“It’s just the two of them, then, right? Charlie and the kid?”
“Far as I know. Why not ask Walt, here?”
“Take the sock out of his mouth.”
Jon did.
Walter tried to spit the taste out of his mouth, didn’t quite get the job done.
“This is Nolan,” Jon said. “The guy I told you about.”
Walter said nothing. He had a blank expression, as though he couldn’t make up his mind whether to be outraged or scared shitless.
“How about it, Walt?” Nolan asked. “Just you and your dad?”
Walter said nothing.
Jon said, “I don’t think he’s going to say anything.”
Nolan said, “Well. I’m going up the hill.”
“Wait,” Walter said. “Don’t hurt him! He’s just a poor old man!”
Nolan said nothing.
Jon said, “What do I do?”
Nolan stuffed the sock back into Walter’s mouth and said, “Stay here and guard Junior. If Charlie comes out on top, you’ll have good bargaining power.”
“Don’t talk that way! How could that old bastard come out on top over you?”
“Oh I don’t know. Maybe shoot me, like the other two times.”
“Jesus, Nolan.”
“Come on, I’ll help you take him downstairs. Ground floor’ll be better for you and if you set up behind the bar you’ll have a decent vantage point, and you’ll be right by the garage. He didn’t have car keys on him, by any chance?”
“No.”
“Can you hot-wire a car, kid?”
“My J.D. days pay off at last. Sure I can hot-wire a car, can’t everybody?”
“Good man. Come on.”
They dragged Walter down the stairs into the game room.
“See you kid,” Nolan said.
“See you, Nolan,” Jon said. But he didn’t quite sound sure.
7
The elevator hadn’t seen regular use for years, having only recently been brought back into service for Charlie’s homecoming to Eagle’s Roost. Nolan stood inside the cramped, steel-frame cage, finger poised over a button that said UP. Should he press the damn thing?
He didn’t know.
All he knew was the elevator would deliver him somewhere inside that yellow stucco dinosaur up there. But somewhere covered a lot of unchartered territory. Still, it would be an easy, quick way inside the place; he would avoid that steep, out-in-the-open climb, wouldn’t have to worry about approaching the many-windowed house on all that flat surrounding ground. And there was surprise in it, too: no way in hell Charlie would figure Nolan for coming up the damn elevator.
But the cage was doorless, and gave him absolutely no place to hide, nowhere to shoot from behind, nothing to help him work out a defense in case he was dropped into a waiting Charlie’s lap. And as basic as this elevator system was, Nolan expected no sliding door to await him at the end of his upward ride.
Chances were good, however, that the elevator would open onto an entryway of some kind, with coat racks and such, a vestibule type of thing. Or perhaps somewhere in or near the kitchen, since anyone coming to a summer place like this for a stay would surely come bearing groceries. Neither kitchen or vestibule seemed highly likely places for Charlie to be hanging around.
He pressed the button.
The motor wheezed and coughed, the cable groaned as it lifted the cage. That was okay. He had known there’d be noise, especially with an elevator as old as this. Charlie would be expecting his son to be coming back and the sound of the elevator wouldn’t surprise him. And if Charlie was waiting for Walter by where the elevator came up, no problem either, as long as the old man was expecting the kid and not Nolan, he’d be easy to overcome.
To get to the underground elevator, Nolan had had to shove his way through the brush and weeds that had overtaken what had once been a well-worn pathway, and sure enough, just in that area Jon had pointed out from the boathouse window, Nolan found an entrance. A heavy wrought-iron gate, which was being choked to death by ugly, clinging weeds, had been swung open to one side and a rock shoved against it to keep it open. He had then entered a narrow, low-ceilinged passageway, with plywood walls and a gravel floor; the air was dank and stale, the atmosphere falling somewhere between dungeon and cattle shed.
The passageway, and the elevator itself, said something about the mobster mentality, or at least first-generation mobster mentality, and this, as much as the obvious age of everything, dated it all back to Capone days, in Nolan’s mind. After going to the fantastic expense of tunneling a hundred feet down through a hill, and then out thirty or forty feet more through the side of the hill to make the passageway, the first owner of Eagle’s Roost had then spared all expense, getting the most fundamental, bare-ass elevator system he could, and putting in a passageway that could’ve been the gateway to Shanty Town. Those old mobsters betrayed their beginnings every time; they reverted to the penny-squeezing of poverty-stricken upbringings, whenever given half a chance. Those bastards knew how to suck up the money, Nolan thought, but they never learned how to spend it.
And that none of it had ever been extensively revamped said something about Charlie, a first-generation mobster himself, who hadn’t been born into the Family, he’d married into it. Like his wife’s father, Charlie had known hard times, and like Nolan, he was a product of Depression years. While the elevator had apparently been kept in good working order and minor renovations made (electric motor replacing hydraulic, perhaps), Charlie had never put a new elevator in, or modernized the rustic passageway. Nolan could understand the psychology of it, because he shared Charlie’s inability to enjoy money, had never really been good at spending it, afraid somehow to get accustomed to luxury, as if getting ready for the next Depression. With it came a tendency to hoard your money for a rosy retirement, which wasn’t the best policy for men in high-risk fields, like Nolan and Charlie.
In fact, this wasn’t the first time Nolan had lost all his money in one fell swoop, wasn’t even the first time Charlie had been responsible. Not long ago Charlie had exposed Nolan’s well-established cover name and cost him his hoarder’s life savings. And Nolan had done the same for Charlie, hadn’t he? Exposing him to the Family and ending a lifelong career?
And so now they were down to this. Two men who hadn’t been young for a long time, who for reasons obscured by the years had done their best to wreck one another’s lives (and with considerable success), two men alone in a house, with guns. Going up in that elevator, impressions of the long conflict with Charlie flashing through his mind, Nolan might have felt a sense of destiny, a feeling that here at last would be an end to the struggle, an answer to a question long ago forgotten, an end to the senseless waste of each other’s lives. But he didn’t. His mind was full of one thing: the money. He had squeezed the need for revenge out of his perception. Charlie was just a man who had taken Nolan’s money, and Nolan had to get that money back.
The elevator chugged to a halt.
Nolan had been right, on two counts: no door, sliding or otherwise, greeted him, just a metal safety gate that creaked unmercifully when he folded it back, and yes, he was in a vestibule, to the right of which he could see the shelves of a pantry, to the left the white walls of a kitchen.
But he was wrong, too, on just about everything else.
Charlie was in the kitchen.
Charlie was sitting on one of four plastic-covered chairs at a gray-speckled formica-top table in the surprisingly small kitchen, its walls crowded with appliances, sink, cabinets, with one small counter strewn with Schlitz beer cans and empty TV dinner cartons.