Read Two for the Money for Free Online Page A

it’s a YM and YWCA combined.”
    “I could get a room there, couldn’t I?”
    “I think so. If you stay on the male side.”
    “Do my best. How do I get there?”
    “Oh. Yes. Well, walk down toward the river one block, till you get to Second Street, then take a right and go five blocks I think it is, five or six. Anyway, can’t miss it, it’s kitty-corner from the bridge.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Are you just passing through the Cities?”
    “Business trip.”
    Salt-and-Pepper-Pushing-Sixty cleared his throat in the window next door, looking pointedly at the blonde teller over the tops of his dark-framed bifocals. There was a shrug in the girl’s smile, and Nolan smiled back, folding his stack of fives in half and turning away from the window.
    He paused for a moment before leaving the bank, pocketing the twenty splinters from his hundred-dollar bill. Must not be too ungodly old, he thought, if a pretty young girl like that teller can show interest. Encouraging.
    Lingering by the door for a moment, he caught himself glancing around the bank’s interior, casing the place almost subconsciously. A guard at the door gave him a fisheye and Nolan got himself quickly back onto the street.
    Looking suspicious inside a bank was never good practice, Nolan thought, but especially not when he had a package under his arm filled with revolvers and ammunition.
    As Nolan walked down Second Street, he passed by a Penney’s store with a sign in the window reading “Close-out Sale on Men’s Suits.” He had a distaste for assembly-line clothes, more from the fact that he had a nonexistent suit size that fell between two standard ones than from anything else. Clotheshorse he was not, but as it stood now, his entirewardrobe consisted of what he had on—white shirt, black slacks, blue sportcoat, and brown corduroy overjacket. The bag back at his hotel room had nothing more in it than a safety razor, can of lather, toothbrush and paste, spray deodorant, and three or four changes of socks and underwear. No best-dressed-man lists this season.
    Inside the store Nolan found a light gray suit that fitted him all right, a little tight in the shoulders maybe, and a couple of years out of style, but all right, and he cut his stack of twenty fives to thirteen buying it. Two sale ties brought the bills down to twelve.
    With the second, less incriminating bundle under his arm, Nolan returned to the street and walked on.
    The hundred-dollar bill had been a safety catch of his, a single C note pinned inside his inner sportcoat pocket to provide loose change in case his wallet got lifted or lost. Nothing more than a habit he’d picked up in those early years in Chicago, but a habit he’d hung onto. He’d never imagined the time would come when he’d be down to that hundred alone.
    A hundred-buck stake, he thought. Christ.
    The hundred and twenty-five he’d had in his wallet when the Cicero fiasco came up had gone relatively fast during the opening weeks of his month-plus recuperation at the girl’s apartment. In the last few weeks of his stay, he knew, the girl’d had to dip into her personal savings. He almost felt guilty about not letting her know about the extra hundred pinned in his coat, but he’d known he’d need it to get him started when he was back on his feet again, so there’d been no choice.
    Now the remaining twelve pieces of his shattered hundred were a folded lump in the same inner sportcoat pocket where the bill had been pinned. Nolan had asked for the hundred in fives because that way it looked like a lot of money without being as awkward as a stack of one hundred ones. Childish, he realized, senility setting in at last, but he hated like hell feeling broke. And anyway, he might find theneed to make the remainder of his cash look like more than it was.
    Down Second five blocks, the last two of which had gotten as seedy as the blocks surrounding Irish’s place, and Nolan came to the YM–YW.
    A huge parking lot encircled