Free Hard Cash by Max Allan Collins

really been a bitch; she’d worked all morning without a break and straight through lunch and fought hunger pangs throughout the long and hectic afternoon. And now, home finally, she was so tired, she wasn’t even hungry anymore. Take a bath and get rid of the smell of hair spray and customer (and her own) perspiration and just flop in bed. She unlocked the door, stepped inside, and George was there.
    Sitting at the table with glass of booze and accompanying bottle in front of him.
    Terrific.
    “Hi, baby,” he said. A little sheepishly. A little drunkenly. Sitting in his shirtsleeves, his coat and vest and tie tossed on the couch the way a kid tosses off his jacket after coming in from school. George was a handsome man, in that slick executive way of his, but when he got the least bit drunk, his eyes started drooping, and he began getting a rather stupid look to him. She hated him when he looked stupid like that, which was, unfortunately, a way he’d been looking more and more lately.
    She closed the door, slipped out of her cloth coat, hung it on the rack. She was still wearing her white beautician’s uniform. After nine solid hours of doing her best to make other women’s hair look presentable, her own was matted from sweat and generally a mess. She didn’t smell good. Or feel good. And George was here.
    Terrific.
    She walked over to the table and stood over him as he sat fiddling with his half-drained glass of bourbon. She looked down scoldingly and said, “I thought we agreed not to get together. Until tomorrow, when we meet with your robber friends.”
    “Well, baby, I . . .”
    “I thought we agreed you’d spend some time with your wife.”
    “Baby, you know I can’t stand being around her when she’s drinking. You don’t know what it’s like being around somebody who’s drinking all the time.”
    “Don’t I?”
    He looked down into his bourbon, then hung his head. “I . . . guess I deserve that, don’t I? I have been drinking a lot myself lately, haven’t I?”
    She thought, why don’t you shape the hell up, you self-pitying son of a bitch?
    She said, “It’s okay, honey. You’ve been under terrible pressure. I understand.”
    And as she said that, she patted his head, twisting some of his slightly curly dark brown hair in her fingers playfully, affectionately.
    He touched her arm. “Sit down, baby. I’ll get you a glass, if you’ll just sit down and have a drink with me, and we can talk.”
    She didn’t sit down. Instead she plucked the bottle off the table and put it behind the bar on a shelf with all the rest of the bottles and came back and kissed his neck, nuzzlingly, and then took him by the elbow, saying, “Now, come on. Be a good boy and shoo. Go home. I want you out of here.”
    And he looked at her with tearful eyes, still slightly stupid eyes, but compelling, too, in their way. “Julie. I need you. Let me be with you.”
    Goddammit, he was almost whimpering . Seeing him act like this made her want to slap him silly, in a way, and in another, want to hold him.
    She did neither.
    She went and got his coat, vest, tie, and topcoat and put them on the table in front of him and said, “Go home, George. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
    “I need you tonight.”
    “Tonight I need for myself, George. I need some time to rest, some time to get myself together for what’s coming up. Please.”
    “Julie . . . surely you understand how I feel, how I’m . . . I’m shaking inside, Julie. How I’m scared out of my mind thinking about . . . about what we’re going to do and . . . how I need you. To hold me.”
    Shaking inside, he said. And outside, too. He was a wreck, a nervous damn wreck, and she had to do something.
    She sighed.
    “All right,” she said. “Go on into the bedroom.”
    “Baby . . . it’s not that . . . We can just talk. . . . I just need to be with you right now, I don’t. . .”
    “Go on in the bedroom and wait for me. I have to take a bath. I have to relax a