Hard Cash Read Online Free Page B

for it, did not believe in hurting people. He did not enjoy seeing people suffer, could hardly bear to see someone suffer.
    On the heist in Detroit, two months ago, he had killed a man.
    A crazy old man named Sam Comfort, who was pointing a shotgun at Nolan, getting ready to let loose that shotgun straight into Nolan’s guts.
    And Jon had shot Sam Comfort.
    A man who was a double-crossing, probably psychopathic and wholly corrupt thief, in the worst sense of that word, who had betrayed his compatriots time and time again. Killed time and again. A man who, in the opinion of many, deserved to die anyway.
    In this case, however, Jon couldn’t make the rationalizations work for him. He hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since Detroit.
    And Detroit wasn’t all He would lie awake and think back to the earlier heist the very first one, the Port City bank job, and realize that that time the same thing could have happened: guns could have started going off. He and Nolan had been holding guns on innocent people at that bank, innocent people who could have gotten in the way of guns going off and been killed.
    It was hard enough living with the thought of killing a Sam Comfort. But the thought of even the possibility of causing the death of an innocent person, a “civilian,” as Nolan would put it, was something Jon could not bear.
    So he was glad the game was over. He would miss the positive side of it, the excitement, the heady rush brought on by the presence of danger, the satisfaction of working well under pressure, and of meeting Nolan’s high professional standards; but as for the dark side, the blood and killing and all of that, good riddance.
    The cop show on the tube seemed to be ending, a shootout in progress. People were dying in that sterile, bloodless way people die on television. He got up and switched the channel and the same thing was going on, but with slightly different faces. He turned it off, got his sketch pad, and began to doodle, finally roughing out a graphic story idea he’d had in the back of his head a while. He lost himself in the drawing, and the upsetting thoughts of death and violence left him.
    Around nine he heard Nolan coming up the steps.
    “How come back so early?” he asked Nolan as he came in, not looking up from the sketch pad.
    “Here,” Nolan said, and Jon looked up.
    Nolan was tossing something at him.
    “You’re maybe going to need that,” Nolan said.
    Jon looked down at what he’d caught: a gun.
    Nolan disappeared into the bedroom.
    Jon stared at the snubnose .38 as if he couldn’t remember what it was for. In a moment Nolan was coming out of the bedroom, getting into his shoulder holster.
    “I had a visitor at the Pier tonight, lad,” Nolan was saying. “George Rigley.”
    “Uh, George who ?”
    “Rigley.” He was loading slugs into the long-barrel .38 now. “President of the Port City bank.”
    “Port City. . . Jesus. Did he . . . ?”
    “Recognize me? Like a long-lost identical twin brother.”
    Jon didn’t say anything. He was having trouble just thinking. Talking was out of the question.
    “He wants us to rob the Port City bank again,” Nolan said
    Jon felt his mouth drop open, but nothing came out
    “We got two choices, kid. The guy’s evidently been doing some book-juggling, and wants us to rob his bank for him so he can cover, and we can do that. That’s one choice. The other choice is obvious.”
    The other choice was to kill the bank president.
    “Well, Jon,” Nolan said, shoving the gun down snug in the underarm holster. “What’s your preference? Choice A or B?”
    “How . . . how about ‘none of the above. ’ ”
    “That’d be my choice too . . . if it was a choice.”
    “Then . . . then I suppose we rob his fucking bank. Christ.”
    Nolan sat on the edge of the couch. Jon was sitting up now; it wasn’t the land of news you took lying down. Nolan said, “There are some things we have to do tonight. Kid? You listening?”
    Jon let out the