Scratch Fever by Max Allan Collins Read Free Book Online Page B

jewelry stores, armored cars, mail trucks. He had gone into that line more or less as a matter of survival. He had been employed in Chicago, by the Family, in a noncriminal capacity, specifically managing a Rush Street nightclub; but a falling out with his bosses (which included killing one of them) had sent him into the underground world of armed robbery.
    Not that he’d been a cheap stick-up man. No, he was a pro—big jobs, well planned, smoothly carried out. Nobody gets hurt. Nobody goes to jail.
    It took almost the full twenty years for those Family difficulties to cool off—then, largely due to a change of regime—and it was during those last difficult days of his Family feud that Nolan teamed up with Jon. An unlikely pairing: a bank robber pushing fifty and a comic-collecting kid barely twenty. But Jon was the nephew of Planner, the old goat who pretended to be in the antique business when what he really was was the guy who sought out and engineered jobs for men like Nolan. It had been at Planner’s request that Nolan took the kid on.
    And the kid had come through, these past couple of years—the two Port City jobs; the Family trouble that included Planner being murdered; the heisting of old Sam Comfort And more.
    But Jon just wasn’t cut out for crime. Oh, he was a tough little character, and no coward. He’d saved Nolan’s life once. Nolan hadn’t forgotten. But the kid had a conscience, and a little of that went a long way in Nolan’s racket.
    Fortunately, he and Jon had made enough good scores to retire, about a year ago. Or anyway, Nolan considered himself retired, knowing that his was a business you never got out of, not entirely; there were too many ties to the past for that.
    Wagner was one of those ties: a boxman, a safecracker, who retired a few years ago and started up a restaurant in Iowa City, called the Pier. He’d made a real go of it but his health failed, and he invited Nolan to buy him out and Nolan had.
    Only now Nolan was in the final stages of reversing that process: letting Wagner buy him out and take the Pier back over.
    And there Wagner was—knifing through the crowd of window-shopping kids, moving way too fast for a guy in his fifties with a heart condition. But then, that was always Wagner’s problem: he moved too fast, was too goddamn intense, a thin little nervous tic of a man with short white hair, a prison-grey complexion, and a flat, featureless face made memorable only by a contagious smile.
    And then he was sitting next to Nolan, pumping Nolan’s hand and saying, “You’re a pal, Nolan, you’re really a pal.”
    “I made money on the deal,” Nolan said noncommittally.
    “Not that much. Not that goddamn much. It was nice of him wasn’t it?”
    “Nice of who?”
    “The banker!”
    “Bankers aren’t nice. Bankers are just bankers.”
    “It was nice of him, Nolan. To come down after hours to sign papers. That just isn’t done, you know.”
    “Banks have been known to open at odd hours.”
    “Huh? Oh, yeah. I get it Ha! Lemme buy you lunch.”
    “It’s past lunch.”
    “Why, did you eat already?”
    “No.”
    “Then let’s have lunch. It’ll make a great prelim to dinner. It’s on me, Nolan.”
    “Okay,” he said.
    They walked across the bricked former street to a place called Bushnell’s Turtle; it was a sandwich place specializing in submarines (its name derived from the fact that a guy named Bushnell invented the “turtle,” the first submersible) and was in a beautiful old restored building with lots of oak and stained glass and plants. They stood and looked at the menu, which was on a blackboard, and a guy in a ponytail and apron came and wrote their order down. Then they were in line a while; the kid in front of Nolan was long-haired and in overalls with a leather thong around his neck and was reading, while he waited, a book called Make Your Own Shoes . Soon they picked their food up at the old-fashioned soda-fountainlike bar, where the