batman.’ž”

  “Fine reason to hit a bank, fine. So you can build a comic book collection.”

  “Am I asking you what you want to do with your share?”

  “No.”

  “Let me ask you something . . . you ever go to college, Nolan?”

  “No.”

  “I’m not in this semester, going back when I can dig up the bread, but do you know what kind of grades I got?”

  “No.”

  “I got a three point five average on a basis of four.”

  “Really? Well, that’s fine, that’s perfect. Sound credentials. Not only do you love comic books, you get straight As. Where’s the note from the Dean saying what a swell heist artist you’ll make?”

  Jon walked over to the cot, lifted the covers that hung to the floor and pulled from under a barbell with massive lead weights on either end. He rolled it out into the middle of the room.

  He looked at Nolan and said, “Try it.”

  “Step one in my test to earn you as a partner?”

  “Try it.”

  Nolan finally let the sigh escape and dropped his bag to the floor and bent down and gripped the weight. His side burned as he brought the barbell to his waist, then jerked it up to his chin. He pushed to get it over his head, tried, tried, but couldn’t make it. When he set the weight down, the room shook.

  Jon laughed. “Bet that knocked a few hamburgers off the grill downstairs.”

  “Now,” Nolan said, “I suppose you lift the weight and show me up, instantly creating a till-death bond between us.”

  Jon smiled and said, “Something like that.” He leaned down, bending only at the waist, and quickly did an underhand curl with the barbell, shoving the weight over his head and switching his hands around in midair, then easing it back to the floor.

  “Now what?” Nolan asked. “You kick sand in my face?”

  “No,” Jon said. “You and I talk about that robbery.”

  “If we were going to swipe a bunch of lead weights, those biceps of yours might come in handy.”

  “So it was a stunt,” the boy shrugged. “It got your attention.”

  “This is a deadly serious business, you know.”

  “Sounds like you’re the one reads comic books.”

  Nolan grinned. “Okay.” He dug in his pocket for his cigarettes, got one out and lit it. “Best thing to do first off is meet with the other masterminds you got lined up for this once-in-a-lifetime score.”

  “Good enough. This afternoon too soon? We’ll have to drive a ways. Fifty miles.”

  “Got a car?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right.”

  “I’ll have to make a phone call.”

  “Go on.”

  “I don’t have a phone. Have to use the booth downstairs.”

  “You need a dime, in other words.”

  Jon nodded, smiling.

  Nolan searched his pockets, came up with two nickels and tossed them to the boy. “Just don’t come back with a comic book.”

  “Be right back,” the boy said, heading for the door.

  Nolan was standing in front of the poster of the black-garbed Western figure with mustache and pipe, surveying it suspiciously, when the boy re-entered the room five minutes later.

  “Lee Van Cleef,” Jon said.

  “What?”

  “That’s Lee Van Cleef. An actor. Looks something like you, don’t you think?”

  Nolan shook his head, smiled with half his mouth and jabbed a finger toward Buster Crabbe. “Flash Gordon’s more my style. How long till we leave?”

  3

  Grossman didn’t like beer: it was a liquid to be guzzled by simple-minded farmers who spent their evenings sipping its suds and listening to country-western music. He much preferred pot; in fact a friend of his who was a med school dropout had told him grass was safer than booze, maybe even good for you. But here in Junction he figured it was best to stay with beer, at least in a public place like this bar, where he and Shelly had already gotten more than their share of long looks.

  He’d dressed as convervatively as he could, throwing an old green wool sweater over his usual tee-shirt with the ZigZag rolling papers logo on it, and jeans and a worn denim jacket. There was no way, of course, to do anything about the nearly shoulder-length hair, but even the hicks in a podunk like Junction ought to have seen long-haired men by now. In fact some of the younger farmers had beards and bushy hair themselves, in addition to bib overalls and duckbill hats. Jesus.

  The medieval atmosphere of the room gave Grossman a headache. From the booth in back where he and Shelly were sitting, he soaked in the tomb-like blackness of the place, which was highlighted only by the lengths of fluorescent tubing over the mirror behind the bar, and by hanging plastic beer ads lit up inside. The farmers at the bar, in their overalls and duckbill hats, were sneaking funny looks at the two of them—digging elbows into each other’s ribs and making cracks, he supposed, about the weird-ass with the shoulder-length hair and/or the pretty little girl with the pretty little pink-sweatered boobies, and what was a pretty little girl like her doing with a long-haired weird-ass like him. The light from the plastic beer ads and fluorescent tubing hit their farmer faces angularly, making them look like stone gargoyles sprung to life.

  And all the while in the background the jukebox retched country-western pickin’ and a singin’.

  One time out in Utah, in another podunk, Grossman had been sitting in a bar not unlike this one, listening to the same country-western slop dribble out of a juke, and slightly high on booze and grass, had stood up and said, not in a yell but in a controlled, fir
m tone of voice, “I knew an ‘Okie from Muskogee’ once and he was a goddamn fucking queer!” Before he’d sat back down, a couple of shitkickers in cowboy hats came over and lifted him up under the arms and hustled him out into the alley by the bar and beat the piss out of him.

  That was bad enough, Grossman thought, but Jesus fucking Christ, of all the out-of-it states he’d been in in this out-of-it country, Iowa had to take top honors in the shit-kicking hick department.

  Especially the podunks like this one, like Junction, dozens of which, Grossman felt sure, were scattered through each county in the Tall Corn State. Iowa City, where Jon lived, wasn’t so bad; and Davenport, where Grossman was staying, was halfway decent; but Port City, the town of twenty thousand where Shelly had a job at the bank, was just a podunk gotten out of hand.

  Junction, a one-tavern hamlet of two hundred, had been picked by Jon for the meeting because it was halfway between Iowa City and Davenport, and only twenty miles from Port City.

  This meeting was something else Grossman didn’t like. He didn’t figure they needed any outside help, some middle-aged bastard who thought age equals smart. Grossman figured he and Shelly and Jon could do just fine by themselves.

  Shelly was sipping her beer, looking very calm, her blue eyes heavy-lidded and languid, and she laid her hand on top of Grossman’s, stopping the nervous drumming of his fingers. Her touch felt cool, soothing.

  Grossman rubbed his right temple and looked down into his glass of beer. “Where are those assholes?”

  Shelly said, “It isn’t time yet. Five more minutes.”

  Grossman nodded, gulping down a swallow of beer.

  It would be okay, he thought. Just as long as he had Shelly. God, what a beautiful kid she was! Heaven, Grossman thought, heaven was Shelly and that musk-scented bod of hers between the cool sheets of a warm Canadian bed. All that long black hair, drifting down over creamy shoulders, and that pale ivory skin, the rose-petal lips, and those uplifted, brown-nippled breasts, the silken thighs, and that hot sucking warmth between her . . .

  Grossman’s back arched. He could feel the eyes of those shitkickers at the bar, feel them staring at him, gaping at her, peeling Shelly in their minds and with their words, and he wanted to rush over there and crack their farmer skulls open like melons on the hard mahogany bar.

  And it wouldn’t be the first time, either. That stagnated pile of shit called America was full of them, he knew, and it wasn’t just the shitkickers, it was the “movement,” too, and that was what made everything so hopeless.

  A few years ago he had thought there was a chance. The fat-cat capitalists would get theirs, get it from the student revolutionaries, from the black militants, a cleansing bath of blood from the young and the blacks, that had been his credo.

  Ever since he’d flunked out of that eastern junior college a thousand years back, when his loving parents (mom and hubby numero three) disowned him, he’d been campus-hopping, hanging around college towns and working with radical left groups, a pseudo-student, until he got bored or in trouble. Then he’d pick up and move on to another campus, helping the local revolutionaries stir things up there, pushing grass on the side to get the necessary bread.

  Then at Berkeley he’d met Shelly, pretty, idealistic, intelligent Shelly. With horrible, smothering parents, giving her, giving her, giving her, suffocating her with guilt/love. Shelly wanted a new life, something simple, something fresh. And Grossman wanted her to have it.

  He and Shelly connected about the time he was realizing that the “movement” wasn’t what it once had been; he supposed he’d gotten aboard the train too long after it’d left the station. So many good people had been corrupted, swallowed into the straight world; what was left, among the older ones, were burn-outs and losers, and most of the ones his age or younger were into sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll, but in no political context. Talk of revolution had faded into trivialities like women’s rights and nuclear power . . .

  Take Jerry, for example. A Marxist whose idea of sharing the wealth ran to putting the make on Shelly. He’d caught Jerry forcing himself on Shelly in the backroom of the co-op bookstore, and had beat the living shit out of him. Shelly had cried. You’re too trusting, babe, he’d told her; you’re too gullible.

  Then came the letter from that buddy of his in Colorado, who’d been “born again” and was living in a mountainside commune run by a Jesus cult. Back to the soil, a return to the land. Back to God. It was something new to try: Grossman and Shelly went.

  They said they were children of love, those Jesus freaks, and they were children of love, all right, only when they said peace, they meant piece; and sharing food and lodging and Jesus was one thing, but sharing Shelly was something else.

  He found one of the cult leaders “praying” in the high weeds with Shelly, taking advantage of her, taking advantage of her small size, her giving spirit, and Grossman lifted the guy up by the neck and threw him to the ground, and while Shelly cried hysterically in the background, he slammed his fist into the son of a bitch, kicked, kneed him, elbowed him, reached for the rock and smashed it down on the bastard’s head and . . .

  “Are you all right, Gross?” Shelly asked.

  He breathed out. “Yeah. I was just thinkin’.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t. Don’t do that. Don’t think backward, Gross, only ahead. Canada, remember?”

  “Okay.”

  Canada.

  Canada and bread. Canada where you could still buy some land and get back to beginnings. Canada and a nice fat bankroll to get them started fresh, Shelly and him, and leave all the phony idealism behind, behind in the land of the Red, White, and Blue, along with the shitkicking hicks and the fat-cats and the failed revolutionaries and all the other assorted American nightmares and dreams.

  Revolution, Grossman had come to believe, was in the mind, and politics was a fantasy and nothing more. His personal purge accomplished, Grossman was ready, ready for years of lying on his back with his woman next to him, making love, getting high, living off the land; not bothering, not bothered.

  Shelly said, “There’s Jon. He’s alone.”

  Grossman turned around in the booth. Jon was approaching them, winding his way through the shitkickers, looking nervous and a little excited.

  “Hi, Jon.”

  “How ya doin’, Shelly? How’s it goin’, Gross?”

  “Jon. Where’s the big man? We’re here to meet the big man, aren’t we?”

  Jon leaned over the table. “Now look, Gross, let’s start cool and stay that way, okay? We’re lucky this guy’s even willing to sit down and talk with us. I mean, he’s been around a long time in a business where you don’t stay around a long time, unless you’re very, very good. And Planner says he’s the best.”

  “You convincing me or yourself?”

  “You’re going to blow it, Gross, I just know you are. One talk with you and he’ll be gone.”

  “Okay, okay. So where is he, this guy we’re so lucky to be on the same planet with? Sees us by appointment only or what?”

  Jon motioned toward the door. “In the car. Doesn’t want to talk in here.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Says we shouldn’t be seen together.”

  “Christ. What does he think this is?”

  “He’ll probably ask you the same thing, Gross.”

  Shelly’s soothing touch to Grossman’s hand silenced his next response. She said, “Let’s go out and talk to this guy. If he’s as good as he’s supposed to be, we’ll profit by it, right, Gross?”

  Grossman heaved a sigh, finally nodded.

  Jon grinned. “Okay. Let’s go out and talk to Nolan.”

  4

  Nolan sat in Jon’s decade-old Chevy II while the boy entered the narrow brick building, the outward-hanging neon in front already on, crackling now and then, glowing the words “Junction Tavern” listlessly in the cold late-afternoon overcast.

  Reaching over by the driver’s side to the dashboard lighter, Nolan punche
d in the button, stuck a cigarette between his lips and waited, trying to ignore his urge to laugh. Here he was, not forty miles from Werner and the Quad Cities where all this had begun, and scarcely more than two hundred miles from Charlie and Chicago, sitting in a beat-up old car in an Iowa village that consisted mainly of a tavern and a gas station, waiting for three punk kids to come out and tell him about the bank job he was going to pull with them. Ridiculous. It was a laugh.

  Only it was Charlie’s laugh: if Nolan fucked up, and died, or ended in stir, Charlie would just love it; and if Nolan did pull this off, Charlie would be a hundred grand ahead and would have saved face with the Family. Nolan would’ve appreciated the joke, but for the dull ache in his side from Charlie’s last attempt to kill him.

  The lighter popped out, and he yanked it free and lit his cigarette. Okay, he thought, on the surface it looked pretty bad, but at least he would have complete control. In the past, working with pros, he’d always been forced to compromise over certain points in the planning, because every individual pro has his own thoughts on how a heist should run. Nolan usually preferred Nolan’s ideas, and when a job did go bad, he almost always could trace the failure to faulty, compromise planning.

  Here he would be in charge, complete charge. Or else he’d just have to look for something different even if that something different was putting a bullet in Charlie.

  The kid, Jon, seemed to have a good head. On the way to Junction from Iowa City they’d refrained from talking about the job, both of them thinking it best to wait for the other two. Nolan’s initial scare over the boy’s passion for such a triviality as comic books was gone now. A lot of people in the trade had crazy ideas; the business was full of unconventional dreamers who supplemented their dreams with heist money.

  Jon had told Nolan of his plan to acquire a bookstore, where he would deal in rare comic books and strips while working on the side to get his start as a freelance cartoonist. His uncle Planner had heard of such a store in Waterloo, operated by an old guy whose health had started to fail. Jon wanted to buy the place and build it into a mecca for comic collectors.