And so the Tropical.
The Tropical was a modest operation in comparison with those other places the Family had offered him and, in fact, was used as a trial-run spot for people being considered for top managerial positions in the countless hotels, resorts, niteries and other such establishments owned by the powerful Chicago syndicate. The Tropical was a motel, consisting of four buildings with sixteen units each; two heated swimming pools, one indoor, one out; and a central building housing a restaurant and bar, both of which sported a pseudo-Caribbean decor meant to justify the motel’s name. It was located ten miles outside of Sycamore, Illinois, and was devoted to serving honeymooning couples, some of whom were actually married. Lots of legit businessmen out of Chicago, as well as Family people, used it as a trysting ground, and so, accordingly, the Tropical made damn good money for its size.
Nolan himself had been serving a trial run at the Tropical before his money was stolen; now he was there on a more permanent basis, to observe the progress of others undergoing trial runs, doing little more than watching, really—just some mental note-taking and reporting back to Felix on the behavior and capability of the temporary managers. He would break in each new man (whose stay would range from three to six months) and see to it that a sense of continuity was maintained in between these pro tempore managers.
Which meant he mostly sat around.
And considering the salary he was drawing, that didn’t make for such a bad setup. At least, not when Sherry was around.
Sherry was young, almost obscenely young, a pretty blonde child who spent most of her time in and out of bikinis. She had applied for a waitress job at the beginning of Nolan’s stay at the Tropical, but she couldn’t keep the food and coffee out of customer laps, and rather than fire her, Nolan found a place for her. The place was between the sheets of his bed, and when she wasn’t there, she was adding to the Tropical’s already erotic atmosphere by sunning in her hint of a bikini around the outdoor pool. She was not a brilliant girl, nor was she an empty-headed one, and if she did talk a trifle much, he’d gotten used to it quickly; anyway, her voice was melodious and soothing, so if you didn’t listen to the words, it was no trouble at all.
Now she was gone.
The summer was over and there was no sun for her to lie under. She’d begun to get itchy at the tail end of September, and yesterday, when she got the call from her father saying her mother was sick, she’d decided to go back to Ohio and help out her folks. She and Nolan had had their most emotional night last night: she crying and Nolan making an honest effort to be cheerful and kind about the whole thing. She swore she’d come back the next summer; Nolan didn’t mention that he hoped to be long gone from the Tropical by then. He just nodded and eased back up on top of her again.
He tried to bank the one ball in and missed. He said, “Shit,” and chalked up his cue.
“Want some company?”
“No,” Nolan said. He shot again; this time the ball went in.
“Hey. I said, want some company?”
“No,” Nolan said.
The kid doing the asking was maybe eighteen, skinny, with long, greasy hair and a complexion like a runny pizza. A fat kid, older by a couple years probably, came sliding up to the table like a hog to slaughter. The skinny kid had on jeans and a gray work shirt with a white patch on the breast pocket that identified the shirt’s origin as Ron’s Skelly Station and the kid’s name as Rick; the fat kid had on a yellow short-sleeve shirt with grease stains and massive underarm sweat-circles, and the buttons over his belly couldn’t button.
“Hey, Chub,” Rick said to his friend. They were like two balloons, one with the air let out, the other inflated to bursting. “You know what feeling I got about this guy, Chub? I got this awful feeling he’s some kind or prick or something.” There was emphasis on the word “prick.”
Chub, however, said nothing. He just stood there, shifting his weight, from foot to foot and looking Nolan over.
Rick went on. “I mean, I ask him does he want some company and he says, ‘shit no.’ He’s some kind of antisocial bastard, I think. What do you think, Chub?”
Chub, apparently, didn’t know what to think. He’d come over to have a laugh with ol’ Rick, but now that he was here and had a look at Nolan, he wasn’t sure he liked what he saw. After a moment he tapped his skinny friend on the shoulder and gave him a flick of the head that said, come on, don’t mess with this dude.
But then reinforcements arrived: two older guys, looking like something out of a fifties hot rod movie, came up from the other end of the hall to see what was the hassle. One of them actually had on a T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a cigarette pack stuffed in at the shoulder; he was an emaciated sort with pipe-cleaner arms down under the rolled sleeves, who made the skinny Rick look healthy. His cohort, however, was more genuinely menacing: a sandy-haired, greasy-haired, wide-shouldered bear with close-set, glittering eyes; he wore jeans and a T-shirt under a black cotton vest, and had biceps the size of California grapefruit.
“Okay,” Nolan said. “Who wants to play some eightball?”
He played once with Rick and lost. His mind was still elsewhere. But the crowd around began making snide remarks about his shooting, and it brought his mind into focus. When he played the fat kid, for a five, he broke and didn’t sink any; then next time his turn came around, he sank all the little-numbered balls and the eight, leaving Chub’s stripes scattered all over the table. A murmur went through the small crowd, and pipe-cleaner arms stepped up, and Nolan took five from him the same way. He did it to all of them, except that most times he was running the balls right from the break.
He was good at pool; he was, in fact, good at most games. He’d been playing in a low-stakes poker game regularly with some Sycamore businessmen and had found it an enjoyable enough time killer. Good as he was at games, he was not a gambler. He was interested in pool and card playing for the chance to exercise his mind and to hone his skill; he didn’t like to play with pros, because they had their life in the game, and you don’t want to screw around with people in something they make a living at. The best amateur doesn’t want to play the worst pro, because the game is a lark to the amateur, whereas the pro is deadly serious, and sometime you’ll find yourself with a broken head and stuffed in a garbage can if you fuck with the pros and win.
Also, Nolan never hustled. Pool or cards or anything. He could go into a pool hall like this one and almost always clean the place out, if he felt like it; same with lots of small-town, high-stakes card games. But you made enemies that way. Same as when you diddled the pros, the amateur who thinks he’s a pro can get pretty mad himself.
Like this crowd around him was now.
“Some kind of smart-ass hustler, buddy? That what you are?” It was the first kid, Rick—skinny Rick with the bad complexion. “Come in here and shoot real shitty and say you don’t want to play, and then when we beg you, you say okay and wipe our butts, is that it?”
The bear with the close-set eyes, who seemed to be the leader of this small-time pack, said, “Just lay our money on the table, hustler. Just lay what you stole from us on the table, and you can walk out of here with your ass.”
Nolan glanced over toward the proprietor, who was standing by the counter where he served up beers. The proprietor was an elderly guy with a flannel shirt and baggy pants and apron on. He was aware of what was going on, but knew he couldn’t do anything about it; these were his usual customers, and he was looking the other way, toward some tables down at the other end of the room, which nobody was using right now.
Nolan picked up the cue ball and threw it at the bear and hit him in the middle of his forehead and knocked him on his back, knocked him out. He used the butt of the cue on Rick’s stomach, and Rick promptly crawled away and threw up for a while. The rest of them just stood there and looked at Nolan. Nolan was smiling. And then he saw in their eyes that they realized he wanted them to continue the brawl.
Because Nolan was bored, and
hostile, and it was something to do.
Disgusted with himself, Nolan threw the cue down across the table, said, “Fuck it,” and walked out of the place. In an hour he was back in his room at the Tropical, fixing himself a shot of Scotch over ice and turning on the news to catch the sports.
At eleven, he was taking a shower and the phone rang.
“Logan?”
It was Sherry. The image of her face flashed through his mind: gentle, little-girl features framed by arcs of blonde-frosted brunette hair . . .
“Where you calling from, Sherry?”
“Home. Ohio. I miss you.”
“Yeah. I’m stir-crazy myself, in this room alone.”
“My mother’s real sick, Logan.”
Logan was the name she knew him by, the one he was using at the Tropical.
“Logan?” she said again. He’d been quiet for a moment, his mind full of her naked: her skin coppery from all that summer sun, except for the stark white where the bikini had half-heartedly covered the best parts, the breasts tipped as deep a copper as the sun-tanned skin; the light brunette triangle forming a similar contrast below . . .
“Yeah, I’m here,” he said. “I’m sorry to hear your mother’s sick.”
“She’s going to be bedridden a long time.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I got a job today.”
“What kind?”
“Waitress.”
“Oh, Christ.”
She laughed. “I’ll be careful. I haven’t scalded anybody’s nuts with hot-coffee-in-the-lap yet.”
“Oh, then all your customers were women today, huh?”
She laughed some more and then said, “I miss you.”
“You said that.”
“I know. I want to see you again, Logan.”
“Sure. Next summer.”
“I don’t think you’ll still be there. At the Tropical, I mean. You been restless lately.”
“Well.”
“Let me give you my address. Come and see me when you can. Tell me where you end up, if you end up anywhere.”
“I’d like that, Sherry.”
She gave him the address, and he wrote it down.
“Logan?”
“Yeah?”
“Take care of yourself. Be happy.”
“You too, kid.”
They hung up.
Nolan sat there, dripping wet from the shower, getting the bed damp, feeling pissed off and, dammit, lonely. He couldn’t understand it, because he’d been self-sufficient for a lot of years, hadn’t ever been one to shack up with a broad for more than a day or two.
But he was fifty, and this goddamn life at the Tropical was goddamn getting him down.
He sat there a while and the phone rang again. It was Jon. Calling long-distance from Iowa City.
“Nolan? You got to come here, right away.”
Life pumped into his veins; he didn’t know what Jon wanted, but whatever it was, Nolan was game.
3
BREEN NEVER THOUGHT it would come to this. Stealing nickels and dimes. Christ! He pulled into the driveway of the little farmhouse where old Sam Comfort and his son Billy were waiting. At least this would end it, he thought. He would be glad to be done with this one; it certainly hadn’t been the normal sort of heist he worked. In fact, it hadn’t been one heist at all, but a series of thousands of little ones, infinitesimal heists, nickel-and-dime stuff. Literally. Because Breen had been helping the Comforts heist parking meters.
He was a stocky guy of forty-two, black hair cut military-short, his fleshy cheeks covered with a perpetual five o’clock shadow. His eyes were wide-set and dark blue, his nose bumpy and squat in the middle of a rough but intelligent face. Right now, as he sat in his battered green Mustang in the farmhouse drive, Breen’s often intense features were softened in pleasant anticipation of severing the alliance with the Comforts.
He guessed he’d been lucky till now. Before this, he’d worked with only the best people; never before had he stooped to the level of the Comforts. He was spoiled, he supposed, from years of working with guys the caliber of Nolan. Used to be, Breen would work at least one job a year with Nolan, picking up one or two more with somebody else reliable. But Jack Taylor and a whole string of good men got busted two summers ago heisting an art gallery, and last year Laughlin and three others were killed after that Georgia armored-car job went sour and they’d been caught between state and local cops in a back-roads chase that turned fucking tragic. Worst of all, about two years ago this time, Breen had been in Chicago with Nolan and several others, planning a bank heist, when some syndicate guy shot the job right out from under them. Word got out later that though Nolan wasn’t dead after all (surprising, as that syndicate guy nailed him a couple times; Breen had seen it happen), the Chicago Family was definitely declaring open season on Nolan. Which made it less than healthy to keep company with the man. So what was a guy to do? You had to work with somebody. And if you were desperate enough, you worked with the likes of the Comforts.
Old Sam Comfort’s reputation was bad; it went back years before Breen had gotten into the business, and he’d never heard any specific stories about the old man, just that Sam Comfort was not to be trusted. In recent years Sam had worked strictly with his two sons, Billy and Terry, but last year Terry drew a short term for statutory rape, and the Comforts had been lacking a man on their string. And according to Morris (a pawn shop fence in Detroit, whom Breen used as a sort of underworld messenger service), the Comforts had a racket going that required a minimum of three, and they’d been using a fill-in man for Terry Comfort but weren’t satisfied with him. Morris suggested that Breen go see the Comforts.
Breen would’ve dropped the whole thing right there, would’ve read the handwriting on the wall and just got the hell out of heisting, but he needed the money too bad. Breen was from Indianapolis, where he had a little bar he owned and operated with the help of his wife and brother-in-law. He would’ve made a good enough living with just the bar, but he was a horse-player; Breen played the horses like an alcoholic drinks and a nymphomaniac screws: in dead earnest, with little joy and less success. He was trying to give it up, but he was into his bookie for four gee’s worth of markers, and there was the alimony and child support for his first wife, that blood-sucking bitch; he was way behind on that, and wouldn’t it be shit if that was the way he finally ended up in stir.
So he’d left the bar in the hands of his wife and brother-in-law and gone to see the Comforts. It was almost a whirlwind trip: when Sam explained they were heisting parking meters, Breen damn near left without sitting down.
But the parking meter deal wasn’t as ridiculous as it first sounded. Old Sam had done his homework, no question about it. He’d put together a route: Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, and the Quad Cities, all linked by Interstate 80. He’d spent time in each town tracking prowl car runs, and pinpointed the most untraveled, poorly lit streets, and such prime targets as waterfront parking lots and parking ramps, with thousands of meters for the picking, virtually unattended in the pre-dawn morning hours. He had keys to open the meters, and son Billy (decked out in olive-green uniform with the words “Meter Maintenance” stitched across the back) would go about draining the meters, while Sam stayed around the corner in the car, motor going, Citizen Band radio on to monitor the cops. Breen’s role was to empty the buckets of coins that Billy brought him and hand him back a fresh one; Breen would pour the coins into a large, rubber-lined metal tray built down in the floor of the trunk. A lid flopped down over the tray when the night’s work was done, a false bottom that made this trunk look like any other in a Buick Electra. No one questioned the maintenance man working the meters (traffic was slow in the wee hours), and most people probably just went by muttering, “Always wondered when they emptied those damn things.”
Even with cities as small as those that comprised the Iowa-Illinois Quad Cities, they could pick up several thousand a night, easy, and that was playing it Sam’s safe, cagey way
, leaving enough coins in each meter to fool the actual maintenance people. That way they could go back for more periodically, and no one would be the wiser, not till the monthly tally for meter earnings came in. Even then, the city might not figure it out: maybe meter revenue was just down that month, who could say?
Sam and Billy rented a house on the outskirts of Iowa City, because it was midway along their Interstate 80 route, but Breen didn’t choose to join them. The old man was a boozer and the kid blew grass all the time, and Breen preferred his own company. He chose to stay in Cedar Rapids, where he found an apartment and, before long, a young cocktail waitress to shack up with.
Working with the Comforts had been a royal pain. Not only had the work been hard and tedious, hitting a different city six nights a week for a solid month, but the Comforts had personalities that put a burr up Breen’s ass. Billy was an introspective, cynical type, and his old man was an egotistical, egocentric loudmouth, and Breen was glad that most of the time he spent with them was on the job, where keeping quiet was a necessity. Listening to Billy’s occasional sarcasm and Sam’s constant bullshit was trouble enough on the ride down from Iowa City; at least when the team worked Cedar Rapids, he didn’t have to ride in the car with them.
But he had to hand it to old Sam. He’d underestimated the crafty old coot. Sam had the operation down pat, slicker than shit. The Comforts had worked the parking meter scan for a straight year now, alternating between six routes Sam worked out, never staying in one area longer than a month, keeping the local authorities confused. Sam had an account in a bank in each area he hit, but not in any city on the route (he had an account in Iowa City, for example) and used a fictitious name and fictitious business, of course, to keep the bank free of suspicion regarding the heavy amount of coin involved. In Iowa City, Sam posed as the owner of a pinball rental outfit, so the tellers were used to seeing him haul in sacks of coin for deposit. This was canny: others might have fenced the coin at a loss; not old Sam.
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