Authors: Max Allan Collins
Planner tried to say, “Yes?” but his voice cracked and it came out a croak. He cleared his throat, kicked open the screen door and shot a clot of phlegm out on the gravel to the left of where the older man was standing. He grinned. He said, “Excuse me, boys, you caught me napping. Not quite awake yet. What can I do for you?”
The older guy said, “We have some things here we’d like to have appraised.”
Oh, shit. Should’ve known, Planner thought. Christ, what a nuisance. Sitting here waiting for Nolan to call, anxious as hell, and somebody comes around with piddling shit like this.
“I don’t do much appraising,” Planner said.
“We have some real nice china in the car,” the older man said. “We have some real nice pieces.”
“Well . . .”
“You can make us an offer, or you can just tell us what you think they’re worth. We’d be much obliged.”
“I usually charge for appraising,” Planner said. He wondered how he could be so petty; why didn’t he just tell them come on in and take a look at their damn china. But he was irritated, irritated Nolan hadn’t called yet, and couldn’t help himself taking it out on these nice folks.
“How much?”
The older man seemed to be getting a shade irritated himself, Planner thought, and with just cause, he supposed.
“Oh, a dollar,” Planner said. “But what the hell . . . come on in and I’ll tell you what I think of the stuff. Never mind the buck.”
“Thank you,” the older man said.
The younger one said nothing. He looked kind of pale. He wasn’t the healthiest-looking kid Planner had ever seen.
“I’ll get the box,” the older man said, and he went to the car and got a big cardboard box out of the front seat.
What’s wrong with that kid? Planner wondered. Letting his father carry that box. What was wrong with him?
Planner held the screen door open for the older man and the boy followed close on the man’s heels. Planner shut the screen and locked the side door. He didn’t like anyone coming in the side door, and besides, he had to keep it shut to keep the air-conditioning circulating.
Right away, the young man walked up to the front of the store and started browsing. Almost immediately he found
the display case of political buttons and looked in at them. In spite of himself, Planner felt proud; no one could resist his buttons.
At the rear of the store, the older man was setting the large box on the counter, which ran from the front of the store clear back. The counter had once been used as the bar in a saloon back in Iowa City’s pioneer days, and was one of the more valuable antiques in the store, though it was roughed up and scarred and chipped from daily use for a century or so. Planner let out a sigh. The sigh was one part boredom, the other part anticipation. Well, he thought, might as well see what this fella has in the box; maybe it’ll take my mind off waiting for Nolan to call.
The older man was lifting some newspapers out of the box and laying them on the counter. He said to Planner, “Come take a look at this, I think you’ll find it interesting,” and Planner walked over to him and joined him at the end of the counter. The man reached both arms into the box and came back up holding an automatic in either hand. The automatics were good-size guns, not .45’s, but good size. Nine millimeters, probably. Worst of all, Planner thought, they had silencers on them. That was bad. Very bad. It meant these guys were most likely pros of some kind. Somehow he knew. Somehow Planner knew these men knew about his safe full of money. It’s all your fault, Nolan, he thought.
The older man nodded to the younger man, who was still in the front of the store. The younger man locked the front door; it was a Yale lock and was no trouble. He turned the sign around on the door so that the side reading “Closed” faced out, while the “Open” faced in. He hadn’t really been interested in buttons at all. He walked back and joined the older man and Planner. The older man gave the boy one of the silenced automatics. The boy held it tight and with some effort, as though the gun were very heavy. As though it were an anvil he was holding.
The older man watched the boy for a moment to make
sure he was all right. Then he said, “Let’s go in your back room and talk. I don’t want nobody looking in the windows and seeing us talking. They might get suspicious, seeing we got a couple of goddamn guns.”
Planner didn’t like the older man. He appeared to be cool, calm, and collected, but there was a manic edge to his voice. He wasn’t crazy about the nervous kid, either. He wished he was in Tahiti.
Also, he wasn’t crazy about taking them into the backroom. There were two rooms directly behind where they were standing, and in the farthest one back was the safe. Planner would have liked to have been behind the counter, up by the cash register. He kept a Colt .32 automatic under the counter by the cash register. It wasn’t a big gun, because he didn’t want a lot of bullets flying and messing up his store, in case of a robbery; a .32 was big enough to do whatever was needed. But right now he wished it was a .357 magnum, so he could blow these fuckers into a million bloody pieces. He didn’t like either one of them at all.
“Move it,” the older man said. He shoved Planner’s shoulder with the heel of his hand.
Planner said, “All right,” and led them into the first of the backrooms. He pulled the string on the overhead hanging bulb. The room was full of boxed and crated antiques Planner was saving for some hazy future use.
“Where’s the safe?” the older man said.
Planner smiled. He’d been right! He’d been right. They knew. They did know.
The older man slapped Planner across the face with the silenced gun. The blood was salty in his mouth. The older man said, “Where’s the goddamn safe?”
“This way,” Planner said.
That’s okay, Planner thought. He had almost forgotten, but now he fully remembered that the safe was the best place in the world to lead them. Because the twin of that .32 automatic was in the safe. Tucked behind the piles of money. Waiting.
“Okay,” Planner said, tugging on the string on this room’s overhead light. This room, too, was full of crates and boxes, as well as some old chairs and tables in need of repair. There was a small work area in one corner where Planner did his own mending. In the other corner was the big old gray metal safe. So old the name of the company was worn off. A good man could open it up in ten minutes. Planner had never bought a newer, more burglarproof (ha!) safe because it seemed foolish—after all, the only people who knew that he kept goodly amounts of cash in the safe were his friends, and he had the kind of friends who could open
any
safe, so why bother?
“Open it,” the older man said. The younger man was standing behind him with the empty cardboard box in his arms, the silenced automatic peeking around one side of it.
That was just what Planner wanted to do. He wanted to open that safe and bring his hand out shooting that .32. But he didn’t want to be obvious.
So he said, “No.”
The older man slapped him across the face with the silenced gun again and Planner’s upper plate flew out onto the floor. The floor was all dusty and dirty and now so was his plate. He wished Jon had cleaned this room up yesterday, as he was supposed to. Feeling silly with only half his teeth in his head, he said, “You lousy son of a bitch, put that gun away and I could whale the crap out of you.”
The older man hit him again, in the stomach this time, and Planner lay down on the floor. It didn’t hurt all that bad, but he figured if he acted as if it did, maybe the guy would stop hitting him. He shouldn’t have got mad at the guy and sworn at him like that. That was stupid. He looked up and said, “Who the hell are you, anyway?”
“A friend of a friend,” the older man said. “Now open that goddamn safe.”
“What made you want to rob me for? I’m just an old feller trying to make a buck. There’s nothing in there worth taking. Oh, sure, I keep a few of my prize heirlooms in
there. I’ll admit it. They’re worth some money, sure, but they mainly just make an old man happy in his last days.”
“Cut the crap,” the older man said, kicking Planner in the side. “Open the goddamn safe, I said. You can keep the heirlooms, you goddamn old buzzard, and we’ll take the money.”
Planner just looked at him.
“That’s right,” the older man said. “There’s a lot of goddamn money in that safe, isn’t there? You know it and I know it. Forget about pretending and open it.”
“Nolan will come after you,” Planner said. “I feel sorry for you bastards when Nolan comes after you.”
Something funny glittered in the older man’s eyes. He kicked Planner again and said, “Open it. Open it.”
Planner got to his feet, said, “All right, okay,” and dialed the combination lock. The latch creaked as he opened the heavy door, which swung out on its hinges to reveal six shelves, lined with stacked green.
“Jesus,” the younger man said, awestruck. It was the first word he’d uttered since coming into the store.
The older man said nothing. He just smiled, a grim, tight sort of smile, and nodded his head.
Planner said, “Toss that box over here and I’ll help you load it up, damn it,” and reached into the safe. He felt behind the stacks of money on the middle shelf, found the cold metallic surface of the automatic. He wrapped his fingers around the gun and swung his arm out, firing. Money scattered as his arm knocked stacks from the shelf, and the contact with the stacks of cash were probably what threw his aim off. The bullet splintered into the gray wood behind the older man, between him and the boy, and Planner knew he was in trouble.
He tried to drop to the floor, so he could roll and keep firing, but the room was too small, and he was too old and too slow. He was moving when he got hit by the first shot, which he didn’t even hear. He was motionless when the silenced automatic snicked and the second bullet caught him in the stomach, two small bubbling holes in his gut, and
the back of him felt wet, and he felt warm, he felt hot, he felt afire, and he went to sleep.
A bell was ringing. Distant. He woke up. The older man and the younger man were on their haunches, packing the money into the big cardboard box. The box was just big enough to take all of the money. The older man said, “We can lay newspaper over the top of it, and stuff it down so we don’t go dropping money behind us. That’d be a hell of a goddamn trail to leave.” Planner’s stomach felt warm. His hand felt cold. No, something in his hand. The gun! They hadn’t taken the gun away from him. The gun!
He fired and caught the older man in the thigh. It knocked both of them down, the older man knocking into the younger, and upsetting the box of money. The older man said something unintelligible, and his gun snicked and Planner felt the third bullet enter his stomach, and he thought, Christ no! Not my stomach, I’ve got two there already. Jesus.
A bell was ringing. Distant. The phone! Nolan! Nolan, thank God!
Relieved, he died.
The day he turned fifty, Nolan didn’t feel old anymore.
For the several years approaching this day—the day marking the start of his fiftieth year, the day he’d come to regard as the starting gun for senility—for these two long years he had become increasingly paranoid about old age. About becoming an old man: a codger; a coot. The time would’ve come for trading in his .38 Smith and Wesson for a cane and a spot on the bench in front of a court house in some small town somewhere.
Or in a rest home. In his nightmares he saw himself, a vegetable, a shell of a man, emaciated, sprawled on a bed in a ward full of other wrinkled husks of once men, tubes running into and out of his arms and nose and crotch, bottles of amber fluid hanging beside his bed, dangling like shrunken heads. The root of his dream came, no doubt, from the two occasions in the past two years when he’d been bedridden, the first time for three months, the second for six. Both times he’d been down with bullet wounds, the second time being the more serious, as he had been just barely healed up from the prior wound when these slugs entered his left side, the same approximate area of his body as before. It was during that second, more precarious ordeal that the rest home dream had begun, first as one of countless other feverish, delirious dreams, then as a recurring nightmare.
But that doctor had pulled him through, somehow, despite his great loss of blood. The doctor himself had said it was impossible to save him, but Nolan’s whispered, almost deathbed offer of, “Five grand extra if I live,” proved the trick. Money was indeed the world’s most potent miracle drug.
And now today, his birthday, fifty candles on his cake, today he felt fine, just fine. Emaciated? A shell of a man? He sat up in bed, patted his pot belly and laughed like Buddha getting his feet tickled. He felt young. He felt good.
He also felt tired, even though he’d just woken up.
Well, why shouldn’t he feel tired? He had a right to be tired, damn it. He ought to be hung over as hell, after all that drinking last night, and he wasn’t. And he ought to be feeling physically drained, after the extended bedroom athletics with Sherry, but he didn’t. The way he acted last night you’d have thought he was a soldier on his last night before shipping overseas. Well, the morrow was here and the war had been declared over and he had his discharge papers and he felt fine.
He patted the ass of the sleeping girl next to him. She was a pretty thing, a sweet thing, a pleasant and very young plaything, who had made his summer pretty, sweet, and pleasant. And young. He knew now, in a sudden flash of self-awareness, his reason for choosing a girl, how old? Twenty? Nineteen? Better be eighteen at least. That would be the crowning touch, wouldn’t it? Of all the things Nolan had done in a long, enjoyable lifetime of crime, to get busted for statutory rape! He’d get laughed out of the business.
Right now, though, he was doing the laughing. At himself. For picking out a girl who was, yes, young enough to be his daughter. For all he knew she
was
his daughter; he’d never been one for keeping track of those things. He stroked her ass again and she groaned in her sleep and turned over, stretching out, her long, lithe, naked body pearled with sweat. Her legs were parted. The fountain of youth, Nolan thought, and laughed again.