Fly Paper

1

Somebody was banging at the side door. Jon ignored it for a while, focusing his attention on the late movie he was watching — the original 1933 King Kong. But the banging was insistent and finally, reluctantly, Jon pulled away from the TV and headed downstairs to see what inconsiderate S.O.B. had the crazy idea something was important enough to go around bothering people in the middle of King Kong. Better be pretty damn earth-shaking, Jon thought, pisses me off, and yanked open the door and saw a heavy-set man leaning against the side of the building, his shirt and hands covered with blood. The guy had blood on his face, too, and looked at Jon and rasped, “Who... who the hell are you?”

Which took the words right out of Jon’s mouth.

Up until then, it had been a normal day. He’d risen around noon, showered, got dressed, thrown some juice down, and gone out front to the box to see if he’d gotten any comic books in the mail. Jon was a comics freak, a dedicated collector of comic art in all its forms, and did a lot of mail-order buying and trading with other buffs around the country.

He was also an aspiring comics artist himself (as yet unpublished), and while he was disappointed to find no letters of acceptance for any of the artwork he’d sent off, so too was he relieved to find no rejections.

Jon was twenty-one years old, a short but powerfully built kid (he was such a comics nut that he’d actually sent in for that Charles Atlas course advertised on the back of the books) with a full head of curly brown hair and intense blue eyes. He also had a turned-up nose that he despised and that girls, thankfully, found cute. His dress ran to worn jeans, and T-shirts picturing various comic strip heroes, everything from Wonder Warthog of the underground comics to Captain Marvel (Shazam!) of the forties “Golden Age” of comics. Today he had a Flash Gordon short-sleeve sweatshirt; the artwork (a full-figure shot of Flash with cape) was by Alex Raymond, the late creator of Flash. Jon would accept no substitutes.

You see, comics were Jon’s life.

Take his room, for example. When his uncle had first given it to him, this room was a dreary storeroom in the back of the antique shop, a cement-floored, gray-wood-walled cubicle about as cheerful as a Death Row cell. Now it was a bright reflection of Jon’s love for comic art. The walls were literally papered with colorful posters depicting such heroes as Dick Tracy, Batman, Buck Rogers, and the aforementioned Flash Gordon, all drawn by Jon himself in pen and ink and watercolored, and were uncanny recreations of the characters, drawn in their original style. (That was both a skill and a problem of Jon’s: while his eye for copying technique was first-rate, he had no real style of his own. “Give me time,” Jon would say to the invisible critics, “give me time.”) Shag throw rugs covered the floors in splashes of cartoon color, and the walls were lined three deep with the boxes containing his voluminous collection of plastic-bagged and filed comic books, a file cabinet in one corner the keeper of the more precious of his pop artifacts. A drawing easel with swivel chair was against the wall, a brimming wastebasket next to it, and sheets of drawing paper and Zip-a-Tone backing lay at the easel’s feet like oversize dandruff. And the two pieces of antique walnut furniture his uncle had given him were not exempt from comics influence, either: the chest of drawers had bright underground comics decals stuck all over its rich wood surface (Zippy, the Freak Brothers, Mr. Natural), and on top Jon’s pencils, pens, brushes, and bottles of ink were scattered among the cans of deodorant and shave cream and other necessities. Even the finely carved headboard of his bed was spotted with taped-on scraps of Jon’s artwork, cartoonish sketches of this and that, mostly character studies of his girl, Karen, and Nolan, and his Uncle Planner.

His Uncle Planner. Still hard to think of Planner as being dead. Just a few months since it happened, and though Jon was almost used to the absence of the old man, he still didn’t like living alone in the big, dusty old antique shop. Soon he’d be getting around to contacting some people to come in and appraise and bid on the merchandise in the store. Planner’s collection of antique political buttons alone would bring a pretty penny. Of course the stuff in the front of the store, the long, narrow “showroom” of supposed antiques, was junk, crap Planner had picked up at yard sales and flea markets just to keep the shop sufficiently stocked; the good stuff was in the back rooms, because when Planner had run across actual antiques, he’d crated them up carefully and packed them away. Jon’s uncle had had real respect for real antiques, and felt it was silly to sell them, as their value was sure to increase day by day. Jon, however, had no hesitation about selling those back-room treasures, though he’d do his best to find a buyer who’d haul away the junk as well as the jewels.

Mostly, of course, the shop had been a front for Jon’s uncle. Planner had been just what his name implied: he planned things — specifically, jobs for professional thieves. He’d traveled around on “buying trips” and, in the role of cantankerous old antique dealer, had gathered the information necessary to put together successful “packages” for professional heist men like Nolan. Planner’s packages were detailed and precise, at times even including blueprints of the target, and he’d charged a fee plus percentage of the take. Two years ago, with the guidance of his uncle, Jon had participated in the execution of one of those packages, a bank robbery headed by Nolan (whom Planner rated as perhaps the best in a dying craft), and some three quarters of a million dollars from that robbery had rested in Planner’s safe since then — until this summer, when two men with guns came into the antique shop and shot Planner dead and took the money.

Jon and Nolan had gone after the two men and the money, and caught the two men, all right, but the money was lost. And so was Jon’s dream of owning a comic book shop, a mecca for collectors like himself — as were his hopes for having enough money to support himself for as long as it took to break into the comic art field. All of that — up in smoke.

But not really. As Planner’s sole heir, he was now owner of the shop, which he could conceivably convert into his comic book mecca, even if its location (Iowa City, Iowa) was a bit off the beaten track. And he had those two back rooms full of valuable antiques to turn into cash. And, too, Nolan had told him that the next time something came together, Jon was the first man he’d call. So things weren’t so awfully bleak, really.

Jon returned to his room with the mail (not much — just some bills and the latest issue of The Buyer’s Guide for Comics Fandom) and flopped on the bed, his eye catching the poster of Lee Van Cleef on the wall over his easel. The Van Cleef poster was one of a few posters in the room that were photographic and not his own drawings. Van Cleef was in his “man-in-black” gunfighter stance and, it seemed to Jon, resembled Nolan a great deal: they shared the same narrow eyes, mustache, high cheekbones and genuinely hard, hawkish look, though Nolan could get an even surlier look going, if that was possible.

He wondered for a moment if Nolan was just being nice when he’d promised to contact Jon when something came up.

No.

Jon was sure Nolan had been telling the truth. He knew that Nolan felt responsible for the loss of their money, and that sooner or later Nolan would come to Jon with a plan to get them both back on their financial feet again.

Karen had once suggested to Jon that he was using Nolan as a father substitute, a bullshit idea that embarrassed and irritated Jon; why, he wouldn’t even talk about it, it was such dime-store bullshit psychology. He’d never needed his real parents; why the fuck should he need a fake one? His father was just some guy his mother knew before Jon was born; and his mother was just a fourth-rate saloon singer who was on the road all the time, leaving him to shuttle back and forth between one relative or another, none of them particularly grateful for an extra mouth to feed. A few years ago, his mother had died in an automobile mishap, and he hadn’t even shed a tear; he simply hadn’t known her that well. Early on he’d developed a capacity for amusing himself, for losing himself in the four-color fantasy of the funnies, for being a self-sufficient loner. And, in fact, when he moved to Iowa City to attend the university (briefly, as it turned out), he’d taken a cubbyhole apartment for himself rather than move in with a relative again, even if that relative was Planner, the most pleasant of the lot. Only after the robbery last year, when Nolan had stayed at Planner’s, healing from gunshot wounds, only then had Jon moved in with his uncle. And that was to help his uncle help Nolan.

His life since meeting Nolan had been hectic but exciting, tragic but exhilarating. Nolan’s reality put the fantasy of Jon’s comic book super-heroes to shame. Reality was harsh — in fantasy, Planner would still be alive, and last year’s bank job wouldn’t have erupted into insanity and blood — but, as Nolan might have said, jerking off is less trouble than screwing but it’s nowhere near as rewarding.

The Van Cleef poster seemed to be squinting skeptically over at Flash Gordon, as if knowing how ridiculous it was of Jon to equate Nolan with comic book heroes. Ridiculous to think of Nolan as any kind of hero. But Jon did. Even though Nolan was a thief. The way Jon saw it, heroism had nothing to do with morality, or just causes, or politics, or anything else. Heroism had to do with courage; derring-do; a personal code; a steel eye and cool head. And all of these Nolan had. Plenty of.

Jon thumbed through The Buyer’s Guide (a weekly newspaper of comics-related ads and articles) and saw some photos of a comics convention held out on the West Coast. He wished for a moment he’d gone to Detroit for the convention there this coming weekend; today was Thursday and the start of the con. He’d attended the New York Comic Con several years running, but hadn’t been to too many of the countless other such fandom gatherings. Seemed a pity with a con located here in the Midwest, for a change, that he hadn’t been able to go.

But this weekend was Karen’s birthday, and he had to be here. She would be justifiably hurt if he chose comics over her. And this would be a traumatic birthday for her: Karen would be turning thirty-one, and the ten-year difference in their ages would be shoved to the front of her awareness. It was something that didn’t bother Jon in the least, but Karen was somewhat paranoid about it. The only thing Jon didn’t like about Karen being older than he was (and divorced) was her ten-year-old freckle-faced brat, Larry, a red-headed refugee from a Keane painting, who was the best argument for birth control Jon could think of.

Which was something he was very much conscious of when, an hour-and-a-half later, he was having a late lunch with Karen at the Hamburg Inn; now that school was started again, he could enjoy her lunchtime company minus Larry. Bliss.

Jon and Karen had been semi-shacked-up for six months now. Semi-shacked because Jon hadn’t really moved in with Karen (and vice versa) for the simple reason that Jon and Larry didn’t get along, and besides, Karen thought it might be bad for Larry if Mommy’s boy friend lived with them. A quaint idea in these loose days, Jon thought, but he didn’t bitch: he liked his moments of privacy, and no way was he going to have his comic book collection and Larry under the same roof. It was a pleasant enough relationship as it was, and Karen was happy receiving the healthy alimony/child support check from her lawyer ex-husband (which would stop, of course, if she and Jon were to marry), and Jon had promised himself he wouldn’t consider marriage with Karen until Larry was either old enough to send to military school or got hit by a truck.

Still, Jon had toyed with the idea of asking Karen to move in with him — even if Larry did have to come along. Karen ran the Candle Corner, a downtown Iowa City gift shop with head-shop overtones: hash pipes, Zig-Zag papers, posters, water beds, and the rack of underground comics that had brought Jon into Karen’s shop in the first place. He’d considered asking her to help him convert Planner’s antique shop into a larger version of her shop downtown, with more emphasis on water beds and apartment furnishings, and he would restrict his “comic book mecca” idea to a mail-order business out of one of the back rooms. She’d have no trouble interesting someone in taking over her long-term lease on that three-story building downtown that housed her shop, her apartment, and another to let above; and she and (ugh) Larry could move in with Jon, since the whole upstairs of the antique shop was a nicely remodeled five-room living quarters that Planner had used. So far, however, Jon had stayed in his room downstairs, only using the upstairs for its kitchen facilities and the living room’s color TV, and that last only lately: it had taken Jon weeks to get used to the idea of Planner being dead and longer to lose the creepy feeling the upstairs gave him.

Anyway, he was considering that — asking Karen to move in, to become his business partner. But he hesitated, and when he’d put in a long-distance call to Nolan (who had met Karen), to ask his opinion of the idea, the following advice had come from Nolan: “Never mix bed partners and business partners, kid — you get fucked both ways.” And since Nolan tended to be right about such things, Jon was, for the present, holding off asking Karen.

He spent the afternoon drawing, working up rough pencil layouts for a science fiction story he was hoping to sell to Heavy Metal magazine. It was to be somewhat in the style of the old EC Weird Fantasy and Weird Science, two great but long-dead comics, casualties of the bloody war waged upon comic books by parental groups and psychiatrists back in the early fifties. Jon’s script was two Ray Bradbury stories put together and all switched around, and for the art he was combining elements of the underground’s Corben and EC’s Wally Wood in hopes of disguising his own lack of style with a weird mixture.

At four o’clock he watched a “Star Trek” rerun.

At five he went across the street to the Dairy Queen for supper — a tenderloin and hot fudge sundae. He usually ate with Karen, but she was at a Tupperware party, for Christ’s sake. (“You’re going to a Tupperware party, Karen? What kind of free spirit are you, anyway? Hash pipes, water beds, and Tupperware!” “Jonny, she’s a friend of mine. She’s one of my best friends and she invited me; I have to go. If you’re not busy... could you sit with Larry?” “Anything but that, Kare. Let me pay for the damn sitter myself. Anything.”)

At six-thirty he got out a stack of comic books he hadn’t gotten around to yet and started reading.

At ten he went upstairs and turned on the TV and got himself a bottle of Coke and some potato chips and got settled down for the showing of King Kong on the educational channel at ten-thirty.

At eleven-thirty somebody knocked on the back door.

The man with bloody hands and shirt.

2

The night after Sherry left, Nolan was consumed with boredom and hostility, and felt he had to get away from the motel for an evening or he’d go fucking crazy. The motel was called the Tropical, and Nolan had been managing the place for some syndicate people out of Chicago for months now, but it was a job he’d grown tired of lately, and he had to let off steam. Since he didn’t care to embarrass or anger his employers, he took the time to drive some fifty miles to a little town where nobody knew him and, dressed in the grubbiest old clothes he could dig up, spent the evening in a tawdry little pool hall with the village’s “rougher element,” people who would have been born on the wrong side of the tracks had the town been big enough to have tracks.

Nolan was good at shooting pool. He was hustler-good, but chose to shoot by himself, and did so undisturbed for two solid hours, drinking beer and doing his best to run the balls as rapidly as possible. Tonight he was off a little, as his mind was busy with Sherry and the job at the Tropical and ways of changing what was becoming a tiresome life.

He was fifty years old, even if he didn’t look it, a tall, raw-boned man with just a little gut from several months of overly easy, overly soft living. His hair was black, widow’s-peaked, with considerable gray working its way in along his sideburns; he wore a down-curving mustache that made his mouth take on an even more sour expression than it naturally wore; he had high cheekbones, and his face had a chiseled look, like something turned out by a sculptor in a black mood.

He had been a professional thief for almost twenty years, an organizer and leader of robberies, mostly institutional (banks, jewelry stores, armored cars, and the like) and his was the best track record in the business: there was not and never had been a single member of a Nolan heist behind bars — though some were in jail for other, non-Nolan jobs they’d been in on, and a few did die in double-cross attempts Nolan squelched.

Before that, when he was just a kid, really, Nolan had worked for the Family in Chicago, as a nightclub manager, utilizing those same organizational abilities of his. He turned a Rush Street dive into a legitimate (if syndicate-owned) money-maker, partially from the local color he provided by serving as his own bouncer. Trouble was, his reputation for being a hardcase fed back into the Family hierarchy and gave some of the top boys the wrong idea: they tried to get Nolan to leave their Rush Street saloon and come in with them, for grooming as a young exec, so to speak, wanting him to start at the bottom in an enforcer capacity. He had balked at the suggestion, and the dispute that caused with the local Family underboss eventually got bloody, and Nolan had to drop out of the Family’s sight for a while. “For a while” being almost twenty years, during which he’d turned to heisting. Only recently, when a long-overdue change of regime hit the Chicago Family, had Nolan come into syndicate good graces. Through a lawyer named Felix (the Family consigliere), Nolan had been invited in, in the capacity he’d originally sought — nightclub manager — and part-owner as well. The Family offered Nolan a choice of several multimillion-dollar operations (including a well-known resort and a posh nightclub-cum-restaurant) on the stipulation that he buy in as a partner. That was fine with Nolan, because he had some $400,000 in his friend Planner’s safe, his share from the Port City bank job, and this would make an excellent investment for putting the money to use.

Unfortunately, while he was still negotiating with Felix, Nolan’s money was stolen and eventually lost, and Nolan was unable to uphold his half of the Family bargain.

And so the Tropical.

The Tropical was a modest operation in comparison with those other places the Family had offered him and, in fact, was used as a trial-run spot for people being considered for top managerial positions in the countless hotels, resorts, niteries and other such establishments owned by the powerful Chicago syndicate. The Tropical was a motel, consisting of four buildings with sixteen units each; two heated swimming pools, one indoor, one out; and a central building housing a restaurant and bar, both of which sported a pseudo-Caribbean decor meant to justify the motel’s name. It was located ten miles outside of Sycamore, Illinois, and was devoted to serving honeymooning couples, some of whom were actually married. Lots of legit businessmen out of Chicago, as well as Family people, used it as a trysting ground, and so, accordingly, the Tropical made damn good money for its size.

Nolan himself had been serving a trial run at the Tropical before his money was stolen; now he was there on a more permanent basis, to observe the progress of others undergoing trial runs, doing little more than watching, really — just some mental note-taking and reporting back to Felix on the behavior and capability of the temporary managers. He would break in each new man (whose stay would range from three to six months) and see to it that a sense of continuity was maintained in between these pro tempore managers.

Which meant he mostly sat around.

And considering the salary he was drawing, that didn’t make for such a bad setup. At least, not when Sherry was around.

Sherry was young, almost obscenely young, a pretty blonde child who spent most of her time in and out of bikinis. She had applied for a waitress job at the beginning of Nolan’s stay at the Tropical, but she couldn’t keep the food and coffee out of customer laps, and rather than fire her, Nolan found a place for her. The place was between the sheets of his bed, and when she wasn’t there, she was adding to the Tropical’s already erotic atmosphere by sunning in her hint of a bikini around the outdoor pool. She was not a brilliant girl, nor was she an empty-headed one, and if she did talk a trifle much, he’d gotten used to it quickly; anyway, her voice was melodious and soothing, so if you didn’t listen to the words, it was no trouble at all.

Now she was gone.

The summer was over and there was no sun for her to lie under. She’d begun to get itchy at the tail end of September, and yesterday, when she got the call from her father saying her mother was sick, she’d decided to go back to Ohio and help out her folks. She and Nolan had had their most emotional night last night: she crying and Nolan making an honest effort to be cheerful and kind about the whole thing. She swore she’d come back the next summer; Nolan didn’t mention that he hoped to be long gone from the Tropical by then. He just nodded and eased back up on top of her again.

He tried to bank the one ball in and missed. He said, “Shit,” and chalked up his cue.

“Want some company?”

“No,” Nolan said. He shot again; this time the ball went in.

“Hey. I said, want some company?”

“No,” Nolan said.

The kid doing the asking was maybe eighteen, skinny, with long, greasy hair and a complexion like a runny pizza. A fat kid, older by a couple years probably, came sliding up to the table like a hog to slaughter. The skinny kid had on jeans and a gray work shirt with a white patch on the breast pocket that identified the shirt’s origin as Ron’s Skelly Station and the kid’s name as Rick; the fat kid had on a yellow short-sleeve shirt with grease stains and massive underarm sweat-circles, and the buttons over his belly couldn’t button.

“Hey, Chub,” Rick said to his friend. They were like two balloons, one with the air let out, the other inflated to bursting. “You know what feeling I got about this guy, Chub? I got this awful feeling he’s some kind or prick or something.” There was emphasis on the word “prick.”

Chub, however, said nothing. He just stood there, shifting his weight, from foot to foot and looking Nolan over.

Rick went on. “I mean, I ask him does he want some company and he says, ‘shit no.’ He’s some kind of antisocial bastard, I think. What do you think, Chub?”

Chub, apparently, didn’t know what to think. He’d come over to have a laugh with ol’ Rick, but now that he was here and had a look at Nolan, he wasn’t sure he liked what he saw. After a moment he tapped his skinny friend on the shoulder and gave him a flick of the head that said, come on, don’t mess with this dude.

But then reinforcements arrived: two older guys, looking like something out of a fifties hot rod movie, came up from the other end of the hall to see what was the hassle. One of them actually had on a T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a cigarette pack stuffed in at the shoulder; he was an emaciated sort with pipe-cleaner arms down under the rolled sleeves, who made the skinny Rick look healthy. His cohort, however, was more genuinely menacing: a sandy-haired, greasy-haired, wide-shouldered bear with close-set, glittering eyes; he wore jeans and a T-shirt under a black cotton vest, and had biceps the size of California grapefruit.

“Okay,” Nolan said. “Who wants to play some eightball?”

He played once with Rick and lost. His mind was still elsewhere. But the crowd around began making snide remarks about his shooting, and it brought his mind into focus. When he played the fat kid, for a five, he broke and didn’t sink any; then next time his turn came around, he sank all the little-numbered balls and the eight, leaving Chub’s stripes scattered all over the table. A murmur went through the small crowd, and pipe-cleaner arms stepped up, and Nolan took five from him the same way. He did it to all of them, except that most times he was running the balls right from the break.

He was good at pool; he was, in fact, good at most games. He’d been playing in a low-stakes poker game regularly with some Sycamore businessmen and had found it an enjoyable enough time killer. Good as he was at games, he was not a gambler. He was interested in pool and card playing for the chance to exercise his mind and to hone his skill; he didn’t like to play with pros, because they had their life in the game, and you don’t want to screw around with people in something they make a living at. The best amateur doesn’t want to play the worst pro, because the game is a lark to the amateur, whereas the pro is deadly serious, and sometime you’ll find yourself with a broken head and stuffed in a garbage can if you fuck with the pros and win.

Also, Nolan never hustled. Pool or cards or anything. He could go into a pool hall like this one and almost always clean the place out, if he felt like it; same with lots of small-town, high-stakes card games. But you made enemies that way. Same as when you diddled the pros, the amateur who thinks he’s a pro can get pretty mad himself.

Like this crowd around him was now.

“Some kind of smart-ass hustler, buddy? That what you are?” It was the first kid, Rick — skinny Rick with the bad complexion. “Come in here and shoot real shitty and say you don’t want to play, and then when we beg you, you say okay and wipe our butts, is that it?”

The bear with the close-set eyes, who seemed to be the leader of this small-time pack, said, “Just lay our money on the table, hustler. Just lay what you stole from us on the table, and you can walk out of here with your ass.”

Nolan glanced over toward the proprietor, who was standing by the counter where he served up beers. The proprietor was an elderly guy with a flannel shirt and baggy pants and apron on. He was aware of what was going on, but knew he couldn’t do anything about it; these were his usual customers, and he was looking the other way, toward some tables down at the other end of the room, which nobody was using right now.

Nolan picked up the cue ball and threw it at the bear and hit him in the middle of his forehead and knocked him on his back, knocked him out. He used the butt of the cue on Rick’s stomach, and Rick promptly crawled away and threw up for a while. The rest of them just stood there and looked at Nolan. Nolan was smiling. And then he saw in their eyes that they realized he wanted them to continue the brawl.

Because Nolan was bored, and hostile, and it was something to do.

Disgusted with himself, Nolan threw the cue down across the table, said, “Fuck it,” and walked out of the place. In an hour he was back in his room at the Tropical, fixing himself a shot of Scotch over ice and turning on the news to catch the sports.

At eleven, he was taking a shower and the phone rang.

“Logan?”

It was Sherry. The image of her face flashed through his mind: gentle, little-girl features framed by arcs of blonde-frosted brunette hair...

“Where you calling from, Sherry?”

“Home. Ohio. I miss you.”

“Yeah. I’m stir-crazy myself, in this room alone.”

“My mother’s real sick, Logan.”

Logan was the name she knew him by, the one he was using at the Tropical.

“Logan?” she said again. He’d been quiet for a moment, his mind full of her naked: her skin coppery from all that summer sun, except for the stark white where the bikini had half-heartedly covered the best parts, the breasts tipped as deep a copper as the sun-tanned skin; the light brunette triangle forming a similar contrast below...

“Yeah, I’m here,” he said. “I’m sorry to hear your mother’s sick.”

“She’s going to be bedridden a long time.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I got a job today.”

“What kind?”

“Waitress.”

“Oh, Christ.”

She laughed. “I’ll be careful. I haven’t scalded anybody’s nuts with hot-coffee-in-the-lap yet.”

“Oh, then all your customers were women today, huh?”

She laughed some more and then said, “I miss you.”

“You said that.”

“I know. I want to see you again, Logan.”

“Sure. Next summer.”

“I don’t think you’ll still be there. At the Tropical, I mean. You been restless lately.”

“Well.”

“Let me give you my address. Come and see me when you can. Tell me where you end up, if you end up anywhere.”

“I’d like that, Sherry.”

She gave him the address, and he wrote it down.

“Logan?”

“Yeah?”

“Take care of yourself. Be happy.”

“You too, kid.”

They hung up.

Nolan sat there, dripping wet from the shower, getting the bed damp, feeling pissed off and, dammit, lonely. He couldn’t understand it, because he’d been self-sufficient for a lot of years, hadn’t ever been one to shack up with a broad for more than a day or two.

But he was fifty, and this goddamn life at the Tropical was goddamn getting him down.

He sat there a while and the phone rang again. It was Jon. Calling long-distance from Iowa City.

“Nolan? You got to come here, right away.”

Life pumped into his veins; he didn’t know what Jon wanted, but whatever it was, Nolan was game.

3

Breen never thought it would come to this. Stealing nickels and dimes. Christ! He pulled into the driveway of the little farmhouse where old Sam Comfort and his son Billy were waiting. At least this would end it, he thought. He would be glad to be done with this one; it certainly hadn’t been the normal sort of heist he worked. In fact, it hadn’t been one heist at all, but a series of thousands of little ones, infinitesimal heists, nickel-and-dime stuff. Literally. Because Breen had been helping the Comforts heist parking meters.

He was a stocky guy of forty-two, black hair cut military-short, his fleshy cheeks covered with a perpetual five o’clock shadow. His eyes were wide-set and dark blue, his nose bumpy and squat in the middle of a rough but intelligent face. Right now, as he sat in his battered green Mustang in the farmhouse drive, Breen’s often intense features were softened in pleasant anticipation of severing the alliance with the Comforts.

He guessed he’d been lucky till now. Before this, he’d worked with only the best people; never before had he stooped to the level of the Comforts. He was spoiled, he supposed, from years of working with guys the caliber of Nolan. Used to be, Breen would work at least one job a year with Nolan, picking up one or two more with somebody else reliable. But Jack Taylor and a whole string of good men got busted two summers ago heisting an art gallery, and last year Laughlin and three others were killed after that Georgia armored-car job went sour and they’d been caught between state and local cops in a back-roads chase that turned fucking tragic. Worst of all, about two years ago this time, Breen had been in Chicago with Nolan and several others, planning a bank heist, when some syndicate guy shot the job right out from under them. Word got out later that though Nolan wasn’t dead after all (surprising, as that syndicate guy nailed him a couple times; Breen had seen it happen), the Chicago Family was definitely declaring open season on Nolan. Which made it less than healthy to keep company with the man. So what was a guy to do? You had to work with somebody. And if you were desperate enough, you worked with the likes of the Comforts.

Old Sam Comfort’s reputation was bad; it went back years before Breen had gotten into the business, and he’d never heard any specific stories about the old man, just that Sam Comfort was not to be trusted. In recent years Sam had worked strictly with his two sons, Billy and Terry, but last year Terry drew a short term for statutory rape, and the Comforts had been lacking a man on their string. And according to Morris (a pawn shop fence in Detroit, whom Breen used as a sort of underworld messenger service), the Comforts had a racket going that required a minimum of three, and they’d been using a fill-in man for Terry Comfort but weren’t satisfied with him. Morris suggested that Breen go see the Comforts.

Breen would’ve dropped the whole thing right there, would’ve read the handwriting on the wall and just got the hell out of heisting, but he needed the money too bad. Breen was from Indianapolis, where he had a little bar he owned and operated with the help of his wife and brother-in-law. He would’ve made a good enough living with just the bar, but he was a horse-player; Breen played the horses like an alcoholic drinks and a nymphomaniac screws: in dead earnest, with little joy and less success. He was trying to give it up, but he was into his bookie for four gee’s worth of markers, and there was the alimony and child support for his first wife, that blood-sucking bitch; he was way behind on that, and wouldn’t it be shit if that was the way he finally ended up in stir.

So he’d left the bar in the hands of his wife and brother-in-law and gone to see the Comforts. It was almost a whirlwind trip: when Sam explained they were heisting parking meters, Breen damn near left without sitting down.

But the parking meter deal wasn’t as ridiculous as it first sounded. Old Sam had done his homework, no question about it. He’d put together a route: Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, and the Quad Cities, all linked by Interstate 80. He’d spent time in each town tracking prowl car runs, and pinpointed the most untraveled, poorly lit streets, and such prime targets as waterfront parking lots and parking ramps, with thousands of meters for the picking, virtually unattended in the pre-dawn morning hours. He had keys to open the meters, and son Billy (decked out in olive-green uniform with the words “Meter Maintenance” stitched across the back) would go about draining the meters, while Sam stayed around the corner in the car, motor going, Citizen Band radio on to monitor the cops. Breen’s role was to empty the buckets of coins that Billy brought him and hand him back a fresh one; Breen would pour the coins into a large, rubber-lined metal tray built down in the floor of the trunk. A lid flopped down over the tray when the night’s work was done, a false bottom that made this trunk look like any other in a Buick Electra. No one questioned the maintenance man working the meters (traffic was slow in the wee hours), and most people probably just went by muttering, “Always wondered when they emptied those damn things.”

Even with cities as small as those that comprised the Iowa-Illinois Quad Cities, they could pick up several thousand a night, easy, and that was playing it Sam’s safe, cagey way, leaving enough coins in each meter to fool the actual maintenance people. That way they could go back for more periodically, and no one would be the wiser, not till the monthly tally for meter earnings came in. Even then, the city might not figure it out: maybe meter revenue was just down that month, who could say?

Sam and Billy rented a house on the outskirts of Iowa City, because it was midway along their Interstate 80 route, but Breen didn’t choose to join them. The old man was a boozer and the kid blew grass all the time, and Breen preferred his own company. He chose to stay in Cedar Rapids, where he found an apartment and, before long, a young cocktail waitress to shack up with.

Working with the Comforts had been a royal pain. Not only had the work been hard and tedious, hitting a different city six nights a week for a solid month, but the Comforts had personalities that put a burr up Breen’s ass. Billy was an introspective, cynical type, and his old man was an egotistical, egocentric loudmouth, and Breen was glad that most of the time he spent with them was on the job, where keeping quiet was a necessity. Listening to Billy’s occasional sarcasm and Sam’s constant bullshit was trouble enough on the ride down from Iowa City; at least when the team worked Cedar Rapids, he didn’t have to ride in the car with them.

But he had to hand it to old Sam. He’d underestimated the crafty old coot. Sam had the operation down pat, slicker than shit. The Comforts had worked the parking meter scan for a straight year now, alternating between six routes Sam worked out, never staying in one area longer than a month, keeping the local authorities confused. Sam had an account in a bank in each area he hit, but not in any city on the route (he had an account in Iowa City, for example) and used a fictitious name and fictitious business, of course, to keep the bank free of suspicion regarding the heavy amount of coin involved. In Iowa City, Sam posed as the owner of a pinball rental outfit, so the tellers were used to seeing him haul in sacks of coin for deposit. This was canny: others might have fenced the coin at a loss; not old Sam.

Also, Sam had told Breen that he closed out a route after hitting an area a certain number of times; this was the third go-round for the Iowa Interstate 80 route, and it would not be used again, not for several years, anyway. He would develop a new route in untapped territory and add it to his list. And he would be closing out his account at the local bank. This time, the month of meter lootings had tallied $47,000; he had another $110,000 in the Iowa City bank from the other two times he’d hit the area.

Tonight was the payoff. Breen would receive just under twelve thou for his month of hardass work. The $47,000 would be split four ways, with Sam taking a double cut because the package had been put together by the old man. That was fair, Breen thought, and though $12,000 was hardly the best he’d ever done in a heist, it would be enough to get him out of the woods with his bookie and his alimony-hungry ex-wife. Now, if he could just stay away from the damn nags.

He approached the farmhouse, a ramshackle clapboard the Comforts had picked up for cheap rent, not unlike the equally run-down farmhouse outside Detroit, where the Comforts actually lived, a sprawling shack filled with luxurious possessions bought with the spoils of Comfort heisting. Bunch of slobs, Breen thought, glad tonight would be the end of ’em.

“Come on in, Breen,” Sam said, standing in the doorway, framed in light. “Come get your cut.” The white-haired, pot-bellied old sot was wearing a green cotton sportcoat with patched elbows over a T-shirt showing the brown suspender straps holding up the baggy brown pants; the old man needed a shave and stood there scratching his ass in the doorway. Fucking slob, Breen thought. Somewhere in the house, the kid would be sitting in his underwear sucking up weed. Nice family.

Breen approached Sam, bracing himself for the blast of whiskey breath, heading up the slanted cement walk toward the house and saying, “After tonight, I’m out, Sam. I’ve had it; this meter bit is not my bag. You’re going to have to add somebody different to the string after tonight.”

“Fine with me,” Sam said, jovial. “Terry’ll be out of stir next month, and we were going to ask you out anyway.” They were about ten feet apart. Sam’s hand moved out from behind him, where he’d seemed to be scratching his ass, and something glittered in the light coming from inside the house.

Gun metal.

Breen rolled to the left, tumbling on the grass, but old Sam’s shot caught him anyway. More gun-fire broke the solitude of the Iowa country evening, explosions as terrifying to Breen as nuclear war. Breen was almost back to his car when another slug caught him in the leg. No matter. He scrambled behind the wheel anyway, ignoring the gunfire behind, ignoring the pain. The back windshield shattered into a sudden spiderweb with a hole punched in its middle, and he felt one of the back tires sag flat.

But he made it out of there. He drove the half-mile into Iowa City, not even looking behind him to see if the Comforts were following. He knew he could lose them; he’d been in Iowa City before and could wind through streets and confuse them. He did that, though he had no idea if they were back there or not. He was getting delirious. He looked down at himself and he was all bloody.

Then he remembered Planner.

That was why he’d been to Iowa City before. To see Planner, that old guy at the antique shop who put together most of Nolan’s packages. He could go there for help. He could go see Planner.

He got there, somehow, and stumbled up to the side of the shop and slammed his fist against the door, slammed his fist against the wood again and again, hard as hell, as much to stay awake and keep some sensation going in his body as to rouse somebody inside.

Finally somebody answered. A wild-haired hippie kid, and Breen’s hopes sunk in his chest. He mumbled something, like who the hell was this kid, and dropped to the floor just inside the door.

4

This was one of those rare times when all the Charles Atlas muscle-building came in handy. Jon was carrying the bleeding man like an absurdly oversize babe in arms. The guy was heavier than Jon and a shade taller too, and so made quite a load. Jon hauled the fleshy freight to his room in the rear of the shop, hoping that following his impulse to help the guy wasn’t some gross error in judgment. Anytime something like this came up, Jon wished he had Nolan around to check with, to consult.

But Nolan isn’t here, Jon thought, so screw wishful thinking.

As he carried the man, Jon looked him over carefully, trying to get past that first impression of a guy covered with blood. The man was in his early forties, Jon estimated; he had short dark hair, and wore a light blue sportshirt, bloodstained on the lower right side, and summery white slacks, also stained with blood down the left lower leg. The blood on his face apparently had gotten there when a hand had touched one or both of the wounds, and speckles and smears of blood were spread variously around his clothing in spots other than those immediately around the wounds. Jon eased him onto the bed, went upstairs, and came back down with some bandage makings, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a basin of water, and several washcloths.

The wounds weren’t bad, really. Not near as bad as he’d at first thought, from the shock of the blood-soaked clothes; it was the light colors that made the red stand out so, the light blue shirt and white pants, and the guy must’ve run after he was shot, scattering blood around on his clothes. Jon was relieved to find the leg just nicked, and the side wound showed evidence of the bullet going through clean, nothing important having been hit. Or that was Jon’s guess, anyway; if the slug had caught an artery there’d be blood gushing everywhere, but the bleeding here wasn’t severe at all. Jon washed the wounds clean and applied bandages that were tight, but not tourniquet-tight.

The guy came around just as Jon was finishing.

He said, “Who... who the hell are you?”

“You asked that before,” Jon said. “Suppose you tell me who the hell you are, and we’ll see about who I am afterwards.”

“Where’s Planner?”

Jon’s suspicions were confirmed: this was an associate of his late uncle, someone who’d run into trouble on a heist or something and had come here for help. That had been Jon’s first guess, and as he’d been in a similar boat that time with Nolan, his instinct had been to help this man.

“I said, where’s Planner, kid? You do know who I’m talking about?”

“I know who you’re talking about,” Jon said. Then, after a moment, “Planner was my uncle.”

“Was?”

“He’s dead. Few months now.”

“Jesus.” The guy propped himself up on his elbows and spoke, almost to himself. “Jesus Christ, these days everybody good’s either dead or in jail, seems like... Jesus H. Christ. How’d it happen, anyway?”

Jon started to hesitate again, but those last comments from the guy sounded right, so he said, “My uncle was keeping money in his safe for some people. Two men came in and took the money and killed him.”

“Shit! Is that right? Shit. Somebody ought to find those guys and...”

“Somebody did. You feeling okay? You look kind of pale. You better lay back and take it easy.”

“I feel okay.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think your wounds are too serious, but you better lay back and take it easy just the same.”

“I appreciate this, kid, you taking me in, patching me up like this.”

“If you appreciate it so damn much, you might tell me who you are and what’s going on.”

“Well, I’m in the business your uncle was in. You know what sort of business your uncle was in, don’t you, kid?”

“I do. I’m in that line of work myself.”

“Antiques, you mean? Like all this old comic book bullshit you got in here?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Okay, then. So who have you worked with, if that’s the line of work you’re in.”

“Nolan. He’s the only one so far. Him and some people you wouldn’t know.”

“I thought Nolan had Family troubles.”

“Not anymore.”

“You worked with Nolan? What, on your first job? What’d he want to screw around with a goddamn kid like you for? No offense.”

“Because big-deal pros like you wouldn’t come near him. No offense. That Family trouble, remember?”

The guy was convinced. He said, “My name is Breen,” and held out his hand, which Jon shook; for a guy just shot, Breen had a hell of a grip. “An old whoremonger named Sam Comfort and his pothead kid Billy just pulled a double-cross, with me on the shitty end of the stick. I wouldn’t be talking about it right now if the senile old fart hadn’t been half crocked when he started shooting.”

Jon had never heard of the Comforts. He said so.

“Well, you’re lucky. They aren’t a family, they’re a social disease.” He sat up again, quickly. “Hell! Listen, you better move my car. I left it outside, and the Comforts know about Planner and might figure I came here. You got a gun? I don’t carry one, goddamn it, or I might’ve stayed there and shot it out with the fuckheads. But you better get a gun and go out there and move that goddamn car of mine, the windshield’s shot to shit, and if nothing else, you don’t want some cop spotting it and asking questions.”

“Okay,” Jon said.

“Do you have a gun, kid?”

“I got a couple.”

“Maybe I ought to back you up. Maybe you ought to help me out of this bed, and I’ll stand at the window or something and back you up...”

“Look. Lean back and shut up. For a guy just got shot, you’re sure lively. If you don’t talk yourself to death, you’ll do it to me.”

“Say,” Breen said. “You do know Nolan, don’t you?”

Jon grinned, told the guy to shut up and rest, and left him.

Back upstairs, Jon stuck one of his uncle’s .32 automatics in his waistband, threw on a wind-breaker, and went down to move the car. First he drove his own car, an old Chevy II he’d had for some time, out of the garage in the rear and re-placed it with Breen’s Mustang. Then he shut the garage door and pulled the nose of the Chevy II up just close to touching. The door had no windows, and the way the garage was built into the shop’s back end, it had windows on the left side only, and those were opaque and grilled, with no way for anyone to see whether or not the Mustang was in there, short of breaking in. Not that breaking in didn’t sound like something the Comforts were easily capable of.

He was just inside the door when light came shooting through one of the side windows in the shop, the lights from the front beams of a car pulling in. The Comforts had come calling. He took the windbreaker off and stuck the .32 in his belt behind his back, leaving right hand on hip for easy access.

The knock came soon enough, and Jon sucked in wind. He told himself to be calm, damn it, calm, and wondered if once, just once, he could pull off something without Nolan holding his hand. There was a night latch on the door, which Jon left bolted, cracking open the door to stare into a gray-eyed, wrinkled old face that had to belong to Sam Comfort. It was the sort of face that looked kind, superficially, but actually was full of the smile-lines that come from a sadistic sense of humor. Sixty-some years ago, you would’ve found this man a child, pulling the wings off butterflies.

“Who the hell are you?” Sam Comfort asked.

Jon was getting tired of that question. On top of his case of nerves, it was especially irritating, and he moved his right hand further back on his hip, closer to the .32, rubbing the sweat off his palm as he did. He said, “It’s after midnight, mister. We’re closed.”

Comfort’s boozy breath was overpowering, but the gray eyes were not unclear; he was the type of man who could drink you under the table and not feel it himself.

He said, “I’m not a customer.”

‘That makes us even,” Jon said, “because I’m not selling anything.”

“I’m an old friend of Planner’s.”

“I don’t care what you are,” Jon said, and started to close the door.

Thick, strong fingers curled around the door’s edge and held it open. “I said I’m a friend of Planner’s. Tell him an old friend’s here to see him.”

“Let go of the door.”

Comfort did, tentatively.

Jon said, “My uncle — Planner — is dead.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Sorry. I hadn’t heard. How did it happen, boy?”

“Heart attack.” Which was what the death certificate had said, anyway, and an expensive damn piece of paper that was, too.

“And you’re his nephew, then? Taking over the business, are you?”

“No. I got no interest in antiques, and I’m going to sell all the stock at once, soon as a good buyer turns up, and will you please get out of here and let me get some sleep?”

The gray eyes narrowed, then eased up. “Well, I’m sorry to see you so hostile to an old friend of your uncle’s, and I’m sorry to hear the news about his untimely end. Please accept my condolences.”

“Sure. Sorry if I was short.”

“Understandable. Say, what you keep in that garage of yours?”

“If it was a garage, I’d keep my car in it. But it isn’t, it’s a storeroom. Good night.”

And he pushed the door shut and locked it, and stepped to one side in case any bullets should come flying through. Several heartbeats later, he crept to the side window and looked out to see the old man join a long-haired kid, leaning up against their Buick Electra. They shared a few moments of heated conversation, most of the heat coming from the old man, as the kid was a spacey type. Then both men shrugged. The old man got behind the wheel, the kid next to him, and they drove away.

When he rejoined Breen, the man was asleep and snoring. Jon was at first relieved that he wouldn’t have to listen to any more of the talkative man’s ramblings, but then he thought better of it, shook the guy awake, and told him about the brush with the Comforts.

“You’re okay, kid,” Breen said, grinning. “You handled old Sam beautiful, sounds like.”

“Why don’t you show your gratitude,” Jon said, “by telling me what all this is about.”

Breen did. He told Jon he’d been working a month of parking meter heists (“Small potatoes, kid, but over the long haul, she adds up!”); told him old man Comfort had over a hundred and fifty gees, cash, from several such runs of meter heisting in the area, and had tried to kill Breen less than an hour earlier, to avoid paying Breen’s $12,000 share.

“Listen,” Jon said. “I’m going to call Nolan. I think maybe he’ll have some ideas concerning the Comforts.”

Breen thought that was fine.

Jon went out to the phone that sat on the long counter behind which Planner had constantly sat puffing expensive cigars. Jon sat on the counter, dialing the phone, thinking of his uncle’s violent death, wondering if he was being a fool to follow in those bloody footsteps. But he forgot that when he heard Nolan’s, “Yeah?”

“Nolan? You got to come here, right away.”

“What’s the problem, kid?” Nolan’s voice was calm, but Jon seemed to detect a note of enthusiasm in it.

“You know a guy named Breen?”

“I do.”

Jon filled Nolan in on what had happened to Breen, and how he’d come bleeding up to Jon’s doorstep.

“What about a doctor?”

“I bandaged him up, Nolan. He’ll last okay. Maybe tomorrow we can get Doc Ainsworth in for a look at him. So far, I been more concerned about the Comforts than anything.”

“Rightly so. And you were right not bringing in a doctor, because the Comforts might be watching. You locked the doors, of course? And moved Breen’s car?”

“Of course. And the Comforts have already come around once.” He’d held that back to shock Nolan with — saved it for effect.

But he should have known better with Nolan, who just said an emotionless, “Well?”

And Jon told him about the run-in with Sam Comfort.

“You’re doing better all the time, kid. In fact, what do you need me for there? You got things under control.”

“Well, for one thing, these damn Comforts got me sweating. They’re unpredictable, judging from what Breen says, and from what I saw of them.”

“Did you fool old Sam, you think?”

“I got an idea what was going on in that head. He could come barging in with a gun right now and I wouldn’t be surprised. You know the Comforts pretty well, Nolan?”

“I worked a job with that crusty old son of a bitch, years ago. He didn’t cross me, because I didn’t give him the opening. But if my back had been to him, he’d have put the knife in, no doubt about it. Breen was stupid to work with him in the first place. Everybody knows Sam is as crazy as he is unreliable.”

“Well, Nolan, what do you think?”

“I’ll come, yeah.”

“It’s not that I need help, exactly...”

“I know, kid. You just like having me around.”

“That’s part of it.”

“And that hundred and fifty thousand of Comfort’s is another.”

“Right.”

“We’re about due, Jon. Maybe we can help my old buddy Breen and do ourselves a favor, too.”

Jon grinned into the phone. “Right.”