Cat Chaser by Elmore Leonard

Author:Elmore Leonard [Leonard, Elmore]
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Published: 2010-03-23T08:34:56.023000+00:00

Jiggs sat in an easy chair that faced away from the front windows and the door, so that Nolen came in almost behind him. He saw Jiggs look him up and down, Jiggs just sitting there. Nolen looked past him at the two suitcases lying closed on a round card table. He turned and looked toward the hallway.

“Where’s the general?”

“In the bathroom.”

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“Still?” Nolen looked at the suitcases again. “How come you haven’t opened ’em?”

“They’re open.”

“Well, why don’t you say something, for Christ sake?”

“I want to hear you,” Jiggs said.

Nolen went over to the card table. He reached up to switch on the hanging fixture that was like an oil lamp with a glass chimney. He saw the suitcases were unfastened, unzipped, and looked at Jiggs again.

“Go ahead,” Jiggs said.

Nolen lifted the flap of a suitcase and let it fall open. He saw newspapers. He saw the front page of the Miami Herald telling him Haitians had drowned in the surf at Hillsboro. He felt down under the papers. He threw back the flap of the other suitcase and saw more newspapers and felt through them all the way to the bottom. He looked at Jiggs, squinting at him.

“The general see us coming?”

“Nah, it wasn’t the general.”

“Well, did you have a talk with him? Christ!” Nolen whipped around, cocked his weapon as he stomped toward the hallway.

“I said it wasn’t him,” Jiggs said.

He waited, a clear picture of a rainy afternoon in his mind: Moran throwing the same kind of luggage into the back seat of a beat-up Mercedes, girlfriend who was way ahead of everybody behind the

wheel of the getaway car. He heard Nolen scream:

“Jesus Christ!”

And waited for him to appear: barely moving in his shroud raincoat, gunhand hanging limp, like he’d been hit over the head and was now about to fall.

“It was your buddy,” Jiggs said. “Son of a gun beat us to it.”

“My settlement,” Mary said, on the floor next to the open suitcase. “Now do you love me?” She had taken off her wet clothes, chilled, and held a cotton bedspread around her like an Indian blanket; a young girl at a pajama party eager to have fun. She said, “What’s the matter, can’t you say anything? You’re looking at it, but you still can’t believe it, huh?”

“I believe it,” Moran said without emotion.

He sat in his shirt and Jockeys on the edge of the sofa, hunched over in lamplight to look at the stacks of currency, packets of brand-new hundred-dollar bills, rows of them filling the suitcase, remembering Scully telling him about the Igloo coolers and a hundred thousand stacking up to less than a foot high. He felt vulnerable and wished he had run across to his house to change first. He’d

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brought Mary here because of the three suitcases, because he thought she’d need more room for clothes than his house could offer.

He said, “All three are full of money?”

“No, two,” Mary said. “I brought a few things, but I didn’t want to load myself down.

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