Hard Cash

7

She walked him out to the car. They had rested for several hours, and then she fixed him something to eat — nothing fancy, just a sandwich — and it was early evening all of a sudden, and he was saying he had to get back. Something doing in Iowa City tomorrow, he said, and she got his coat for him.

She’d been surprised how good he looked. She hadn’t seen him for several years, since the last time he’d stopped at the bar to talk to her husband about some job. She’d heard from her husband of Nolan’s troubles, that he’d been shot damn near to death several times the last couple of years, and she’d expected that to show on him. No. Some gray hair at the temples, but Nolan stayed the same. Handsome, in that narrow-eyed, mustached, slightly evil way of his. His body remained lithe, muscular; scarred but beautiful. He’d felt so beautiful in her...

“You’ll be back then?” she said, leaning against the car, by the window. He was behind the wheel; the engine was going. The snow had let up.

“I’m going to poke into your husband’s killing a little, yes,” he said. “But it’s not the movies. No revenge, Mary. I don’t believe in that. I’m doing it to protect my own ass.”

She smiled. “And my ass has nothing to do with it.”

“Well. Maybe just a little. Take care of that ass, okay, till I get back and can take over?”

“Sure. And watch your own while you’re at it. Next week, did you say?”

“Probably. I’ll probably give you a call.”

And he was gone.

She went back into the house, into the kitchen, and drank the last of the pot of coffee she’d made.

She wondered if Nolan would really find her husband’s murderer, and if he did and took care of whoever it was, would she feel any better about it?

Now she felt very little. Anger, there was anger. Some sorrow. But more than anything there was confusion. Her husband had been blown to hell by a shotgun. In the company of one of his barmaid bitches. Naked, the two of them.

She wondered if there was any significance to the bitch’s body being in the back room, while her husband had been in the outer bar. To open the cash register, she supposed; it would have been locked after closing, and he would have had to reopen it for the thieves. She wondered if she should have mentioned any of that to Nolan. And that one other strange thing: the bottle her husband had had in his hand. He’d evidently grabbed for that bottle off the shelf just as he’d died, or as he’d realized he was about to die. What kind of crazy reflex action was that? To grab a bottle of Southern Comfort off the shelf?