Two for the Money

by Max Allan Collins

  Charlie slapped Jon with the gun and put him to sleep again.

  Walter said, “What are you going to do, Dad?”

  “I don’t know. Let me think. Help me up on the table. I want to sit down.”

  Walter helped his father.

  He watched his father sitting there, the close-set eyes narrowing, the lips moving ever so slightly. Was his father deciding to go ahead with the next phase of some secret master plan? Or just throwing together some spur-of-the-moment piece of strategy? Walter didn’t know and couldn’t guess. But a full minute went by before the eyes softened, the lips settled into a tight grin and a false calm washed across the tan, lined face and Charlie said, “We’ll take the little bastard with us.”

  Why? Walter wanted to ask it, but knew he shouldn’t. He was glad of his father’s decision, in a way. He had a feeling the alternative would’ve been to kill the kid named Jon.

  “Come here, Ainsworth,” Charlie said.

  The doctor shuffled over. The room was air-conditioned and near-cold, but the doctor was sweating profusely.

  “Where’s the stuff you were going to get for me?”

  The doctor looked down at his right hand, which was clenched in a nervous fist. He opened it and revealed two little white packets. “Antibiotic,” the doctor said, handing one of the little envelopes to Charlie, “and painkiller,” handing him the other one. “Instructions are written on the packets.”

  Charlie told the doctor about his high blood pressure and asked if it made any difference about anything. The doctor said no, but that the high blood pressure probably added to Charlie’s passing out from the wound, perhaps had made him bleed somewhat more than the average person might.

  “Okay, Doc,” Charlie said, “you’re doing fine. You getting more relaxed now? Not so nervous anymore?”

  Ainsworth nodded.

  “Good. You don’t need to be nervous. Nothing’s going to happen to you. You’re a friend of Sturms and Sturms is a friend of a friend of mine, so we’re all friends and nothing’s going to happen to you. But I want your help. Give that kid something that’ll keep him out for a while.”

  “How long?” Ainsworth asked.

  “Oh, four hours maybe. Can do?”

  “Yes.”

  Walter watched the doctor go to the counter and fill a big hypo with clear fluid. It seemed to Walter that the doctor was moving faster than before.

  Walter sat down and swallowed and looked at what was going on in front of him. A doctor in a golf outfit was giving a horse-size hypo to a curly-haired kid in a weird tee-shirt who was slumped unconscious on the floor. And a man in a bright Hawaiian-print shirt and Bermuda shorts, thigh bandaged, hand squeezed tight around a cannon of a gun, was sitting high on an examining table, seeming to tower over the rest of the room, ruling over the insanity and violence that hung in the air of this white, unpadded cell.

  Walter closed his eyes and wished it would all go away.

  5

  Jon woke to darkness.

  He was hot. He was sticky. He hurt.

  For the first few moments he was aware of nothing else: just the saunalike heat of the room, his shirt and jeans damp, clinging to his body; the staleness of the air, like some musty old museum; the overall pain, a sluggish doped aching that coursed through his arms and legs and seemed to culminate in the throbbing between his temples; and the extreme darkness of the room, the lack of any light at all, making him think for one awful half-awake moment that he had gone blind.

  Or had been blinded.

  Maybe he was in hell. Maybe this was the end of an EC horror comic and he was trapped in some ironic hell for robbing that bank last year. The thought made him laugh, but the laugh got caught in his throat and came out as something else, something that smacked more of despair than amusement.

  “All right,” he said aloud, but not loudly. “Okay.” Just a whisper. He was telling himself that he was alive. Assess the situation, he told himself, his head foggy. Take your time. Slowly now.

  He was on his back. He could feel something hard and metallic under him, but circular, like large rings, and springy. Springs? Bedsprings? He moved his body slightly, jiggled the surface beneath him. Yes. He was on a bed. On the exposed springs of an old-fashioned bed.

  He smiled and the sweat running down his face got into his mouth and tasted salty. He didn’t mind. He was on a bed somewhere, alive, and that beat being in hell by a long shot.

  He tried to get up off the bed and found he couldn’t. He wasn’t paralyzed, he knew that. He could lift the trunk of his body several inches off the bed, maybe half a foot. He wasn’t paralyzed.

  What, then?

  He lay there and breathed deep, slow, trying to let his mind clear, which it did, gradually. The fuzziness went away and he realized he was bound, he could feel the rope around his wrists, around his ankles. Rope was looped around ankles and wrists, not tight, but secure. His circulation wasn’t cut off or anything, but working with his fingers he found the chance of slipping the loops up around over his hands was nonexistent. The rope he was bound with was not thick and coarse, but more on the order of clothesline, and didn’t scrape his skin or make him particularly uncomfortable. There was a lot of leeway in the rope, which he’d decided was tied to the bedposts, and he actually had his arms free at his sides and could lift them or his legs in the air and do just about anything with them except push himself up and walk off—without taking the bed with him, anyway.

  So. His situation was this: on his back, on a bed, tied to the bedposts, God knew where.

  Where? Was he in Ainsworth’s office? That was where he last remembered being. Not likely, unless Ainsworth had taken to collecting antique beds. Antiques! He’d been taken back to Planner’s and tied to an old antique bed! But the only one in the shop was Jon’s, and it was small, with a box spring. Planner didn’t have any other antique beds.

  Planner.

  Planner was dead. Planner was more than dead. Planner was murdered. Murdered by that son of a bitch Charlie.

  Charlie.

  Jon hadn’t recognized Charlie immediately. Jon’d come to Ainsworth’s office early, but not by design; he was just walking by on his way to grab a quick sandwich at the Hamburg Inn and saw Ainsworth’s lights on and thought what the hell and stopped. He’d just been standing there saying hello to Ainsworth and Ainsworth had been getting ready to show him into the private office to fill out some forms and such and that madman had come tumbling out into the hall, waving an automatic that looked like the Gun of Navarone. It took Jon a few seconds to recognize the man, but the pieces had fallen together quickly: gun and bandaged thigh had gelled with Nolan’s mention of Charlie, and Jon had known.

  He had only seen Charlie one time before—that night when Nolan got shot up by Charlie and his men—and then only for moments and not close up, but the image of the wild little man had stuck in Jon’s mind: short and dark with powder-white hair and two black little eyes stuck together close like beads on the face of a cheap rag doll.

  And so Jon had jumped at the crazy gun-waving madman in the hallway at Ainsworth’s office, leaped at him, mind full of Nolan bleeding and Planner dead and got knocked cold to the floor by a backhand blow from Charlie’s gun-in-hand.

  He had come to twice after that, both times in Ainsworth’s examining room. The first time he’d come out of it, he’d looked up at Charlie and fingered the sucker and told him what Nolan would do to him. And Charlie had whacked him to the floor again. The second time he woke up, just half woke, and saw Ainsworth coming down on him, and it was like some fish-eye camera angle in a monster movie, distorted, out of focus, Ainsworth as Dr. Frankenstein bug-eyed and sweaty above a hypo the size of Cleveland. And as the needle jammed into his arm, he glanced up and saw that little asshole Charlie sitting, sitting way up there like some court jester who’d made his way to the throne by poisoning the king and queen.

  That was the last thing he could remember, and it wasn’t a pleasant memory to dwell on, th
ough it was vivid enough. How much time had passed since then? He could feel his watch on his wrist, right under where the rope was looped, but in all the knocking about the thing had probably conked out on him. Why couldn’t he be a normal person and have a Bulova with a luminous dial? But no, he had to be different—he had to wear an antique Dick Tracy watch that ran when it felt like it.

  Never mind that, he told himself. Never mind superfluous thoughts. Think. What could have happened? Where was he? Why had Ainsworth stuck a needle in his arm?

  To put him out, of course. He’d been doped. But why? Getting knocked out, or just tied up, would keep him indisposed long enough for Charlie to get away. Why dope him and tie him up and clobber him? Just for the sheer hell of it? Why not just kill him?

  Jon tried to make sense of it, tried to develop logical theories about where he was and who had put him there, but all he came up with was questions, more questions. He had the feeling that Charlie had not only done all this to him, but was still around, that Charlie had taken him off somewhere and was keeping him captive. He even remembered, vaguely, delirious, strange dreams of travel, a ride, dreams of an ocean voyage that might have been a drive in a car.

  But there was no sense in it, none at all. Why would Charlie have any interest in Jon?

  Fuck it, he thought. He decided to concentrate his efforts on getting loose. Prospects were dim, but he had to try, didn’t he? He started out slowly, tugging first at his right wrist, then moving to the left, then each foot got a prolonged effort. He spent a good while at it, kicking, tugging, struggling, making absolutely no progress at all. Finally he heaved up off the bed, came down hard, repeated the process, again, and again, at the same time thrusting his legs upward and outward and every way, flailing his arms, pounding his butt on the springs, hoping to break the bed if nothing else and maybe, somehow, slip rope over broken bent bedpost and . . .

  But in the end all he got was tired. Very tired, and he found himself getting drowsy, and found also that after staring up at the darkness for a time there was little else to do but sleep. So he did.

  “Wake up.”

  Jon’s eyes opened. Light. It was light in the room now.

  “Hey, wake up.”

  Jon’s eyes focused. He saw a young guy of maybe twenty, twenty-two years, about his age, sitting on a chair by the bed. He was thin and pale and had the same close-set eyes as Charlie.

  “Who the hell are you?” Jon said. “Some relative of Charlie’s?”

  “I’m his son.”

  “You got my sympathy.”

  “I brought some food for you. You want some food?”

  Jon sat up.

  “Hey,” he said. “I sat up.” He shook his hands; they were free. His legs had been freed, too. The ropes hung untied on the bedposts of, yes, an old antique bed, a brass one, and quite attractive; the nicest bed Jon had ever been tied to. The room was still dim, but light was creeping under the drawn shade on a window directly across from the foot of the bed.

  “Look,” Charlie’s son said, “I’m sorry about the ropes and everything. I didn’t know he’d tied you up like this. Dad has a tendency to be overdramatic. He’s . . . he’s been acting a little strange lately.”

  “Like killing my uncle, you mean,” Jon said. “What’s he going to do to me? What’s going on? Where the hell am I?”

  “Do you want this food?”

  The guy had set up a tray by the bed and on it was a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon and some milk.

  “Sure I want the food,” Jon said. “I feel like I haven’t eaten for hours.”

  “You haven’t. You been out fifteen hours. First five or six hours you were unconscious, from the stuff that doctor gave you. I suppose you woke up sometime in the night and squirmed a while, then fell back asleep.”

  Jon frowned at the guy. “Give me the food.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be back in half an hour and take the dishes off your hands and see how you’re doing. I’m not going to tie you up.”

  “Aren’t you afraid I’ll get away?”

  “Take a look at the two-story drop out that window and decide for yourself. And I don’t think you’ll be breaking down the door, either. The wood’s four inches thick and the lock’s pretty firm.”

  “Let me eat, why don’t you.”

  “See you later.”

  The guy left and Jon started in on the food. It tasted good to him, but wasn’t as good as the last meal he’d eaten, which had also been a breakfast of scrambled eggs. Hell, right now he wouldn’t even have minded the company of Larry, that wide-eyed brat of Karen’s.

  Karen.

  His gut ached with the thought of her. He put down his fork and rubbed a spot over his left eye.

  She’d be worried as hell. She’d have spent a miserable night. He’d called her and told her a little about the situation, not much, but enough to worry her to death, god-dammit. Mentioned she should watch her step about whom she let into the apartment. “There’s a guy with a gun involved,” he’d told her. When he’d told her that, she’d insisted on having a number to call for help, if she couldn’t find him or he didn’t show up or something. Jon had given her Nolan’s number at the Tropical and while he hadn’t liked doing that, he’d supposed an emergency might come up, requiring that sort of thing, and he sure as hell didn’t want her phoning the police. He’d also given her the doctor’s number, and he wondered what Ainsworth had said when she called him, as she must’ve. The good doctor would’ve lied through the teeth, no doubt. But would he tell Karen a soothing lie, or one that would upset her? Would she then have called Nolan? If so, would it do any good? How in hell could Nolan find him? Shit, he didn’t know where he was. He could have a phone fall out of the sky, plop down in his lap, a direct line to Nolan and what would he say? “Help, save me! And while you’re at it, tell me where I am.”

  Fuck.

  Jon ate. As he did he glanced around the room. All the furniture had been covered up with sheets, but he could tell this was a girl’s room, or had been once; one of the pieces of furniture had the shape of a make-up table with tall mirror, and the walls were papered in pink with blue bells on it. The rest of the room was rugged, running to rough, barnlike wood, from the unvarnished floor to the open-beamed ceiling that followed the slant of the roof. If a girl’s room could be so rustic, Jon figured, the place must be a large cabin or cottage of some kind.

  He had just finished his milk when the guy came back in.

  “How was breakfast?”

  “It was swell. Now if I could just have a cake with a file in it.”

  “Listen, I don’t blame you for being bitter.”

  “No shit.”

  The guy sat wearily down, frustration obvious on his face. For some reason he seemed to want Jon to like him, or approve of his actions. Jesus. Jon studied him.

  He wasn’t particularly big; in fact, he was slender, his arms thin. He was wearing a tank-top tee-shirt, blue, and white jeans. He had a college boy look to him, as if he should be out hazing some pledges for a fraternity somewhere.

  Jon made his decision. He would watch the guy and find an opening and go with it. Take the guy down and get the hell out. It would be easy. Find an opening and cream the guy. Easy.

  “I’d like to tell you what’s going on,” the guy was saying, “but I don’t know myself, really. I’m just as scared as you are, believe it or not, maybe more. I’m in this situation because I wanted to stand beside my father and I guess I didn’t realize just exactly who my father was.”

  “That he’s a maniac, you mean.”

  “That’s your point of view. He’s still my father, and I’m in this with him, to the end. Whether I like it or not, at this point. I guess I could go to jail a long time.”

  “If Nolan finds you, don’t sweat jail.”

  “Who is this Nolan?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “Wait. Just wait.”

  “Look. I’m trying to
tell you I’m going to help you, if I can.”

  “Oh?”

  “I won’t let Dad, uh, do anything . . . extreme.”

  “Like kill me?”

  He shrugged. “Like kill you,” he admitted.

  “Get me out of here, then.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You won’t.”

  “All right I won’t. But stay cool. It’ll be all right.”

  “You’re crazier than your father.”

  “Could be. Anyway, can I get you something? We got some beer. Something to read maybe?”

  “Not unless it’s your old man’s obituary.”

  “I try to help you and you hassle me.”

  “Ungrateful me.”

  “I noticed your watch.”

  “What?”

  “Your watch. I noticed it. What kind of watch is that?”

  “It’s just a watch.”

  “You some kind of comic book nut or something?”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “That watch has, who? Dick Tracy on it? And the tee-shirt you’re wearing is some other cartoon character. Thought it followed, your being a comic book nut.”

  “All right, so I like comic books. What of it?”

  “Christ. Take it easy. Just thought you might like to look through the box of old comics we got in the attic, up in the other house. At least I think they’re still up there, if they haven’t been thrown in the trash or something.”

  Jon perked, getting interested in spite of himself. “How . . . how old are these comics?”

  “I don’t know. They were my cousin’s, and he’s older than I am. My sister and I used to read them when we were kids, coming up here summers.”

  “Well, I guess I wouldn’t mind taking a look at them.”

  “Okay. Your name’s Jon, right? Mine’s Walter. Walt.”

  “It’s a pleasure.”

  Walt ignored the sarcasm and said, “I’ll go over and get them for you.”

  Jon watched him leave, the door shut and lock behind him. He sat on the bed and wondered if there would be any good books in the box. You never knew when you were going to luck onto a find. If that cousin was older than Walter, why those comics could be early fifties or before, and that meant there could be some good shit in . . .