Scratch Fever (7 page)

The dyke.

Terrific.

“Put your shirt on,” the dyke said to Darlene. A low, but not exactly masculine voice.

Darlene, still blasé, did so, saying, “I only did what you told me to.”

Like unlock the goddamn door when he wasn’t looking, Jon thought, as the dyke crawled inside the van and shut the door behind her. In a black leather jacket and dishwater blonde ducktail and Elvis sneer, she was a fifties parody. A fifties nightmare.

“You don’t scare me,” Jon said, zipping up, scared. “Now just get out of here. Take your friend with you.”

The dyke pulled at either side of her leather jacket, and the metal buttons popped open, and she took something out of her waistband. It was a gun. A revolver with a long barrel. Just like the one Nolan used.

“What is this? . . .” Jon started to say.

Just as the dyke was swinging the gun barrel around to hit him along the side of his head, the damnedest thing happened: he remembered her name.

Ron.

2

6

IT WAS
a November afternoon that could have passed for September—not quite Indian summer, cooler than that, but with the sun visible in a blue, not quite cloudless sky. A nice day to be in Iowa City—if you liked Iowa City.

And Nolan didn’t, particularly. Maybe that was why he moved out of here, a few months ago. That had certainly been part of it. That and Jon leaving.

Not that he and Jon had been particularly close. They had been through a lot together, but basically they were just partners—in crime, in business, if there was a difference—and had shared that old antique shop as mutual living quarters for a year or so. That was about the extent of it.

But without Jon around, Iowa City stopped making sense to Nolan. It was as though the town had an excuse being this way, with a kid like Jon living in it; now Nolan felt out of place, out of step, and more than a little bored in a college town perched uneasily between
Animal House
and Woodstock.

This downtown, for instance.

He was seated on a slatted wood bench. A few years ago, if he’d been sitting here, he’d have been run over: he’d have been sitting in the middle of a street. Since then, the street had been closed off so these college children could wander among wooden benches and planters and abstract sculptures, like the one nearby, a tangle of black steel pipe on a pedestal, an ode to plumbing, Nolan guessed. Some grade-schoolers were climbing on a wooden structure that was apparently supposed to be a sort of jungle gym; very “natural,” organic as shit, he supposed, but the tykes seemed as confused by it as he was. A movie theater was playing something from Australia given four stars by a New York critic; people were lined up as if it was
Star Wars 12
. A boy and girl in identical U of I warm-up jackets strolled into a deep-pan pizza place; another couple, dressed strictly army surplus, followed soon after and would no doubt opt for “whole wheat” crust. Nolan hadn’t seen so much khaki since he was in the service. One kid in khaki was playing the guitar and singing something folksy, as though he hadn’t heard about Vietnam ending. Like Nolan, he was seated on a wood bench, and people huddled around and listened, applauding now and then, perhaps to keep warm. Nolan burrowed into his corduroy jacket, waiting for Wagner, feeling old.

That was it. Sudden realization: these kids made him feel old. Jon hadn’t had that effect on him. Jon had, admittedly, looked up to him, in a way. But it hadn’t made him feel old. Not this kind of old, anyway.

He glanced over at the bank. The time/temperature sign said it was 3:35. Wagner had been in there an hour-and-a-half already. Nolan had been in there, too, but only long enough to sign the necessary papers. He didn’t feel comfortable in a bank unless he was casing or robbing it.

For nearly twenty years, Nolan had been a professional thief. His specialty was the institutional robbery: banks, jewelry stores, armored cars, mail trucks. He had gone into that line more or less as a matter of survival. He had been employed in Chicago, by the Family, in a noncriminal capacity, specifically managing a Rush Street nightclub; but a falling out with his bosses (which included killing one of them) had sent him into the underground world of armed robbery.

Not that he’d been a cheap stick-up man. No, he was a pro—big jobs, well planned, smoothly carried out. Nobody gets hurt. Nobody goes to jail.

It took almost the full twenty years for those Family difficulties to cool off—then, largely due to a change of regime—and it was during those last difficult days of his Family feud that Nolan teamed up with Jon. An unlikely pairing: a bank robber pushing fifty and a comic-collecting kid barely twenty. But Jon was the nephew of Planner, the old goat who pretended to be in the antique business when what he really was was the guy who sought out and engineered jobs for men like Nolan. It had been at Planner’s request that Nolan took the kid on.

And the kid had come through, these past couple of years—the two Port City jobs; the Family trouble that included Planner being murdered; the heisting of old Sam Comfort And more.

But Jon just wasn’t cut out for crime. Oh, he was a tough little character, and no coward. He’d saved Nolan’s life once. Nolan hadn’t forgotten. But the kid had a conscience, and a little of that went a long way in Nolan’s racket.

Fortunately, he and Jon had made enough good scores to retire, about a year ago. Or anyway, Nolan considered himself retired, knowing that his was a business you never got out of, not entirely; there were too many ties to the past for that.

Wagner was one of those ties: a boxman, a safecracker, who retired a few years ago and started up a restaurant in Iowa City, called the Pier. He’d made a real go of it but his health failed, and he invited Nolan to buy him out and Nolan had.

Only now Nolan was in the final stages of reversing that process: letting Wagner buy him out and take the Pier back over.

And there Wagner was—knifing through the crowd of window-shopping kids, moving way too fast for a guy in his fifties with a heart condition. But then, that was always Wagner’s problem: he moved too fast, was too goddamn intense, a thin little nervous tic of a man with short white hair, a prison-grey complexion, and a flat, featureless face made memorable only by a contagious smile.

And then he was sitting next to Nolan, pumping Nolan’s hand and saying, “You’re a pal, Nolan, you’re really a pal.”

“I made money on the deal,” Nolan said noncommittally.

“Not that much. Not that goddamn much. It was nice of him wasn’t it?”

“Nice of who?”

“The banker!”

“Bankers aren’t nice. Bankers are just bankers.”

“It was nice of him, Nolan. To come down after hours to sign papers. That just isn’t done, you know.”

“Banks have been known to open at odd hours.”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. I get it Ha! Lemme buy you lunch.”

“It’s past lunch.”

“Why, did you eat already?”

“No.”

“Then let’s have lunch. It’ll make a great prelim to dinner. It’s on me, Nolan.”

“Okay,” he said.

They walked across the bricked former street to a place called Bushnell’s Turtle; it was a sandwich place specializing in submarines (its name derived from the fact that a guy named Bushnell invented the “turtle,” the first submersible) and was in a beautiful old restored building with lots of oak and stained glass and plants. They stood and looked at the menu, which was on a blackboard, and a guy in a ponytail and apron came and wrote their order down. Then they were in line a while; the kid in front of Nolan was long-haired and in overalls with a leather thong around his neck and was reading, while he waited, a book called
Make Your Own Shoes
. Soon they picked their food up at the old-fashioned soda-fountainlike bar, where the nostalgic spirit was slightly disrupted when a computer cash register totaled their order.

“The hippies did it right for once,” Wagner said, referring to the restaurant. He was about to bite into a sub the size of one of the shoes the kid in line was planning to make.

“I agree with you,” Nolan managed, between bites of a hot bratwurst sandwich, dripping with mozzarella cheese and sauerkraut.

“I love this town. Love it. Makes me feel young.”

“Yeah, well, it makes me feel old, and you be careful or you’ll have another heart attack before the ink is dry.”

“Don’t worry about me,” he said, his mouth full of sub, “this pacemaker’s made a new man out of me.”

“You should’ve stayed in Florida. There’s nothing wrong with being retired.”

“Florida stinks! Nothing but old people and Cubans.”

“And sunshine and girls in bikinis.”

“Don’t believe everything the Chamber of Commerce tells you. How’s the Quad Cities thing working out?”

“Okay,” Nolan said. “It’s early yet.”

“It’s smaller than the Pier, I take it”

“Much. I can loaf with this place.”

“You opened yet?”

“In a couple weeks. Still getting the inventory together. Still working with the staff.”

“I’m sure you’re working with the staff. Particularly the female staff.”

“Just one.” He smiled.

“Special, this one?”

“Just a girl. I knew her from before.”

“Oh. What’s it called?”

“Sherry.”

“Not the girl, the joint.”

“Nolan’s.”

“No kidding? What was it called before that?”

“I don’t know. I think it was always called Nolan’s. It’s been around for years. That’s why I had to shut it down, for remodeling and such.”

“Whaddya know. It must’ve been meant to be. So are you using the Nolan name there, then?”

“Yeah. I decided to. The coincidence of it was just too good to pass up. I still pay taxes and sign legal stuff with the Logan name. That’s one good thing I got out of the Family—a legal name.”

Wagner started on the second half of the massive sub. “You know,” he said through the food, “I feel guilty about not giving you more money for the Pier. You’re giving me a better operation than I sold you.”

“I know. I didn’t sell out entirely, remember. I still got half interest.”

“Which you split with that kid, Jon, right?”

“Right. And the money you’re going to be paying me monthly is sent in two checks, one for me, one for him.”

“You see much of him lately?”

“No.”

“So what’s he doing? Where is he?”

“Playing with a rock ’n’ roll band, of all things.”

Wagner shook his head. “A nice kid, messed up in a business like that.”

Nolan smiled, sipped his beer. “Yeah. When he could’ve stayed in heisting.”

They finished their meal and walked out onto the street. “We still got work to do,” Wagner said, hands in pockets, rocking back and forth on his feet. “The accountant’ll be down at the Pier by now.”

“Let’s get it over with,” Nolan said.

“You in a hurry or something?”

“Look who’s talking.”

“Then you’ll stay the evening? The Al Pierson Dance Band’s playing.”

“Sure. Why not.” He hadn’t given Sherry a definite time he’d be back. There was no rush.

They drove down in Nolan’s dark blue LTD.

The Pier was a former Elks Lodge, on the banks of the Iowa River, converted into a seafood restaurant. The bottom floor was the Steamboat Lounge; the main floor was the Mark Twain Dining Room; and the upper floor was the Captain’s Ballroom. But Nolan and Wagner were headed for the Accountant’s Den, which was to say, the office that had been Nolan’s and was now Wagner’s, where an accountant was waiting to go over the books, before the final changeover in management.

That took several hours, and by that time Nolan and Wagner were ready to eat again, in the dining room, where an illuminated aquarium built into the length of one wall gave a deep-sea effect. Nolan had the house specialty—pond-raised catfish—the one thing about Iowa City he missed.