Two for the Money by Max Allan Collins

Author:Max Allan Collins [Collins, Max Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781781161005
Publisher: Titan Books
Published: 2011-11-16T07:00:00+00:00

3

The ax was embedded in the man’s head, the blood gushing down his forehead, yet somehow he was still standing, implanted there in the doorway, his eyes wide and dead but staring. The other man gasped in horror, the sweat streaming down his face, the guilt apparent in his terror-swollen eyes.

Jon grinned. He laughed out loud.

It was the most beautiful poster he’d ever seen in his life. He held it out in front of him, drinking it all in. He couldn’t believe how fantastic the artwork looked blown up to this huge size; the violent scene had originally appeared as a comic book cover back in the early fifties, and blown up to a 22” by 28” poster, and in full-blooded color yet, was some trip. Almost reluctantly he allowed the poster to roll itself back up, and he tossed it on his as yet unmade bed, to be put up on the wall later that day.

Of course it wouldn’t be easy finding a place to display that beautiful poster: the walls of the little room were full as it was. In its former life, the room had been one of Planner’s storerooms, and after Planner and Jon had cleared and cleaned it, what remained was a dreary cubicle with four unpainted gray-wooden walls and a cement floor.

Jon had met the challenge by papering the gray-wood walls with poster after poster after poster, and the cement floor was covered by shag throw rugs and Jon’s considerable collection of comic books. The comics were neatly boxed, three deep along each wall, with a filing cabinet in one corner that contained the more valuable comics. Planner had contributed a genuinely antique single bed with a carved walnut headboard, and a nonmatching walnut four-drawer chest of drawers. The room was cluttered but orderly, though against one wall was a wooden drawing easel with an expensive-looking swivel chair such as an executive might have back of his desk, easel and chair surrounded by scattered paper and pencils.

Comic art was Jon’s life. It went far beyond a simple hobby, and Jon was fond of his uncle but thought Planner’s button-gathering was dumb, just not sensible at all. Those precious political buttons of Planner’s were artifacts of a boring and unpleasant reality, while comics were “immortal gateways to fantasy,” as Jon had said in an article he was working on for submission to a fanzine.

He supposed his love for comics had something to do with his fucked-up childhood. Jon was a bastard, he hoped in the literal sense alone, and his mother had liked to think of herself as a chanteuse. What that amounted to was she sang and played piano in bars, and not very well. Because his mother was on the road most of the time, Jon’s childhood had been spent here and there, with this relative and that one, Planner part of the time, and Jon hadn’t lived steady with his mother until those last few years when she was serving cocktails in bars instead of singing in them.

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