Hard Cash Read Online Free

shaking in his powder-blue pinstripe, the tic at the comer of one bluish-gray eye revealing that he was close to panic.
    “You better have a drink, Rigley,” Nolan said. “You look like you don’t feel so good.”
    Rigley showed momentary surprise that Nolan remembered him by name, tried to cover it, then went on. “You don’t scare me. I know you won’t kill me or have me killed. Not right away. You’re not a stupid man. Don’t you think I left word where I’d be? Don’t you think someone knows where I am, and why?”
    Well, Nolan certainly didn’t know why.
    But one thing was becoming clear: Rigley had not just stumbled onto Nolan. He hadn’t just walked in, recognized Nolan, and come over on impulse to confront him. Evidently Rigley had spotted Nolan at the Pier some time earlier, last weekend maybe, when it was so crowded and Nolan wouldn’t have been as likely to notice Rigley as tonight, a slow, snowy Wednesday.
    No, not a chance meeting, but a planned confrontation, contrived for some special, specific reason. But what? Nolan wondered.
    So he asked, “What do you want, Rigley?”
    Rigley smiled his unreal smile. The tic at the edge of his eye stopped.
    “I want you to rob my bank again,” he said.
     
     

 
     
     
     
     
    3
     
     
    TWO WEEKS AGO , after the first real snowfall, Jon had gone out and bought a Christmas tree. An artificial one, a two-foot-high affair that was an aluminum tube with holes you stuck plastic piney branches in, but a Christmas tree. Then, when he got home, he got embarrassed thinking about how Nolan would react to any such deck-the-halls bullshit, and he tossed the thing, still packed away in its cardboard box, unassembled, into a closet and forgot about it.
    But today it had snowed again, and it was beautiful snow. He had looked out the window, and the world was a damn Christmas card. It had snowed yesterday too, but that was slushy, messy stuff. Today was colder, the snow dry, like a fine white powder, and he had gone straight for his sketch pad and grabbed his winter coat and gotten in the car and driven out into a wooded area and began drawing. At dusk he headed back, with half a dozen detailed sketches under his arm (some in the styles of cartoonists whose winter scenes Jon admired—Milton Caniff, George Wunder, Stan Lynde) and stopped downtown at the Airliner to warm up over something alcoholic. By the time he got back to the antique shop and inside and upstairs in the living quarters that had been his uncle Planner’s and were presently being shared by Nolan and himself, Jon was full of Christmas cheer, and soon he was hauling the artificial tree out of the closet and putting it together pine by plastic pine.
    Jon was twenty-one, short but powerfully built, with a headful of curly brown hair and the sort of pleasant, boyish blue-eyed features that made girls want to cuddle him. Which was an asset, of course, but Jon himself didn’t much like the way he looked, and didn’t much care, either, his wardrobe running to sweatshirts with comics characters on the front and old worn-out jeans with patches on the ass.
    He was a cartoonist, or anyway wanted to be. He’d loved comic books since he was a kid, and had been trying to write and draw them himself as long as he could remember. He’d kicked around from relative to relative and from school to school while his mother (a third-rate nightclub “chanteuse”) was on the road, and fought the trauma of his fatherless, all but motherless childhood by escaping into the four-color, ten-cent fantasy world of the comics. It was a hobby that grew into a way of life, and would, hopefully, one day become a livelihood.
    So far he was unpublished, but he was getting pretty good, so it shouldn’t be long now. But drawing comics was a risky field to try to go into. Right now, with comic books suffering because of distribution problems, and underground comics having run out of steam after the goddamn Supreme Court’s obscenity