Spree

9

The mall was decorated for Christmas. At every entrance, including the one in back where Jon came in, a wreath-ringed red placard greeted customers, like a yuletide stop sign; it sat on a treelike post growing from a Styrofoam-snow base, saying, in a white Dickensian cursive, Our Merry Best — Brady for the ’80s. Considering the lettering style, Jon thought, maybe that was the 1880s. Muzak dreamed of a White Christmas from unseen speakers above, as if God were Mantovani. Red and green banners hung from the ceiling, rows of them extending the width of the aisle, every six feet or so, swaying ever so slightly, looking more like grotesquely oversize military ribbons than anything having to do with Christmas. Or so thought Jon, anyway, who was in a very bah-humbug mood.

It was Monday afternoon, a few minutes after two. He had just come from the post office in downtown Davenport, where he express-mailed a package containing the original art for Space Pirates, issue #5, to his publisher in California. Normally that would have put him in a relaxed state of mind — knowing he had another issue behind him, thinking that a month sounded like plenty of time, a luxurious amount of time, to write and draw another twenty-two pages of outer-space comic-book whimsy. It wasn’t, of course, but he liked to spend a day or two pretending it was, getting a leisurely start on the scripting of the next issue, picking up speed so that by week’s end he’d be ready to start drawing.

This week wouldn’t quite work that way.

For one thing, he was in no frame of mind to think up funny stuff — and for another, his time wouldn’t be his own for a while, not till Friday, and chances were Friday wouldn’t find his frame of mind any more conducive to thinking up funny stuff than it was today.

This week was spoken for; his time was taken up.

He had a mall to help heist.

This mall he was strolling through right now, Casual Corner, Radio Shack, Mrs. Field’s Cookies, Kroch & Brentano’s, Barb’s Hallmark, weaving through the swarm of seasonal shoppers, in and out and around the mock rustic carts perched periodically in the middle of the wide mall aisle, cute carts filled with Christmas knick- knacks, quilted Christmas stockings and little wooden reindeer and lots and lots of candles, seasonal shops on wheels overseen by teenage girls dressed as elves. In the central area of the mall, where the ceiling rose an extra half story to a mirrored height, tiny twinkling white Christmas tree lights, arranged in circular chandeliers, hovered like plastic ghosts; a white picket fence decorated with gay red bows surrounded Santa’s cotton-covered slope, in the midst of which steps rose to the Christmas occasion. The fat man in red and white sat on a red and white throne with an eight-year-old girl in his lap; you can be arrested for that in some states, Jon thought. Teenage girl elves atop the slope were charging four bucks per Polaroid with Santa. Maybe stealing was in season.

Ho ho ho.

Christmas was Jon’s favorite holiday, favorite time of year, for that matter; usually the commercialism didn’t get him down, it was just part of the Christmas package — only this year he felt cynical and angry, because Nolan’s Sherry was in the hands of that crazy murderous son of bitch Comfort. Maybe she was dead already.

He had thought he’d left this behind him. He had thought those days, with Nolan, were over. He liked Nolan. He respected him, and supposed he felt something like affection for the guy, though you’d have to take Jon’s toenails out with pliers to get him to admit it.

But those days with Nolan seemed a nightmare to him now. A vivid nightmare, easily recalled, but nothing he wanted to dream again. He had seen people die, violently; he had done violence himself. He had felt no exhilaration during the handful of heists Nolan had taken him on — only nausea and cold, clammy fear.

Already, he had the butterflies; like he always had before a performance. The trouble was, the resemblance between rock ’n’ roll and heisting ended there: once on stage, music all around him, the butterflies flew; on a heist, impending violence around him, the butterflies grew.

How did he ever get mixed up with a guy like Nolan? He had his criminal uncle to thank for that; thanks, Unc. RIP. Merry Christmas.

He turned left at Santa’s Kingdom and walked down a wide short corridor where, near the front entrance and separated by another Our Merry Best stop sign and a fenced-in patch of cotton snow with electronic big-eyed smiling-face rosy-cheeked puppets riding a sleigh, was the First National Bank branch, on the right, and at left, Nolan’s. The restaurant wasn’t open yet, but Nolan was waiting there for Jon. When Jon raised his fist to knock, in fact, Nolan’s face appeared in the glass door and he opened it up.

Jon stepped inside, glanced around the place. This room (one of two, not counting the kitchen) seemed to be largely a bar, and there was a nice parquet dance floor, room for a band to play, if some tables were moved out. The walls were busy with nostalgic bric-a-brac and lots of yuppie-ish hanging and potted plants; it wasn’t much like Jon pictured a place called Nolan’s would look. Sherry’s touch, he supposed.

“Nice place,” Jon said.

“It’s a living,” Nolan said. He was wearing a pale blue dress shirt and black slacks; no tie or jacket. He pointed to a nearby table, and they sat.

“You want a beer or something?” Nolan asked.

“No.”

“Did you take a look around?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think?”

Jon gestured with two cupped hands, as if grabbing the balls of a giant. “I think this is nuts. Heisting a goddamn shopping center? It’s looney! Why not Fort Knox, other than Goldfinger already tried it. And, shit, man, Comfort’s crazy. As a fucking bedbug.”

Nolan moved his head to one side, slightly; that was his shrug. “You’re right and you’re wrong. Right about Comfort. Wrong about the mall heist.”

Jon looked at Nolan carefully; the lighting was dim, and Nolan seemed even harder to see than usual. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I don’t kid, kid.”

Jon smirked. “Really? I seem to recall a few thousand sarcastic remarks directed in my general vicinity.”

“Sacking this place can be done,” Nolan said. “It’s nagged at me ever since I took space here, how easy it would be.”

“Nolan, this place is fucking huge. And now this alternate-universe Jed Clampett wants to pull a couple of trucks up to the back door and go shopping? A couple days from now? And you think that’s a good idea?”

Nolan folded his hands on the table and looked at them. “It doesn’t matter what I think; it’s Comfort’s party. But the job is workable. It’s also nothing I want any part of. It endangers the life I got going here.”

Jon sat forward. “You mean, you figure an investigation after the robbery might be serious enough that somebody could uncover your checkered past?”

“Investigation is hardly the word. And neither is robbery. There are fifty shops in Brady Eighty. Two of them are jewelry stores. Plus three major department stores — Petersen’s, J. C. Penney and I. Magnin. There’s also a bank.”

Jon shrugged. “Sure there’s a bank, but there’s no way to get in the vault. They’re sure to have a big mother with a time lock. Right?”

“Right. But they got two night deposit safes, and an instant-cash machine. That’s three safes — modest-size ones. You know what they got in in ’em?

“No idea.”

“I’d say, twenty grand in the instant-cash machine. And as for the night deposits, you were out in that mall. You saw the kind of business they’re doing.”

“It’s crowded, all right.”

“It’s December. The month that makes the rest of the year possible, for businesses. There could easily be fifty grand in night deposit money — not less than twenty-five.”

Jon shrugged again. “So there’s serious money, in this. But there’s also a ten-man string. Assuming Comfort won’t pay the two of us, that still leaves eight, which is a lot of ways to split the take.”

Nolan got up. He paced slowly beside the table. That bothered Jon; Nolan wasn’t the pacing type.

“I don’t want to go into it in detail right now,” Nolan said, still pacing, “but I figure this for a half-mil haul, conservatively, after goods are fenced.”

This time Jon didn’t shrug. “So if this goes down, it’s going to be major. Major media coverage; serious cop action.”

“Yes. My being the inside man on the heist could well come out. So could my ‘checkered past.’”

Jon was nodding. “The bank robbery will bring in the feds; state and local police will enter the other robberies; the department stores will have insurance investigators on the case...”

Nolan stopped pacing, looked around him. “I could lose everything.”

“Is this place what’s important to you?” Jon said, disgustedly. “What about Sherry?”

Nolan looked at the floor. “I said I could lose everything.”

Jon sighed. “I’m sorry. I know she’s what’s important in this.”

“She’s more important to Comfort than she is to us.”

“How so?”

“She’s what’s keeping him alive.” Nolan checked his watch. “Come on. I’m having coffee with a guy at two-thirty. I want you to meet him.”

They turned right at Santa’s Kingdom toward the Walgreen’s, half of which was drugstore, the other half cafe, whose outer wall was lined with booths looking out on the mall. Jon followed Nolan into the café, where they joined a ruddy-cheeked balding blond man of about twenty-five, who wore an expensive-looking gray suit and a red-and-green-striped tie; the gray coat was supposed to say executive, and the tie was supposed to say Christmas, or so Jon assumed. The guy wanted it both ways: authority figure and nice, regular guy.

“Nolan,” he said, putting down the coffee cup he was sipping from, half rising, extending a hand to shake. “Good to see you.”

“How are you, Stan? Stan, this is Jon Ross. He’s an old friend of mine.”

Stan half rose, grinning, extended a hand to Jon and they shook; too firm a grip, Jon thought, an overcompensating grip.

“Old friend?” Stan said. “He’s as young as I am.”

“We’re none of us getting any younger, Stan,” Nolan said, smiling faintly. “Jon’s the nephew of a friend of mine. Late friend. Neither of us have much family, so we like to spend Christmas together.”

“Right,” Jon said, smiling blandly at the guy, thinking, gee, Nolan, what a crock of shit.

Nolan gestured toward Stan and said, “Stan Jenson is our new mall manager.”

“Well, six months new,” Stan said, embarrassed, as if Nolan had been praising him effusively, as if “mall manager” were a designation on a par with “ambassador” or “astronaut.”

“He’s the guy who thought up that ‘Our Merry Best’ slogan,” Nolan said to Jon, deadpan.

“Really,” Jon said.

“No big deal,” Stan said, waving it off, as if Jon had said “Wow.”

“Snappy,” Nolan said, nodding.

“The advertising firm said they couldn’t have done it better,” Stan admitted, with a modest little shrug.

A waitress came and Nolan, who hadn’t had lunch yet, ordered the chicken fried steak. Jon, who hadn’t had lunch yet either, was still in no mood to eat; he ordered a Coke.

“Stan,” Nolan said, “I appreciate you getting together with me. I missed last month’s Mall Merchant Association meeting.”

“I know,” Stan said, smiling, “and we met at your restaurant!” He was grinning, as if he’d pointed out the biggest irony of them all. This guy was harmless, Jon thought, but a jerk. If a jerk can ever be harmless.

Nolan said, “What I wanted to talk to you about was mall security.”

Jon squirmed in his seat.

Stan put on an exaggerated “oh no” look, shook his head. “Not that again. Are you singing the same old song, Nolan?”

“I think security here is lax, Stan.”

Stan’s expression turned somber. “Nolan, I appreciate your concern. And as a merchant yourself you have every right to voice your opinion. But I wish you wouldn’t denigrate our fine staff.”

“I’m not denigrating anybody. On the other hand, I didn’t want to embarrass anybody, either. That’s why I wanted to talk to you, one on one. Not at a meeting.”

Stan nodded, appreciating that.

“Virtually every store out here, including the bank, is tied into the same security system,” Nolan said.

“A-1 Security,” Stan said, smiling tightly, nodding some more.

“They’re a good outfit. But did you ever stop to think that all of our alarms are carried on one phone line? All it would take is for a thief to snip that one phone line and he could have carte blanche.”

Stan smiled wide now, shaking his head, waving a hand as if to quiet a child. “That’s not the way alarm systems work, Nolan — if the wires are cut, the alarms are activated — at both the A-1 office and the police department.”

“It’s possible to jump the alarm, Stan.”

“Jump the alarm? You mean, cross the wires to bypass the alarm?”

“Yes.”

“Wrong again, Nolan. This just isn’t your area.”

“How am I wrong?”

“Well, this is going to get a little technical. But bear with me.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“A-1 tells me that if their alarm is jumped, the ‘pulse rate’ of the current flowing through it will set off the alarm.”

The waitress put Nolan’s chicken fried steak platter down in front of him; it included a generous portion of mashed potatoes with brown gravy, and Jon, whose Coke she also delivered, thought it was no wonder Nolan was getting a belly on him.

“Well, that’s reassuring,” Nolan said, cutting a bite of meat. “But I’d like to put another alarm system in, at the restaurant — not just a silent one, connected to A-1, but something nice and loud.”

Stan lectured with a pointing finger, friendly but firm. “Check your lease. We don’t allow any audible alarm systems.”

Jon couldn’t stay out any longer. He said, “Why not?”

Smiling, Stan looked at Jon patronizingly. “It’s been our experience, in our other malls, that when such alarms go off during business hours, by accident, as they sometimes do, it can be very unnerving, alarming, if you will, to the shoppers.” He stopped to chuckle at “alarming.”

“With our location, on the edge of the city, with so little else around, who would hear such an alarm after hours, except the burglar himself, who would beat a hasty retreat? A silent alarm, on the other hand, which A-1 assures us that it can react on within minutes, will keep the burglar there and unaware.”

“What’s wrong,” Jon asked, “with scaring him away before he has time to take anything or do much damage?”

Stan shrugged matter-of-factly. “What’s wrong with capturing him? The five minutes it would take A-1 to dispatch a car, not to mention the police who may well be there just as soon, isn’t that big a deal.”

“Okay,” Nolan said, his chicken fried steak eaten, just starting his potatoes, “you’ve convinced me. But one thing you will never convince me on...”

Stan laughed softly, shaking his head in friendly frustration. “You still think we should have a security man on duty twenty-four hours a day.”

Nolan nodded, swallowed a bite, said, “I think you should hire four more men, and two should stay on night shift. Patrolling inside and out.”

“That’s simply not necessary. The corporation has malls all over the Midwest, and security measures in those malls are exactly like those here. When was the last time you heard of a robbery at a mall?”

“Hell,” Nolan said, grinning, which was something Jon had rarely seen, “maybe I’m just paranoid.”

“Well,” Stan said, finishing his coffee, “at least you didn’t suggest our security guard be armed, for pity’s sake, like you did at that one merchants’ meeting.”

“I just suggested that for after hours,” Nolan said. “And by the way, that kid you have on the job just doesn’t have the experience.”

“He was an M.P. in the service.”

“You should hire some retired ex-cop to work with him.”

“How is some paunchy old guy going to do going up against the young punks who cause problems in a modern mall?”

Nolan pushed his clean plate away from him. “If you had a young guy plus an old pro, you might come up with a winning combination.”

“It would never work,” Stan said. He glanced at his watch. “Got to run. Have a meeting with the marketing director at three.” He got up and out of the booth, shook Nolan’s hand, thanked him for his concern, shook Jon’s, smiled, said it was nice meeting him, left.

“Jesus,” Jon said.

“His father is vice-president in charge of personnel for the home office, by the way. Not that security would be any better around here if somebody competent were in his job.”

“No armed guard at night?” Jon said, dumbfounded.

“No guard at all, after ten P.M. One maintenance man, who’s a woman, who mops and does windows. Who could Windex a ‘burglar,’ if she ran into one, I guess.”

“What about that ‘pulse rate’ business?”

“He’s right, but it can be got around.”

“Are you saying this is going to be easy?”

“No. There are plenty of problems. But problems can be solved. That’s what our business is about.”

“Are we back in that business?”

“Yeah. Just in time for Christmas, too. Come on. Let’s walk.”

They walked the mall, tinsel and plastic greenery all around them. Hickory Farms. Record Bar. Ann Taylor.

“Comfort called this morning,” Nolan said.

“Yeah?”

“He told me some of the people he has lined up. I know two of them. Pete-man named Roger Winch, who usually works with a locksmith named Phil Dooley — Comfort didn’t mention Dooley’s name, though, and I didn’t ask if he was a player; and an electronics guy name of Dave Fisher. Good people. That may make the difference for us.”

“Well, good.”

“I told Comfort that getting Sherry back wasn’t enough. That I had to be in for a full share. And you, too.”

“Well... uh, why did you do that?”

“I want him to think I buy into the notion that all he wants out of this is my help on the heist.”

“And you don’t?”

“Of course not. I’m convinced Comfort intends to keep Sherry alive only till after the job goes down. You see, I told him I wouldn’t play unless I talked to Sherry on the phone right before the heist happens. That keeps her alive till Thursday, anyway.”

“Damn.”

“We’re going to try to find her, Jon.”

“I figured as much.”

“Because once we’ve helped Comfort, he’ll kill her. And me.”

“Don’t say it.”

“And you.”

“I asked you not to say it.” Muzak played “Jingle Bells.” Jingle all the way.

10

Andy Fieldhaus, forty-five years old, five ten, balding, slightly overweight, wearing a leather bomber jacket under which was a pale pink shirt with a leather tie, co-owner and manager of the Haus of Leather at the Brady Eighty mall, was enjoying the happiest — and most frightening — days of an existence that (save for his glory years as a high school quarterback of some local renown) had largely been a disappointment.

What made his days happy was his girlfriend Heather.

What made them frightening was his wife Caroline.

Heather was twenty-two years old, and his assistant manager at the Haus of Leather. Heather had a lot of frosted brunette hair and large breasts and a small waist and nice hips and a good head on her shoulders, in every sense of the word: a good head containing an above-average brain; a good head on the front of which was a pretty face consisting of big green eyes and a small nose and a small mouth with small very white teeth that made for an enchanting, childlike smile; and, last but not least, a good head capable of giving good head. Very good head.

She had been a cheerleader in high school, and in junior college too, before she had dropped out to get married to a basketball hero. She had divorced her fading-jock husband, who had turned to drinking when he got laid off at John Deere, at which time he began beating her. They’d had one child, before she dumped him, a sweet little girl named Tara, who was now two.

Andy liked the little girl. It reminded him of when his two girls were small; he liked the energy of little kids, how unquestioningly loving they could be. Heather was young enough herself to take him back, to make him feel young again. He hated being forty-five years old, but if he had to be forty-five years old, let him be forty-five years old with a shapely, sexy young girlfriend.

Caroline, who had once been a shapely brunette with large breasts herself, was simply large now. Oh, Andy knew he wasn’t perfect himself — while he still possessed his square-jawed ail- American good looks, he also carried the usual middle-aged spare tire, and his hair was thinning. But ever since her first pregnancy, so many years ago, Caroline had really let herself go; eating was her only hobby — eating and soap operas. Her idea of a good time was an evening in front of the TV with a box of caramel corn in her lap. He no longer loved this woman. He didn’t hate her. He just didn’t feel anything much toward her at all, except repulsion during sex.

He would have left her five years ago if the inheritance from her grandfather hadn’t gone into the Haus of Leather. She was co-owner of the store, though she rarely set foot in the place, and a divorce settlement would be ungodly expensive. She might even end up with the store itself; or so had said the attorney friend he’d quizzed on the q.t.

Once a week, Saturday night usually, they would make love. Making love to this obese woman, who had once been so lovely (though the image of that version of her was fading in his mind), was a nauseating chore. But when she clung to him in the darkness, the voice was the voice that went with the not completely faded image of a lovely shapely twenty-year-old he’d married a lifetime ago, and he felt a pang of something — guilt, remorse, longing, something.

The joy he felt in Heather’s arms, however, overwhelmed such pangs. What they did not overwhelm was his fear — the fear that Caroline would find out that the long hours he put in with the store were frequently not at the store, but at Heather’s apartment, the other employees covering for him if she called; that he was invariably accompanied by his pulchritudinous assistant manager on his various buying trips and, of course, the annual leather convention in Fort Worth; that on those evenings when he was doing inventory and working on the books at the store itself, he spent most of his time in the office in the back room, with Heather, where they were frequently on his couch, which oddly enough was covered in vinyl.

Vinyl was fine with him. Leather meant nothing to him except customers. The smell of leather in the shop, overpowering as it was to the customers, was something he’d long since stopped noticing, his sense of smell dulled to it. And he’d never been into leather, sexually speaking, though he did turn a pretty penny on the side special-ordering bizarre leather goods, for some of the straightest-looking customers.

You never knew about people. Andy figured he was no different than anybody else: he had secrets; he wasn’t as straight as he looked. Heather was his secret, or anyway the reason for all his secrets. She was no dummy, Heather. It had been her idea to keep the money for the sexually oriented leather goods “off the books,” to deal only in cash where that stuff was concerned; and from there he began to play other tricks with the books.

Brady Eighty was a prosperous mall, and the Haus of Leather was the only store of its kind in the entire area — and its goods were top-quality and expensive, leather pants and jackets and boots for men and women both, and every accessory you could imagine. None of that western shit, either; class all the way.

The Haus of Leather was making a killing, in fact — but Andy was watering that fact down in the books. Heather helped him do it. She had accounting in junior college.

The idea was not just to salt money away. The idea was to make the business look less prosperous than it was, so that when the time came, Caroline’s divorce settlement wouldn’t amount to so much. And so that Andy might end up with the business, which could then openly prosper.

It wasn’t stealing. You can’t steal from yourself, and this was his business. What did Caroline do but sit on her fat ass, munchies in her lap, watching daytime soaps till the nighttime soaps came on?

His girls, Tabatha and Tammy, were both in college; sweet-looking girls, who had taken after their mother, but fortunately had not yet shown signs of her tendency to run to fat. Trust funds set up, from the grandfather’s estate, were bankrolling the girls’ schooling, so his responsibility to them, God love them, was met. He hoped they would understand when he started his new life with Heather. He supposed it was too much to ask that they ever accept Heather as their stepmother, when she was only two and three years older than they were, respectively.

He’d had an affair once before — early in the marriage; during Caroline’s first pregnancy. She had found out about the girl — a little blond high school student, a senior (legal age — he was no pervert), who was a frequent customer at the gas station where he was working at the time — and Caroline had been enraged. The memory of the seven months’ pregnant Caroline lumbering after him around the trailer with a carving knife in hand was etched in his mind, like the place on his shoulder where she’d cut him. That’s when he stopped loving her, he thought; the night she made him beg for his life. He’d sworn fidelity (and who wouldn’t, facing an enraged pregnant woman with a carving knife) but it had never been the same after that. They had stopped communicating, and she started eating. Well, no — they had made something of a comeback, resulting in the second girl; the parental experience had drawn them back together. He liked little kids. He was a good dad.

He was a good businessman, too, now that the Haus of Leather had given him a chance to prove it. After high school, it had all been downhill; he’d gone to Augustana on a football scholarship — he couldn’t make it at a bigger school, despite his record, because of his size — and by the second year he’d been dropped from the team and lost his scholarship and flunked out soon after. He’d worked a lot of jobs — blue-collar and white-collar both, and starting fifteen years ago had a little success in real estate till the economy went to shit and the market got glutted with houses; and then finally he got a break: Caroline’s grandfather died.

Caroline was one of three grandchildren — some money was left to the two surviving children, too, but that didn’t include Caroline’s father, who died of the Asian flu back in the fifties; the grandchildren pooled together and sold the farmland they’d inherited; so she ended up with a chunk of money. One thing in Caroline’s favor was she had never considered Andy a loser, as some people did; she believed he could make a go of it.

They had bought the Leathery, as the shop was then called, for a song — Andy had heard through his real estate buddies that there was a good chance the Brady Street Shopping Center would be bought up, by a Chicago firm, and refurbished into an enclosed mall. Andy knew they’d have to honor his lease or buy him out of it, which was his initial plan; but, doing some checking with his real estate contacts, he finally decided to stay a part of what would become Brady Eighty. Which had become the hottest mall in the Cities, overnight, and his Haus of Leather one of the most profitable shops in the mall.

Just don’t tell his wife or the IRS that.

Anyway, tonight Andy was tooling his year-old dark blue Corvette (Caroline never rode in it — she couldn’t; it was the station wagon for her) across the bridge at Moline, on his way to Nolan’s house. There was a poker game tonight. They usually got together once a month on a Sunday night, early in the month, but for once, last minute, Nolan set it up for a Monday. Unusual, but the other guys were making it, so he better, too.

He had left the store a little after 8:00 P.M., shrugging and looking glumly frustrated as he turned the till over to Heather. No time even for a quick blowjob in back of the store. If Nolan hadn’t got a bug up his butt to have their poker game tonight, he and Heather would’ve had at the very least a rendezvous on the couch in his office. Maybe even a run to her apartment, in Rock Island.

But he never missed poker with the guys, and he didn’t want anyone — including them — to suspect his secret life, so here he was, pulling into Nolan’s driveway, behind DeReuss’ Lincoln Continental, that lucky Dutch bastard. Where did his money come from?

Harris’ Toyota was in the drive as well, and Levine’s Caddy. He wondered if the game had started without him; he wondered if Nolan had won all the money yet.

Nolan didn’t always win; he just usually won. The hell of it was, he played so conservatively. Took so few risks. Played the odds, and embraced winning streaks, and backed off losing streaks. Nolan was a winner, sure, but he lacked imagination. Whereas Andy liked to win big, and he didn’t mind losing big nine out of ten times to win big once. Playing it conservative was dull.

Like Nolan himself. Nice enough guy, but really dull.

He rang the bell, and Nolan answered, sleeves of his pale blue shirt rolled up. The game was already on.

“Any money left for me?” Andy asked him.

“Some,” Nolan said. “Come on in.”

Andy stepped inside. “Where’s your lovely lady?”

“Away,” Nolan said, as if that explained it.

“Well, I’ll miss her charming presence. She has so much more personality than you, Nolan.” But then so did a doghouse.

“Figured with her away,” Nolan said, taking Andy’s leather bomber jacket, hanging it in the closet, “it’d be a good time for us to get together for some cards.”

“You know me,” Andy said. “Always ready for a friendly game.” He followed his host into the spacious living room, where a round table was set up over by the wall of picture windows looking out on the backyard and trees, a view reflections obscured; the living room walls were devoid of pictures or decoration of any kind — a room with no personality, Andy felt, like Nolan himself.

DeReuss, Levine and Harris were sitting at the table playing, Nolan having folded when he went to answer the door. They were playing dealer’s choice, and the game — Levine’s choice — was seven-card stud. The chips were fairly evenly distributed, except Nolan’s piles were a little higher. Stakes were quarter for whites, fifty cents for reds, buck for blues.

Andy sat to the right of DeReuss and, when the hand was over, bought in.

DeReuss was a solemn man of about fifty-five with lots of lines in his face, especially around his pinched mouth, and thinning dark blond hair, combed back severely. His eyes were china blue behind designer wire-rim glasses. He kept his narrow dark tie snugged up to his collar, but his sharkskin suit coat was slung over his chair, as he studied the cards (five-card draw, his deal) like a blueprint. He looked German. Maybe that was where the money came from for his jewelry store, Andy thought; Nazi parents.

To DeReuss’ left was Levine, the Toys ’R’ Us guy, a small dark man with a ready smile and a good sense of humor; he wore a gray turtleneck sweater and looked a little like a turtle, in fact. Like Andy, he took risks playing, but only at first; as he started to win, or lose, Levine got almost as conservative as Nolan.

To Levine’s left was Harris, the owner/manager of the Dunkin’ Donuts near the mall, a heavyset guy with dark hair and a mustache and a doughy complexion; he wore a University of Iowa sweatshirt. Nice guy, but quiet. Not as quiet as Nolan, but quiet.

Andy was the most gregarious of the lot, but Levine was no wallflower, and enough beers into the evening and Harris would turn talkative, and even DeReuss would open up. Not Nolan, though. Andy never ever saw him drink enough to get really loose.

What made a guy like that tick? As Nolan dealt a hand of Black Maria — seven-card stud with high spade down splitting the pot with the poker-hand winner — Andy studied the man, wondering how anybody could be so goddamn straight. It was all business with this guy. He didn’t smoke. He barely drank. The only kink at all was this dish he lived with, Sherry, who wasn’t that much older than Heather, really; so the guy at least liked to get his ashes hauled. But if the subject turned to women, Nolan never had much to say; Andy kidded him now and then, called him pussy whipped and Nolan would just smile, barely, and that would be the end of it.

“So where’s Sherry?” Andy said, dealing five-card draw, jacks or better to open, progressive.

“Visiting a friend.” Nolan never looked at his cards till they’d all been dealt. That drove Andy a little crazy, too.

“She’s a pretty lady.”

“Yes she is,” Nolan said.

“You going to marry her, or what?”

DeReuss glanced up from his cards, sharply; evidently he found Andy’s question to Nolan rude. Tough shit.

“Maybe,” Nolan said, then turned to DeReuss. “Know where I can get a diamond?”

“I think so,” DeReuss said, with a faint dry smile. “Fifteen percent discount.”

“When the time comes, I know where you can get your toys at a twenty percent discount,” Levine grinned, adding, “I can open — bet a blue one.”

An hour later, while he was shuffling the cards, Nolan said, “I talked to our mall manager today.”

“That pinhead,” Andy said.

“He’s not so bad,” Levine said.

“He’s a child,” said DeReuss.

“I got on him about mall security again,” Nolan said. “I don’t suppose I could get any of you guys to line up with me.”

“You think it’s that big a problem?” DeReuss asked. His accent was faint, but there.

“Yeah. Our security sucks. We should do something about it. One unarmed inexperienced kid who goes home at ten.”

Harris said, “This cold weather, you’re not even getting the cops patrolling much.”

“How do you know?” Andy asked, somewhat irritably. This line of conversation bored him. “You’re not even in the mall.”

Nolan began dealing Black Maria.

Harris shrugged. “The cops always stop for coffee and doughnuts, my girls tell me. Once around midnight, and again around four. Then they make a run around the mall.”

“Every night?” Nolan asked.

Harris swigged some Coors. “Not at all, since this cold weather and snow; they haven’t eaten a doughnut in a month. They just don’t get out that far. There’s nothing else for them to patrol out so close to the Interstate, no housing developments, so few other businesses. I don’t like it. I’m easy prey for stickup guys, dope addict crazies; I like having the cops drop by for doughnuts.”

“Well, at the mall we’re tied into A-1,” Andy said, hoping to close out the subject. “They patrol.”

“No,” DeReuss said, shaking his head. “They did, for a time. But they wanted more money to continue it. The Mall Merchant Association voted it down.”

“A mistake,” Nolan said. “Ante up, gentlemen.”

An hour later, Nolan brought the dull subject up again; Andy couldn’t believe this guy.

“You have a lot to lose,” he said to DeReuss. “All your diamonds and such.”

DeReuss, who was shuffling, shrugged facially. “Our inventory is considerable, yes.”

“I can imagine.” He began dealing Black Maria. “How much?”

“Approaching three hundred in jewels and merchandise,” he said, adding, “Thousand,” to clarify three hundred what.

Jesus, Andy thought, and I thought I was in a lucrative line.

“The other jewelry store carries somewhat less,” DeReuss added, faintly regal.

Nolan smirked darkly. “And you’re protected, if you call it that, by an alarm on one easy-to-snip phone line.”

DeReuss looked at his hole cards. He smiled on one side of his face; whether it had to do with his cards or the subject at hand, Andy couldn’t tell. “I have my own security measures.”

“Oh?”

“Tear gas. Anyone opens my vault, he’ll cry all the way — and not to the bank.”

“Good idea,” Nolan said. “But I’d still appreciate your support at the next meeting.”

“What,” Andy said, “are you running for office?”

“I just think we need an armed guard on duty, twenty-four hours a day. Preferably two guards.”

God, this guy was a stick in the mud.

“Let’s play cards,” Andy said. “Fuck business.”

DeReuss said to Andy, “How’s your assistant manager working out? What’s her name?”

“Heather. Fine. I’ll open for a buck.”

DeReuss looked at his hole cards again, smiled privately. Did the Dutchman suspect about him and Heather? Andy hoped to hell not; he’d tried so hard to be careful. He wished he were with her. He was losing heavily tonight. Twenty bucks in the hole, only three hours into the game.

The game broke up around one-thirty. Nolan had cleaned up. On the last hand, which he dealt, a hand of Black Maria, he’d had the ace of spades in the hole and won the poker hand as well; it was a big pot, biggest of the night. He seemed embarrassed about it, as he was showing them out.

“For the big winner,” DeReuss said, smiling just a little, “you seem less than overjoyed.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Levine said to Nolan, grinning, ”’cause nobody I know loves the green stuff more than you.”

“Next time I’ll let you pay for your goddamn doughnuts,” Harris said, good-naturedly.

“Hey, you won,” Andy said, patting Nolan on

the shoulder. “Loosen up. Enjoy being so goddamn lucky.”

Nolan opened the door for them; he shrugged, smiled. “You’re my friends,” he said. “I hate taking your money.” And Andy and the rest went home.

11

Roger Winch felt uneasy about working with Cole Comfort again. The only time he’d worked with the guy was one money-desperate month, ten or eleven years ago, when Comfort pulled him and his partner Phil in on some supermarket heists.

Heists, hell — burglaries was more like it: Comfort and some lowlife trucker pals of his would pull up in back and load up all the beef from the meat freezer, while Roger and Phil were up front, Phil — having picked the locks to get them inside — now playing point man, watching for cops and such, while Roger blew the safe. Which was usually a snap, because virtually every one was a J. J. Taylor where he could do a simple spindle shot — knock off the dial with one swift hard blow of the sledge, and then tip her over on her back and use an eyedropper of grease, and hell, in five minutes he was in her.

Small-time jobs, those grocery “heists,” although they took thousands of bucks out of them, because Comfort knew when to time it — Thursday nights, when the stores allowed the money to pile up to cover cashing paychecks on Friday.

Still, Roger hadn’t liked the Comforts — Sam and Cole — because they were small-timers and mean and smelled bad. He didn’t trust them. They never cheated him. They never tried to pull a cross. But he didn’t trust them, anyway.

He always had the feeling the Comforts would have just as soon killed him as look at him. But for some reason — perhaps because they thought he might be of use to them again one day — they had never pulled anything on him.

Nonetheless, he would have passed on this gig but for two reasons: Nolan’s presence; and he needed the money.

Nolan made any job worth doing. Roger was about the only pete-man in the business who’d never done time, and that had a lot to do with working so often with Nolan, who beyond a doubt was the most careful and tediously precise organizer in the business. No little old lady in the entire U.S. of A. was as cautious, as conservative as Nolan.

And Roger liked that. He liked going into jobs knowing the lay of the land — the specific safe, the floor plan, the alarm system, the security guards (if any), the proximity of patrolling cops, the whole megillah. He didn’t like carrying guns. He didn’t like anything that smacked of armed robbery. Night work. That was Roger’s style.

Roger’s style was playing it safe. He was, in every sense of the term, a safe man. He lived in a safe neighborhood in a safe city and he had chosen a safe, low-key, respectable life-style, which included a ranch-style split-level home in West Des Moines, a homemaker wife and three well-behaved children, Vicki, twelve, Ron, eight, and Joe, four. He didn’t run around on his wife — she was a little plump, but he liked her plump, and she was pretty as the day he met her, a waitress in a bar in Seattle, where he and Phil worked a job.

Even Roger’s appearance was unthreatening: he was forty-six years old, five seven, 137 pounds, usually encased in pastel Banlon shirts and polyester slacks, his brown hair cut very short, his face filled with reassuring character lines, his brown eyes lidded sleepily, his nose straight and never broken, his smile gentle. He had a safe, respectable business — locksmithing — which he maintained with his longtime partner Phil Dooley, a middle-aged, rather stout confirmed bachelor who somewhat resembled a smaller, balding Walter Matthau.

Phil was an excellent locksmith, and lived as quiet and low-key a life as Roger. Phil, who lived in a tastefully art-deco-appointed sprawling apartment on the top floor of an apartment building he owned, was a homosexual, which was something they had never discussed, rarely even alluded to, in twenty-some years of business and friendship. Phil lived with no one, although he seemed to maintain relationships with various young men attending Drake University, though such boys moved on with graduation and nothing permanent ever came of it.

Roger had grown up in Massachusetts, in the Boston area, living in a safe little neighborhood in safe little Malden — where his parents, who ran a stationery shop downtown, had raised him. He’d lost his parents long, long ago — while he was still in high school; they had been on their way for a safe, quiet weekend in the Hamptons when they were killed in a head-on collision with a semi that was passing another semi. He’d gone to live with an aunt, briefly, before going to Drake on a track scholarship.

During his freshman year, he’d met Phil, who’d invited him up to his apartment; they had met in a pizza place and found a mutual interest in what was then called “hi-fi” equipment. Phil invited him up to show him the latest in hi-fi, and to listen to Kingston Trio records — in stereo, no less. Unfortunately, Roger soon found that the hi-fi stuff was the equivalent of etchings, and he had to set Phil straight about some things.

Phil had apologized profusely, saying he’d misread Roger and was so very sorry, so very embarrassed; and they’d become friends. Roger didn’t much care about Phil’s sexual bent. Roger’d had his own secrets. One of which was that he’d been a shoplifter for as long as he could remember.

He had shared this secret with Phil, one evening when they were both in their cups; and Phil, who already had a hole-in-the-wall locksmithing shop, admitted he had certain criminal leanings himself. He’d done time, in fact. That was where his homosexual leaning had flowered, Roger gathered. Anyway, Phil had used his locksmithing abilities on a number of burglaries, back in St. Louis where he’d grown up; he’d been involved with a ring that broke into stores and businesses. Phil used to work with a pete-man — safecracker — named Harvey Watters; they’d lived together for a time. But Watters was “inside,” as Phil put it.

Watters had taught Phil a lot about the safecracking business, but Phil didn’t have the nerve for it — specifically, for making the necessary grease — that is, the nitro — and working with knockers (detonators) and explosives in general.

But Roger had no such fears — the Fourth of July was his favorite holiday — and through Phil, Watters’ expertise was passed on to Roger, who in the meantime had lost his scholarship and was expelled from Drake when he was caught cheating on his chemistry finals.

And so they had begun, through Phil’s St. Louis contacts and a few others right there in Des Moines, doing jobs. Three or four or five times a year. Roger was a natural pete-man and, despite the relative infrequency of their jobs, gained a real reputation in the trade. He and Phil made a lot of money. Soon they had expanded the locksmithing shop and had a healthy legit business going.

They always planned to phase out their “other” profession, but they had never quite got around to it.

Because what Roger and Phil had in common, besides hi-fi and business and crime, was a love of gambling. Gambling was the only part of Roger Winch’s life, besides crime of course, that couldn’t be classified as safe. He and Phil — on three or four times a year “convention” trips — went to Vegas or Tahoe or Atlantic City, and played high-roller. They tended to go their separate ways — Roger concentrating on blackjack, and Phil on roulette. Now and then one of them came home a winner. Frequently neither did.

At the moment, Roger’s savings account (he couldn’t speak for Phil) was flatter than a blackjack dealer’s ass. It needed replenishing, to say the least; Doris — Roger’s wife — was oblivious to their finances, but he had promised her that condo in Florida, and unless he came out of semi-retirement, criminally speaking, and made a score, he’d have to disappoint her, and that was one thing Roger didn’t want to do.

Neither he nor Phil had done a job in a year and a half. They were getting older (Phil was sixty) and, Roger’s gambling losses aside, had built comfortable lives for themselves. Their locksmithing business was tops in town, and could be sold for a nice piece of change, when they went into retirement, a few years from now, something they were already discussing.

But Phil, Roger could tell, missed the excitement of doing a job; Phil might not have had the stones to handle explosives, but he obviously loved night work: unlocking doors and going in places and taking things. And there was, Roger had to admit, a thrill to it. There were, Roger could not deny, few things sweeter than seeing the door of a safe, which you’ve punched or blown, swing open.

But the business had changed. There just wasn’t as much work as there used to be. Oh, it wasn’t technology — changes in safe design were no big deal — nitro can beat any style of vault; and being in the locksmithing business gave them access to all the inside info for the finer points.

But too many safes these days were out in full view, floodlit at night, often near windows at the front of stores, where the cops could see you working. And the credit card was putting pete-men like Roger out of business, anyway: there just weren’t as many cash transactions as there used to be. Also, businesses routinely used bank night depositories, rather than stick the day’s proceeds in an on-site safe. So even if you could get to the safe, there wouldn’t likely be much in it.

So Roger, broke, frustrated, was pleasantly surprised to receive the phone call from Cole Comfort, of all people.

“It’s a big job,” he said. “We need you and your pansy pal, too.”

“Don’t say that,” Roger said.

“Say what?”

“Don’t say anything unkind about Phil. He’s a real gentleman, and I expect you to treat him that way.”

“Why, of course. No disrespect meant. We need his special talent — there’s going to be lots of doors that need unlocking.”

Hearing Comfort’s soothing, southern-accented tone made Roger queasy; the man was a liar, and a small-timer to boot. Roger couldn’t think of Comfort without thinking of heisting grocery stores, loading frozen meat into trucks. A nickel-and-dimer, Comfort was, and a dangerous one.

“I don’t know, Cole,” Roger said, wanting very much to take the job, but not feeling it prudent.

“It’ll be fifty gees each, minimum,” he said.

“Hmmm.”

“It’s an inside job. Very safe. More than that I dare not say.”

“Who else is in?”

“Nolan.”

That decided it.

“Count me in,” Roger said.

“How about the... your pal?”

“He’s in.”

“You can speak for him?”

“I can speak for him.”

Now it was a week later, in Davenport, Iowa, in the restaurant/nightclub called Nolan’s. It was just past three o’clock in the morning. They had come in two cars; he and Phil had been picked up downtown, at the Hotel Davenport, where they shared a room (he had no qualms about sharing a room with Phil — Phil never fooled around on the job). Cole Comfort himself had been driving, a blue Ford pickup; Roger sat next to driver Cole, and Phil sat next to Roger. In the other car were the three Leech brothers (as it turned out) and Dave Fisher, the slightly nerdy electronics guy.

They sat at a big table in the dimly lit bar area of Nolan’s. Nolan himself, in a pale blue shirt and dark new-looking jeans, stood off to one side, leaning against a pillar, among hanging plants, lurking in the foliage like a jungle cat. Cole Comfort sat at the head of the table, a white-haired, blue-eyed near coot in a plaid shirt and overalls. Overalls, God help us. Roger glanced at Nolan, wondering why the man would lower himself to work with Comfort. Nolan, as usual, was expressionless.

Next to Roger was Phil, looking professorly in a tweedy brown sport jacket over a sweater-vest and tie; sitting like a student next to him was Fisher, a serious, earnest man in his late thirties, wearing thick glasses with heavy black frames and a white shirt and black tie with pens and gizmos in a plastic pouch within his shirt pocket, a pocket-size notebook on the table in front of him. Across from them were the Leech brothers — Ricky, Jerry, Ferdy — three lumberjack-brawny guys in their late thirties with five-o’clock shadow and dirty sweaters and stocking caps, which they were wearing indoors, just as they were wearing the same blank-eyed expression. They were triplets. No one on earth, outside of their family, could tell them apart.

Seeing them here had not made Roger’s night. They were the same truckers who’d worked with Comfort on the supermarket heists. They were not really stupid men; they showed signs of being smart. But they were brutes — crude, lewd and rude, as Phil had once put it. Roger knew Phil would be equally less than thrilled to see the owners and operators of Leech Bros. Trucking of Sedalia, Missouri.

“I don’t like working with faggots,” a Leech said to Comfort.

“I don’t neither,” another Leech said, also to Comfort.

The third Leech merely nodded.

“Shut up,” Comfort said. “Phil’s good at what he does. We need him.”

“Thank you,” Phil said. The sarcasm in his voice was faint, but there. The Leeches missed it; no one else did.

One other person was there — a young guy of about twenty-five, with short blond curly hair and a sweatshirt with some sort of space-cadet comic-book character on it. He wasn’t sitting at the long table — he was at a small table for two nearby, sitting in a chair that was turned around, leaning over it, head on his crossed arms, like a kid in study hall. He did not want to be here.

“Do we all know each other?” Comfort said.

“I don’t know him,” a Leech said, pointing back to the blond kid.

Nolan said, “He’s with me.”

“Does he have a name?” a Leech said.

“Jon,” the kid said. “I caught your names earlier. Huey, Dewey and Louie, isn’t it?”

The Leeches didn’t get it.

One said, “I’m Ricky.”

Another said, “I’m Jerry.”

Another said, “I’m Ferdy.”

Nolan said, “We’re supposed to be ten. I only count nine.”

Comfort looked over at Nolan and said, “My boy Lyle can’t be with us tonight.” Then he said, “Come join us, Nolan,” waving him over.

Nolan walked past Comfort to the table for two and joined the kid named Jon.

“How about some beer?” a Leech said, pointing over toward the bar.

Nolan said, “We’re not socializing. We need to make this as short as possible. I don’t like hanging around here.”

Comfort smiled at Nolan and said, “I just thought this was as good a place as any to meet.”

“It’s a stupid place to meet,” Nolan said.

Comfort glared at him, then the glare melted into a seemingly sincere smile. “You’re mistaken, Nolan. It’s a real smart place to meet. We’ll meet here tomorrow night, too. It’s better than meeting at one of our motel rooms where we might be seen together. This is real out of the way and private.” Comfort smiled like Daddy at the men sitting at his table. “Nolan’s nervous about meeting here because this very mall we’re sitting in is our target.”

That confused Roger, who said so: “You mean, the mall bank here’s our target? I don’t do banks... you can’t blow a vault like that without noise to raise the dead—”

“Shush,” Comfort said gently. “I mean, we’re gonna take this whole dang mall. We’re going shopping; a regular moonlight madness sale, only it’s all on the house. Thanks to Nolan, here.”

Phil was sitting forward; even the generally bored-seeming Fisher was shifting in his seat. The Leech brothers weren’t impressed; they obviously were already in the know. Nolan and Jon, too.

Fisher said, “What exactly do you mean? This mall has, I would guesstimate, fifty-some stores.”

Comfort turned to Nolan, who then said: “Fifty stores exactly — not counting the bank, this restaurant or the three major department stores.”

A rather stunned Phil asked Comfort, “How in God’s name do you heist a mall?”

Comfort said, “Nolan?”

Nolan, still seated at the nearby table, said, “Right now, as we sit here, there are no security guards on duty. Only a single janitor. The alarm system is silent — no audibles at all — on a phone line to a security company and the cops.”

“Lead me to it,” Fisher said, smiling smugly.

Nolan cautioned him: “I’m told the change in pulse rate, if you jump it, automatically sets off the alarm.”

Fisher shrugged. “Not with one of my little black boxes wired in, sending them the right pulse rate. Go on.”

Nolan did: “The security guard goes off at ten. He doesn’t even come back on duty till one o’clock the next afternoon. The maintenance man opens the doors at seven A.M. Merchants start arriving around eight-thirty, and stores open at ten.”

“We would have from ten till six-thirty or so,” Roger said, “inside this mall, to do what we pleased.”

“That’s exactly right, friends and neighbors,” Comfort said.

Nolan said, “I don’t think we need that long. Cole, here, wants to use the Leech brothers and three semis to loot the place. I don’t think that’s necessary.”

Comfort glared at him again. “You don’t?”

“No,” Nolan said. “You got two jewelry stores — each with at least a quarter million worth in their safe. The bank has three safes — Roger is right, the main vault is out — but they have an automated cash machine, which has twenty-some thousand bucks in it at any given time. And two smaller night depository safes, which at this yuletide time of year could have anywhere from ten to fifty grand each in ’em.”

Phil said, “So you’re saying, fuck the small shit.”

“Right,” Nolan said. “Even allowing for fencing the diamonds, we can clear three hundred thousand, probably more, for a few hours’ work. And no heavy hauling. Roger just goes in, blows all five safes, and you don’t need trucks to haul away diamonds and cash.”

A Leech said, “Where does that leave us?”

“You’re in,” Cole said. Anger hung off his voice, as cold and brittle as icicles. “You’re a fool, Nolan. We got all night in this place, to do as we like, take as we like, and you want to stay for a few minutes and play it safe grabbing the easy stuff.”

Roger said, “Blowing five safes isn’t easy, Cole.”

Comfort nodded, saying, “And it takes time. During which, we’re taking advantage of the situation. We’re going the whole fucking route. This place is Disneyland for thieves, and we got all the free tickets we want. We’re all gonna pitch in and help the Leeches, here, load their three semis, which’ll be pulled up to loading docks out back, and fill ’em with refrigerators and microwave ovens and TVs and VCRs and stereo shit and computers and washing machines and furs and leather goods and cameras and designer clothes and sterling silver and china and Cuisinarts and every other goddamn thing we can lay hands on, before this place opens the next morning, at which time there’ll be tumbleweed blowing through this goddamn place, it’ll be so empty.”

“You forgot jockey shorts,” Nolan said.

“What?” Comfort said.

“You can probably get a quarter each for jockey shorts,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to leave any of them behind.”

“You just cooperate,” Comfort said, raising a lecturing finger.

That was weird, Roger thought. It was almost like Comfort had a hold over Nolan...

Fisher was taking notes; he looked up from them and said, “You have a fence lined up who can handle a load like this?”

“Burden in Omaha,” Comfort said, “for everything but the stones. We got to go to Chicago for the stones.”

“What’s the rate?” Phil asked.

“We’re getting thirty percent of wholesale on the goods; forty on the stones.”

“Not bad,” Phil admitted. “And this goes down how soon?”

“Thursday,” Comfort said.

“This Thursday?” Roger asked.

“This Thursday,” Comfort said.

“What’s the rush?” Fisher asked.

“No rush,” Comfort said. “I been working on this for weeks, now. We got all the inside dope we need. Christmas money is flowing, out there. We’re all here. Thursday’s as good a time as any.”

Roger looked at Nolan. “Nolan? Opinion?”

Nolan shrugged. “Thursday’s fine.”

Fisher looked at Nolan sharply. “Why are you doing this?”

Nolan said, “Why else? The money.”

“You have a good thing going here,” Fisher said, looking around the place like a tax assessor. “Why risk it?”

Comfort said, “You can never have too much money, right, Nolan?”

“Right,” Nolan said.

They talked till after four, and agreed to meet back here at two-thirty tomorrow night. In the meantime, Comfort instructed, they would all, on their own, walk around the mall tomorrow during business hours. Each, in his own way, casing the joint.

“We could have jerseys made up,” Jon said, “that say ‘Mall Heist’ on ’em — and maybe walk arms linked. That’d be a nice touch.”

Comfort smiled kindly at him and said, “Remember what I told you about children, son?”

Jon, still sitting backward in the chair, gave him a sullen look, then looked away.

Roger got up and went over to Nolan’s small table and asked a few questions about the bank.

“The instant-cash machine is an NCR,” Nolan said. He dug in his shirt pocket for a slip of paper and handed it to Roger. “There’s the model number and a sketch. You can walk right in the bank and look at it tomorrow.”

“Don’t forget your jersey,” Jon said.

“What’s with you guys?” Roger said.

“Nothing,” Nolan said. “The jewelry store safe is tear-gas rigged.”

“I’ll talk to Fisher,” Roger said. “He’ll know how to get around that.”

“Fine,” Nolan said, smiling tightly. “See you soon.”

Roger smiled back, glanced at the slip of paper Nolan had handed him; it did indeed include the model number of the safe — but it also had a Moline address jotted down and said: “Come to my house now. Say nothing to Comfort.”

Roger nodded, folded the paper and slipped it in his pocket; he collected Phil, said his goodbyes all around, and left with Comfort, who dropped them at their hotel. Saying nothing to Phil about where he was going, he took the car, found an all-night gas station that could direct him to the Moline address, and when he got there Nolan was waiting.

12

The light blue Ford van was hardly ideal for a stakeout, but it was all Jon had. Neither of Nolan’s cars was usable, as Comfort had seen Sherry’s red 300 ZX, and had probably ID’ed Nolan’s silver Trans Am by now as well, whereas Jon’s van had been dropped off for a tune-up at a garage near Nolan’s place the morning after Jon got there — where it had sat ever since.

And now Jon sat in it — that is, the blue Ford van (which at least no longer said “The Nodes” on the side), in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn on Brady Street, just a few blocks from Brady Eighty. He didn’t have the motor running, and it was cold today — this was Wednesday afternoon, the first Wednesday of December — but he was warm in his bulky army-navy surplus store navy coat, and fur-lined gloves, and ski mask.

The ski mask was almost too warm — it was certainly too scratchy — but it was necessary. He couldn’t afford to be recognized by Comfort, whose red Chevy pickup, parked just across from him, he was watching. They’d seen Comfort climb into the driver’s seat of this pickup, Missouri plates, last night in front of Nolan’s.

It was a little after five o’clock and getting dark already. He’d been here damn near all day — since around nine this morning. He had a Thermos of hot chocolate (he hated coffee — that was for grown-ups) and the snub-nose .38 and a science-fiction novel by Walter Tevis, Mockingbird, which he’d finished an hour ago. The book was good, but reading a couple paragraphs and then glancing up at Comfort’s parked pickup, and then reading a couple more paragraphs, and then glancing up at Comfort’s parked pickup again, was a grueling process which he repeated to the point of a stiff sore neck. He kept the van doors locked, because if Comfort spotted him, a door might be yanked open and Jon jerked out; and the Comforts, of course, were capable of anything — which was why the .38 was snugged in the side right pocket of the navy coat.

He also had a mobile cellular phone in the car, a toy Nolan usually carried in his own car (he’d gotten it at a discount from the Radio Shack at Brady Eighty). Jon checked in every hour with Nolan, who was nearby at his restaurant at the mall.

Nolan had dropped by once, around noon, stopping quickly to drop off a sack of McDonald’s food, and to give him a fresh Thermos of hot chocolate.

Jon had been reading the science-fiction paperback when Nolan appeared in front of the windshield, just standing there before the van like Mad Max in the middle of a post-nuclear-holocaust road.

Jon opened the door for him, Nolan handed in the food and Thermos and said, “You shouldn’t read.”

“I can’t take the boredom otherwise.”

“Boredom is one thing. Bore of a gun barrel’s another.”

“Cute, Nolan. He hasn’t touched his fucking pickup yet, in case you’re interested.”

Nolan nodded and shut the van door and was gone.

Finding out where Comfort was staying was a break, or had seemed to be at the time; now that it was dusk and Comfort had stayed inside the motel all day, it seemed less significant. Time was running out. Tomorrow was the day. Operation Mall Haul. If they didn’t find Sherry tonight, they might not find her at all.

But at least they had an ally in Roger Winch.

Jon had just listened, last night, while Winch sat on the couch in the living room, Nolan standing in front of him like an attorney pleading his case.

“I’m taking a big chance, Roger. If Comfort knew I was talking to you, somebody could die.”

Winch, who was a low-key guy, didn’t like hearing that. He said, “I knew I shouldn’t get involved with Comfort. I only came in ’cause you were part of it.”

“Comfort wouldn’t have asked you in,” Nolan said, “if he’d known how many jobs we worked together.”

And Nolan had filled Winch in about Sherry’s kidnaping, explaining that his own participation in the heist was strictly coerced.

“I’m retired,” Nolan said. “I want no part of this.”

“It’s a sweet score,” Winch said, shrugging, smiling mildly. “It could go down in history.”

“So did the Manson murders. Comfort is a double-crossing murdering son of a bitch who’s likely to kill all of us when this is over.”

Winch’s expression was pained. “Maybe Phil and I should just go...”

Nolan patted the air with one hand. “No. Stay in. But I have to warn you — if I have the chance to stop this before it goes down, I will.”

“This is bad. I don’t like violence. You know me, Nolan — I never carried a gun in my life.”

“Yeah, but your pal Phil does.”

Winch shrugged again. “That’s part of a point man’s job. He’s never killed anybody.”

“It’s always a possibility, Roger. Look — I’d like you to stick. Play along. If you don’t, my girl’s going to die.”

“It sounds like she’s going to die anyway.”

“Not if I can find her before the heist goes down. He has to keep her alive to keep me part of this. Without me, there’s no score.”

Winch thought about it. Then he said, “What’s in it for me? I hate to say that, but if you’re going to try to stop this from going down, why should I play? Friendship doesn’t quite cut it. I like you, Nolan — but I like living more, and I got to agree with you: Cole Comfort is planning to do some killing before this is over.”

“I’ll make this worth your while,” Nolan said. “I can guarantee you a minimum of ten grand for sticking. Out of my own pocket. If we scrap the heist, consider it a kill fee.”

“What if the job goes down? If Comfort’s planning a double cross like you say, then—”

“Then a triple cross is called for. He thinks he’s on top of everything — he won’t expect us to be on top of him. I’d like to pull Phil in on this, and talk to Fisher, too. I’ve worked with him. Not as often as with you, but I’ve worked with him.”

Winch was nodding. “I think he’d line up with you. But it’s going to be tricky. And dangerous.”

“Yes it is. Remember — you’re not supposed to know about Sherry. As far as you and Phil know, this score is something Comfort and I put together as partners.”

“Could you make it twenty grand?”

“Fifteen.”

“Five up front?”

“No. Fifteen after.”

Winch shrugged. “Done. What now? The thing is supposed to go down in less than forty-eight hours.”

“I’m going to try to find Sherry and steal her back. I figure he’s got her stashed someplace being baby-sat by his boy Lyle.”

“Yeah,” Winch said, “his boy’s in on this — Comfort says so. But he wasn’t at the meet last night.”

“I only saw the kid once,” Nolan said. “Years ago. He was just a teenager. I don’t remember much about him.”

“He was around when I worked with Comfort, five years ago,” Winch said. “The boy was on the fringes of the supermarket jobs I was in on — he was in his late teens, then. He’s a nice enough, nice-looking kid, but a little thick.”

“Is he dangerous, do you think?”

“Nolan, he’s a Comfort.”

“Yeah. Stupid question. Do you know where Comfort’s staying?”

“No. I got a phone number, though.” Winch dug in his pocket and found a slip of paper. “Here. Copy it down.”

Nolan did, and Winch went back to his hotel, and Nolan looked in the Quad Cities directory, yellow pages, hotels and motels, and compared the number to the numbers listed there.

“He’s at the Holiday Inn,” Nolan said. “Figures he’d stay close to Brady Eighty, close to the Interstate, his getaway route.”

Jon looked at the slip of paper. “It says extension 714.”

Nolan nodded. “Which is probably his room number.”

“Could he have Sherry there?”

“Almost no chance. She’s stashed somewhere. Lyle’s looking after her. I’m sure of it.”

“Could we break in Comfort’s room tonight and just put a gun to his fucking head?”

“Sounds like fun,” Nolan said, “but all we’d have at best is a Mexican standoff. We can always try that — grabbing Comfort himself and threatening to kill him if he doesn’t call and have Sherry released.”

“Wouldn’t that work?”

“If Comfort wasn’t crazy, maybe. Who knows what he’d say when at gunpoint he called Lyle or whoever’s holding her? And he’s got firepower. He’s probably got the Leeches in his corner, and they’re violent crazy fuckers too. He’s got his son. Too many unknowns.”

“I don’t know. It’s tempting to bust in his room in the middle of the night, and—”

Nolan was shaking his head no. “We don’t know what or who is in his room. Sherry might be there, and we don’t want to start a shooting war. Cole Comfort could buy it, and we’d never get Sherry back from Lyle once that happened. Too risky. She’s safe for the moment.”

“So what do we do?”

Stake out the Holiday Inn. Which was how Jon had spent his day today. The plan was, if Comfort went to his pickup and left, Jon would tail him, calling Nolan on the mobile phone. Nolan would then search the room at the Holiday Inn — despite the slight chance Lyle might be in there with Sherry, which was a situation he could better control than one that included Coleman Comfort.

If Nolan could get in that room, without Comfort there, something might turn up — a phone number, a room key, a matchbook, something that would lead them to where Sherry was being held.

But so far Jon had done nothing but sit on his ass in this van, reading his paperback, calling Nolan briefly every hour, drinking hot chocolate, eating McDonald’s food and, every now and then, leaving the van to use the Men’s off the Holiday Inn lobby. Nolan had wanted him to piss in a tin can, but you have to draw the line somewhere.

By eight o’clock his bones were starting to ache; it was colder, and now and then he would turn the motor on and get the heat going. He was starting to think Comfort wasn’t going to leave his motel room until the second meet, tonight, which would once again be at 2:30 A.M. at Nolan’s. He was contemplating getting out and going into the lobby for another piss, when somebody approached the parked pickup.

And got in and started it up and pulled away.

“Holy shit,” Jon said to nobody in particular, and pulled out after the pickup.

“Nolan,” Jon said into the phone.

Nolan’s voice came on, tinny: “What?” The sounds of the restaurant/club, now open for business, were a muffled presence in the background.

“I’m tailing the pickup truck.”

“Good. I’ll toss the room.”

“No! Nolan, it isn’t Comfort driving! He isn’t even in the goddamn thing.”

“Who is?”

“Some girl.”

“Some girl.”

Jon was having trouble keeping up with the red pickup, zooming along up ahead of him on the one-way that was Harrison. “She must be about seventeen. I just got a glimpse of her, is all. Good-looking. Great ass.”

“Reddish-blond hair?”

“Yeah!”

“He has a daughter. She was just a little kid when I saw her. It was years ago. She was cute.”

“You think this is Comfort’s daughter?”

“Probably.”

“What should I do?”

“Just what you’re doing: follow her. She may be headed for where they got Sherry.”

“Do you think so?”

“Follow her. Call me when you got something.”

“Nolan—”

“Give it your best shot, kid. I’ll be waiting.”

The phone clicked in Jon’s ear; then he put it back in its bed on its black battery pack. He was right behind her, as they headed down the oneway of Harrison toward Davenport, the vast North Park Shopping Center whizzing by at their right (never say “whizzing” to a guy who has to pee). She was moving fast. Speeding, actually. For a moment Jon wondered if she’d made him; but he didn’t think that was the case. He could see her up there, looking straight ahead, no discernible rear view mirror glancing, no turning her head to look behind her.

He allowed a couple of cars to get between him and the pickup, but she was traveling too fast for that to work without losing her. He had to keep his speed up. Which was just swell, considering he had a .38 in his pocket. He pulled the ski mask off. Comfort’s daughter — if that’s who this was — didn’t know him from Adam. Why risk being a guy in a ski mask with a gun in his pocket stopped by a cop for speeding.

At the foot of Harrison, she turned left onto River Drive. Soon she pulled into the riverfront parking lot near the Dock, a fancy seafood restaurant, and the Loading Ramp, a nightclub in an old remodeled warehouse adjacent to the restaurant. He cruised by her, as if looking for a parking place, just as she was getting out of the car, a strawberry blonde, hands tucked in the short pockets of the denim jacket, which was much too light for this cold, to which she seemed oblivious; she had a nice tight little ass encased in denim paint. She wore red spike heels. Yow.

Jon saw her go in the big wooden door of the Loading Ramp, and then he pulled the van into a parking place not far from her pickup, but not next to it. He called Nolan.

“I’m going in there,” Jon said.

“And do what?”

“I’m not sure. Talk to her.”

“Better keep your distance.”

“Trust me on this, Nolan.”

“Jon—”

“Sometimes I know what I’m doing.”

“Take the gun.”

“I was planning to. I always take a gun into heavy-metal bars.”

Which is what the place was; the sounds of Motley Crue were blaring forth from speakers left over from when this joint was a disco, and down at the far end of the smoky barely converted warehouse, a band, five skinny males in heavy-metal war paint and sparkly skimpy clothes, was preparing to play a set. They were called Hellfyre and Jon had heard of them; second-raters all the way.

He had paid at a caged window, coming in, and had been carded, which now that he was getting into his mid-twenties actually sort of pleased him. Drinking age in Iowa was nineteen, so the possible Comfort daughter was either of age or had a fake ID.

Getting a close look at her, as she sat at the bar, a beer and a smoke before her, he figured it was a fake ID. This was a kid. She had the denim jacket off, slung over the back of her high-backed bar-stool, and she wore a yellow RATT T-shirt under which nice high handfuls poked, and her hair was a long and teased and heavily sprayed mane, and she was smoking a cigarette, apparently from the pack of Camels before her; but this was, nonetheless, a kid. With her cute features, big blue eyes, pug nose dusted with freckles, Kewpie-doll lips: a kid. She didn’t yet have the hard look the nineteen-year-old girls in this place did. The crowd was blue-collar all the way, guys in Skoal painter caps and scuzzy work clothes (the latter signifying unemployment) and girls in tight slacks and revealing tops and lots and lots of eye makeup.

The bar was a squared-off area at the back, and beyond it were tables and dance floor and stage; at the left and back a balcony surveyed the smoke and darkness. The place was about half full. Okay Wednesday night business, bar-band veteran Jon thought; typical.

He sat next to her.

She looked at him, noncommittally, looked away, sipped her beer, smoked her cigarette.

There had been no recognition in the look at all; Jon was quite relieved.

He said: “You ever hear these guys before?”

“Hellfyre?” she said. She had the faintest southern accent. She’d be from Missouri, if she was Comfort’s daughter; and sometimes you ran into a bit of a southern accent down there.

“Yeah,” he said. “Have you heard ’em before?”

She was a very cute kid; she was the kind of cute kid you think you’ve met before, Jon thought, even though you haven’t.

“Yeah, I heard ’em.” It was a nice voice, sultry and childlike at once. “They play down where I come from, sometimes.”

“You’re not from here?”

She shook her head. “I come from Missouri.”

He risked a grin. “Does that mean you’re going to show me something?”

She smiled back, warming to him; she had small, childlike teeth, very white. And her pink tongue licked out as she said, “Time will tell.” The slight southern lilt made the words sound great.

Fuck, could this little vision be a Comfort?

“I just love heavy metal,” she said.

“Yeah, uh, me too.”

“What’s your favorite heavy-metal band?”

“Hard to choose. What’s yours?”

“I like that band Spinal Tap. They had a special on HBO. But I can only find one of their records.”

“Uh, that’s a satire, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Good band.”

“I like all kinds of music, though. Except country and western. My daddy listens to that all the time and I could just barf sometimes.”

“It’s not my favorite, either. I’d like to buy you a beer, when you’re through with that one.”

“Why not? Say. Don’t I know you?”

He slipped his hand into the deep pocket of the navy coat; the handle of the .38 felt rough and cold.

“I do know you.” She was pointing her finger at him, waggling it at him, and pointing her nipples at him, too; he was pointing the .38 at her from within his coat, though she didn’t know it.

“Isn’t your name Jon?”

“Why don’t we just leave here quietly,” he said, his gun poking at the pocket; but she didn’t seem to see that.

“You played with the Nodes!” Her face lit up like Christmas. She squealed like he was the Beatles. “You’re the organ player!”

His gun hand went limp in his pocket; something like relief coursed through him.

She leaned over and looped her arm in his.

“Don’t you remember me? I’m Cindy Lou.”

“Cindy Lou...”

“Cindy Lou Comfort. But maybe you didn’t catch my name. Year or so ago, in Jefferson City? It was at that place out on the highway.”

Shit. It was coming back to him.

She touched her hair. “I had my hair all cut off, then. During a break, you and me sat in this little dressing room under the stage and kissed and stuff.”

He’d felt her up. He’d felt up Cole Comfort’s daughter. Cole Comfort’s underage daughter.

“I remember you, Cindy Lou,” he said, his mouth dry, his dick erect.

“Is that a pistol in your pocket,” she grinned nastily, “or are you just glad to see me?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“I think that was a good idea you had,” she said.

Hellfyre began playing “We Ain’t Gonna Take It” by Twisted Sister.

“What was that?”

“Leaving here quietly.”

And they did; her arm around his waist and his around her shoulder.

13

Cindy Lou just couldn’t believe her luck. Running into the keyboard player from the Nodes! She loved that band; when she heard they broke up it made her sad. They’d always played a lot of oldies and some new wave and even a little heavy metal. And they jumped around on stage, and the guys were really cute. Especially that keyboard player. He reminded her of Duane, from the seventh grade, who popped her cherry. He was a little blond hunk, too.

They stepped outside into the chilly air, walking side by side, arms around each other. You could smell the river. You could see it too, moon dancing on the little waves. Real romantic, Cindy Lou thought, surprised at herself, surprised she could get it up after last night. But she put that out of her mind.

“Where do you want to go?” Cindy Lou asked.

“Where are you staying?”

“At the Holiday Inn.” She paused, then added, “With my daddy. He’s here on business.”

“I see.”

“We better not go back there. He doesn’t even know I’m out.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. He’s been keeping me cooped up at that motel, and finally when he wasn’t looking I just took the pickup keys and went.”

He led her to a sky-blue van.

“We could just climb in back of there,” she said.

“We could. It’s not fancy, but I got some blankets back there.”

She smiled, hugged his waist. “This used to be your band’s van, didn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

She pulled away from him, traced her finger on the side of the van. “You can almost see where your name used to be. The Nodes. You guys were real good. What happened to that girl that sang with you?”

“Toni? We were still in a band together till recently. She’s up in Minneapolis playing in one of Prince’s groups.”

“Really? That’s cool! That Prince guy is so sexy.”

He opened the rider’s side of the van and she climbed in and crawled between the seats in front into the back of the van, where the cold metal floor was warmed by several quilts and blankets. Some corduroy pillows were piled up against one side. Jon got in on the driver’s side, turned on the engine, started the heater going, locked the doors, and joined her.

“It’s going to take a while for that heater to get going,” he said, sitting on his knees, watching her as she arranged a little makeshift bed out of the quilts and blankets. At the head of the “bed” she placed two of the cord pillows and invited him to lie next to her, which, after removing his big navy coat, he did. She slipped out of her denim jacket and kicked off her heels, but otherwise left her clothes on as they got under a quilt and lay facing each other, smiling in the near dark, leaning on an elbow, some moonlight and streetlights filtering in through the back van windows.

“You don’t know how glad I am to see a friendly young face,” she said.

“Oh?”

“Yeah.” She shrugged. “I been having some family trouble. Nothing serious.”

“Oh?”

“I’m getting too old to live at home, anyway.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

He smiled, a cute little smile on half his face making a dimple. “I didn’t think you were of drinking age.”

“Seventeen’s old enough.”

“For what?”

“Anything I want.”

“What are you, a senior, Cindy Lou?”

“Naw. I stopped going to high school.”

“Why?”

“Daddy didn’t want me to go.”

“Why?”

“Needed some help in the family business. Needs me to run the house. My mom’s dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I never knew her.” She sighed. “I sorta killed her.”

“You... what do you mean?”

“She died having me.”

That seemed to bum Jon out; she touched his face.

“Don’t be blue,” she said. “You got any drugs?”

“No. Sorry.”

“It’s okay. That gets old after while, anyway. Boy, I sure do miss your band. Why’d you break up?”

“We weren’t getting anywhere, I guess.”

“What are you doing now? You playing with a new band?”

“I was. Mostly I’m working as an artist. Cartoonist.”

“You draw cartoons?”

“Yes.” He smiled; seemed a little proud of himself.

“Like on TV, you mean. G.I. Joe, He-Man, those things? They’re awful violent. You think little kids should watch those things?”

“I don’t work on animated cartoons, Cindy Lou. I draw a comic book.”

“Oh, like Archie or Batman.”

“Something like that.”

“Are you good?”

“Yeah. I’ll draw your picture sometime.”

“In the nude?”

“If you like.”

“It’s getting warmer in here.” She pulled off her T-shirt; it was still cold enough to make her nips stand out. She looked at his face; looked at his eyes on her boobs. She knew she didn’t have the biggest boobs around, but they were real firm and had a nice shape and pretty pink nips. She liked the expression they put on his face — like he was struck dumb by her beauty. She’d seen that expression many times, and relished it.

Then she leaned back on her elbow and started making small talk again, pretending to be matter of fact about her nudity but knowing she was making him crazy. It was a sort of teasing, although she was no tease: Cindy Lou liked sex. She had put out since she was twelve. Screwing was fun, and besides, it put a guy in your back pocket, for as long as you wanted him there. And she’d had “encounters,” as she liked to think of them, with a lot of guys who played in bands.

“Your band played a lot of your own songs, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” he said. “About a third of what we carried was original material.”

“Who wrote it?”

“Mostly Toni. I did some of it. We made a record, you know.”

“No! Really? Can you get me one?”

“Sure. How long are you going to be in town?”

“Just till Friday. We’re leaving real early Friday morning.”

“You and your dad.”

“Well, and Lyle. He’s my brother.”

“He’s staying at the motel with you?”

“No, he’s over on the Illinois side somewhere, looking after business for Daddy.”

“I could drop an album off at your motel tomorrow.”

“You best not stop by the room. Daddy’s funny about boys. He doesn’t know, uh...”

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said.

Cindy Lou’s daddy didn’t know she put out. He thought she was pure as the driven snow; he had no idea she’d drifted, in the seventh grade. And he sure as hell didn’t know she and her brother Lyle used to do it together, either. She was thirteen and he was eighteen. Not often. Just now and then, when Daddy was out of the house, till she missed her period once and got scared about having a Mongoloid. It was a false alarm, but she and Lyle got the fear of God put into them, or as near to it as possible for two kids raised to believe in nothing.

Lyle was a great lover; he made her come like a four-alarm fire. One time they made love in a rainstorm, with the water running down the window next to them all streaky, throwing spooky shadows on their naked bodies, with thunder cracking out there. Daddy was home, that time. It made it real dangerous and real exciting. But eventually the fear was stronger than the love of danger and excitement and even of her brother Lyle’s long lovely pecker, and now she and Lyle didn’t even mention it. Didn’t even talk about it. It was like it never happened, except for an occasional glance between them that said it did.

She never thought of it as incest, exactly, at least not till that month her period was late, and she didn’t believe in sin, but she did believe, vaguely, in right and wrong. That much had crept in through her schooling. She sometimes lay awake at night thinking about the stealing her daddy and Lyle did, which she sometimes helped them with, like the food stamp deal she quit school to pitch in on. She wondered if that was any kind of way to make a living.

Her daddy had always treated her like a princess, and had never been mean, except to spank her bare butt when she was bad. Daddy defined “bad” as disobeying, and she’d learned not to do that early on. She hadn’t had her bare butt spanked (by Daddy) since the seventh grade — coincidentally, it stopped about the time she started putting out.

Once, about three years ago, she had sat in Daddy’s lap and, reverting to the manner of a child, which always charmed him, asked: “Is stealing wrong, Daddy?”

“You shouldn’t steal from your kin, darlin’.”

“People go to jail for stealing.”

“People go to jail for getting caught. Everybody steals, darlin’. The government steals from the public, and the public steals from the government. What goes around comes around.”

“Do you hurt people when you steal from them?”

“Your daddy has to make a living in a cruel, cold, hard world. And sometimes that takes being cruel, cold and hard.”

“Does that mean you hurt people?”

“If I have to. Only if I have to. I could lie to you, darlin’, but it wouldn’t be right of me to. You got to be true to your family. That’s all there is in this old world that can be trusted; that’s all there is that’s worth holding on to. Family.”

“I love you, Daddy.”

“I love you, darlin’,” he’d said, and gave her a big old sloppy kiss.

She thought her daddy was handsome; she’d seen the pictures of him and her mom, before his hair turned white, and he and her mom — who looked a lot like Cindy Lou, so much so it was spooky — looked so happy together. Such a handsome, happy couple. Sometimes she felt guilty for coming between them. Sometimes she cried herself to sleep over it, holding her mother’s picture in her hands. Usually during her period, this was.

But sometimes Daddy scared her. When he drank, he got “handsy.” He would put his hands on her and want a kiss. It didn’t go any further than that, but she sometimes went to bed early and slid the dresser across the door. He’d never tried to come in the room, but she’d grown afraid, lately, that he would someday. Some night.

Ever since she quit school and was around the house more, she noticed Daddy looking at her. Looking at her in that way she knew so well. She figured the only thing keeping him off of her was his foolish mistaken notion she was still a virgin. She was afraid of what he’d do if he found out she wasn’t.

He had his foolish old head in the sand, Daddy did. What did he think she did, when she went out on the weekends and didn’t get home till three in the morning? He bawled her out about it sometimes, and threatened (just threatened) to “whack” her if she didn’t mind. She could always sweet-talk him out of his mood, though.

“Daddy,” she’d say, archly, “I’m just a poor country girl all cooped up on the farm all week, doin’ chores. You gotta let me raise a little hell weekends!”

He’d laugh at that, and let her get away with it. But that was because she’d never had a regular guy, that he knew of — she’d never (except once) had a guy call for her at the house, she always met him (and there was quite a succession of hims) at a movie or a dance hall or bar or maybe motel. She had followed this route because the one time she did have a guy pick her up, back when she was in the ninth grade, Daddy had given the guy such a hard time, it spoiled the whole night. And the next day her daddy had been in a foul mood and snapped her head off at every turn.

So she’d decided to keep her private life her own. And she’d continue to sit in her daddy’s lap and baby-talk him when she wanted something, and that would be that.

And it was — until last night.

She was staying in this motel room with him, a nice room at a Holiday Inn, just her and Daddy, with two double beds, one for each of them. He’d had some business meeting real late, way after midnight, and didn’t get back till after four in the morning. He stripped to his longjohns and climbed in bed — with her. He started cuddling up to her. She could smell liquor on him, but she didn’t think he was drunk. She turned her back to him and he started bumping up against her. And he started saying things.

Things like how she was going to be a woman soon. Something about educating her to the ways of the world, about ushering her into the glory of womanhood.

And she knew what he meant: fucking.

“I gotta pee, Daddy,” she’d said, and got up and scurried into the bathroom and sat on the toilet, seat down, feet up on the cold seat and hugging her legs to her, shaking like to have the palsy, staring at the locked door, afraid of her own father. Her own daddy.

She’d sat there like that a long time. He never knocked on the door or tried to open it or anything. She just knew he was in bed on the other side of that door, thinking about her, in that way. But finally she heard him snoring out there, and peeked out, and he was dead asleep, mouth open, sawing away at those logs.

She slipped into the cool sheets of the other bed and waited to see if anything was going to happen. Nothing did, except over in that other bed her father kept on snoring, and pretty soon so was she.

Today, Daddy had slept in till ten. She was awake at eight, and was all showered and made up and dressed and ready for a day of shopping when he woke. But when Daddy got up, he informed her he wanted her to stay right here, in the room and around the Holiday Inn; no shopping spree for her, this trip. She’d asked him why.

“I got to keep an eye on you,” he said.

“What do you mean, Daddy?”

“There’s some terrible people in this world. A lot of girls your age just disappear and never get seen again.”

She could tell from the tone of his voice there’d be no arguing with him; so she’d let it pass, and joined him for a late breakfast in the coffee shop. The rest of the day Daddy and his friends the Leech brothers — creepy people — sat in the room and talked business, while she either watched TV (she had a couple soap operas and game shows she’d started following since quitting school) or walked around the motel, snooping. She spent a couple of hours in the video arcade room playing Galaga and Donkey Kong Jr. A day dull as spit.

They had supper in the motel restaurant (those yucky Leeches, too), and Daddy bought her a filet mignon, her favorite, and said, “I miss your mother, sometimes.”

She hadn’t said anything; just sat and cut her meat up into little pieces.

“Even after all these years. You look so much like her, darlin’.”

And she knew she wasn’t out of the woods yet. Tonight would be another long night. It was awful to be scared of your own father. Maybe it was time. Time to get out of the house and start her own life, like her friend Ginger who was out in L.A., now, doing great probably.

After supper, Daddy and the Leeches went to the hotel bar to do some drinking, and she felt she had to grab her chance and just get out. She’d seen in the morning paper that Hellfyre was in town playing at a riverfront club and that knowledge had been nibbling at her brain all day. So she went and got the keys to the pickup from the room, leaving Daddy a note saying she’d be back before midnight, and now here she was, in the back of a van with a cute guy from a band. She’d kind of figured it would go this way, only with that bass player from Hellfyre; but what the hell — she liked this Nodes keyboard guy even better.

“Getting warm in here,” he said.

“Sure is,” she said. “Take off your shirt, why don’t you?”

He had a great build, a little mini Rambo. What a hunk! She eased on top of him and started kissing his smooth chest, which was as hairless as Don Johnson’s. His hands were on her ass, which was still in the jeans, making circles, rubbing. She was getting hot. He kissed and fondled her breasts, and she got hotter.

She unzipped his pants, pulled them down under his pecker, which was medium size and pretty. She went down on him awhile, and he tasted salty and good, and made him moan; she liked doing that. He was all hers. Then she let him pull the tight jeans off her, then her black lacy panties, and soon he was on her and in her, filling the hollow spot.

She fucked with an animal urgency, as if trying to prove something, pumping with her hips, and he was hot, too, slamming it home. They came together, noisily, rocking the van. It wasn’t just another fuck to her — it was special; it was about something more than just a quickie in the parking lot. She was proving to herself that her horny old daddy hadn’t ruined sex for her.

She wondered if it had been just another fuck for Jon.

14

Nolan hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours in a couple of days. He was using his drug of choice — caffeine — to keep on top of things. It was 2:25 A.M. and he was drinking his seventh cup of coffee of the night. This would be the last cup. He had to be able to let the tiredness through, once the meet was over; he had to get some sleep tonight. Everything rode on tomorrow.

Last night he’d sat up planning this elaborate fucking heist he wanted no part of. It was part of the deal; Comfort expected it of him. And in a sense he was relieved to be planning it: Comfort had the balls to sack Brady Eighty, but he certainly didn’t have the brains.

Not that Cole Comfort wasn’t smart. He was — or anyway, he was shrewd. But Comfort’s lowlife penny-ante instincts would have defeated him, had he not pulled Nolan in for organization and strategy; he’d have been the proverbial kid in a candy store, Nolan knew — running pell-mell through the mall taking things right and left, your typical American consumer gone berserk, a manic shopper with a credit card from hell.

And if Nolan had to be in on this goddamn thing, at least let it be done right. He found himself using muscles he hadn’t used in a long time; he found some part of him that liked being back in the old life. He found himself caught up in the planning, thinking it through, studying each detail, making lists and maps and charts, getting lost in the work.

It also helped him keep his nerves and emotions in check. He wasn’t thinking about Sherry in any other terms than doing what was needed to get her back. He wasn’t letting himself deal with what the bastards might be putting her through. He wasn’t contemplating life without her. He was doing what was needed to get her the fuck back.

And that required doing two things: cooperating with Comfort, or anyway pretending to, planning his heist; and working behind Comfort’s back to find where they were keeping Sherry. He might on some level be caught up in the momentum of the heist; but his goal was still to shut it down and get the girl safely back. He had Winch and Dooley on his side, on the sly; and tonight he would talk to the high-tech guy, Fisher, after the meet.

Fisher was a good man — clueing him in would be a risk, but a minimal one; Nolan knew from past experience that Fisher shared Winch’s distaste for violence, and Comfort’s kidnaping of Sherry to coerce Nolan’s participation would not likely sit well with the slightly stuffy electronics whiz.

And some light, however faint, was showing up down at the end of the tunnel. Jon had gotten a piece of something. In more ways than one.

Jon had showed up at the restaurant just after midnight and Nolan took him into the cement-walled back room where Nolan’s desk and file cabinet kept company with boxes of liquor and food. The kid seemed dazed, confused.

“What the hell happened to you?” Nolan had demanded. The kid hadn’t checked in with Nolan in hours.

“I couldn’t use the phone in the van,” Jon explained, breathlessly, “because I had company in there, till just a few minutes ago.”

And Jon had told him about Cindy Lou Comfort, who turned out, of all things, to be a groupie of sorts for bands like Jon’s; she’d even gone to see Jon’s band on occasion, and knew him from it.

“I was in the van with her for two hours,” Jon said. “I didn’t find out where Sherry is exactly, but some of what I did learn is going to be helpful.”

Jon filled him in, including the news that Sherry wasn’t at the nearby Holiday Inn: she was somewhere on the Illinois side, being watched by Lyle.

“You’ve narrowed the state down, anyway,” Nolan said, darkly.

“She’s kind of an innocent kid,” Jon said, “for a little slut. I get the idea she’s only vaguely aware of what her father does. She’s also having some problems with him — she made some vague references that I think may mean he’s hitting on her.”

“Hitting on her?”

“Sexually,” Jon said, shrugging, embarrassed.

“He’s a class act, our Cole. She doesn’t know who you are?”

“She knows my name is Jon and I used to play keyboards for the Nodes. That’s it. She’s a troubled kid — she’s thinking about hopping a bus to California, to go live with some friend of hers out there.”

“So is every other teenage girl in the Midwest.”

“I suppose. But how many of ’em have a homelife with Cole and Lyle Comfort in it?”

“We could snatch her.”

“What?”

“We could snatch her and swap her for Sherry.”

“Jeez, Nolan—”

“If you’re thinking that would make us no better than Comfort himself, kid, you’re dead bang full of shit. On our worst day we’re better than that evil worthless cocksucker, who started this, remember. He grabbed Sherry, so all bets are off!”

Jon did something unusual: he touched Nolan’s arm.

“I’m with you,” Jon said. “Whatever it takes.”

Nolan’s hands were shaking; he looked at them shaking and shook his head disgustedly. “Goddamn coffee,” he said.

Now it was just after two-thirty and everybody was here, most of them sitting at that long table — including Nolan, who had taken Comfort’s position at its head; Comfort sat to Nolan’s left, on the corner of the table, as if almost sitting at the head reminded everybody he was really in charge — just deferring to Nolan for this one planning session. Jon again sat off to the side at a small table.

But the big change was the presence of Lyle Comfort, who sat next to his father; Lyle was a handsome, well-groomed kid in expensive clothes — he wore a rust-colored leather jacket and a shirt with a faint yellow and gray puzzle pattern, had curly brown hair and brown eyes and a tan and a blank fashion-model expression. He looked like a city kid, on first glance, but if you looked hard, Lyle was a dumb-as-a-post country kid, who learned how to dress from TV and magazines.

The Leeches were again lined up on one side of the table, but Fisher was sitting on their side, tonight, down at the far end, still with a shirt pocket full of pens and gizmos, still with a notepad in front of him — open to a page of notes he’d already taken. Neither the slight, easygoing Winch nor the dour, basset-faced Dooley, sitting next to Lyle Comfort, gave anything away; they seemed completely at ease — what they knew about Nolan’s situation, they kept close to the vest. Nolan’s favorite kind of people: pros.

Tonight the Leeches had taken their stocking caps off, and spoiled their uniformity: one was sandy-haired, one was brown-haired, the other was brown-haired balding. They were sitting there putting the beer away pretty good. Nolan had relented and put two pitchers of beer on the table — this meet would take a while, and a nod to sociality wouldn’t hurt.

Lyle Comfort’s presence here, however, was disturbing.

If Lyle was here, who was watching Sherry?

Before the meet began, Nolan cornered Cole Comfort and put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Nice to have your son with us tonight, Cole.”

Comfort nodded, not knowing what Nolan was getting at.

“Who’s minding the store?” Nolan asked Comfort.

Now Comfort got it. “Never you mind,” he said.

Nolan whispered in Comfort’s ear. “If she’s dead, so are you.”

Comfort pulled away, shaken, nervous. “She’s fine. Don’t talk about that here.”

Nolan laughed harshly. “Here? Meeting here at all is moronic, meeting at the place we plan to hit in twenty-four hours. Less than twenty-four hours.”

“We’re here,” Comfort said. “Let’s have our meet.”

“You know, if the cops prowl the parking lot, this will make two nights in a row that pickup of yours and that pimpmobile of the Leeches’ll be out in front of my restaurant in the wee hours.”

The Leeches drove a yellow Camaro with gaudy racing stripes. Very inconspicuous — if this were Tijuana.

“You said the cops don’t prowl the mall,” Comfort said, irritably.

“My information is that they haven’t been lately, yes. But that information was casually obtained. We didn’t stake out the lot like we should have, seeing if they are prowling, and if so, what the pattern is, if any.”

“Aw shut up,” Comfort said. He prodded Nolan with a pointing finger. “And leave this negative horseshit behind, when you’re running through your plans, front of the others.”

“Don’t poke me, Cole,” Nolan said.

“I’ll do what I fuckin’ well please.”

“I’m sure you will. But I’d ask you to keep in mind, I’ve been upholding my end of the bargain. I’m helping you heist your mall — my mall — and I’m giving it my best shot.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know you are. I appreciate that.”

“I expect Sherry back — unharmed — and my full share. Jon’s, too.”

“We been through all that...”

“Just so we understand each other.”

Now Nolan was talking while the seated group studied photocopies of a map he’d made of the mall.

“The stores with the X’s,” Nolan said, looking down toward Dooley, “are the ones we’ll need opened, Phil.”

“No problem,” the locksmith said.

Comfort said, “Were you out to Brady Eighty today, Phil?”

“Yeah. I walked the mall. They use those sliding glass doors that lock together; a few have metal cage doors. In either case, picking the locks is no big deal.”

Nolan asked, “How long will it take you to open each shop?”

“Five to fifteen minutes.”

A Leech said, “Fifty stores, that’s a lot of time.”

Nolan said, “We won’t be opening fifty stores.”

Comfort scowled at Nolan and slammed a fist on the table and the beer pitchers sloshed. He said, “How many times do I have to say it? We’re looting the whole motherfucker! We’re taking it all!”

“Cole,” Nolan said, smiling tightly, “as much as you may wish to take every spool of thread and Snickers bar and Slinky, we got a finite amount of time, and finite manpower. We got to pick and choose.”

Comfort thought about that, just momentarily, waved a hand at Nolan dismissively, and said, “You’re right.” Then he looked at his photocopy of the map. “These places you X’ed are the targets, then—”

“Twelve stores,” Nolan said, “not counting the three big department stores, all of which are worth hitting.”

“And not counting the bank,” Winch said.

“Right,” Nolan said. “Not counting the bank.”

“What’s this double X,” Dooley asked, “near the back entry, on the east side of the building.”

“That’s where the maintenance and security people work out of,” Nolan said. “The security guy will be off duty, and we’ll drop a Mickey Finn in the janitor’s coffee.”

“Who will?” a Leech asked.

“I’ll take care of that,” Nolan said. “Now, note the three major department stores — Petersen’s on the east end, Penney’s in the middle, and I. Magnin at the west end. I. Magnin, of course, is the most important of these. Expensive merchandise.”

Another Leech said, “And that’s where the loading docks are.”

“Right,” Nolan said. “Behind each of the major department stores. Which is perfect for us. Easy loading access to one of the semis, no matter what store you’ve been ‘shopping’ at.”

He went on to explain why he’d chosen the various stores — the leather shop, for example, carried an inventory of leather goods and furs amounting to well over a quarter mil — and indicated a priority list, which shops to hit first, and began making assignments. To best utilize manpower, the truck cabs would sit empty with the exception of the middle one, where Jon would sit, as point man.

“Why him?” Comfort said.

“Why not?” Nolan said.

“Somebody’s gotta watch,” a Leech said. “Let him do it. He’s just a little guy.”

“What about guns?” Dooley asked.

“What about them?” Nolan said.

Comfort said, “Whoever wants to carry, carry. If you need something, just ask; I got some extra pieces. I’ll be packing and my boy will and the Leeches. I assume you will too, Phil.”

Dooley nodded, but Winch said, “I don’t have shit to do with guns.”

Comfort shrugged. “Up to you.”

Fisher looked up from his note-taking to say, “I have a stun gun. I don’t like bullets. Very crude.”

A Leech said, “Why ain’t the Walgreen’s got an X?”

“Why should it?” Nolan asked. “That’s dime-store stuff.”

Another Leech said, “They got a pharmacy.”

Yet another Leech said, “Meaning drugs.”

Nolan looked at Comfort, who shook his head no, violently.

“No, sir,” he said. “That’s one thing I won’t abide. I never dirtied my hands with dope.”

The Leeches looked at each other, doing comic takes, as if to say, “The guy’s crazy, but what are you gonna do?” Nolan tended to share that sentiment; the notion of Cole Comfort drawing the line somewhere was pretty fucking absurd.

Fisher said, “I was in DeReuss Jewelry today. I spotted the tear-gas alarm. It’s a wall-mount — turns on and off with a cylindrical key.”

“I saw it too,” Dooley said, nodding. “I could pick it, like any lock.”

“I’d suggest not,” Fisher said. “It could have a time sequence of some kind — turn the key right for three seconds, back three seconds, and right again, or whatever.”

“It’s bound to be a simple sequence,” said Dooley, nodding, “but that doesn’t make it easy to guess.”

“I’d suggest just knocking the metal plate off,” Fisher said, “and jumping the wires. Not much different from hot-wiring a car, actually.”

“And that would take care of the tear gas,” Nolan said.

“Should,” Fisher said.

“You know, a mall’s a big place,” a Leech said, making as profound an observation as Nolan guessed a Leech could make.

“And we’re going to be all spread out,” another Leech said.

“How’ll we keep in touch?” the final Leech said.

“Yes, Uncle Donald,” Jon said. “How?”

Nolan almost smiled at that, but again it was lost on the Leeches. “Walkie-talkies,” Nolan said. “Clip right on your belt. Radio Shack has plenty in stock; I checked.”

“Did you buy them at a discount?” Jon asked wryly.

“No,” Nolan said. “They’re the first things we’ll steal. That’s called five-finger discount, where I come from.”

The meeting went on one more hour and two more pitchers of beer. Nolan answered questions and they went over the details. It was a big job, but simple in many ways, particularly once it had been broken down into man-by-man tasks. The hardest thing was the loading they’d all be doing — particularly hauling the larger appliances on dollies and carts to the waiting semis. It would be a long hard night of physical labor. The hourly wage would be considerable, however.

As the party began breaking up, Nolan saw Fisher head for the john and followed him in. As they were pissing at adjoining stalls, he told Fisher he needed to talk to him privately, and Fisher agreed to drive out to Nolan’s house, once well shy of Comforts and Leeches.

Before he left, Comfort patted Nolan on the shoulder and said, “You’re doing fine. Keep it up, and everything’s gonna work out.”

“Keep up your end and it will.”

Comfort only smiled his disarmingly engaging smile and left. Why did that sadistic son of a bitch have such a warm, friendly smile?

When the restaurant was empty, Nolan, who’d had none of the beer, poured some whiskey in a shot glass and asked Jon if he wanted any. Jon, who rarely drank, said, “Fuck yes.”

They sat at a small table and drank the whiskey and Nolan said, “Did you notice Comfort’s thick kid Lyle didn’t say anything all night?”

“You’re wrong, Nolan,” Jon said, swirling his whiskey in his glass, staring at the dark liquid like it was a crystal ball hiding his future. “His presence spoke volumes.”

“What do you mean?”

“If he’s here, who was baby-sitting Sherry?”

“It occurred to me she might be dead.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You think your new squeeze Cindy Lou was watching Sherry. Sitting in for brother Lyle.”

Jon nodded and kept nodding. “Yeah. I sure do. And I don’t think she’s going to like it.”

“You don’t.”

“She may be a little slut, but she didn’t strike me as a bad kid. She didn’t strike me as somebody who’d get much of a kick out of playing jailer, either.”

“She’s a Comfort.”

“Yeah, but she’s disenchanted with her family, with her old man. And tonight they made her an accomplice in a kidnaping. She isn’t stupid. She’ll figure that out.”

“What are you saying?”

“Let’s not snatch her. Let me try to link up with her tomorrow and, shit, try to get her on our side.”

“I don’t know.”

“I think I can get it out of her.”

“You mean you can get it in her.”

“No, I mean I can get it out of her — where Sherry’s being kept.”

Nolan thought about it. “We could also just grab her and trade her to her father even up for Sherry.”

“If that’s the way you want to go, I’m in. But you were right — on our worst day we’re not as bad as that evil cocksucker. And that evil cocksucker knows it.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning he knows that he’s capable of killing your girl. And he also knows you’re not capable of killing his daughter.”

“I’m capable of cutting off her fingers one at a time and sending them to him.”

“No you aren’t.”

Nolan drank some of the whiskey.

Then he said, “We’ll try it your way. Talk to her. Fuck her again. When she’s coming, ask her where Sherry is.” He let some air out. Finished the whiskey. “Come on. Fisher’s probably invented a black box by now to open my garage door.”

And Jon went out to the van, and Nolan to his silver Trans Am. Nolan wishing he had it in him to kill Comfort’s daughter, knowing he didn’t.