Two for the Money Read Online Free PDF Page A

brick building across the street in the center of the block. To the building’s right was a narrow alley.
    Nolan found a hole in the flow of cars and crossed the street, walking up to the window. Beneath the foot-high red lettering were smaller red letters outlined in black: HERMAN CAVAZOS, MANAGER.
    Herman?
    So that was Irish’s real first name. Nolan smiled to himself as he moved over to the front door and tried it.
    Locked.
    He peered into the room beyond the window, peeking between the huge red letters. There was a waiting room in there, as wide as the building but not very deep, with a reception desk and a couch. The room managed to look both messy and unused at the same time. There was no one in it.
    Nolan walked around the side of the building into the alley and found a side entrance, also locked, and a triple-size garage door with a row of head level windows running across it. He looked in and saw a huge cement-floored room. Coin-operated entertainment, new and old, was scattered across the floor: jukeboxes, pinball machines, cigarette vendors, and coin-run machines of many kinds.
    Nolan tried the handle on the garage door and found it unlocked. He swung the big door over his head and walked in.
    No one around.
    Since this was Wednesday, it didn’t really figure as a day off, but that was the only way Nolan could see it.
    Of course, there were four floors above this one, andsomebody might be on one of them, so Nolan decided to give it a try. He yelled, “Irish!”
    He didn’t get an answer; he tried again.
    After half a dozen tries, he got a response. A distant voice from behind a closed door yelled, “Who the hell’s down there!”
    “IRS!”
    “In a pig’s ass!”
    “We tax those too!”
    Footsteps came clomping down the stairs behind the closed door, which snapped open, and the figure that belonged to the voice appeared in the doorway.
    He was a small man, a few inches over five feet, with a nut-brown complexion and carrot-red hair. Nolan had never questioned the strange racial mix: he’d been told the little man was called Irish, and he’d left it at that.
    “Nolan!”
    Irish stayed in the doorway for a moment, repeated “Nolan!” and began to cross the cement floor at a walk that was nearly a run. He grabbed Nolan’s hand and pumped it.
    “Nolan!”
    “You dress good for a mick-spic jukebox jockey.”
    Irish was wearing a light blue cotton suit, the cut of which had not come off a rack, with a pale yellow shirt and a striped tie in shades of yellow and blue. His Latin complexion and the red hair, with shaggy red eyebrows hanging over deepset brown eyes, made startling contrasts with the pale colors of his clothing.
    “And you,” Irish said, “dress piss poor for an IRS man.”
    Nolan raised an eyebrow and said, “Some joke. Round now, a joke’s the only place I can afford even thinking about the federal boys.”
    “You got trouble, Nolan?”
    “Up the ass. Where is everybody? Don’t you work all week like the other nine-to-five folks?”
    “My guys are out today making their weekly run of service calls and deliveries—we do that every Wednesday. Butwhat’s this with you? Something happen, you have a job go sour?”
    “Like month-old milk. Someplace handy we can sit and talk?”
    “Sure. Upstairs. Come on.”
    They walked across the jukebox-filled floor, sidestepping machines, parts, and tools, and started up the rickety steps. They passed three doors on as many landings, going on up till they stopped at the fourth landing. The stairway and all the woodwork in the building looked poor, paint-peeling and seemingly rotting; and when Irish opened the final door, Nolan was stunned to see the room behind it.
    “Like it, Nolan?”
    “I take it Werner treats you well.”
    The room was large, lush. It had thick white wall-to-wall carpeting, with side walls paneled in rich, dark wood; the back wall was taken up by a bar and three shelves of booze behind it, against textured white wallpaper