Read Online Hush Money by Max Allan Collins - Free Book Online

and company were starting to swim in front of his eyes, and maybe it was time he took a break and sacked out a few hours.
    He checked his watch (early 1930s Dick Tracy), and it was almost nine-thirty. He’d been at this since just after lunch. He’d driven out to the country this morning to pick up the strips from an old farmer named Larson who had boxes of funnies up in his attic, stored there since the childhood of his two long since grown daughters and forgotten ’til Jon’s ad, seeking old comic books and strips, came out in the local tabloid shopper. Jon had all but stolen the pages—there were thousands of them, easily worth a quarter to a buck per page—and felt almost guilty about it. But the old guy seemed tickled as sin to get fifty bucks in return for a bunch of yellowing old funny papers, so what the hell? As soon as he had finished a quick lunch at the Dairy Queen across the street from the antique shop, Jon had gone to work, cutting up the pages and stacking them for future, more thorough sorting.
    There was a reason, he knew, for his going at the project with such manic intensity. Every time something went haywire in his life, he turned to his hobby, to comics, spending more than he should, both time and money. Collecting old comic books was no kiddie game; it was a rich man’s hobby, roughly similar to the restoration of old automobiles but potentially more expensive. He’d gotten in the habit as a kid, when he was living with first one relative and then another, while his mother (who liked to call herself a chanteuse) toured around playing piano and singing in cheap bars. He’d never lived in one town long enough to make any friends to speak of. The relatives he stayed with, for the most part, provided hostile quarters where his was just one more mouth to feed and not a mouth that rated high on the priority list either. So he’d gotten into comics, a cheap ticket to worlds of fantasy infinitely more pleasant than the drab soap opera of his reality. Ever since then, he had turned to comics for escape. He was, in a way, a comic-book junkie. He needed his daily dose of four-color fantasy just as a heroin addict needs his hit of smack and for similar reasons. And prices.
    But who could put a price tag on escape, anyway? To Jon, comics were the only happiness money could buy, a physically harmless “upper” he could pop to his heart’s content.
    Take yesterday, for example. He’d gone over to see Karen. Karen was the thirty-one-year-old divorcee he’d been screwing for going on two years now. She had brown hair (lots of it—wild and flowing and fun to get lost in) and the sort of firm, bountiful boobs Jon had always hoped to get to know first-hand. She was great company, both in and out of bed, and looked and acted perhaps ten years younger than her age, while at the same time being very together, very mature, mature enough to run a business (a candle shop below her downtown Iowa City apartment) that was making her disgustingly wealthy. Sounds terrific, right? A rich, fantastic-looking woman, with a beautiful body and a mind to match, as faithful and devoted to Jon as John Wayne was to the flag, a woman absolutely without a fault.
    Or almost.
    She did have one fault. The fault’s name was Larry.
    Larry was her ten-year-old, red-haired, freckled-face pride and joy. Larry was the one thing about Karen that Jon didn’t like. Jon hated Larry in fact. Larry was a forty-year-old man hiding out in a ten-year-old’s body. Larry schemed and manipulated and did everything in his considerable power to break up his mommy and Jon.
    And yesterday he had damn near succeeded.
    Yesterday Larry had been sitting across the room in Karen’s apartment, staring at Jon with those shit-eating brown eyes, saucer-size brown eyes like the waifs in those godawful Keane paintings, and he gave Jon the finger. The goddamn kid just sat there and out of the blue thrust his middle finger in the air and waved it at Jon with a