Hard Cash Read Free

untouched by gray (or retouched by something else) and had been cut—no, styled—by a barber who considered himself an artist. His eyes seemed the same color as his suit, but in the dim light it was hard to tell, exactly; maybe they were gray. A handsome man, in a cold, sterile, dull sort of way, like an aging male model or over-the-hill pretty boy actor who would never make it in character roles.
    Nolan said nothing. He just folded his hands and looked out across his knuckles at the man across the table.
    They were in the Pier, a seafood restaurant on the banks of the Iowa River, in the cocktail lounge, a long, rectangular dark-paneled room with lots of black vinyl-covered furniture and some oil paintings of steamboats, ship captains, and Mark Twain at various stages of life. The main floor, above them, was a tribute to the ingenuity of Nolan’s friend Wagner, who had bought the building left vacant when the Fraternal Order of Elks, Iowa City Lodge, moved to newer, larger digs out in the country; the big dining room, with several other, more intimate rooms off to either side, was given a twenty-thousand-leagues-under-the-sea atmosphere via black light and other other-worldly lighting effects that played tricks with Day-glo wall murals. An oddly-illuminated aquarium built into and running the length of one wall furthered the underwater feeling, while menus printed in fluorescent ink glowed the various seafood and steak selections to customers who had by now completely forgotten they were sitting in the old, mostly unremodeled Elks Lodge. The upper floor, a ballroom, was rented out occasionally but otherwise went unused, and the lower, which housed the cocktail lounge, was pretty much the same as it had been when the Elks were loose in it, except for the nautical oil paintings.
    The two men had the lounge almost to themselves. It was a cold, snowy Wednesday night, and nobody was there who didn’t have to be: just the help; Nolan, the Pier’s new co-owner and manager; and this man in the powder-blue pinstripe suit, who’d come to see Nolan.
    The man leaned across the table, smiling, his teeth so perfect and white, they were either capped or a miracle, and said, “I said I know you.”
    Nolan shrugged with his eyes.
    “And you know who I am, too, don’t you?”
    Nolan nodded.
    “Don’t you wonder why I’m here?”
    There was something in the man’s voice—what it was, Nolan couldn’t quite pin down . . . smugness maybe, maybe nervousness.
    “Doesn’t it . . . bother you, my being here?”
    Both. It was both.
    “No,” Nolan said.
    “No? Why not?”
    “Because,” Nolan said, leaning forward himself now, returning the smile, whispering, “when you leave here, a friend of mine is going to shoot you, toss you in the trunk of his car, and dump you in a ravine.” And he leaned back and stopped smiling.
    A tic got going at the left edge of the man’s right eye, and they were gray eyes, not blue, Nolan decided.
    “I . . . don’t believe you.”
    Nolan shrugged again, this time with his shoulders. “Do what you want. All I know is I saw you come in, twenty minutes ago. You sat down and started staring at me. I left the room, used the phone. My friend’ll be outside now. And there’s only the one exit, you know.”
    All of that was bullshit, but the man didn’t know it. There had been no phone call. Nolan had left the room—to go up to his office and get a .38 snub out of a desk drawer. The gun was stuck in his belt, under his sport coat, but he of course had no intention of using the thing in a public place like this, even if it was a slow night. And the only friend he had in town who could conceivably help him was Jon, who was as unlikely an assassin as Nolan could think of. Even the bit about the exit was crap: there were three, as a matter of fact.
    Not that Nolan wouldn’t kill this man if he had to. And he was starting to think maybe that’d be the case.
    Nolan was fifty years old and did not look it,