Blood Money

1

The two men with guns sat in the car and waited. The man on the rider’s side was young, about twenty-five, and apprehensive. The man behind the wheel was about fifty-five and his face was firmly set, as though he were very determined to do something. They were both wearing Hawaiian print sportshirts and solid color shorts. In the front seat between them was a large cardboard box full of old newspapers. Under the newspapers were the guns, two Smith and Wesson nine-millimeter automatics with silencers.

The young man was thin and had a pale complexion with some fading acne under his ears along his neck; his right arm, which was elbow bent out the window, was getting red from the sun. His dark eyes were set close together and gave him a look of naive sincerity; his eyebrows met over the bridge of his nose. His hair was brown, long but not over his ears. Beads of sweat ran down his forehead. He was slapping his left hand against his left knee in some nervous inner rhythm and didn’t realize it.

The older man was thin and had a dark complexion; his skin was lined and leathered from too much sun over too many years, and his lower cheeks and neck were pockmarked. He had been handsome once. He, too, had dark eyes sitting close to each other, giving him a naturally intense look. His hair was powder white, cropped short. Though the day was hot and humid, he was bone dry. He sat motionless, staring at the building across the street.

The young man said, “How you feeling, Dad?”

“I’m feeling fine,” the older man said. His voice was low. “I’m feeling fine. How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” the younger man said. “Fine.”

Their car, a dark blue Oldsmobile of recent vintage, was parked in the open cement area beside a Dairy Queen restaurant in Iowa City, Iowa. The car had Wisconsin license plates and air-conditioning, which the older man had rejected using while they waited, a wait that had been going on now for just over an hour. A few minutes ago they had eaten hamburgers and French fries and root beer. The food had not settled well in the young man’s stomach and the root beer had gone through him at once, first teasing, then torturing his bladder, but the young man felt he shouldn’t mention his condition to his father. The older man had eaten an extra hamburger and felt, as he’d said, fine.

It took several more minutes for the older man to notice his son’s discomfort. He was too busy concentrating on the antique shop across the road. The shop was a two-story white clapboard structure, resembling a house more than a business establishment, and in fact marked the point where the business district trailed off into residential, the downtown and University of Iowa campus being some four blocks of filling stations and junk-food restaurants away. Directly across from the Dairy Queen was a Shell station, and next to that was the antique shop; directly across from the antique shop was a grade school, an old empty brown-brick hulk, deserted for the summer, separated from the Dairy Queen by a graveled alley. And down the street were homes, modest, aging, but well kept up, strewn along this quiet street lined with lushly green shade trees. The older man nodded to himself; yes, this was a street you could retire on, like this man Planner had.

“Dad?”

“Hmmm?”

“How’s it going, Dad? How you feeling?”

“Fine,” he said, still not noticing how ill at ease his son was acting.

He continued to watch the antique shop, studying it. The lower level of the building was divided in half by a recessed door set between two window displays showing assorted junk on either side: old metal advertising signs (“Coca Cola,” “Chase and Sanborn,” “Call for Philip Morris!”) and china and kids’ metal toys and tea kettles and phonograph records and mason jars and crap, just plain crap, how anyone could pay money for crap like that the older man couldn’t fathom. The windows were many-paned, sectioned off with metal, like stained glass, and in the midst of each display hung a sign saying, “Antiques — Edwin Planner, proprietor.” With pleasure, the older man had been noting the lack of business the antique shop was doing; it had been two o’clock when they first arrived, and now, at three-fifteen, not a soul had gone in or out.

But if this man Planner felt badly about his nonexistent customer flow, he certainly didn’t show it. The older man had watched carefully as the shop’s proprietor peeked outside, glancing up at the hot sun in the cloudless sky and smiling. Planner was a lanky old guy, balding, wearing baggy pants and a red tee-shirt, puffing a cigar. Twice Planner had done this, and the third time he peeked out and smiled, the older man had smiled, too, and glanced at his son to share the good cheer, and then he noticed his son’s discomfort.

The boy’s legs were crossed tight, like a woman afraid someone was after her privates, and he was shaking his foot. His face was bloodless pale and he was gritting his teeth. The older man sighed.

“Go get me an ice cream cone,” the older man said.

His son said, “What?”

“Go get me an ice cream cone.” The older man gave his son a dollar.

“Uh, how many dips?”

“Two.”

“Okay, Dad. Dad?”

“Hmm?”

“Uh, what flavor?”

“Doesn’t make a damn to me. Strawberry.”

“I think all they got’s chocolate and vanilla.”

“Vanilla.”

“Vanilla, okay.”

“And Walter?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“Go to the can, too, why don’t you, before you piss all over the front seat.”

Walter let loose a shaky grin, then saw his father wasn’t joking, and retracted it. He got out of the car and walked around to the back of the Dairy Queen building to the restrooms. The men’s was clean, very clean, as white and wholesome as ice cream itself. He felt guilty when in his extreme need and nervousness he overshot the stool and before he flushed it, he got down on the floor with toilet paper and wiped up his mess. After he was finished doing that, he felt silly, felt he was acting irrationally, and he put the seat down and sat and held his face in his hands. Shit, he thought, I got to get my head together. Christ, he thought, don’t let me make an asshole out of myself in front of him.

He went to the sink and washed his hands, then brought the cold water up and splashed it against his face. After the heat of the day, this cold water was heaven. He splashed more cold water on his face, more, more, and it felt good, then suddenly it didn’t feel good, it felt lousy, and he went to the stool and frantically slapped the lid up and emptied his stomach.

Back in the car, the older man was watching a young guy walk around from behind the two-story structure. Must be a rear entrance back there, he thought, and this must be that kid they told me about. Planner’s nephew. He watched the boy walk past the Shell station and head toward the Iowa City business district. The boy was short, maybe five-six or-seven, but he was strongly built, his arms muscular. His hair was curly brown and long, stopping just this side of an Afro, and the older man wondered if there was any chance in hell the boy was on his way downtown for a haircut. He was wearing worn, patched jeans and a white tee-shirt with some cartoonish thing on the front. About Walter’s age, the older man thought, maybe a little younger.

“Here’s your cone, Dad.”

The older man turned his head and nodded to his son and took the cone. Walter came around the front of the car and got in and sat, feeling queasy as he watched his father eat the ice cream. Walter said, “Did I see a kid come out of the shop?”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t see anybody go in there.”

“It’s the guy’s nephew or something. He lives there.”

“Oh. You didn’t say anything about that.”

“I wasn’t sure whether the kid lived with him or not.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, I’m glad he’s left.”

“How come?”

“Don’t be stupid. It’ll be easier with just the one guy.”

“Oh. Yeah, of course.”

The ice cream tasted good. And he felt good, knowing the kid wouldn’t be in there. He had no compunction about what he was going to do, but killing or even hurting some kid Walter’s age was something he didn’t care to do. He’d gone into this knowing it would be like the old days. It had to be like the old days, like coming up in those years when brains weren’t enough, you had to have balls, and balls meant shooting who you had to when you had to and the hell with manners. He had to have the right frame of mind if he expected to deal with Nolan and come out on top. So sure, this was like the old days, this was a situation where if you had to be hard, you were hard. But these last ten, fifteen soft years made it hard to be hard; it was like sex, he could still get it up, if need be, but he wasn’t no tiger anymore.

He was glad the kid wouldn’t be around. Some old son of a bitch, what did that matter, but some damn kid? That was something else.

2

At two o’clock, just as the two men with guns were pulling into the Dairy Queen parking lot across the street, Planner was lighting a cigar and wondering when the phone call would come. The cigar was a Garcia y Vega, at least one box of which Planner kept under the counter always; he liked cigars, Garcia y Vegas especially, and if the occasional customers who walked into his antique shop were irritated by the smoke, well, fuck ’em. The phone call he was waiting for was from Nolan, a man who played a part in Planner’s other and primary occupation, which was planning jobs for professional thieves.

The antique shop, however, was more than just a front. Long before the thought of using an antique shop as a front had ever entered his mind, Planner had been a collector of antiques, though like many collectors he was a specialist and only one small branch of antiquing held a fascination for him.

Buttons.

Planner loved buttons.

Not buttons that hold your clothes together (though there were collectors of those around, too) but political buttons and advertising buttons and anything that pinned on, including sheriff’s and other cop badges, if they were old enough. The mainstay of his collection was the political buttons, the pride being his Lincoln tokens and the large picture buttons of Hoover. These were in a frame upstairs, while others of lesser value and importance, but gems nonetheless, graced a display case in the front of the store.

It was that display case that let other dealers who came around know that despite the junk quality of most of the merchandise in the shop, Planner was a dealer who knew what he was doing, worthy of respect. It was with great pleasure that he would turn down offers from fat-cat dealers who would drool at the generous assortment of political buttons in the airtight case, the Willkies, the Wilsons, the Bryans. If he was feeling really generous, he might sell them one Nixon or a Kennedy or perhaps a Goldwater, but not often, as even recent buttons brought a pretty penny, since during the last three or four presidential campaigns a man had to contribute five or six bucks before the party would give him a picture button of the candidate. And who could guess what a McGovern/Eagleton would one day be worth?

If he was feeling particularly ornery, Planner would show dealers the Lincoln tokens and the Hoovers upstairs and would listen to their eager bids and pretend to consider and then calmly refuse. Even if a dealer got down on his knees (which had happened a couple times) Planner would shake his head solemnly no. Back downstairs, to rub salt in the wound, Planner would point out the barrel of buttons next to the front display case, a barrelful of zilch buttons Planner sold to the school kids for a quarter a throw.

Also, from dealers who came around and from stops he made to keep his “buying trips” looking honest, Planner had managed, over these past thirteen or fifteen years, to fill in the gaps of his own collection, picking up damn near every button he needed. But even before he got into the antique trade, Planner had had one of the best goddamn button collections in the U.S. of A. (if he did say so himself) and so, when he was picking out some way to semi-retire, the antique hustle had been a natural.

Sometimes, sitting behind the counter, smoking a Garcia y Vega, Planner would wonder if he could actually make a living selling antiques, you know, straight-out legitimate. Even though he purposely filled his shop with unspectacular horseshit, he did pretty good, better than he needed to with a situation that was basically a front. But the little old ladies in tennis shoes would ooh and ahh at the god-damnedest junk, and he would constantly (three or four times a year) have to spend a day going to flea markets and yard sales and load his station wagon with more bottles and jars and furniture and china and kettles and toys and crap and more crap. When he’d bought the place, it had been jampacked with junk, which he’d thought would last for years and years. Six months, it had been, and he was out scouting flea markets to replenish his supply. Occasionally he’d run onto an honest-to-God antique for next-to-nothing and these he would pack carefully away in one of his back rooms. One day he might sell them, but not now. Somehow it seemed crazy to sell an antique, a real one that is, since an antique’s value is its age, and tomorrow it’s going to be older and hence more valuable.

In that way, and many others, the antique shop was more than a simple front. In addition to feeding Planner’s button habit, and turning a nice dollar itself now and then, the antique shop was just the sort of nebulous one-man business operation that made it damn near impossible for the IRS to get to you. Just the same, Planner reported a healthy income and gave the feds their healthy share, faking his own bookkeeping, which required both math skill and imagination. It was a time-consuming task, doing the books and other records, but he would find ways to amuse himself, such as inventing wild merchandise when writing up fake sales slips, his favorite being “One Afghanistan banana stand, $361.” He had told that one to Nolan once, thinking he would laugh, but Nolan had said, “That’s a little silly, isn’t it? You’re getting senile.” Nolan implied that if Planner got too goddamn cute with his records, the IRS would smell something, should they go sniffing. Planner didn’t think so. Anyway, the tax boys, classically, didn’t care how you made your money, they just wanted their piece of your action.

Probably the best angle was that as an antique dealer, Planner could make frequent buying trips and on them gather the information that would enable him to put together “packages” for clients like Nolan. These trips aroused no suspicion whatsoever, neither locally nor wherever he chose to go.

On the trips he got his information by playing the role of a cantankerous but friendly old antique dealer, and while putting on the eccentric act had been a chore at first (fifteen, sixteen years ago when he got started) he found that now, at sixty-seven, the role was much easier to play convincingly. People weren’t surprised when an old guy like him would want to talk for a while, and he could always manipulate a stranger into a lengthy and rewarding conversation. The information was easy to get: he’d act paranoid and tell about his shop and how he was afraid of being robbed and ask about alarm systems and safes and such. He’d admire the layout of, say, a jewelry store and tell about how he was thinking of remodeling his place along similar lines and just how is everything put together here, exactly. He’d express dissatisfaction with his present payroll system for his staff of ten employees (all nonexistent, of course) and ask advice. And on and on. No trick to it.

He puffed his cigar and grinned to himself. It was a damn good life. Much better than it had been for those years and years he’d spent actually working on jobs, the bank hits, the armored cars, the payroll robberies, all of it. When he was young, he’d found it stimulating, but before long (oh, even into his late twenties) his nerves had started to bother him. Planning ahead of time was one thing, but being on the job when the shit hit the proverbial fan and you got to improvise is another thing entirely. He worked things out so that at age fifty he could “sort of” retire, which he had, and a good thing too. He wouldn’t like to work in the field the way things were now. He wouldn’t enjoy working with the kind of people that were in the trade these days, if you could even call it a trade anymore.

Planner had been in the trade when it was a trade. He started young, young enough to have worked with Dillinger a few times. There wasn’t anybody around today, needless to say, who could compare to Dillinger, except for Nolan, who was almost an old-timer himself, and that guy Walker, and a few others, Busch, Peters, Beckey, not many. Every string you put together these days has got somebody you can’t be sure of, he thought, and one or maybe two somebodies you never heard of and got to trust what some other somebody told you about ’em. It was hard to find pros these days, people who really knew what they were doing.

Like Nolan and that bank job, a year ago November. Even with that team of amateurs, Planner thought, Nolan had managed to put together a professional score. Most people these days, when they hit a bank, clean out a teller cage or two or three (picking up mostly bait money, the marked bills every teller keeps on hand for just such occasions) and come off with a grand total of two, maybe three thousand. Shit, Planner thought, Nolan wouldn’t cross the street for three thousand. Because he knew what he was doing, Nolan had knocked that bank the hell over, he’d cleaned that bank’s vault out of every damn cent, choosing the day when the bank would be brimming with cash (the first Monday of the month) and got away with close to eight hundred thousand bucks.

Most of which, Planner thought, swallowing, is back there in that safe of mine. He felt suddenly uncomfortable. His cigar went out and he relit, using an old-fashioned kitchen match. He wished Nolan would call.

“Hey, unc, I’m talking to you. Snap out of it.”

“Huh?” Planner woke from his reverie and noticed his nephew Jon was standing across the counter from him, grinning. The boy had a mop of curly hair and was wearing a tee-shirt picturing a manlike pig (or pig-like man) in a superhero outfit, including cape, under the words “Wonder Warthog.” Planner grinned back at his crazy nephew and said, “What the hell, I didn’t even see you there, Jon. I’m getting old. You say something?”

“I just wanted to know if I got any mail.”

Planner nodded and reached under the counter, pulling out four wrapped packages and a long cardboard tube. Jon was always getting stuff in the mail; it was that damn fool comic book collecting of his, mostly.

Jon took the bundles in his arms and said, “Great!” His eyes were lit up like a four-year-old on his birthday. The boy nodded toward the long tube and said, “That’s my EC poster, I’ll bet. Made a good haul today.”

“Just take that nonsense away and don’t bother me.”

Jon laughed. “Yeah, I can see how busy you are, unc. Hey, has Nolan called yet?”

“No.”

“Be sure to say hello to him for me.”

“You know I will.”

“Thanks, unc.”

The boy disappeared into the back of the store, where his room was stuck way in the back. Planner was glad Jon was living here; he felt better having someone else around what with all the cash in the safe. After all, half of that eight hundred thousand dollars from Nolan’s bank job belonged to Jon. Yes, Planner thought, smiling, relighting his Garcia y Vega once again, remembering how he brought Nolan and Jon together, my nephew’s a very wealthy boy, thanks to his old uncle.

But Planner wouldn’t feel at ease, couldn’t feel at ease, until that money was out of his safe and in some bank where it belonged. There were reasons for keeping it here, sound ones, but he would be glad, glad — hell, overjoyed — when Nolan’s call came through saying special arrangements’ve been made and the money can be moved.

He was used to keeping money in the safe, and large amounts of it, too. Personally, he didn’t have much faith in banks, having seen too many of them fail in the Depression and having had a hand in the robbing of a goodly number as well. So he usually had twenty to fifty thousand dollars in that big old safe of his in his farthest-back back room, as well as smaller but still substantial amounts belonging to various clients like Nolan who liked to have little nest eggs stuck here and there for emergencies. But Nolan and Jon’s little nest egg — eight hundred thousand dollars — Christ! If there was such a thing as too much money, that was it; it hardly fit into the safe, all of it, between it and the other money in there, near a million all together crowded into that poor old safe, and had been for almost a year now.

When Nolan was staying there, Planner hadn’t felt so nervous about the money. At first, when Jon brought Nolan in all shot up like that and that doctor trying to keep Nolan patched together, there had been too much excitement to be nervous. Then, when Nolan was healing up from the wounds, feeling pretty good and able to move around some, Planner felt fairly safe; even under the weather, Nolan was a good man to have around. And of course Jon had moved from his apartment into that room in back of the shop, and Jon was a strong, tough kid, don’t let his size fool you, who’d seen Nolan through a rough spot and proved to his uncle that he could handle himself.

But near a year Nolan had been gone and all that money had been sitting in that safe, brother. Nerve-racking.

Well, Planner thought, doesn’t do any good to sit and worry like some goddamn old maid. Nolan will call today and that money’ll be out of here by tomorrow night. Maybe sooner.

He let out a sigh and suddenly noticed how nice and cool it was in the shop. That old air-conditioner of his was really putting out. He’d had it a long time, but it was still working like a son of a bitch. Just because a thing is old, he thought, doesn’t mean it’s not worth a damn. He smiled at the thought.

He got out from behind the counter and poked his nose outside the front door. The day was hot, a real scorcher, but the sun was big and yellow in the sky, and the sky was blue without any clouds at all. It was a beautiful day.

Now call, Nolan, damn you.

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 non-matching 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. She was dead now, hit by a car some three years ago, perhaps by choice. Jon hadn’t known her well enough to get properly upset, and he had occasional feelings of guilt for never having cried over her.

His childhood was a good example, Jon felt, of reality’s general lack of appeal. Either it was boring — like the half dozen or so faceless relatives he’d lived with, the score of schools he’d gone to, the hundreds of kids he’d failed to get to know — or it was so goddamn tragic it was a soap opera and impossible to take seriously.

So why not comic books?

He had built his collection up carefully over the years, at first just hoarding the books he bought off the stands, then gradually, as he got into his teens, he began working on the older titles, seeking out other collectors and swapping, sending increasingly large amounts of hard-earned money through the mail for rare old issues, even trekking to New York each summer these past four years for the big comics convention. Jon read and reread the books, savoring the stories, studying the artwork. When he finished rereading one of the yellowing classics, he’d seal it back in its airtight plastic bag and carefully return it to its appropriate stack in its appropriate box.

Though he was as yet unpublished, Jon considered himself already to be a full-fledged artist in the field of the graphic story (as comics were called in the more pretentious moments of fans like himself) and he felt this way primarily because he was too old now to say, “I want to draw comics when I grow up.” He was grown up, as much as he was going to anyway, and at twenty-one years of age, Jon was more than just serious about his artwork and comic-collecting; it was his lifestyle.

The posters on his walls reflected this. More than half of them were recreations of classic comic book and strip heroes, drawn with black marker pen and water-colored, Dick Tracy, Batman, Flash Gordon, Tarzan, Captain Marvel, Buck Rogers. The latest poster was a finely detailed face of an old witch, a withered old crone with a mostly toothless grin and a single bloodshot, popping eye, and was an indication that Jon’s taste in comic art was undergoing a transition. Once the ax poster was put up, and one of the superheroes taken down, the shift from heroes to horror would become even more apparent.

He sat on the bed and began eagerly opening his other packages. One of them was from California and was filled with underground comics. Jon smiled as he examined the cover of R. Crumb’s latest grossly funny masterwork; one of the nonoriginal posters on the wall was Crumb’s popular “Keep On Truckin’ ” poster, with a row of tiny-headed, huge-footed absurd men dancing in a line against a field of orange. One of the undergrounds had some Gilbert Shelton as well; Jon especially liked Shelton, whose “Wonder Wart Hog” was pictured on Jon’s tee shirt, though his “Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers” strip was more famous. Not much else of the underground art was up to their standard, in this batch of books anyway. Maybe the undergrounds were where he could make his first splash, he thought, leafing through several books full of artwork he considered beneath contempt.

Two of the other packages turned out to be rejections. Jon was very disappointed. It wasn’t so much that he’d expected to sell these “graphic stories,” but that he hadn’t realized that this was what the packages contained. He was disappointed that their contents hadn’t been more old comics or fanzines, dozens of which he’d paid for by mail order and should be showing up any day now. Both of the rejected stories were horror tales, and he was told, in a polite note from one editor, that he drew well but his style was too derivative of “Ghastly” Graham Ingels, and if he could just develop a more original style, they would be interested in seeing more. The other publisher included no note, but Jon was not surprised the story was coming back, because he’d heard through the fan grapevine that this company had gone out of business.

The other package perked him up considerably. It was chock-full of EC’s, and he’d half expected the ad he had responded to was a hoax, since these EC’s had been incredibly low in price, costing only five to six dollars a piece. There were four “Vault of Horror,” two “Tales from the Crypt” and one “Crime SuspenStories.” He flopped down on the bed and one by one opened each plastic bag and eased out the comic inside. He didn’t read the stories, he just thumbed through the magazines, window-shopping.

He had just got into the EC horror comics in the last six months or so. He’d heard of them, of course, but had never delved into the “Vault of Horror” because the prices were stiff for books printed as recently as the early fifties. And Jon’s primary interests had been the superheroes of the Golden Age of Comics, which ran roughly from 1937 to 1947, and issues reprinting newspaper strips like Dick Tracy and Buck Rogers.

But lately he’d gone sour on superheroes. They didn’t seem relevant to his life anymore. He guessed it had something to do with knowing Nolan, meeting him, working with him.

He smiled, remembering the first time he and Nolan had met. He glanced at the posters over his bed, which were the only noncomic art posters in the room: photos of Leonard Nimoy as Spock, Buster Crabbe in his serial days, and Lee Van Cleef decked out in his “man in black” gun-fighter apparel. Nolan had looked over Jon’s series of posters and had noticed especially the one of Lee Van Cleef, studying the black-dressed Western figure with the high cheekbones and narrow eyes and mustache, and Jon had told him who Van Cleef was, adding, “Looks something like you, don’t you think?” Nolan had shaken his head no, smiled crookedly and pointed a finger at Buster Crabbe, saying “Flash Gordon’s more my style.”

In a way, both Van Cleef and Flash Gordon were Nolan’s style. Nolan was the sort of man Jon had always hoped to meet but never thought he really would. The sort of man Jon had admired in fantasy. Nolan was Flash Gordon, and Bogart and Superman, too. Nolan was Dick Tracy and Clint Eastwood and Captain America. Oh, he wasn’t as pretty as any of the fantasy heroes. His face was lean, hard, cruel, and his body was so scarred from bullet wounds he looked as if he’d been used for a year as some medical student’s cadaver. And Nolan could be a bastard at times, could be a real bastard, really an altogether unpleasant person to be around.

Which was maybe why those fantasy guys didn’t satisfy Jon anymore. Nolan was everything they were and more: he was real, both perfect and imperfect, everything. A superhero couldn’t come up to Nolan’s standards.

Did it matter that Nolan was a thief? Not really, Jon thought, his opinion shaded by the fact that he, too, was a thief of major proportions, since that bank job a year and a half ago. It wasn’t what the heroes stood for, it was the way they stood for it that mattered. Jon remembered seeing the film White Heat, where the so-called good guy Edmund O’Brien double-crossed Jimmy Cagney. Cagney was a psychopathic murderer, but he had style. When they showed White Heat at the U of I student union last month, every-body in the house had booed that son of a bitch Edmund O’Brien.

He was picking out one of the “Vault of Horror” issues to read when he heard the phone ringing out in the store. He had the urge to jump off the bed and run out there and see if it was Nolan calling, but he repressed the urge. He’d made up his mind that he was not going to jump up and down like a spastic puppy for the chance to talk to Nolan. Besides, Jon had nothing to say, really, and Nolan just about never had anything to say.

No. This was business between Nolan and Planner (even though Jon was up to his ass involved in that business) and Jon would stay cool, the way Nolan would expect him to.

“Hey, Jon boy!”

The sound of Planner’s rough voice made Jon’s heart leap. Nolan had asked to talk to him! Imagine that.

Jon joined Planner out in the store and Planner said, “It’s for you... it’s that woman.”

Jon didn’t let the disappointment show in his voice. “Karen,” he said, “Good morning, honey.”

“Morning my ass, Johnny. It’s two-thirty. Did you just wake up?”

“Yeah, ’bout half an hour ago.”

“Me, too. I’m hung over as hell.”

“Me, too. Did we have a good time last night, Kare? I can’t remember it too clear.”

“We had a couple good times. You had breakfast?”

“I slept through it, just like you did.”

“We missed lunch, too, you know. Come on over to the apartment and I’ll fix you some eggs.”

“And sausage?”

“You drive a hard bargain. And sausage.”

“That sounds good.”

“Then maybe a little later I can refresh your memory about last night.”

“That sounds better.”

“Get your cute little ass over here, Johnny.”

“Will do.”

Jon hung up and noticed Planner’s reproving gaze. Jon grinned and said, “I know, I know, she’s too old for me.”

“She’s old enough to be your mother.”

“Oh, bull. You’re old enough to be my grandmother. And I don’t hold it against you, do I?”

“No, but I’ll bet you hold it against her,” and now Planner, too, was grinning.

“What would you do in my place?”

“The same damn thing, nephew. The same damn thing.”

“Thought so. All this time you’ve just been jealous.”

“Sure, kid. That broad’s just about the right age for me.”

Jon walked over to the row of penny candy Planner kept along the counter for the school kids from across the street. He took a piece of bubble gum from one of the glass bowls and unwrapped the gum and tossed the pink square into his mouth. He chewed it up good and walked back to Planner and blew a healthy bubble and popped it at his uncle.

“Smartass kid,” Planner said, trying not to smile.

“See you later, unc,” Jon said, and went out the back way.

4

The older man took his time eating the ice cream cone. It irritated Walter that his father could be so calm, just sitting there eating that goddamn ice cream as if they were at the beach or something. He was irritated enough to speak, and in a tone more harsh than he generally dared use when he spoke to his father. He said, “How can you just sit there and eat that goddamn stuff?”

The older man said, “What?”

“I said... nothing. Nothing, Dad.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

“Now what did I tell you? I told you don’t be nervous. We’re going in and do it and we’ll be out and done in nothing flat. So don’t be nervous, understand?”

“I’m not nervous.”

The older man studied his son’s face carefully. The boy was naturally pale, but he seemed to be even whiter than usual. But aside from shaking his foot on the leg crossed over one knee, the boy was showing no overt signs of tension.

“It’s not going to be hard,” the older man said. “I’ll handle all the hard stuff. All you have to do is back me up and keep your damn wits about you.”

“I know, Dad.”

“But I won’t lie to you. It won’t be pleasant in there.”

“You told me.”

“It won’t be pleasant in there because that’s the way it has to be.”

“You told me a hundred times, Dad.”

“Don’t smart-mouth me.”

“I’m not.”

“Don’t. And I’m just telling you this because I look at you right now and you know what I see? I see a kid, I see a goddamn college kid who’s liable to go in there and crap his pants, and I can’t afford that, understand, and you can’t afford it either.”

“Dad...”

“You didn’t have to be part of this. I didn’t want you to be part of this, remember. But you wanted to help. You begged me to help. Fine, that’s fine talk, but this is now, this is right now and we’re about to go across that street and do the kind of thing they don’t teach you in school, understand, so if you want out now, say so, for Christ’s sake.”

“Dad...”

“I’ll drive you back to the lodge. Right now. I’ll drive you back to the goddamn lodge and come back down here tomorrow and do it alone.”

“Dad, you couldn’t do it alone...”

“I could. It wouldn’t be no goddamn picnic, but I could.”

“I’m not nervous, Dad.”

He looked at his son and saw resolve in the young face. He smiled briefly and squeezed his son’s arm, reaching over the box with the newspapers and guns in it to do so.

He felt better now, now that he could have confidence in his son again. But that ice cream, which had gone down so smooth, so easy, so cool and refreshing, the damn stuff was churning in his stomach, making him feel queasy. All of a sudden he was nervous, and it almost made him laugh. Worrying about his son being nervous had got him that way.

Funny, Walter thought, where the hell did that outburst come from? His father had been sitting there for an hour, looking so calm it was unnatural, as though he were on pot or something. And then out of nowhere the old man had let go with this practically hysterical lecture. Walter was stunned; he never would have suspected that his father’s placid surface was hiding such turbulent undercurrents.

Not that he hadn’t had the notion that something was (how should he put it?) wrong with his father. Right now he was wishing he could summon courage to look at his father, to study him, observe his behavior. (Walter was a business major, but he’d taken several psychology courses as electives.) He wondered now, as he’d wondered more than once in the past few weeks, if his father was, well, sane.

Up until this uncharacteristic outburst of a moment ago, the old man seemed normal enough to Walter: quiet, self-sufficient, a hard but not unaffectionate man. But Walter knew these were superficial judgments, biased judgments from a child who desperately wanted to love and respect a father. He had never known his father all that well, really. Dad had been gone so much of the time, the business had been so demanding. Walter had felt much closer to his mother, and if she were still alive today, the situation would most certainly be different, to say the least.

The distance between Walter and his father had been shortened only these past months, these last several weeks especially. The old guy was no longer the aloof, godlike, benevolent family dictator, but a human being, a man willing to meet his son as an equal... or at least as a peer.

Walter liked that. It was a new experience and he liked it, even now, even sitting in this car waiting to... to do what they were going to.

This last week, at the lodge at Eagle’s Roost, had been wonderful and terrible. The memories the place aroused were double-edged, pleasant this moment and painful the next. Like a fire, nice to look at until you got too close. He at times felt he and his father were ghosts haunting the empty old lodge, perhaps in search of other ghosts who could share remembrances of other, better times. He could hear the voices, his mother, his sister, his father, too, and once he heard himself, a high-pitched voice, pre-puberty, and he laughed; he heard all these voices, especially late at night and early in the morning, he really heard them, but then of course he was trying to hear them. He sat in the main room downstairs, that huge open-beamed, high-ceilinged room, dark wooded, dominated by the black brick fireplace and the elk head above it. There were three brown leather sofas arranged in a block C that opened onto the fireplace, forming a room within the room, an area before the hearth where throw rugs and pillows were scattered for lounging. But the pillows and throw rugs were gone now, and when he and his father arrived, the sofas, like all the other furniture, were covered with sheets. Walter had uncovered the center sofa, where he sat and stared at the fireplace, as though it were warm and roaring rather than cold and barren. They uncovered the long table in the dining area to the left of the sofas, and he and his father sat alone together at the table, eating TV dinners and canned food and other survival rations that didn’t jibe with the memories of sumptuous feasts at this same table. On the other side of the room, where Mother’s sewing table still stood, covered of course, and faded areas on the wood floor where card tables had been, for playing Clue with his sister, and, later, Monopoly, was the window seat, the same plaid cushions he remembered. Once again he sat and watched the trees bend slightly in the breeze, their needles shimmering, and if he leaned close to the window, he could still get that same good view of the lake, blue and sparkling where the sun hit it, pink, bobbing swimmers close to shore, the sails of skiffs white along the horizon.

And sitting there in that window seat, his mind flooded with memories, he could not keep himself from wondering what this stranger who was his father, this stranger and guns and robbery, had to do with his life.

He’d known for a long time, of course, what his father’s “business” was. No one had told him, exactly, but he’d gotten it a piece at a time, and the knowledge had been gradual, there’d been no great revelation. But the lodge seemed such an odd setting for preparing for today’s possible violence. High up on that hill, overlooking the two lakes, the lodge had been the one place where his father had allowed no contact from the “business” world. Their home, in a suburb of Chicago, had seen occasionally the hard-faced men who associated with his father “at work.” But the lodge was different.

He remembered the time his Uncle Harry had shown up at the lodge, with two men who wore trench coats and slouch hats and had faces like the Boogie Man. Walter had been eight at the time and had found the two men with Uncle Harry frightening, but no more so than Uncle Harry, who was himself no beauty contest winner, and Walter’s sister called him Uncle Scarey behind his back. Uncle Harry had told their father there was important business at Lake Geneva that he ought to tend to personally, and to come along. Dad had been furious with Uncle Harry for bringing the two men with him, and into the lodge. Walter could still hear his father’s voice: “I told you never to bring any of your goddamn goons around here! This place is for my family and myself and I don’t want you or anybody contaminating it! Now wait outside, Harry.” And Dad had shoved the two Boogie Men out the door as if they were a couple of sissies.

“Are you ready?” the older man said.

“Yes,” Walter said.

“One last thing,” he said. “Don’t be surprised at anything I do. I might have to do some things that make you sick. I might have to do some things that make you not so goddamn proud of your old man. Well, that’s too bad. You’re in it all the way now, and you got to go along with everything I do, and don’t you flinch in there, don’t you panic, don’t show a thing in your face, either. Or we’re liable to die. Now. Do you understand, Walter?”

He’d heard all this before, too. His father had gone over all of this, many times, during the past week at the lodge, though there he’d always seemed calm and now Walter wasn’t sure. And he’d told Walter how they would go about the robbery, though he’d been vague about certain aspects. But when Walter asked him what was the purpose of the robbery, was it just money? Would they be going to Mexico or Canada or South America or something to start a new life on this money? This isn’t about money, his father had said, this is a matter of blood. And that was all he would say.

“Do you understand, Walter?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Here we go then,” and the older man turned the key in the ignition of the car and pulled across the street, up to the side door of the antique shop.

5

A bell was ringing. Planner sat up suddenly straight in the soft old easy chair behind the counter; he’d been dozing. The bell kept ringing. Is that the phone? Planner got up. Is that you, Nolan? Is that your call? The bell rang on and Planner said, silently, no. Somebody at the side door.

He took time out to light himself a fresh Garcia y Vega before answering the door. He had to get rid of the sour taste in his mouth. He wondered how his mouth could taste so foul from sleeping, why, not more than fifteen minutes, a half hour. You’d think he’d slept for twelve hours, as bad as the taste was. He puffed the cigar until he felt he could live with his mouth and then slowly moved toward the side door, the bell still going.

“All right, all right,” Planner muttered, “hold your damn horses, Jesus almighty.”

He unlocked the side door and looked through the screen at the two men standing out on the cement stoop. One of them was old, maybe fifty-five, maybe more; the other was much younger, maybe twenty, twenty-five at the most. Both of them looked like tourists, probably staying at Lake McBride. They had on bright swirling-colored shirts that almost hurt to look at; be better off looking into the sun dead on. Father and his kid, most likely. Both of them had the same dark eyes, set close together, and the same general frame.

Planner tried to say, “Yes?” but his voice cracked and it came out a croak. He cleared his throat, kicked open the screen door and shot a clot of phlegm out on the gravel to the left of where the older man was standing. He grinned. He said, “Excuse me, boys, you caught me napping. Not quite awake yet. What can I do for you?”

The older guy said, “We have some things here we’d like to have appraised.”

Oh, shit. Should’ve known, Planner thought. Christ, what a nuisance. Sitting here waiting for Nolan to call, anxious as hell, and somebody comes around with piddling shit like this.

“I don’t do much appraising,” Planner said.

“We have some real nice china in the car,” the older man said. “We have some real nice pieces.”

“Well...”

“You can make us an offer, or you can just tell us what you think they’re worth. We’d be much obliged.”

“I usually charge for appraising,” Planner said. He wondered how he could be so petty; why didn’t he just tell them come on in and take a look at their damn china. But he was irritated, irritated Nolan hadn’t called yet, and couldn’t help himself taking it out on these nice folks.

“How much?”

The older man seemed to be getting a shade irritated himself, Planner thought, and with just cause, he supposed.

“Oh, a dollar,” Planner said. “But what the hell... come on in and I’ll tell you what I think of the stuff. Never mind the buck.”

“Thank you,” the older man said.

The younger one said nothing. He looked kind of pale. He wasn’t the healthiest-looking kid Planner had ever seen.

“I’ll get the box,” the older man said, and he went to the car and got a big cardboard box out of the front seat.

What’s wrong with that kid? Planner wondered. Letting his father carry that box. What was wrong with him?

Planner held the screen door open for the older man and the boy followed close on the man’s heels. Planner shut the screen and locked the side door. He didn’t like anyone coming in the side door, and besides, he had to keep it shut to keep the air-conditioning circulating.

Right away, the young man walked up to the front of the store and started browsing. Almost immediately he found the display case of political buttons and looked in at them. In spite of himself, Planner felt proud; no one could resist his buttons.

At the rear of the store, the older man was setting the large box on the counter, which ran from the front of the store clear back. The counter had once been used as the bar in a saloon back in Iowa City’s pioneer days, and was one of the more valuable antiques in the store, though it was roughed up and scarred and chipped from daily use for a century or so. Planner let out a sigh. The sigh was one part boredom, the other part anticipation. Well, he thought, might as well see what this fella has in the box; maybe it’ll take my mind off waiting for Nolan to call.

The older man was lifting some newspapers out of the box and laying them on the counter. He said to Planner, “Come take a look at this, I think you’ll find it interesting,” and Planner walked over to him and joined him at the end of the counter. The man reached both arms into the box and came back up holding an automatic in either hand. The automatics were good-size guns, not.45’s, but good size. Nine millimeters, probably. Worst of all, Planner thought, they had silencers on them. That was bad. Very bad. It meant these guys were most likely pros of some kind. Somehow he knew. Somehow Planner knew these men knew about his safe full of money. It’s all your fault, Nolan, he thought.

The older man nodded to the younger man, who was still in the front of the store. The younger man locked the front door; it was a Yale lock and was no trouble. He turned the sign around on the door so that the side reading “Closed” faced out, while the “Open” faced in. He hadn’t really been interested in buttons at all. He walked back and joined the older man and Planner. The older man gave the boy one of the silenced automatics. The boy held it tight and with some effort, as though the gun were very heavy. As though it were an anvil he was holding.

The older man watched the boy for a moment to make sure he was all right. Then he said, “Let’s go in your back room and talk. I don’t want nobody looking in the windows and seeing us talking. They might get suspicious, seeing we got a couple of goddamn guns.”

Planner didn’t like the older man. He appeared to be cool, calm, and collected, but there was a manic edge to his voice. He wasn’t crazy about the nervous kid, either. He wished he was in Tahiti.

Also, he wasn’t crazy about taking them into the backroom. There were two rooms directly behind where they were standing, and in the farthest one back was the safe. Planner would have liked to have been behind the counter, up by the cash register. He kept a Colt.32 automatic under the counter by the cash register. It wasn’t a big gun, because he didn’t want a lot of bullets flying and messing up his store, in case of a robbery; a.32 was big enough to do whatever was needed. But right now he wished it was a.357 magnum, so he could blow these fuckers into a million bloody pieces. He didn’t like either one of them at all.

“Move it,” the older man said. He shoved Planner’s shoulder with the heel of his hand.

Planner said, “All right,” and led them into the first of the backrooms. He pulled the string on the overhead hanging bulb. The room was full of boxed and crated antiques Planner was saving for some hazy future use.

“Where’s the safe?” the older man said.

Planner smiled. He’d been right! He’d been right. They knew. They did know.

The older man slapped Planner across the face with the silenced gun. The blood was salty in his mouth. The older man said, “Where’s the goddamn safe?”

“This way,” Planner said.

That’s okay, Planner thought. He had almost forgotten, but now he fully remembered that the safe was the best place in the world to lead them. Because the twin of that.32 automatic was in the safe. Tucked behind the piles of money. Waiting.

“Okay,” Planner said, tugging on the string on this room’s overhead light. This room, too, was full of crates and boxes, as well as some old chairs and tables in need of repair. There was a small work area in one corner where Planner did his own mending. In the other corner was the big old gray metal safe. So old the name of the company was worn off. A good man could open it up in ten minutes. Planner had never bought a newer, more burglarproof (ha!) safe because it seemed foolish — after all, the only people who knew that he kept goodly amounts of cash in the safe were his friends, and he had the kind of friends who could open any safe, so why bother?

“Open it,” the older man said. The younger man was standing behind him with the empty cardboard box in his arms, the silenced automatic peeking around one side of it.

That was just what Planner wanted to do. He wanted to open that safe and bring his hand out shooting that.32. But he didn’t want to be obvious.

So he said, “No.”

The older man slapped him across the face with the silenced gun again and Planner’s upper plate flew out onto the floor. The floor was all dusty and dirty and now so was his plate. He wished Jon had cleaned this room up yesterday, as he was supposed to. Feeling silly with only half his teeth in his head, he said, “You lousy son of a bitch, put that gun away and I could whale the crap out of you.”

The older man hit him again, in the stomach this time, and Planner lay down on the floor. It didn’t hurt all that bad, but he figured if he acted as if it did, maybe the guy would stop hitting him. He shouldn’t have got mad at the guy and sworn at him like that. That was stupid. He looked up and said, “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“A friend of a friend,” the older man said. “Now open that goddamn safe.”

“What made you want to rob me for? I’m just an old feller trying to make a buck. There’s nothing in there worth taking. Oh, sure, I keep a few of my prize heirlooms in there. I’ll admit it. They’re worth some money, sure, but they mainly just make an old man happy in his last days.”

“Cut the crap,” the older man said, kicking Planner in the side. “Open the goddamn safe, I said. You can keep the heirlooms, you goddamn old buzzard, and we’ll take the money.”

Planner just looked at him.

“That’s right,” the older man said. “There’s a lot of goddamn money in that safe, isn’t there? You know it and I know it. Forget about pretending and open it.”

“Nolan will come after you,” Planner said. “I feel sorry for you bastards when Nolan comes after you.”

Something funny glittered in the older man’s eyes. He kicked Planner again and said, “Open it. Open it.”

Planner got to his feet, said, “All right, okay,” and dialed the combination lock. The latch creaked as he opened the heavy door, which swung out on its hinges to reveal six shelves, lined with stacked green.

“Jesus,” the younger man said, awestruck. It was the first word he’d uttered since coming into the store.

The older man said nothing. He just smiled, a grim, tight sort of smile, and nodded his head.

Planner said, “Toss that box over here and I’ll help you load it up, damn it,” and reached into the safe. He felt behind the stacks of money on the middle shelf, found the cold metallic surface of the automatic. He wrapped his fingers around the gun and swung his arm out, firing. Money scattered as his arm knocked stacks from the shelf, and the contact with the stacks of cash were probably what threw his aim off. The bullet splintered into the gray wood behind the older man, between him and the boy, and Planner knew he was in trouble.

He tried to drop to the floor, so he could roll and keep firing, but the room was too small, and he was too old and too slow. He was moving when he got hit by the first shot, which he didn’t even hear. He was motionless when the silenced automatic snicked and the second bullet caught him in the stomach, two small bubbling holes in his gut, and the back of him felt wet, and he felt warm, he felt hot, he felt afire, and he went to sleep.

A bell was ringing. Distant. He woke up. The older man and the younger man were on their haunches, packing the money into the big cardboard box. The box was just big enough to take all of the money. The older man said, “We can lay newspaper over the top of it, and stuff it down so we don’t go dropping money behind us. That’d be a hell of a goddamn trail to leave.” Planner’s stomach felt warm. His hand felt cold. No, something in his hand. The gun! They hadn’t taken the gun away from him. The gun!

He fired and caught the older man in the thigh. It knocked both of them down, the older man knocking into the younger, and upsetting the box of money. The older man said something unintelligible, and his gun snicked and Planner felt the third bullet enter his stomach, and he thought, Christ no! Not my stomach, I’ve got two there already. Jesus.

A bell was ringing. Distant. The phone! Nolan! Nolan, thank God!

Relieved, he died.