Skim Deep E-Book

Max Allan Collins

• Herausgeber: Hard Case Crime
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Nolan has spent his life pulling heists, and now he's ready to retire. But one job after another keeps pulling him back in. Casino robberies, bank jobs, airplane hijackings – it's all in a day's work. But when things go wrong and lead starts flying, can the old man and his young partner in crime make it out alive…?

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Acclaim for the Work of Max Allan Collins!

Hard Case Crime Books by Max Allan Collins

Author’s Note

Title Page

Leave us a review

Copyright

Dedication

One

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Two

8

9

10

11

12

13

Three

14

15

16

17

Want More Nolan?

Prologue

1

Acclaim For the Work of MAX ALLAN COLLINS!

“Crime fiction aficionados are in for a treat…a neo-pulp noir classic.”

—Chicago Tribune

“No one can twist you through a maze with as much intensity and suspense as Max Allan Collins.”

—Clive Cussler

“Collins never misses a beat...All the stand-up pleasures of dime-store pulp with a beguiling level of complexity.”

—Booklist

“Collins has an outwardly artless style that conceals a great deal of art.”

—New York Times Book Review

“Max Allan Collins is the closest thing we have to a 21st-century Mickey Spillane and…will please any fan of old-school, hardboiled crime fiction.”

—This Week

“A suspenseful, wild night’s ride [from] one of the finest writers of crime fiction that the U.S. has produced.”

—Book Reporter

“This book is about as perfect a page turner as you’ll find.”

—Library Journal

“Bristling with suspense and sexuality, this book is a welcome addition to the Hard Case Crime library.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A total delight…fast, surprising, and well-told.”

—Deadly Pleasures

“Strong and compelling reading.”

—Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

“Max Allan Collins [is] like no other writer.”

—Andrew Vachss

“Collins breaks out a really good one, knocking over the hard-boiled competition (Parker and Leonard for sure, maybe even Puzo) with a one-two punch: a feisty storyline told bittersweet and wry…nice and taut…the book is unputdownable. Never done better.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Rippling with brutal violence and surprising sexuality...I savored every turn.”

—Bookgasm

“Masterful.”

—Jeffery Deaver

“Collins has a gift for creating low-life believable characters…a sharply focused action story that keeps the reader guessing till the slam-bang ending. A consummate thriller from one of the new masters of the genre.”

—Atlanta Journal Constitution

“For fans of the hardboiled crime novel…this is powerful and highly enjoyable reading, fast moving and very, very tough.”

—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Entertaining…full of colorful characters…a stirring conclusion.”

—Detroit Free Press

“Collins makes it sound as though it really happened.”

—New York Daily News

“An exceptional storyteller.”

—San Diego Union Tribune

“Nobody does it better than Max Allan Collins.”

—John Lutz

They got dressed for their night out—the reservation at Hugo’s Cellar was for eight—with Nolan in his milk-chocolate Armani suit and Sherry in a black evening gown with gold filigree at the shoulders, a bare back and a side slit.

Goddamnit, he loved this woman. He’d let himself love a woman once, a long time ago, and then she got herself killed, and he swore off such foolishness. But his life was different now. He wasn’t some hard guy thief anymore, was he? He’d tried explaining it to Jon.

Nolan was strictly legit these days, with a beautiful young wife—some might call her a trophy wife…well, the hell with them. He loved her. From the ground up, from the hair down.

Life was good now.

They were just preparing to go out for their evening at one of the best restaurants in Las Vegas, where an old friend and his wife would be waiting, when the men in ski masks and guns burst in….

HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS BY MAX ALLAN COLLINS:

SKIM DEEP

TWO FOR THE MONEY

DOUBLE DOWN*

TOUGH TENDER*

MAD MONEY*

QUARRY

QUARRY’S LIST

QUARRY’S DEAL

QUARRY’S CUT

QUARRY’S VOTE

THE LAST QUARRY

THE FIRST QUARRY

QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE

QUARRY’S EX

THE WRONG QUARRY

QUARRY’S CHOICE

QUARRY IN THE BLACK

QUARRY’S CLIMAX

QUARRY’S WAR (graphic novel)

KILLING QUARRY

DEADLY BELOVED

SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT

DEAD STREET (with Mickey Spillane)

THE CONSUMMATA (with Mickey Spillane)

MIKE HAMMER: THE NIGHT I DIED

(graphic novel with Mickey Spillane)

*coming soon

SkimDEEP

byMax Allan Collins

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A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

(HCC-146)

First Hard Case Crime edition: November 2020

Published by

Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street

London SE1 0UP

in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

Copyright © 2020 by Max Allan Collins

Cover painting copyright © 2020 by Mark Eastbrook

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Print edition ISBN 978-1-78909-139-7

E-book ISBN 978-1-78909-140-3

Design direction by Max Phillips

www.maxphillips.net

Typeset by Swordsmith Productions

The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

For every one of you who has been here sinceBAIT MONEY

Las Vegas is the only place I know where money really talks.It says, “Goodbye.”FRANK SINATRA

Money—the one lubrication for love.CHESTER HIMES

AUTHOR’S NOTE

As is the case with the Quarry novels I’ve written for my friend Charles Ardai at Hard Case Crime, this book stays within the original time frame of the Nolan series. I consider it a novel written in period, not a historical novel, though I doubt that distinction matters to anyone but me.

The action here takes place six months or so after Spree (1987— to be republished by HCC as Mad Money).

As my dedication indicates, I am grateful to longtime readers who have been after me for some while to tell more of Nolan and Jon’s story (and Sherry’s). I am also grateful to the late Donald E. Westlake (aka Richard Stark) for allowing me to turn a novel that had been intended as a one-time homage (Bait Money, 1973, republished by HCC as half of Two for the Money), into a full-blown series. As I reminded Don many times, “homage” is French for “rip-off.”

But we’re all thieves here.

SKIM DEEP

ONE

1.

Cole Comfort, being dead, no longer lived in his rustic house in the country outside Jefferson City, Missouri. He lived nowhere, obviously, though what was left of him had been buried near Davenport, Iowa, in a gully where the ground was soft enough to dig deep but not so close to the little stream as to get exposed, if the water overran.

He lived on in the memory of his mother, though the location of Cole’s earthly remains—in fact, even whether he truly had died—was unknown to her. Not that she had any doubt that her boy, missing six months, was dead at the hands of a ruthless son of a bitch named Nolan.

Mabel Winifred Comfort, known to one and all as Maw, lived in her son’s humble, plunder-filled farmhouse, a turn-of-the-century structure wearing aluminum siding the way a thief does a stocking mask. She appeared harmless enough, an old lady, overweight, struggling around the place with her walker, the upstairs of the two-story house a country she could no longer visit.

Thanks to the choppers Coleman bought her, Maw still had the lovely smile whose sadistic aspect escaped notice of some, often to their peril. She had been lovely herself once, a showgirl in Kansas City in her teens, a high-class hooker in St. Lou in her twenties, and then the devoted mother of three boys— Samuel, Coleman, and Daniel.

Their father, Jedidiah, had been gone so long, his face was a blur to her. The only picture she had of him was from a wanted poster and that was faded with age worse than she was. Had it really been fifty-year or more that Jed wooed her back with him to the hardscrabble Georgia sticks that spawned him?

Some gangsters Jed crossed in the Lou had been after him, but in time the law and rival hoods took care of that, and finally the Comforts wound up back in the Show Me State. He’d always been a good provider, Jed, and he died brave, exchanging gunfire with a grocer.

Maw was likely in her seventies somewheres, but in those days in backwoods Missouri, such inconsequential things as getting born weren’t well kept track of. Her girlish figure had long since become a memory under a succession of colorful muumuus, floral mostly; what had once jiggled now undulated like water about to come to a boil. Short sexy curls were a now frizzy gray skullcap.

For years she had lived with Coleman and his son and daughter—dumb-as-a-stump Lyle and jailbait babydoll Cindy Lou. Six months ago the boy’s butchered body turned up in a ditch a few miles from this house, and the girl was off in Hollywood making dirty movies, if family gossip was to be believed. To Maw that was a step up from just giving it away.

What blew things to hell and gone was Coleman’s scheme to blackmail former accomplice Nolan into helping loot a big shopping mall in Davenport, Iowa. In a nursing home at the time, Maw was only on the fringes of the thing; but Cole had spoke to her about it, grinning that grin so much like hers, proud of what he was cooking up. Such a handsome boy with that snow-white hair, full head of it, too. He’d been visiting her at Sunny Acres, an assisted care facility in Jefferson City.

She’d not been a resident, though, just recovering there from hip surgery, having taken a fall in the parking lot outside the Golden Spike Bar & Grill. Cole had bought her a new hip, a plastic one. That was just the kind of son he was, even if she sometimes cursed him for that hip, when it rained bad and got sore as a boil.

Why didn’t you just let me die, you dumb son of a bitch? she would say even now. But then she’d smile to herself, thinking how much she loved him.

How much she missed him.

She knew that bastard Nolan, who years ago had done a few jobs with Sam and Cole, had killed her firstborn and now likely her middle boy, too. Cole’s mall score didn’t come off and everybody connected with it either run for the hills or was dead. In the aftermath, somebody had killed Lyle, likely right here in this house when he got back home, judging by the blood spatter left behind like a grisly “fuck you.” Probably that was Nolan, too. Nothing worse than a goddamned reformed crook.

Mabel Winifred Comfort wanted nothing else out of this life but resolution of what was done to Coleman. Well, resolution and continued comfort. She ate well, having groceries delivered, and she ordered off Home Shopping Network all kinds of goodies, beauty products and exercise machines and jewelry, most of which remained in their boxes, stacked in the downstairs spare bedroom.

Her barn was filled with boxes, too, of such items as microwave ovens and VCRs and TVs, from tiny to big, and cigarettes and booze and various other things and stuff that made life worth living, or at least ways tolerable. These were items she bought, but not from Home Shopping. Maw had taken over her late son Coleman’s fencing operation, buying and selling, dealing only in cold hard cash. Jars and shoeboxes of the stuff were squirreled around the place, which was hers now, not that any deed said so.

Daniel had moved her in, maybe a month after Coleman disappeared off the face of God’s good earth. She hadn’t seen him since, though it was only a two-hour drive. He did talk to her on the phone once a month. Big of him.

Always a disappointment to her, Daniel—at 45, the youngest— was kind of a black sheep, or maybe in the Comfort family more a white one. He’d got himself some kind of two-year degree in accounting from a junior college and then a job as a bank teller. He weaseled his way up, over the years, to loan officer in a bank in O’Fallon, a suburb of St. Lou.

And he never once used that position to help Cole or any of the Comforts rob the goddamn fuckin’ place! What kind of boy had she raised anyway? Did the wolves switch her baby for a lamb? He didn’t even use the name Comfort! He was Daniel Clifford, legally.

It was like he was ashamed of his own kin! Of course the Comforts had made the papers in Missouri, over the years time to time, and that might be the why. Benefit of the doubt.

She kept the place tidy, or rather the colored girl who came in once a month did—that gal was about due, because right now the kitchen sink and counter were piled high with dirty dishes and this and that. Till the cleaning gal come in, Maw couldn’t cook anything but TV dinners, like the Hungry Man turkey and fixings she put away at noon.

But Maw liked keeping a nice house. She had to put up with leaving it crummy outside. The two-story was set back off a gravel road that cut through farmland the family hadn’t owned for ages, with a sagging silo and an overgrown yard home to various dead vehicles that were rusting into art pieces.…

It all seemed an unlikely setting for a fencing operation that brought in thousands every week. She had a boy from town (who’d worked with Cole) who came by to supervise the unloading of merchandise into the barn or up on the second floor.

The first floor of the farmhouse was pretty much her whole world. She had struggled with the interior decorating. Other than her own bedroom, she’d never had any input in that regard—and she was okay with that. It had been Coleman’s house to live in as he chose with his boy and girl. If he wanted velvet paintings of John Wayne and Elvis all over the cheaply woodgrain-paneled living room walls, that was his right; she had her kitten posters and her frog collection in her own quarters to suit her.

With Coleman likely passed, she might have taken those Elvises down, skinny and fat alike, and the old and young Duke, too. Only she just couldn’t bring herself. They weren’t to her more refined tastes, true, but they were Coleman. They represented him. They made it feel like he was still here, like the smell of his cigar smoke that was still in the drapes.

Nothing wrong with the furniture in that living room, though. No, Coleman had seen to it that they had only the best, and at Maw’s request kept the couches and recliners and such protected in clear vinyl. She might have preferred just early American, and not this mix of modern and traditional and every other damn style you could think of. But that reflected less what Coleman’s personal preference was and more what had been in the furniture warehouse he looted that time.