Mourn The Living Read Online Free Page B

stepped inside the cabin. He said, “You said one more question, Sid, and you’ve had it. Goodnight.” He closed the door.
    Tisor turned and headed for the Tempest. He got it started on the third try and wheeled out of the parking lot.
    He knew damn well how long Nolan would play his little game with Charlie Franco.
    Till one of them was dead.
     
     
    4
     
     
    WHEN TISOR got out of bed the next morning and went downstairs to make coffee, he found Nolan waiting for him in the living room. Nolan was sitting on the couch, dressed in a yellow short-sleeved button-down shirt and brown slacks. He was smoking a cigarette and looking at the centerfold in Sid’s latest Playboy , a photo of a nude girl smoking a cigar.
    “Hi, Nolan.” Tisor tried to conceal his surprise.
    Nolan said, “Good morning,” and tossed Tisor’s Playboy down on the table. “Nice tits, but what can you do with a picture?”
    Tisor said, “When you’re my age, looking’s sometimes all there is.”
    Nolan grunted.
    “Want some coffee?”
    “I started some when I got here. Ought to be done.”
    “I’ll get it.” Tisor trudged into the kitchen, the tile floor cold to his bare feet. He never ceased to be amazed by Nolan. He wanted to ask Nolan how he got in—Tisor had the night before locked the house up tight—but he knew Nolan had no patience with curiosity.
    Nolan had risen at 6:30, after eight hours of sleep, and had taken a cab to Tisor’s place. He’d sat down across the street on a bus stop bench to watch, hiding behind a newspaper. He saw that no one, outside of himself, was keeping an eye on Tisor’s house. And it didn’t look like anybody besides Tisor was staying there, either. Sid looked clean, but over a single doubt Nolan would have frisked his own mother, had she been alive. Nolan sat staring at Sid’s white two-story frame house, one of those boxes they churned out every hour on the hour in the fifties, and didn’t get up from the bench till Sid’s morning paper was delivered at 7:30. By 7:34 he had entered the house, through a basement window, and by 8:05 he’d searched every room, including the one Sid was sleeping in. Then, satisfied that Sid was clean, he had plopped down on the couch and started looking at the pictures in the November Playboy . At eight-thirty Sid came down in his green terry-cloth robe, looking like a corpse that had been goosed back to life.
    Tisor brought Nolan a cup of coffee, black, and set a cup for himself on the table by Nolan. “Be back in a minute,” Tisor said, and Nolan was on his second cup by the time Tisor came back down the stairs, dressed in a Hawaiian-print sport-shirt and baggy gray slacks. Tisor sat down in a chair across from Nolan and sipped his cup of coffee, which was too strong for him though he tried not to let on, since Nolan had made it. Nolan nearly let a grin out: he got a kick out of Tisor, who had been the most unlikely big-time “gangster” he had ever known.
    Tisor was Charlie Franco’s brother-in-law—his wife’s maiden name was Rose Ann Franco—and had lived off Rosie’s relatives since the day they were married. He had been fairly respectable before that, a CPA keeping books for several small firms and embezzling just a trifle; but his wife had insisted he take part in her brother’s “business.” It was quite painless for Tisor, who had switched to bookkeeper for the Family—he was an efficient, overpaid little wheel. And it was just like the world of business, all numbers in columns, and the closest he ever got to violence was the occasional Mickey Spillane novel he read.
    He liked Nolan, who in spite of an apparent coldness seemed less an animal to Tisor than the rest of the gangsters playing businessman games. And in one of his rare moments of courage, Sid had taken a big chance hiding out Nolan when Nolan killed Tisor’s no-good brother-in-law, that swishy bastard Sam Franco.
    Now Tisor was all alone. He’d been alone for two years now, since