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.
In front of Charlie, on the table, was a silenced nine-millimeter automatic. Also in front of him were six more Schlitz cans. Charlie was wearing his underwear, a sleeveless tee-shirt and gray boxer shorts. The flesh of his limbs looked as gray as the shorts, a tan that had sickened, and flaccid; his right thigh was bandaged; on his upper left arm was a tattoo of a rose, nicely done. Charlie had a new nose; it was pink, unlike the gray-tan skin surrounding it. He was sleeping.
He was, in fact, snoring, quite loudly, contentedly, even drunkenly. His head was resting on folded arms and he looked both very young and very old.
Nolan took a chair next to him at the Formica-top table. He picked up the gun and stuffed it in his belt. Charlie didn’t stir. Nolan sat and studied his old enemy, the adversary who’d given him so much hell for so many years, tried to see the maniac he’d come looking for, and saw only a frail old sleeping drunken man.
It was all disappointing somehow. An anticlimax that turned years of running, hating, fighting into an absurd, unfunny joke. He felt foolish, a little. And vaguely sad.
But this wasn’t a time for reflection; there was money to find, and Nolan grabbed the tattooed gray arm and shook the sleeping man and said, “Come on, Charlie, wake up.”
Like the curtain of a play, the lids on the close-set eyes raised slowly, and Charlie lifted head from folded arms and gradually got himself into a sitting position. He yawned. He smiled. He said, “Hello, Nolan.”
“Well, hello Charlie.”
“It’s been a long time.”
“Yeah. We got to quit meeting like this.”
“I see you took my gun, Nolan.”
Charlie’s speech was thick but clear, each word let out after careful consideration.
Nolan shook his head. “Why’d you have to get drunk on your ass like this, Charlie?”
He shrugged, looked almost embarrassed. “A hell of a thing, I know. I guess I wanted to be numb for the goddamn bullets.”
“I won’t kill you, Charlie, not if you give my money back.”
The laughter came rumbling out of Charlie’s gut and he touched his forehead to the Formica top and cackled. When he looked up at Nolan he had tears in his eyes from laughing. “You stupid goddamn asshole, you think I’m afraid of you, afraid you’re going to kill me? Get away, get away, you silly bastard.”
“Charlie.”
“You can’t kill
Charlie got up and weaved toward the refrigerator and Nolan was up and on him, latched onto his arm and dragged him out into the adjacent room.
