Hard Cash (13 page)

17

JON WAS GLAD
it was almost over. Flat, snow-covered farmland glided by as he drove the van along at a leisurely forty-five, the blacktop road not devoid of traffic, but damn near. Nolan sat next to Jon, looking almost bored; he hadn’t said a word since leaving Port City out this back door of a blacktop. Jon’s hands were sweaty on the wheel. The gun in his belt was a lump nudging his belly like something not fully digested. Like a reminder of what might have happened at the bank, had anything gone wrong. Of the ugly kind of things that can happen when a robbery goes haywire.

Like that time, a few months ago, at the Comfort farm. A simple job. Simple and potentially less dangerous than today’s. And yet it had turned into a nightmare of guns going off and people dying. People getting killed.

One of them by him.

He felt the gun in his belt under the jacket, pressing into his gut, and thought,
Thank God I’m not going to have to use this fucking thing.

“No shooting,” Nolan had told him last night. “This job’s not worth the risk. We got money. We aren’t desperate. So if we get caught—well, okay, we make bail, get our asses out of the country. But if we start shooting, somebody might get killed, and they don’t offer bail when somebody’s killed.”

“No shooting,” Jon had nodded, relieved. “That means we’ll be getting rid of the guns right after the robbery, then, right? At the car wash, when we hose down the van and dump those Santa suits?”

“No.”

“No?”

“We’ll hang on to the guns a while after that.”

“I thought you said no shooting.”

“Unless somebody shoots at us first.”

“You don’t mean cops . . . ?”

“Christ no! Don’t
ever
shoot at a cop. Jesus!”

“Then what the hell are you talking about, Nolan?”

“I’m not talking about cops, that’s for goddamn sure.”

“Well, who else is there . . . ? Oh. I see what you mean. You . . . you really think that’s a possibility?”

“Rigley and his bitch crossing us? Yes. If it was just Rigley, I’d say no. But it isn’t just Rigley. So stay alert.”

Jon’s mental replay of the conversation of the night before ended as he pulled onto the blacktop off of which was Rigley’s cottage. When they passed the run-down shack-on-stilts that was Rigley’s closest neighbor, Nolan said to stop a moment: there was a car, a Buick Electra, parked next to the shack. Then he said go on. Jon did.

Jon was swinging the van down the tree-sheltered drive to the cottage when they heard the sound. “What the hell was that?”

“Gunfire,” Nolan said, getting the .38 out of his belt.

“Gunfire?”

“Shotgun.”

Jon brought the van to a halt alongside the yellow Mustang that belonged to the girl.

“Watch that fucker Rigley,” Nolan said. He hopped out of the van.

Jon did the same. He wiped the sweat off his hand, took the .38 from out of his belt and went around to the back of the van and let a white-faced Rigley out.

“What’s going on?” the banker said.

“You tell me,” Jon said, and motioned at him with the .38.

Nolan had already disappeared inside the cottage, and Jon’s teeth were clamped together in tense anticipation of further sounds from within the cottage.

He grabbed Rigley by the elbow and prodded him with the gun and pushed him forward, toward the cottage. The scary part was Rigley made no protest; a little indignation from the man would have gone a long way toward easing Jon’s fears.

The door was open, but Jon couldn’t see in. The cottage was set up too high for that; you’d have to climb the wooden steps to see what was going on in there.

He stood outside in the cold air for a few long moments, digging the gun barrel into Rigley’s back, wishing to hell something would happen and at the same time that it wouldn’t.

“Come on in, kid,” Nolan’s voice said from inside. “There’s an old friend of yours here.”

Jon shoved Rigley toward the door, up the steps. Inside.

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.