Spree

15

Jon had started the stakeout midmorning. As late as the meet last night (this morning, technically) had broken up, he didn’t figure Comfort would be going anyplace at the crack of dawn. Nolan hadn’t argued with Jon’s logic on that point, and over a breakfast of scrambled eggs and sausage, which Nolan prepared, Jon asked Nolan what the game plan was if Sherry’s whereabouts could be ascertained.

“We go in with guns and take her back,” Nolan said.

That didn’t seem like much of a plan to Jon, but on the other hand, until the exact circumstances of how and where she was being held were known to them, coming up with anything more elaborate was a waste of time.

Jon shrugged. “Well, how hard can it be, with only that lunkhead Lyle guarding her?”

“Hard,” Nolan said. “Lyle may be a lunkhead, but he’s also a Comfort. That makes him a dangerous lunkhead.”

Jon was, as usual, impressed by Nolan’s businesslike attitude, even in the face of something as emotionally wrenching as the kidnaping of a woman Nolan may well have loved. There had been a moment, last night, in the back room at the restaurant just before the meet, when Nolan betrayed some emotion bubbling under that stoic surface; and Jon sensed the rage behind Nolan’s occasional quiet remarks about what he would do to Comfort if Sherry were harmed. But mostly Nolan seemed to be sublimating his emotions and anger into working on those two conflicting goals — planning/organizing the heist, and getting Sherry back.

Now it was Thursday afternoon, a little after two, and a light snow was dusting the Holiday Inn parking lot, powdering the immediate world, making it look better and not so real. Jon sat in the parked light blue van in his ski mask and navy coat, his Thermos of hot chocolate between his legs. No paperback today. His full attention was on Comfort’s red pickup truck. The Leeches were apparently staying at the Holiday Inn, as well, as Jon had spotted their yellow, racing-striped Camaro parked alongside a room on the west side of the motel. If the Leeches and/or Comfort left in the Camaro, they would have to drive through the parking lot past where Jon sat in his van. So he had it covered.

Butterflies were aflight in his stomach, however; time was running out: the mall heist was set to go down in a matter of hours — a little over eight hours. Before that time, if things went well, he and Nolan would rescue Sherry, very possibly in a blaze of gunfire and dying Comforts. And that was if things went well. He’d been in situations where he liked the options better.

He thought about Sherry. He hadn’t let himself do that, much. He liked her — he was attracted to her, no question, but it was an attraction he’d never do anything about. A stunning-looking woman, and no dummy. He’d never seen anyone handle Nolan better. She didn’t exactly have him wrapped around her little finger, but close. Surprisingly close.

What sort of hell was she going through? He’d been there himself — he’d been held hostage before, and knew firsthand of the helplessness, the hopelessness, the all-pervasive fear it engendered. And her captors were Cole and Lyle Comfort — he shivered at the thought, and the cold day.

Presumably Comfort would keep her alive and well till tonight’s heist, at least, to keep Nolan playing. Comfort’s own reputation was so rotten it had obviously forced him to call on people who’d worked with Nolan — Fisher, Winch, Dooley — pros who would put their misgivings about working with Comfort aside when they heard Nolan was aboard. (The Leeches were another matter.) This put Nolan’s importance beyond providing inside information and planning; Comfort had — no doubt reluctantly, but of necessity — made Nolan the linchpin of the heist.

Without Nolan, the mall haul simply would not go down. If Nolan failed to show, Fisher, Winch and Dooley would walk.

What Comfort didn’t know, of course, was that those three already knew the real score; Fisher, like Winch and Dooley before him, had last night promised to follow Nolan’s lead, even down to aborting the job (in favor of Nolan kicking in a fifteen-grand payoff — business was business).

At just after four o’clock, Jon decided to take a chance. He pulled off the ski mask and replaced it with a gray beret and wrapped the black muffler around his neck up higher, so that it covered the bottom of his face, like a stagecoach robber. He tucked a square flat brown-paper-wrapped package under his left arm, locked up the van and walked across the snowy parking lot and into the Holiday Inn. His gloveless right hand was on the snub-nose .38 in the deep pocket of his coat.

Cindy Lou had mentioned, yesterday, that her father and the Leeches had spent a good deal of time together, in the lounge, which was off the restaurant, and Jon peeked in. It was just a bar and some booths and a few small tables and a middle-aged mustached pianist playing “Just the Way You Are.” A couple sat at the bar, and some businessmen sat in one of the booths. But in another of the booths the Leeches and Cole Comfort were sitting, countless bottles of beer before them. They were going over one of Nolan’s photocopied maps of the mall. Right in front of God and the pianist and everybody.

Jesus Christ, Jon thought, ducking out before he was seen. Finding them confabbing there meant he’d hit pay dirt; but he couldn’t get excited about it because he was too struck by the notion that he just might possibly be pulling a job with these morons in a few hours.

He walked the halls till he found 714 — the numbering system seemed to apply to wings, not floors — and knocked on the door. He knocked with his left hand, brown-paper package still tucked under his arm, his right hand still clutching the revolver, which remained in his pocket but pointed toward the door, because if Lyle Comfort answered it, Jon just might have to shoot the fucker.

No answer to his knock.

He sighed. He was trembling. He simply was not cut out for this life. What was he doing, hanging around with a guy like Nolan. What the fuck was he doing with a revolver in his pocket.

He knocked again.

The door cracked open and Cindy Lou’s faintly freckled face peered out, and broke into a lovely smile, the small, childlike teeth whiter than outside. She was lovely, but seemed a little haggard. Was it the light of day, and lack of makeup — or had she had a rough night?

In any event, she was dripping wet, except for her reddish-blond hair, which was pulled back from her face. She was wearing a white towel.

“Hi, Cindy Lou.”

Her smile disappeared, and the door chain was still between them. “You shouldn’t oughta come here,” she said, big blue eyes going smaller as she tightened her expression.

“I brought your record.”

The eyes got as large as they were blue again, and she smiled; but then the smile faded, and her eyes became merely huge. “Daddy’s around. It’s dangerous.”

“I think I spotted him in the lounge. He seemed settled in.”

Her brow crinkled. “How would you know which was my daddy?”

“Let me in, Cindy Lou. I got to talk to you.”

Her face tightened further, in thought; under those remarkable eyes she had dark circles. Then the chain was drawn aside, and she opened the door; he stepped inside and chained the door behind him. He handed her the brown package and she opened it greedily, saying “All right!” as the towel dropped to the floor.

Her body, in the light of day, looked just fine. Very pale flesh, very pink, very erect nipples, peachlike breasts, her strawberry-blond pubic hair trimmed into a heart shape, something he hadn’t seen in the near-light of the back of the van last night. His dick said boy, howdy, and he told it, down boy.

And she just stood there, not caring a whit about her nudity, jiggling, bouncing as she grinned and looked at the cover of the Nodes album, front and back.

“I remember some of these songs,” she said, “from hearing you play!”

“Maybe you better get dressed,” he said.

She stood there with her weight on one hip, a hand on one hip, holding the album in her other hand like it was a tray and she was an amused but bored carhop at a topless drive-in.

“Or maybe not,” he said, and took her in his arms and kissed her; she immediately began taking his coat off, even as she was putting her darting tongue in his mouth, and the coat dropped to the floor like the dead weight it was, the gun-in-pocket clunking. Her hands worked on his zipper and she went down on her knees in front of him.

Jon stood there, shaking his head, wondering how he lost control of the situation so fast, and he was in her mouth, but only for a second when he pulled away and said, “No.”

Still on her knees she looked up at him with utter confusion. “No?” she repeated, as if she didn’t understand the meaning of the word.

Certainly in this context, the word seemed out of place, but Jon forced himself back in his pants and said to her, “Get dressed. We got to talk, and I can’t talk to you when you’re like that.”

She smirked humorlessly and got up and picked up her towel and dried herself off a little, and he watched her, every cell of his body aching with regret, as a beautiful naked teenage female, as yet a stranger to cellulite, put on panties and jeans and a loose-fitting red sweater with a scoop neck that showed just enough cleavage to make him simultaneously wish he were dead and could live forever.

She stood there, weight on one hip again, both hands on her hips this time, smirking, but good-naturedly now, challenging him to find something to talk about that was more important than her giving him the best goddamned blowjob the state of Missouri had to offer, in Iowa yet.

He put his coat back on, put his hand on the .38 grip within the pocket, and looked around the room. The signs of Cole Comfort living here were few; his clothes were apparently either in the dresser and closet or still in suitcases. There was a half-empty bottle of Old Grand-Dad on the dresser. Her clothes were also put away, and her personal items must have been in the bathroom, because there was no particular sign of Cindy Lou, either, except her denim jacket slung over a chair, and on a table a Hit Parader magazine with heavy-metal groups on the cover, a publication he didn’t figure was on Cole Comfort’s subscription list.

The side wall of the room was orange-vinyl-curtained sliding doors, leading out to the pool area. Jon reached behind there and unlocked one of the sliding doors; the swimming pool (like Nolan’s) was covered with plastic and a fresh layer of white powder, shimmering in the daylight like a vast coke-covered mirror.

“Sit down,” he told her, pointing to the nearest bed.

She did. He sat next to her.

“Can I trust you?” he asked.

“To do what?”

“To keep a confidence.”

She shrugged. “Sure.”

“It’s not going to be that easy. Last night you talked a lot about you and your father not getting along. You talked around it some, but that’s the general drift.”

She sighed heavily; the dark circles under her eyes weren’t the whole story — she seemed weary, troubled.

“It isn’t that simple,” she said.

“He’s hitting on you, isn’t he?”

She said nothing for a moment; looked at the floor. Nodded.

“Was it worse last night?”

She nodded. She shook her head. Pointed toward the bathroom. “I spent four hours locked in that goddamn toilet. He started pounding on the door. He was crying, after while...”

Jon couldn’t quite picture Cole Comfort crying.

“Was he sorry?” Jon asked.

“He said he was. He said he had... demons. He begged me to forgive him. I forgave him — but through the door. He wanted to fuck me. I know he did.”

Jon looked at her with awe. Her frankness was startling, and he wondered how, after a nightmare night hiding behind a locked bathroom door from a father who probably wanted to rape her, she could so easily go down on her knees and take a casual lover like him in her mouth.

She smiled a little, reading his mind, or anyway his eyes. She touched his leg. “I like lovin’. Daddy ain’t gonna spoil that for me. It’s not that I don’t want to have sex again — it’s just that I don’t want to have it with Daddy.”

“That’s not a bad policy.”

She looked at the orange vinyl curtains. “I’m thinking about leaving. I called my friend out in California — Ginger — she’s got a job and everything. Not hustling, either. She says she can get me on at the Taco Bell, too. It’s a better future than I got at home.”

“I think leaving is a good idea.”

“It is. I just can’t take it. This... it’s getting... I can’t take it.”

“There’s more, isn’t there? Than your daddy pawing after you.”

She seemed to almost wince. Another sigh. Another nod.

“Your father’s a thief, isn’t he?”

She looked at him sharply, pulled away. “What are you?” Her voice turned as harsh as a heavy-metal guitar solo. “Are you some fuckin’ narc or something?”

He laughed a little. Very little. “No. I’m not a narc or any kind of cop.”

“Then... what?”

“I’m another thief. I’m in on this mall heist with your father.”

She looked at him like they looked at Columbus when he said the world was round. “What? You are?”

“Yes. And if he knew I’d made contact with you, he wouldn’t like it.”

“Is that what you call it? Contact? I thought you fucked me. And, brother, he’d kill you, for that.”

“I know he would. I know he would.”

She looked at him, taking him seriously; something in his voice had brought her around.

“See, I’m not really a thief, anymore,” he said. “I used to be. When I was a kid, and wild. I was in on a couple of bank robberies, a few other things. But I went straight. Started playing with the Nodes, working on my comic books — like I told you about last night. But now, after I thought that the whole world was behind me, your father pulls me in on this fucking thing.”

“Why? How?”

“I’m going to tell you the whole story, Cindy Lou. And believe me, I’m putting my life in your hands...”

And he told her. He pulled no punches. He even told her about his part in the deaths of certain of her “kin.” Most of all he told her about Sherry. About how Sherry had been kidnaped to force Nolan and Jon to help heist the Brady Eighty mall.

She was silent throughout, listening raptly; but he couldn’t read her.

Finally he said, “I think you already know about Sherry, and the trouble she’s in. I think you were forced to stand guard on her last night, while your brother and father met with the rest of us, for our final planning session.”

She winced again. Looked at the floor.

“I don’t know what crimes in the past your father has involved you in,” he said, “but this time it’s kidnaping. You’re an accessory. You’re implicated in the mall heist, as well; you’re a conspirator.”

She looked at him, her big blue eyes wet.

“The girl’s all right,” she said. “She hasn’t been hurt or anything. Lyle hasn’t touched her.”

Thank God.

“Good. But your father wants revenge against my friend and me. I think he plans to kill Sherry, eventually. And me. And my friend.”

She thought about that. Then shook her head violently.

“No!” she said. “No, I don’t think he’d go that far. Daddy’s not a bad man, not really...”

“Jesus fuck! How did you spend last night again? Or was that somebody else who was hiding in the can from her rape-happy old man?”

“Jon... what are you asking...?”

“First, don’t betray me. At the very least, just don’t say anything to your father about us talking.”

He waited for her to nod, but she just looked at him.

He swallowed and went on. “What I want most of all is for you to tell me where they’re holding Sherry.”

“Oh, Jon...”

“Where, and under what conditions. I need to know the layout of the place, so we can get her back without anybody getting hurt. That includes Lyle, and your father.”

She was shaking her head no.

“We aren’t murderers, Cindy Lou, Nolan and me. We’re two guys who used to be crooks, who went straight, and something out of our past came back at us and whapped us alongside the head. This girl, Sherry, is innocent in this. She’s done nothing to your father to deserve any of it. She’s not, never was, a criminal. Her only crime was falling in love with the wrong guy.”

“I been there,” she said hollowly.

Tears were making tracks down her cheeks, though her face was oddly impassive.

“I think you should help me,” Jon said. “You should tell me where Sherry is, before she gets hurt. Before she gets killed. You don’t want to be an accessory to murder, do you?”

Now her Kewpie-doll lips were quivering. “Jon... please...”

“Help me. Don’t say anything to your father. And catch that bus to California — today, tonight, as soon as you can break free from him.”

“I don’t have enough money...”

“I’ll tell you what. From here I’m going down to the Greyhound station. It’s in downtown Davenport. I’m going to buy you a ticket to, where?”

“L.A.,” she said, snuffling.

“To L.A. I’ll have them hold it for you at the ticket window, in your name. How’s that?”

“I can’t do it.”

“Go to California?”

“Help you. He’s my daddy, Jon. No matter what he’s done, he’s my daddy. I can’t, I just can’t turn against him. He’s kin.”

Jon reached out and held her hand. “Look. This isn’t a matter of ‘kin.’ It’s a matter of right and wrong.”

Her mouth tightened. “You steal things. How can you say what’s right and wrong?”

“Stealing’s wrong. I don’t do it anymore. At least, I don’t want to do it anymore. Kidnaping is very wrong. Murder is as wrong as you can get.”

“Going against your family is wrong.”

“Not if they’re the Mansons. Help me. And yourself. Tell me where Sherry is — and catch that bus.”

“Jon... don’t ask me this... we hardly know each other...”

“My life’s in your hands.”

The door opened.

Jon withdrew the gun, put a finger to his lips; Cindy Lou sucked in air, brought a hand up to her mouth.

The safety chain kept the door from opening more than a few inches. A voice out there — Cole Comfort’s voice, sounding a little drunk — said, “Let me in, darlin’! What you got this thing locked for? And turn that TV down!”

Jon mouthed, “Please,” to her, and she got up and went to the door, saying, “I got to shut it to open it, Daddy,” and she shut it, turning to Jon and giving him a pained expression and shaking her head no.

Quickly he ducked out the glass doors and sprinted through the snow back to his van, not looking back, gun in his hand and in his pocket. Wondering if he’d blown it.

16

Business was slow, at Nolan’s, even for a Thursday night. It was cold, particularly for early December, and the roads were slick from the light but persistent snow. This was no blizzard, but people weren’t used to the winter driving conditions yet, and a lot of them stayed home. Tonight it was mostly singles, out dancing to the monotonous beat and nasal sounds of some British synthesizer band. Nolan had turned the alleged music down lower than Sherry would have liked. Sherry thought loud music encouraged dancing, which encouraged general socializing, all of which encouraged drinking. It was his thinking that the couples lingering here, after a late dinner, sitting in the bar, might want to talk, or anyway hear themselves think. The loudness of the sound system was a bone of contention between Sherry and Nolan. He usually let her have her way — as long as the customers didn’t complain, and they never seemed to. Without her here, he did it his way.

The regulars were asking for her: “Where’s Sherry?” “We really miss her!” “You’re a poor substitute for a pretty face, Nolan!” He told them, including several of his Chamber of Commerce pals, she’d gone home to visit family. Since her family was all dead, he hoped that wasn’t really the case.

Being at the restaurant was worse, in a way, than being at home; her touch was here — the plants, the decor, even the way things were run, much of it had come from her, or from them both, talking things out, planning together. They had shared the restaurant more than the house. Funny, how the worst waitress in the world could turn out to have such a knowing touch where managing was concerned. Strange, how he could sleep in that bed and force her from his mind but in Nolan’s, he couldn’t. She was everywhere.

Except in the back room. That was where Cole Comfort waited.

Jennifer Wallace liked her job. She never admitted it to anybody, because she was, after all, just a glorified janitor. And not particularly glorified, either.

But she liked solitude — she’d grown up in a big family and hadn’t had near as much time to herself as she would’ve liked, and now, only twenty-five years of age, she was working on her own big family, with three at home, ages two, four and seven, which was the life she’d sought, the life she loved, but solitude wasn’t part of it.

She was a small but sturdy woman, with dark brown hair in a short tight perm, small dark eyes, rather large nose, pleasant smile; wearing a light brown shirt with the Brady Eighty logo on it, and dark brown slacks. It was almost a uniform, giving her a military look, and she liked that. It made her feel less a janitor, as the term bothered her a little, even though she liked the work just fine.

A lot of people wouldn’t have. But all the mopping of floors and Windexing of storefronts (which was pretty much the sum of her duties between now and seven, when the shift changed and the doors opened) had a hypnotic effect on her. She got into it. She liked the feel of her muscles being exercised. She liked working hard but unsupervised, taking her time.

And she varied it. She could finish up the place in five hours, if she pushed it. In which case, she could sit in the maintenance shop — a big cement supply room, like a garage only without a garage door — with her feet up on the workbench, reading a book, or listening to the radio, or watching a portable TV.

Other nights she would take her time. Those were the nights when she was in a thoughtful mood, and let the motion of mopping and Windexing lull her. She could get drunk on work when she took it at that slow, steady pace. But not so drunk that she wouldn’t think about her kids and her Doug.

She had a terrific husband and terrific kids. Doug was blond and chubby and cute as a bug’s ear; they got married out of high school — a “have-to,” but they neither one had regrets, at least not that Jennifer knew. Doug worked at Oscar Meyer, day shift, and she took the kids to day-care when she got home from work around 7:30 A.M. and then she’d sleep all day. She and Doug and the kids had all evening together; she came on at ten, so they’d get the kids in bed at eight-thirty or so, and have a roll in the hay, and she’d go off to work with a glow.

She loved her life.

Tonight, she’d come on, as usual, right at ten, nodding to Pete, whose maintenance shift was just ending, and Scott, that cute security guard, who was going off duty. As usual, Pete had a pot of coffee waiting for her. She needed her caffeine; that’s one thing you needed in this job. That and a good attitude.

She sat in her swivel executive-style chair, which had been abandoned by one of the businesses out here and which Pete had salvaged and repaired, with her feet up on the workbench, trying to decide whether tonight would be a high-energy, five-hour night, followed by some relaxation (she had a historical romance paperback tucked in her purse, Love’s Savage Sword by Linda Benjamin); or a reflective, slow-and-steady worknight, where she could get lost in the circular motion of mop and rag, and contemplate her kids and her old man. She sipped her coffee, and thought: I think tonight I’ll whip through this place like a female Mr. Clean; maybe I can beat my record and come in under five hours — and finish reading my romance.

With that, she was deep asleep.

Nolan sat at his desk. White-haired, blue-eyed Coleman Comfort sat on a box of whiskey bottles nearby; he was wearing his coveralls with a plaid shirt underneath, looking folksy as a postcard from the Grand Ole Opry. He seemed to have developed a bit of a paunch; Nolan didn’t seem to be the only one age had put a spare tire on. One odd note was struck: his high-topped black tennis shoes, over which cream-colored longjohns rose into the coveralls. Nolan understood the shoes, though: he’d suggested to all of them, last night, that they wear something comfortable and suited for the long night of physical labor ahead. And Cole Comfort had obviously taken Nolan’s footwear advice to heart, and sole.

“I guess it’s time,” Cole said, smiling; he had such a nice smile.

Nolan glanced at his watch. Ten after ten. “I’d say the maintenance girl’s out, by now.” He had gone in just before Pete went off and chatted with the man, slipping Seconal in the pot of coffee. The last three nights Nolan had, just after ten, entered the mall the back way, walking past the maintenance shop’s double doors, which were invariably ajar; each night he noticed the night girl sitting having a cup of coffee before getting to work.

Three nights in a row suggested, but did not guarantee, a pattern.

“How do we know she’s out?” Comfort said, just a little irritably.

“We’ll know for sure soon enough. Before this goes any further, you’ve got a phone call to make.”

And Nolan pushed the phone on his desk toward Comfort. Comfort rose and went to the phone and pushed some buttons and, phone to his ear, stood and smiled at Nolan. It was a smile that seemed pleasant enough, but Nolan could see the smugness, the cruelty, that lurked behind Comfort’s good-ole-boy veneer.

“Hello, son,” Comfort said, his voice warm. “Time to put the girl on.”

He listened for a while, and handed the receiver to Nolan.

“Nolan?”

Her voice was breathy; there was fear in it, but also relief.

“Sherry,” he said.

“They’re using me to make you help them, aren’t they?” Her bitter tone of voice conveyed what she couldn’t add: And I hate it.

“You know about the mall heist?” he asked her.

“I’ve picked up on it. You could lose everything.”

“I’m not going to lose you.”

“The life you’ve made...”

“No. I did the planning. It’ll go down smooth. You’ll be returned to me and we’ll even get a piece of the action for our trouble.”

Nolan didn’t believe that, but he needed Comfort to believe he did, and it wouldn’t hurt Sherry’s state of mind to believe that, either.

“They haven’t hurt me. They keep saying once you’ve cooperated, I’ll be released.”

“We’ll be together in a few hours.”

That Nolan believed; or at least, he believed it to be a possibility. He and Jon already had something in motion.

“I love you, Nolan.”

“I love you, too.”

“That’s... nice to hear.”

Was she crying?

He said, “I’ll take you to Vegas when this is over and prove it.”

He told her to hang on, and then he hung up.

Comfort, who again was perched on the liquor boxes, hands on his knees, smiled paternally. “She didn’t complain about the treatment none, did she?”

“No.”

“You’re a lucky man. She’s a nice girl. A pretty girl.”

Nolan didn’t like to hear Comfort talk about her, but he didn’t say anything.

Comfort did: “When this is over, we’ll be even, Nolan. We can put all our differences behind us.”

“It’ll be history,” Nolan agreed.

“History,” Comfort repeated, smiling, standing, clapping, once. “So! Let’s go open the door and let our friends in, what do you say?”

Nolan remained seated. “Soon,” he said.

Comfort’s smile disappeared, and his mouth pulled itself in a tight line across his leathery face, but he just sat down. He’d put Nolan in charge; he had to live with it. For the moment.

Jon, wearing a Space Pirates sweatshirt, peeked in the maintenance room. The woman in the brown uniform was slumped in a swivel chair, feet up on a workbench; she was sawing logs. He had a large gym bag with him, from which he took a pair of handcuffs and some clothesline and a roll of wide-width adhesive tape. He left the woman in her chair, but slipped her feet from the bench onto the floor. He cuffed her hands behind the chair, and tied her feet to it, snug. He ran the adhesive over her eyes and around behind her hair, grimacing with the thought of how removal would hurt the poor woman. But it beat being dead, and Comfort might just as easily killed her, which was why Nolan kept this job for Jon and himself. Jon slapped another piece of adhesive over her mouth, which didn’t quite silence the snoring; her fairly large nose could saw its share of logs on its own.

In the bottom of the bag was a long-barreled .38 and an UZI submachine gun and a box of ammo for the revolver, and half a dozen clips for the machine gun. Jon zipped the bag and stowed it in a corner of the maintenance shed, behind a big shiny golf-cart-like thing, which seemed to be a floor buffer.

The guns were against Comfort’s rules. Despite what had been said at the meeting last night, Comfort had told Nolan privately that he and Jon were to go into this unarmed. Nolan hadn’t protested. He and Jon would go into it unarmed, all right; they just wouldn’t come out that way.

“We’re probably going to have to do some shooting,” Nolan said.

“Oh, Christ. Isn’t there ever an end to it?”

“There is if Comfort gets his way. He plans to kill us all.”

Jon swallowed thickly. “You and me and Sherry, you mean.”

“Possibly some of the others as well.”

“Why, for Christ’s sake?”

“Not for Christ’s sake. For the sake of revenge, in our case. In the others, for the sake of greed; for the sake of self-protection.”

Jon pulled at his own hair till it hurt. “Goddamn, I blew it, I really fucking blew it. We should have tried what you said — we should have grabbed Cindy Lou and tried a trade.”

“That’s hindsight; don’t torture yourself, kid. Besides, it might not have worked. We may have a better chance, tonight.”

“How?”

“It all hinges on Lyle showing up. And judging from his father going to the trouble of including him in our planning session last night, I think the boy will show. And once he has, that means one of two things.”

“Which are?”

“Sherry’s already dead.”

“Jesus.”

“Or she’s being baby-sat by your friend Cindy Lou.”

Jon found a smile. “Who isn’t at all dangerous — who wouldn’t begin to hurt her.”

“I’ll take your word for that. Like I got to take your word she won’t sell us out, after what you told her. There’s no other Comfort or Comfort crony in the woodpile, is there?”

“No. From what Cindy Lou said, it’s just the three of them — father, son, daughter.”

Nolan shrugged with his eyebrows. “Then once Lyle is here, all we have to do is get him and Cole together and under gunpoint and make them take us to her.”

That sounded like fun; if you liked skydiving without a parachute. “And we do that as soon as Lyle shows?”

Nolan shook his head. “Once the heist is under way, it’ll be hard to stop. Even though they’ve lined up with us, Fisher and Winch and Dooley aren’t going to relish working half a caper and then having it get shut down. They could even turn on us.”

“You promised them fifteen grand...”

“They could take home a hundred grand each from this job, if it goes the way it could.”

“Nolan — there’s no part of you that wants to do this job, is there?” Jon hated to say it, but Nolan did seem caught up in the momentum of it; could it be, now that he’d planned it, he couldn’t stand not to see it go down? To see if an entire shopping mall could be looted?

“All I want is Sherry back,” Nolan said.

And Jon dismissed those other thoughts; he believed Nolan. Sherry was what this was about.

“We wait till the Leeches have their trucks loaded up and have taken off,” Nolan said. “Then it’s just the two Comforts against our side. We grab father and son, and they show us where they’re keeping my girl. Or we kill one of them.”

Where Cindy Lou was concerned, an innocent kid, Nolan didn’t have it in him to kill or maim her; that Jon was certain of.

“After we kill one,” Nolan said, “the other loosens up and shows us. And if he doesn’t, we start cutting fingers off.”

As for Nolan killing/maiming the male, anything-but-innocent Comforts... Jon’s certainty ran in the other direction.

He walked down the empty mall, footsteps echoing; the lights in the stores were off. All the Christmas lights were off as well. But the mall was otherwise, albeit dimly, lit. The red and green banners hung limply now, no breeze from the coming in and out of mall shoppers to make them sway; they seemed faded and decidedly un-Christmasy in the dim light. The aisle carts of Christmas knickknacks and such had been abandoned by their teenage elves, empty of their goods, presumably stored away underneath someplace. Santa’s cotton and Styrofoam kingdom was deserted, too.

It reminded Jon of a time he and some friends had sneaked into their junior high school after dark for a little good-natured vandalism; it had been strange, thrilling, frightening. The school was simply a different place at night. What during the day had been a building bustling with people and activity was at night a sprawling barren place filled with echoes and not much else.

Soon, however, this mall would come back to life — night or not.

He turned left at Santa’s abdicated kingdom, skirted the red and green Our Merry Best sign, and used the key Nolan had given him to enter the mall entrance of Nolan’s, which had been locked to customers since nine.

He entered through the closed restaurant side and found Nolan and Comfort facing each other in the back room; Nolan sitting quietly, expressionlessly at the desk, Comfort sitting on a case of whiskey, arms folded, grinning at Nolan like a skull.

“She’s a sleeping beauty,” Jon said, meaning the janitor.

Nolan stood. “Stay here and keep Mr. Comfort company.”

And he left them together, and Jon took Nolan’s place at the desk, but didn’t speak to Comfort. After a while Comfort asked him if a cat caught his tongue.

“No,” Jon said. “I’m just taking your advice about children.”

Dave Fisher, Roger Winch, and Phil Dooley sat in a gray Buick which belonged to Fisher but was officially owned by a nonexistent person named Bernard Phillips. The Buick, which was parked in the Brady Eighty back parking lot, motor running, had Alabama license plates. Fisher had written to the Alabama Department of Motor Vehicles for the plates, fulfilling the requirement of a description of the car, vehicle identification number and registration fee. The Buick was a stolen car which Fisher, who lived in Minneapolis, had bought from a friend in St. Paul, who ran a chop shop. The Buick had a new VIN (vehicle identification number) and new tires; it did not have much of a heater, as the three men were finding out.

None of them was wearing a heavy winter coat — Fisher wore a dark blue polyester jacket, Winch, a brown corduroy sport coat over dingy work clothes, Dooley, a sand-color suede jacket. They needed jackets light enough to keep on, inside, during a long night of work, but protective enough to keep them from freezing when toiling in the chilly loading-dock areas.

“If I’d known this heater was down,” Fisher said apologetically to Winch, in the rider’s seat beside him, “I’d have fixed it.” Dooley was in back.

“Fuckin’ cold out there,” Winch said, rubbing his hands together. “At least it isn’t snowing now.”

Their breath was smoking, clouding up the windows.

Dooley said, “We only got a couple inches. I think it’s lovely.”

Fisher said, “What’s taking so long? It’s twenty after ten, already.”

“There he is,” Winch said, pointing toward Nolan, who could be seen behind the glass doors of the mall’s east-end rear exit. He was crooking his finger at them, like a parent summoning his children.

Fisher admired Nolan; he’d done several jobs with him, oh, probably half a dozen years before, and he’d come to admire the man’s logic and discipline. He had no such admiration for Comfort, with whom he’d worked on a Mickey Mouse house burglary about ten years ago — a rich guy in St. Louis with an elaborate alarm system, or so Comfort said; Fisher had no difficulty getting around it. The job wound up paying a couple grand. Whoop-de-do.

When he heard how Nolan had been forced out of retirement by Comfort, Fisher hadn’t been surprised exactly, although kidnaping Nolan’s lady seemed extreme even for Comfort. Fisher was on Nolan’s side in this, although he was eager to do this job and even more eager for the money. This was a challenging score (because of the size of it — the alarm system would be nothing) and would bring in a sizable piece of change, one that should indefinitely underwrite him as he continued developing the computer software he knew would one day make him a millionaire.

They piled out of the car. Fisher opened the trunk and took out a large square suitcaselike affair. Winch took out a duffel bag which made metallic clinks and clunks as the tools within bumped against each other; not to worry: the safecracker’s partner, Dooley, carried the knockers and grease, in his jacket pockets. Nothing was going to blow up tonight except some doors on safes, Fisher thought, smiling to himself — and, possibly, this job in Comfort’s face, if the old fool crosses Nolan.

Nolan let them in, locked the door behind them. He said to Fisher and Dooley, the men upon whom the job depended, “The Leeches will be here with the trucks at eleven. We got enough time?”

“Sure,” Fisher said, referring to the alarm system.

“Sure,” Dooley said, referring to the minimum eighteen locks he’d have to pick in the next few hours.

Nolan directed Winch and Dooley down to the mall entrance to Nolan’s, where Jon would be waiting to let them in — they’d be entering the restaurant side, which was closed; they would join Comfort in the back room, where all would wait till Nolan gave the go. The go was contingent upon Fisher’s success in jumping the alarm system.

Toward that end, Nolan walked Fisher into the maintenance shop, just to their left through the double doors. The unconscious woman who was the night janitor was tied up in her swivel chair; she looked dead, but she was snoring, which was among the things dead people didn’t do. The garagelike room was cluttered with cans of paint and canisters and bottles of cleaning solutions and such; the bag of guns was stowed in the corner, as he’d instructed Jon. Good.

Nolan walked Fisher up a half flight of stairs into another cluttered but low-ceilinged area, littered with unidentifiable junk and more cleaning supplies. On the wall at left was the board where the phone line came in; it looked cluttered, too, to Nolan, who knew little about such things — to him, it was just a couple of metal control boxes affixed to a board with dozens of little green wires shooting off here and there, making side trips into junction boxes. But Fisher seemed to know immediately what the various wires were for and where they were headed; he touched some of them, lightly, lovingly, smiling like a suitor.

Then Fisher opened what looked like a traveling salesman’s sample case and started unloading it.

“You need any help?” Nolan asked.

“No. It’s just a matter of clipping onto the phone line and measuring the pulse rate with this oscilloscope” — he pointed to a small battery-operated TV — “and, once I’ve got a wave reading, adjusting my little black box” — he nodded to a little black box with some dials and switches — “to that specific pulse rate and clipping it onto the alarm line, completing the circuit, fooling their so-called system.”

“And if you fuck up?”

“The cops’ll be here in five minutes,” Fisher said, and took his pocket knife and started scraping the phone wire bare.

17

The small cabin, one room with bath, would have seemed cozy to her, normally. A fire was going in its wood-burning stove, across the room near the far wall; this was, at the moment, the only light source in the room, and the warm orange glow cast on the rustic, knotty-pine interior of the cabin was as homey as a Norman Rockwell painting. Sitting before the stove, in a textured gray narrow-lapel jacket, over a wine-colored shirt, with matching pleated pants, was the boy/man, Lyle. He was a stylish dresser, Lyle was. The problem was his I.Q. seemed about the same as his shirt size. He sat there now, roasting a marshmallow on the end of a long twig he’d found outside, sat there cross-legged like an Indian in designer clothes, like a new-wave Boy Scout.

Sherry didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She did neither: she didn’t want to upset Lyle. She’d had some bad moments with him, over the past days, and had only today begun rebuilding. There were signs Lyle was warming to her again. He had, for example, offered to roast a marshmallow for her, just minutes ago. She declined, but thanked him for his thoughtfulness. That was one of the small pleasures of being held prisoner by a dimwit like Lyle: he never picked up on sarcasm. You could get away with anything — verbally. You just couldn’t get away.

She shifted on the bed; her ass felt raw — bedsores, possibly. Today was Thursday — tonight was Thursday; it was dark out the cabin windows (when it was light, there was nothing to see but snow and trees). She was dressed just as she had been Sunday when she’d been shanghaied: bulky lavender turtleneck sweater and matching cords; her suede boots were under the bed — she wasn’t sure what became of her gold jewelry. She was sitting up, pillow behind her, her left hand cuffed to one thick rung of the bed’s maple headboard. The arm was sore and stiff, particularly her shoulder, which ached; her whole upper back ached, as a matter of fact. Sleeping that way, as she had for four nights now, was awful; the first night, she’d kept waking herself up, turning in her sleep only to yank her own chain — but she was used to it now. She had been here forever, after all.

The square room had two single beds, separated by a bed stand on which was a phone; and at the root of the other bed was a small rabbit-eared TV on a stand. Over at the right was the only door, and just left of the door, catercorner from where she lay, was a little off-white kitchenette area, the only part of the room that wasn’t dark-yellowish-varnished knotty pine. Just opposite her was the bathroom. To her left was a window, nailed shut.

On the bed stand, near that teasing phone, was a Sony Walkman with assorted tapes: the Cars, David Bowie, Billy Idol, Tears for Fears and (perhaps most appropriately) Simple Minds. That Lyle listened to such tapes first amazed, then amused, and finally depressed her. She had tried to engage him in a conversation about Bowie, and Lyle had said, “I like some oldies.” Further observations about the music he listened to included liking the beat and a “smooth” sound and “It has a cool video.” Lyle was born to rate records on American Bandstand.

In fact, Lyle was “bummed out” (a leftover hippie phrase that seemed oddly anachronistic, coming from the lips of this eighties Li’l Abner) that the cabin’s “tube” didn’t get MTV. No cable out here in the country, no satellite dish either apparently; just rabbit ears. Nonetheless, Lyle seemed able to settle into soap operas and game shows, during the day, and sitcoms and cop shows in the evening, his stupidly handsome face impassive as he watched the moving images on the screen, often while listening to his own alternative track on his Sony Walkman — The Cosby Show with Billy Idol voice-over, Hill Street Blues starring the Cars.

He had not been mean to her. He did not seem to have a mean bone in his body (nor a brain in his head, but at least he wasn’t sadistic). Her first thought, upon waking handcuffed to a bed, with the two men standing at the foot of it staring at her, was rape.

But Lyle hadn’t touched her. The other one had felt her up some, pretending to just be moving her around — nothing overt. This one was Lyle’s “pa,” an almost handsome, white-haired, blue-eyed apparition; he was in his sixties, this one, a frightening son of a bitch with a gentle, charming smile through which shone the intelligence — and sadism — his son lacked. She had only seen him once, that first night, but the threat of him hung over her captivity like a rustic cloud. Lyle, who spoke with his pa on the phone every few hours, was in the old man’s sway, obedient as a well-trained dog and nearly as smart.

That first night had been the worst, or close to it. Her anger ran a race with her fear and came in a close second. She had all but snarled at the old man at the foot of the bed: “What the hell is this about?”

And Lyle’s pa had leaned a hand over and patted her leg; she kicked at his hand, but he anticipated it and pulled it away and smiled sweetly at her. “This is about your boyfriend, honey. And you go kickin’ people, and you’ll wind up with your feet cuffed, too. Mind your manners, hear?”

She heard; she heard bloodcurdling insanity and rage churning under his phony milk-of-human-kindness tone. She knew immediately that Nolan was in at least as much trouble as she was.

“If your man loves you, honey,” said Lyle’s pa, “you’ll be just fine. You’re gonna have to camp out with us for a few days, is all. We’ll treat you right. Just don’t you make a fuss.”

“Nolan will...” she started, then thought better of it.

“Kill us?” Lyle’s pa smiled. “I hardly think so.” He walked around the side of the bed and put a surprisingly smooth palm against her cheek, smiled at her, as demented as a TV preacher. “We got something that’s precious to him. He’s gonna do just like we say.” Some edge came into the voice: “And so are you, honey. So are you.”

“How... how long will I be here?”

“A few days, darlin’.”

“A few days.”

“Thursday. Make yourself to home. Don’t cause trouble. Be a good girl.”

The old man had soon left, and she was in the company of the good-looking boy. He had been polite.

“Pa says you can go to the bathroom,” he said, “long as you don’t overdo it. We got supplies here. There’s a microwave.” That meant frozen dinners, as it turned out; three a day (breakfast was scrambled eggs and sausage but in the little frozen-dinner format). At first she could barely look at the stuff, let alone stomach it; she soon learned to do both.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked Lyle, looking for humanity in this empty-headed hunk.

“Pa told me to.”

This turned out to be a standard reply. Discussion of morality and ethics with Lyle was about as fruitful as exploring theology with a bust of Darwin (who would have appreciated Lyle, who single-handedly proved the theory of evolution).

Helplessness hit her in waves. She couldn’t get through to this autistic twerp, and she felt sure that when the father showed back up, she’d be in deep, deep shit for the opposite reason: the father was smart. And crazy.

And he hated Nolan. She came to know that for a fact later on, but she sensed it from the beginning. She smelled revenge in this. This wasn’t just about forcing Nolan into some heist. It was about getting back at him.

Lyle, on the second day, admitted that. She’d had to ask him again and again, and Lyle had winced at her persistence and retreated to his Walkman headphones; but later, when he was getting lunch in the kitchenette (minus the Walkman — he couldn’t microwave and listen to music at the same time), she started in again and finally he said: “Your boyfriend killed my uncle and two of my cousins. He’s a bad man, your boyfriend.”

She was dead. That was her death sentence, and Nolan’s. Unless he could find, her, somehow — but how? She was out in the boonies somewhere — the state police and a fleet of helicopters couldn’t have found her. And even if they could, Nolan wouldn’t go to them. This was out of his old life: he couldn’t go to the police. And she wasn’t sure she wanted him to: these creatures would kill her, if he went to the police. Like swatting a bug.

She had cried, then; heaving sobs. She didn’t care if the boy heard her — she’d cried the night before, from pain, from fear, but some light of hope and dignity had made her stifle the sounds, not wanting her snoring captor in the next bed to be wakened by her despair, not wanting to let him know, let them know, that they had beaten her down so soon, so easily.

But now that she knew human emotions barely seemed to register with Lyle, she just let go: the tears, the sobs, racked her body. It was a relief, in a way, and as the crying jag subsided she felt better, and a fire within her began fanning itself, bringing her back to life.

Then she got a break. Lyle’s capacity for human emotion had, somehow, been tapped by her crying. He stood at her bedside and touched her arm, gently, and said, “Don’t cry.”

She nodded. Rubbed the tears and snot away from her face with her uncuffed hand.

He raised a finger. “Kleenex,” he said, and went into the bathroom and got her some.

“Thank you,” she said, using the tissues.

He smiled at her, a tight upturned line in his face, and sat back on his bed and reached for his Walkman ’phones.

“No, Lyle,” she said, “please. I’d like to talk.”

He withdrew his hand from the Walkman and looked at her, blankly, innocently.

“I like you, Lyle.”

“I like you, too.” But there was no humanity in it. Nice day. Looks like rain. Have a happy.

“Lyle, you’re too nice a guy to do a thing like this.”

“Pa told me to.”

“I understand that. I understand your loyalty to your father. That’s good, Lyle. That’s admirable.”

“Thanks.”

“But sometimes, Lyle, you have to question.”

“Question what?”

She shrugged, shook her head, searched for the words that could penetrate his fog. “Authority. The things older people say. Your father.”

“I don’t question Pa. He’s family.”

“Lyle, does he like David Bowie?”

“No.”

“Does he like Billy Idol?”

“No. He hates him.”

“Does he like any of your music?”

“No. He really hates it when I listen to funk. He says it’s nigger shit.”

“Is it, Lyle? Is it nigger shit?”

“No. It’s music.”

“It’s good music, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “I think so.”

“So your father’s wrong, isn’t he?”

“About music?”

“About music.”

“I guess.”

“So he could be wrong about other things.”

Logic Lessons with Lyle; a new PBS series.

“I guess,” he said.

“Well, it’s wrong to kidnap somebody. It’s wrong to keep them against their will.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with music.”

Score one for the imbecile.

“Lyle, it shows your father’s fallible.”

“Huh?”

“Not perfect. That he can be wrong.”

“He told me to keep you here. We’re not hurting you. We’ll probably let you go.”

Probably. Oh Jesus Christ; her life was hanging by probably.

“Lyle...” And she didn’t know what to say. She was lost. She was lost if she thought she could talk her way out.

That afternoon, Monday afternoon, she had tried sex. She decided she’d fuck this moron, if she had to, to get out of here; or at least start to fuck him: she might be able to knock him out with his Walkman, if she got ahold of it and smacked him hard enough (the phone was out of her reach, no matter what she tried). Also, he carried a .38 with a wood stock, stuck down in his belt, which would neuter him if it went off, which seemed a good idea to her. He was thick enough, maybe, to take it out and put it on the nightstand, while they made it. If she could interest him in that.

“I’m lonely,” she said.

He was just starting to watch Gilligan’s Island; it was half past four. That was one of the shows where he listened to the original soundtrack, as opposed to substituting his own Walkman rock ’n’ roll version.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“I’m lonely.”

“I’m keeping you company.”

“You’re a good-looking boy, Lyle. Why don’t you come sit by me.”

He did.

“Wouldn’t you like to kiss me, Lyle?” Gag me with a spoon.

“Sure,” he said. “You’re real pretty.”

“Then why don’t you?”

“Pa said don’t fool with you.”

“Do you always listen to your pa?”

“Yes,” he said.

She grabbed the stock of the .38 in his belt, wedging her hand between his belly and the gun, trying to find the trigger, trying to get her finger on the trigger to shoot his fucking nuts off, and he smacked her.

He stood there; he was quavering a little. “That wasn’t nice,” he said.

“Fuck you,” she said, face stinging.

“You can’t be trusted,” he said, shaking his head, turning to his bed and flopping onto it and watching Gilligan’s Island.

She was trembling. With rage. With fear. With disgust at herself, for trying to seduce this retard; with astonishment that he had spurned her so readily. She had gotten everything she ever had with her looks, with her sexual attractiveness, and her cleverness in knowing how to use same, how to mate her intelligence with her good looks. It had landed her Nolan, and a sweet life. It had inadvertently landed her here, as well — in the clutches of a cluck against whom all her feminine wiles, her brain, her body, her manipulative powers, were useless. She was impotent.

He let her bathe, once a day. He let her wash out her clothes, her underwear, and the father had provided some Jordache jeans and a frilly blouse (was there a girl in this god-awful family?) for her to wear while her clothes dried. So at least she didn’t have to feel scuzzy. At least she could be clean, relatively, at least her hair wouldn’t be a greasy mess; it was a clean mess, but that was better than greasy. It helped her keep her spirits up, just enough to be thinking of ways out of this.

She went to the bathroom as often as she could get away with it. It was necessary, because she went through the countless cans of Diet Coke Lyle thoughtfully fetched for her upon command. And she was working on a project: the window.

The bathroom window, which looked out upon snowy ground and evergreens mingling with gray skeletal trees, was painted shut. She was working it loose. Paint chips fell, which she dutifully gathered and flushed down the toilet. She didn’t work on it long or hard at any given time, except during her bath, while the water ran, covering the noise of her upward thrusts at the stuck window.

Wednesday morning, as her bath was drawing itself, she broke it loose. She slid it open, carefully, but the wood against wood made an awful screech.

And Lyle was right there, on the other side of the unlocked door: “Are you okay in there?”

Cold air was rushing in on her; goose pimples took control.

“I’m fine,” she said, trying to keep her voice light, squeezing the words past her heart, which was in her throat, in her fucking throat.

He was saying, “What was that noise?”

“The water pipes, I guess. Cold today.”

“Well. Hurry up in there.”

She waited a few beats; the water was still running, so she couldn’t hear whether his footsteps made their way across the room, back to the bed and TV. Maybe he was still on the other side of that door, 38 in his belt. Maybe he was watching Jeopardy! while Billy Idol sang. Who the fuck knew.

She put the stool down, and stood on it, and crawled over and out of the window and dropped to the snow, on her knees and hands, in the borrowed jeans and frilly blouse, and she began to run, at first toward the trees — then looking around, she saw down the slope, the top of a building; she curved and ran toward there, her feet crunching in snow-covered leaves, and it was a motel, a small one, just a handful of rooms, and down the hill, goddamn! Highway. Beyond that, the river, the Mississippi.

She knew where she was, vaguely; this was the Illinois side. Probably near Andalusia. She tumbled, ankle giving. Damn! Fuck!

She got on her feet again, quickly, front of her wet from snow. Her ankle was okay — she’d twisted it a little, it would slow her down some, but it wasn’t bad, certainly nothing broken, and she heard him behind her. Christ!

She could hear his footsteps, as he strode through the snow, could hear him puffing, gulping in air, and she tried to pick up speed and then he was on her, tackling her, bringing her down. She looked up, saw the goal line, the highway, down the hill. No touchdown today.

He yanked her up, holding her by her upper arm, dragging her like a disobedient child back up the hill.

“That was bad,” he said. “You shouldn’ta done that.”

“Don’t tell your father.”

“I have to.”

“Why?”

“I just have to.”

He was amazing; he was goddamn fucking amazing. “Do you really think it was wrong of me to try to save myself? To try to get away?”

“You’re supposed to stay with me.”

They made her keep the door open when she went to the bathroom, from then on. They let her keep bathing, but with the door open. Lyle had nailed the window shut. He nailed the other windows in the place shut as well, after that.

Wednesday night, late, so late it was Thursday morning, Lyle left for a meeting with his father and Nolan and some other people. By now she had caught the drift of it, hearing Lyle’s half of frequent phone conversations with his “pa.” Unless she was badly mistaken, they were planning to rob some of the stores at Brady Eighty. Maybe a lot of the stores. They were using Nolan’s inside knowledge about the mall in particular, and his expertise at such robberies in general, to pull this heist. But the bottom line still seemed to be revenge. She could smell Nolan’s death in this. And her own.

They left her with the owner of the frilly blouse and jeans, a cute, slutty teenage girl named Cindy Lou, perky boobs poking at a RATT T-shirt; sitting in a chair on the other side of the other bed and reading Hit Parader magazine and listening to her own tapes on her brother’s Walkman. She seemed nervous and embarrassed and avoided talking to Sherry.

Sherry tried to get the girl’s attention, to no avail, but finally the girl put her magazine down and took the earphones off and came and sat on the bed.

“What’s this about?” she asked. It had taken her a long time, lost in her magazine and music, to allow some thoughts, some doubts, to push through. But they apparently had.

“Don’t you know?” Sherry asked.

“I don’t pay much attention to what Lyle and Daddy do. I figure what I don’t know won’t hurt me.”

“Well, it can hurt me. They kidnaped me, your daddy and Lyle. Lyle’s your brother?”

She nodded; she had big blue eyes and was faintly freckled. She looked innocent and worldly at once.

“They’re getting you involved in it, kidnaping, leaving you here with me.”

She swallowed, looked away. “I know,” she said glumly.

“I didn’t do anything to them. I live with a man they’re forcing to do some things, by holding me captive. I think they’re going to kill both of us, when this is over.”

The girl shook her head no. “Daddy wouldn’t do that. Lyle wouldn’t do that.”

“I think they would.”

“Anybody rape you or anything?”

“No.”

“Not Lyle? Not Daddy?”

“No.”

She shrugged. “See,” she said, offering that as proof of her family’s good intentions.

“You weren’t sure when you asked me, though, were you? You thought maybe I might have been raped.”

She shrugged again. But said nothing.

“Help me.”

“How?”

“They left you the key to these cuffs, didn’t they?”

“Not rilly, no. They said if you had to pee, to tell you to hold it.”

“Maybe we can find something to bust this rung, and I can slip my cuff off...”

“No. I can’t help you. I’d like to, lady, but no.”

“Will you take a message to someone for me?”

“No. I’m sorry. Now, I don’t want to talk to you, anymore.”

“Please!”

But the girl was already back in her chair, putting the headphones on, turning up the heavy-metal music.

Thursday night, finally, Sherry got her hands on that bed stand telephone. But it was Lyle’s doing: she had been cuffed to a nearer rung so that she could talk to Nolan, tell him she was alive and well.

Hearing his voice was wonderful and so very sad.

“They’re using me,” she said, “to make you help them, aren’t they?”

“You know about the mall heist?”

That confirmed her suspicions; it was a large- scale robbery.

“I picked up on it,” she admitted. She told him he could lose everything because of this, but he reassured her, said he wouldn’t lose her, said he’d planned the job smoothly; but she could hear it in his voice, try as he might to hide it: they were both under a sentence of death.

Now she felt compelled to reassure him: “They haven’t hurt me. They keep saying once you’ve cooperated, I’ll be released.”

He told her they’d be together in a few hours, and then he said something amazing: when she said she loved him, he said he loved her, too. He’d never said that before. It was nice to hear. Too bad this was what it took...

She wiped the tears from her face, and then he said something wonderful: “I’ll take you to Vegas when this is over and prove it.”

That was as close to a proposal as she was likely to get out of him. Suddenly she was smiling; suddenly she was believing she would live through this ordeal.

“Hang on, baby,” Nolan said, and he hung up.

She put the receiver gently back in its cradle, and the world exploded and went black. She crumpled to the floor, not even knowing that Lyle Comfort had pistol-whipped her. She slept blissfully, ignorant that her captor of these past few days was now slinging her over his shoulder like a sack of something, carrying her into the woods, where the mess wouldn’t matter.

18

The worst part, for Nolan, was having to mingle with his customers. Fisher had wired his black box in at 10:27, according to Nolan’s watch, and they waited till 10:45, just to be safe, before assuming the cops and security guards wouldn’t be showing up. Then the job had really got under way.

But Nolan’s didn’t close till two; the bartender and waitresses would be out of here by two-thirty, and then, finally, better than four hours into it, he could join up with the others out in the mall. Until then, he was a captive in his own club, striving to maintain the appearance of just another night, and building a partial alibi at least.

The very worst thing was DeReuss and his wife had eaten supper here tonight; thank God the jeweler had long since gone — having him here during the heisting of his own shop would’ve been a little much even for Nolan’s nerves.

Before leaving, DeReuss had complimented Nolan on the Surf and Turf, and added, “I’ve been giving some thought to your complaints about the security out here — I’m ready to go to bat for you at the next Merchant Association meeting.”

“Good,” Nolan had said.

Now Nolan glanced at his watch. Eleven-twenty. It would be hours before DeReuss’ jewelry store got Winch’s attention; no safes would be blown till Nolan’s was closed and the nitro noise would attract no attention.

Right now, Dooley would still be working on picking locks, although the Leeches and the rest would be well into looting stores, according to Nolan’s priority list, loading up the dollies and furniture carts with goods from the stores Dooley had already unlocked. The first thing he’d had Dooley do was pick the locks on the three major department stores and the garage doors at the loading docks therein, for the Leeches to pull their trucks up to.

He walked casually in back and used the Radio Shack walkie-talkie on his desk, checking in with Jon.

“Nothing so far,” Jon reported. He was sitting in the cab of the semi backed up to the central loading dock, the one behind Penney’s. He was keeping watch for patrolling cops and any stray Nolan’s customers who might for whatever reason choose to pull around back on their way home. No civilian cars were parked in the rear lot — only the loading-dock trucks, Fisher’s gray Buick, Comfort’s red pickup, Jon’s blue van and an old clunker belonging to the lady janitor. Nolan would move his Trans Am back here after Nolan’s closed.

“How’s the loading going?” Nolan asked.

“Nothing in this truck yet,” Jon said. “Are you sure this is where you want me?”

“It makes you a free agent, not being part of the action inside. That could be helpful.”

The walkie-talkies he and Jon were using were a forty-channel model; these he had purchased, at his usual discount. By now another eight walkie-talkies should have been lifted and distributed among the other players. After Dooley picked the department store and loading-dock locks, the Radio Shack store was next on the list. Nolan had instructed Dooley which walkie-talkies to steal, putting three-channel models in everybody else’s hands, giving Nolan and Jon the opportunity to communicate without being listened in on.

“No sign of Lyle either,” Jon said.

Nolan didn’t know if that was good or bad.

“Okay,” Nolan said, and signed off.

He went back out and mingled with the customers. It was a dirty job but somebody had to do it.

Phil Dooley was averaging ten minutes a lock — the loading dock’s garage doors had taken a little longer, but the stores were going quickly. It was approaching midnight now. He figured he should be done by two, easy. Then he would pitch in with the others and haul goods out and help load up the trucks. He would rather have worked with Roger, as usual — been there to give him a hand, say if he had to lay a safe on its back for a gut shot. But that just wasn’t practical — every able body was needed to get all the heavy labor done.

Right now, Roger was helping the Leeches load refrigerators and TVs out of an appliance store; Fisher was, too.

That left Dooley the solitary job of going from store to store — according to Nolan’s list — and opening them for business. The mall with its Christmas decorations and limited lighting was a strange place to be, even for somebody like Dooley, who was used to being in places after they were closed. Most places were completely dark, though — not half alive, like Brady Eighty. The sounds of the men working, the wheels of their carts, the whump of heavy appliances being set onto carts, occasional swearing, occasional ouches, echoed down the wide central corridor, as Dooley bent over the lock of the Haus of Leather.

The last place he’d opened for after-hours business was a luggage shop — Nolan had suggested it because some of the luggage was expensive, but also because they could use the stuff to transport some of the smaller items — everything from jewelry to expensive perfume.

Dooley liked the concentration, the close work; doing a marathon number of locks like this — nothing in his career to date compared to it — was the sort of challenge he relished. If the take tonight was what Nolan and Comfort indicated, this could even put the capper on his career — he could retire on his cut.

Not that he didn’t feel bad about Nolan’s situation. He truly hoped Nolan’s woman would be returned unharmed — he had no one similar in his life right now, but he could empathize. He had never had a lasting relationship, though not for want of trying, and perhaps for that reason he was especially attuned to pains of the heart. What Nolan must be going through, behind that stony exterior. A shame, a rotten shame.

But the money at stake made Dooley secretly, if guiltily, glad the job hadn’t been called off.

The tools Dooley was using, two of which were presently inserted in the lock where the sliding glass doors joined in front of the Haus of Leather, were picks — small thin steel objects with curlicue tips, not unlike dentist’s tools, and used by Dooley with similar care and expertise. Dooley carried these in a custom soft-leather pouch, which was currently on the floor at his feet, should he need to use another of the fine tools. Delicate instruments, requiring a delicate touch, which Dooley had.

Even at his age, with his experience, Dooley practiced several days a week, at least; and, through his legitimate locksmithing business in Des Moines, he was able to keep on top of the latest trends in the industry, ordering any so-called burglarproof lock advertised in the trades, practicing on it till he could pick it in minutes. He’d encountered only a couple he couldn’t master, and these he never went near.

Picking the locks at Brady Eighty was, thus far at least, about as hard as buttering a roll.

For example, the Haus of Leather was open for business right now.

Andy Fieldhaus, half asleep and completely naked on the vinyl couch in his back room, on his side next to and facing a half-asleep and completely naked young woman named Heather, who was also on her side, on that same vinyl couch (as fate would have it), thought he heard something.

He sat up, quickly, and nearly pushed Heather, who was on the outside, off onto the cold concrete floor; he caught her before she did, and even slapped a hand across her suddenly wide-open mouth, below her suddenly wide-open eyes, before she could say anything.

Into her shell-like ear he whispered: “I heard something.”

Then, making exaggerated facial gyrations, he pointed toward the store out there, beyond the back room, where they had been legitimately working on the books since about nine-thirty, only around eleven having gotten extracurricular, thereafter enjoying the drowsy afterglow of a particularly fine fornication when Andy heard something.

They could see each other, but just barely; a single thick rose-scented candle in a small glass bowl glowed on the desk. Anytime they were in the back room and stopped doing the books and got down to funny business, Heather always lighted that one candle and otherwise doused the lights.

Now she was mouthing the word: “What?”

He whispered in her ear again; there was a rose scent in her hair, too, from shampoo. He said, “It could be Caroline.”

Blood drained out of Heather’s face; even in the candlelight you could see it. She was deathly afraid of Andy’s wife. She had heard the story about the carving knife; hell, she had seen the scar on his shoulder enough times.

He got up off the couch, carefully, oh so quietly, or trying to do so anyway: the vinyl was much noisier than leather would have been. He tiptoed to his trousers, draped over his chair at his desk, and reached his hands into each of the pockets and removed the jingle-jangley stuff — coins, keys and such — and placed them as quietly as humanly possible on the desk, where the candle glowed. It would have been a romantic moment if it hadn’t been scary as hell.

Caroline had a key to the place; she had the only other key. He put on his pants.

Then something very frightening happened: he heard the doors to his shop slide open out there.

Jerry Leech was ready for a break. He told his brother Ricky so. Ricky wiped some grease off his forehead with a heavily gloved hand and agreed they had hauled enough TVs and refrigerators and heavy shit for a while, and they left the Petersen’s loading dock, where the truck there was already a fourth or so full, and pushed open the double doors leading out into the darkened department store and ran into their brother Ferdy, as well as Fisher and Winch, each of whom was wheeling a hand truck bearing stacked microwave ovens and VCRs, winding through ladies’ lingerie.

“We’re gonna get some lighter shit,” Jerry told them.

Winch shrugged and rolled his heavily loaded hand truck on by.

Fisher, pausing with his load of electronics, said, “We’ve got another couple trips’ worth of these. We better stay at it.”

Ferdy looked disappointed, like he wanted to go with his brothers, but Ferdy was the baby of the brothers — youngest by about three minutes — and often caved into the leadership of others. And this time he followed Fisher’s lead.

“Wussy,” Ricky said, once they were out in the mall.

“Yeah,” Jerry said, though he was not sure whether Ricky was referring to their brother or to Fisher. “Nolan said the leather shop was ripe. Let’s hit that.”

“Why the fuck not,” Ricky said.

As they passed the Walgreen’s, Ricky said, “Think of them drugs in there. Fuckin’ Comfort’s a wussy.”

“Yeah,” Jerry said, although he didn’t agree. He didn’t know why Comfort had anything against drugs, but he did know Comfort was somebody he didn’t intend to cross. That was one rough old hard-ass son of a bitch.

Jerry was also a little afraid of Nolan, truth be told. That guy had been around. He knew his stuff and had eyes that made you real uncomfortable. Jerry wasn’t sure crossing Nolan, like Comfort planned, was such a good idea. He also liked some of these other guys pretty well. Even that faggot Dooley seemed like a regular guy. It didn’t seem right, somehow, to kill them all.

But Comfort said Nolan couldn’t be trusted, that he was a murdering cocksucker who killed old Cole’s brother and nephews. And since the other guys — Fisher, Dooley, and that kid with the curly hair — had worked with Nolan before, and wouldn’t go along with offing him, they’d have to go, too. As Cole rightly pointed out, jobs with this many guys on it lots of times come undone because somebody talks; doing this Comfort’s way meant less guys left alive to eventually talk if the cops got lucky. And besides, it meant fewer ways to split the take.

They got to the leather shop just as Dooley was opening it. He didn’t look like no fucking fag. Well, he’d be in hell soon. And queers burned in hell, where Jerry come from.

Ricky pointed to some fat furry white coats and said, “Nolan said get these fox furs.” He fingered a tag. “They’re a grand each, Jeez-us!”

“Nolan knows his stuff,” Jerry said, with an admiring shrug of his head, wheeling the first of several racks of furs out into the mall.

Cole Comfort, who wasn’t doing any of the heavy loading, was wandering the mall, looking in the stores that Dooley had already opened, sizing things up. In his left hand he carried a large suitcase and he was pursuing his dream: he was shopping — filling the suitcase with small, expensive items; currently he was at the perfume counter of the I. Magnin, helping himself to Giorgio and Chanel and Calvin Klein’s Obsession, among other scents. He himself didn’t use toilet water.

But he had to agree with Nolan’s assessment of what to take and what not to take. Like the Radio Shack, for instance. They’d opened it up to get the walkie-talkies, one of which was in Cole’s right hand this very moment; but they were leaving behind all the TVs and computers and such. Because Radio Shack products would be damn near impossible to fence. Stick to brand-name stuff that anybody could carry, Nolan had said. Pretty smart, for a dead man.

And he was a dead man, Comfort thought. A dead man who just ain’t got around to stopping breathing yet.

He checked his watch; ten after midnight. He wondered what was keeping Lyle. That girl would be dead and buried by now. That made him smile.

Not because he was glad to see a nice piece of tail like that turned to so much worm meat; no. But the thought of telling Nolan, before shooting him, that made Cole Comfort smile. He would use a sawed-off shotgun, which was currently in the cab of the Leech brothers’ truck parked behind the I. Magnin. He’d gut-shoot him, to make it last longer. Maybe he’d wait till Nolan’s guts were hanging out of him from both sides, shredded by buckshot, to tell him about the girl. No, best tell him first, in case he blacked out before Cole could give him the news.

The others — Fisher, Winch, Dooley — was just commonsense cleanup, and the Leeches would take care of most of it. With one exception.

The kid would be Lyle’s. He’d instructed Lyle to shoot Jon in the belly with the .38, a couple of times. That kid was just like Nolan: he killed Comfort kin. Dying slow was their ticket to the next world, only Cole knew there wasn’t one.

The Leeches, though, he would take no delight in. They had been helpful to him any number of times over the last ten years or so, but they weren’t the most intelligent men under the sun, and now that this mall haul, this crowning Comfort achievement, would provide him and Lyle and Cindy Lou with enough money to flat out retire, well — the Leeches would have served their purpose. Cole didn’t like leaving loose ends, or loose lips; those dumb-ass sons of bitches wouldn’t sink his ship. They’d drive their trucks to Burden in Omaha straight from here, in the morning, and by nightfall they’d be back in Sedalia. Where Cole and Lyle would be waiting.

He closed the suitcase up; it was filled with perfume and other such niceties. He slipped one last bottle of Giorgio in a coverall pocket. That would be for Cindy Lou. He would have to settle things with the child tomorrow, back at home; after he got back from Sedalia. A peace offering would be needed, first. And then he could teach her about the beauty of the love act.

And tomorrow night would be as memorable as tonight.

Nolan was heading toward the back room again when his bartender, standing at the end of, and just inside, the bar, reached a hand out and stopped him.

“You okay?” Chet asked; the older man sometimes treated Nolan paternally, which irked Nolan no end.

“I’m fine.”

“You been in the back more than out front.”

“I got gas. You want me to fart in here?”

Chet smiled. “And drive out what few customers we got tonight? No way.”

“Well,” Nolan said, “I’d stay out of the back room, if I were you. Unless you light a match.”

“What, and risk an explosion?”

And Chet returned to his handful of customers at the bar.

Nolan checked in with Jon.

“Anything?” he asked into the walkie-talkie.

“Nothing,” Jon said. “They aren’t even loading my truck yet.”

“Well, it’s too early for that, anyway. They started at one end and they’ll get that truck loaded, and then move toward the center of the mall and start loading yours.”

“When’ll that be?”

“Around one, one-thirty.”

Somebody started knocking on Nolan’s back door.

Jon said, “What was that?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” Nolan said.

He tossed the switched-off walkie-talkie on the desk and covered it with a newspaper. He got a long-barreled .38 from a desk drawer and held it in his left hand, behind him, as he cracked the door open.

Where he saw the flushed and very wide-eyed face of Andy Fieldhaus.

Nolan looked out at him and said, “Well, hello, Andy.”

Puffing, his breath visible in the cold air, Andy said, “Jesus Christ, Nolan, let us in.”

“Us?”

“Heather and me. Let us in!”

He closed the door for a moment, stuck the gun in his waistband, buttoned his jacket over it, let them in.

“Thank God for back doors,” Andy said, breath heaving.

They were barely dressed: Andy had his brown leather bomber jacket over his bare chest and wore his pants but carried his shoes and shirt and underthings and such in his hands. The buxom Heather was in a coat, clutched to her with one hand, her shoes in the other, and wadded up under one arm were the rest of her clothes. She was shivering, mostly from cold, but not entirely.

It was a bitter night to go barefoot.

Heather dropped her clothes to the floor and, her coat opening, she flashed Nolan, inadvertently; she had really big tits — also really erect nipples, from the cold, not Andy. She and Andy huddled together, hugging, shaking.

“What can I do for you?” Nolan asked. It was clear they’d gotten dressed — sort of dressed — in a hurry.

Now Andy and Heather broke apart and began, hurriedly, getting fully dressed. This Heather did without shame, and it was fun watching her.

“Are you my friend?” Andy asked Nolan, desperately, hopping on one foot, as he tugged a shoe onto the other foot.

“Sure,” Nolan said.

“Good,” Andy said, smiling tightly. “If my wife asks, will you say we’ve been here all evening?”

“Sure,” Nolan said.

Andy was dressed now, and so, nearly, was Heather.

Rather frantically he went on: “She could show up any minute. Can you keep your cool and cover for us?”

“Sure.”

“God bless you,” Andy said, grinning.

Heather smiled at Nolan and kissed him on the cheek and said, “You’re a saint.”

Nolan followed them as they went out through the bar and watched silently from a window as they made their way to the parking lot, Andy getting in his Corvette, the girl in her Mustang, driving off separately.

Nolan went to the back room and returned the .38 to its drawer and sat at the desk.

“What was that about?” he said, aloud.

19

He was digging in the moonlight, sideways.

She didn’t know what it meant: it was simply the image before her eyes, as they slowly opened. A man was digging, shovel crunching into cold ground, washed in ivory moonlight, and she was on her side, so it was a sideways view, and out of focus. Still groggy, she moved her head just slightly and looked up. She saw the skeletal branches of a tree — the tree she lay under — and through them she could see clouds moving quickly across a blue-gray night sky, like a scrim of smoke gliding across the stationary partial moon. It didn’t seem real.

But the pain in her head did; it ran across her forehead, over her eyes, like a headband of hurt. And the still, cold night air seemed very real; she was only in her sweater and jeans and anklets — her bed was the snowy ground. And the sound of the shovel, that was real too, as it chopped at roots and cut through frozen earth. She moved her head back to where it had been and looked through slits and saw him, digging, in the moonlight.

Lyle.

Handsome Lyle, wearing a brown leather jacket and gray designer jeans, digging, basking unwittingly in shadows from the moving clouds.

He was, she knew at once, digging a grave. It was the right shape; he’d roughed it out and was now only a few inches in. But it was a grave. Her grave.

The pain and the cold were her friends. They made this surreal landscape real. They were something to hold on to, to steady her, while her thoughts raced, while she peeked through the slits of her eyelids and wondered what she could do to keep from sleeping forever in the hole Lyle was making for her.

She lay perhaps ten feet from the foot of the grave. This was not as far as she would have liked. As Lyle walked around the grave, working on this end and that, he often came very close to her. He seemed frustrated. The temperature had fallen; apparently this ground was harder than he had anticipated.

She wondered if she should just get up and bolt and run. She had no sense of where she was — other than lying on her side under a tree near a grave an imbecile was preparing for her. The ground didn’t seem to slope, so they were a ways away, anyway, from the cabin and the hill at whose foot were the highway and the Mississippi. Lyle stood in a small open area, but mostly there were trees, here. Some evergreens but mostly gray, winter-dead ones; more death than life in these woods.

Was she supposed to be dead already? Did he think whatever he’d hit her with had killed her? Or had Lyle simply not got around to the deed as yet; the wood-stock revolver was still in his waistband, the metal catching moonlight and winking at her, occasionally. Perhaps she’d got through to him sufficiently these past few days to make killing her not so easy a chore for Lyle. Maybe he was putting it off.

No. That wasn’t it. He was working at that grave with a mindless diligence; nothing was bothering him. He was that most frightening of men: a guileless dope who meant you no harm but would kill you without blinking. Lyle would do that because his pa had so ordered. To Sherry, in that frozen, surreal moment, Lyle embodied the banality of evil. It was the ultimate empty irony: she would be killed by someone who didn’t even dislike her.

After fifteen minutes or so, Lyle got tired and sat at the edge of the grave, which was now perhaps five inches deep everywhere, more or less. He put the shovel down, so that it was between him and Sherry, whose eyes seemed to be closed. He sat on the ground, hugged his knees to him and looked up at the moon and the smokelike scrim of clouds and didn’t see it coming when Sherry smacked him in the side of the face with the shovel.

He tumbled half in the shallow grave, half out. Feet sticking out. She raised the shovel to hit him again, but he reacted quickly, for a stunned moron, pulling out that .38 and firing at her.

The bullet careened off the metal scoop of the shovel, with a whang, putting a dent in it as the sound of the gunshot cracked open the night and Sherry flung the shovel at him and ran.

She had no idea where she was headed; no sense of direction at all. She just ran where there was space, where the trees weren’t too thick, her shoeless feet, covered only in the thin little socks, crunching and cracking the twigs and snow-and-leaves-layered earth.

She could not hear him behind her, but perhaps that was only because her own breath was heaving so, filling her ears with the sound of her life struggling to hold on to itself.

Maybe that fling of the shovel had caught him good; maybe he was unconscious, not following her at all.

This she thought, this she prayed, but she didn’t slow down. She ran with strides as long as she could make them, cutting them only when a tree got in the way, and then she tripped over something, an extended root, and tumbled into the snow and leaves, and stopped just long enough to pick herself up and heard it: silence.

What a wonderful sound.

Maybe he wasn’t following her. Maybe the shovel did get him. Or she’d lost him, maybe.

Nonetheless, she began to run again, her legs aching, her feet nicked and nudged and pierced countless times by twigs and burrs and acorns, but it felt so good for her feet to tingle and even hurt, her legs to burn and ache, it made her feel so alive; at the same time her head no longer ached and the cold air was just something crisp to run through. Her face stretched tight in a sort of smile and she felt a euphoria as she ran breakneck through the woods, keeping up with the rolling clouds that shadowed her.

But the second time she tripped, catching another root, she went down hard, and it knocked the wind out of her. And as she was getting up, she heard him.

Lumbering through the woods, not far away at all. Twigs and branches snapping, cracking, like he was using a machete to clear a path; but it was no machete — just Lyle. Diligent, guileless Lyle, looking for her to take her back to the hole he was digging for her. Like his pa said.

She tried to run and realized she’d turned her ankle; she didn’t feel it going down: just now, trying to run on it, it made itself known. She could still run, but nowhere near as fast; this was a pitiful, hobbling sort of excuse for running, a shambling, mummylike two-step, and the sound of Lyle moving through the woods toward her was growing louder.

She hid.

She crawled behind a cluster of thorny brush, which nicked and bit at her skin, reminding her she was alive, yes, but she was past enjoying that sensation and teetering instead on the edge of despair and desperation. Her feet were cold and bleeding, the thin socks torn to shreds from her marathon run. She crouched behind the thicket and tried not to breathe audibly. She stopped breathing through her mouth, pulling the air in ever so gently through her nose, sipping and savoring it like a priceless wine.

She was quaking with fear and cold as he lumbered by, gun in hand; he wasn’t running, exactly — it was more like a jog. An idiot jogger wants to kill me, she thought.

Like a four-wheel-drive vehicle, he rolled past, woods be damned, the sound of his forward movement taking several minutes to die down. She waited. She had no idea what to do next.

Stay put? It was night, but she had no notion of the time — if dawn came soon, she’d be naked here. If nighttime lasted long enough, perhaps that dangerous dork would comb the entire woods and find her, finally. If she took off and started running again, he would hear her, quite probably, and, very certainly, take up pursuit again.

What would Nolan do?

Nolan would find a way to kill the bastard, but that wasn’t Sherry’s way. She’d given that her best shot with the shovel, and blew it. It wasn’t likely nature would provide her with a killing tool better than a shovel. Someone who knew the woods would find something to use, no doubt; but Sherry had only stalked shopping malls before. She had never been camping in her life. This was a hell of an indoctrination.

She was shivering with the cold, now. Wondering where she was. Looking up through branches at the spooky sky, wondering how to read it, wishing, way back when, she’d been a Girl Scout and not a cheerleader.

Maybe if she just moved quietly through the woods — in the opposite direction from where Lyle had pushed on — she might get somewhere. Maybe even civilization. The road and the river were around here somewhere.

She moved out from behind the bushes and began making her way through the woods again. Not running. Moving quickly, yes, but not running; pausing at a tree every few yards to listen for Lyle. Hearing nothing.

Pretty soon she came upon the grave in progress again.

It froze her to the earth, like Lot’s wife. She had no idea she’d gotten turned around. Here she was back at square one.

But — once past the shock of stumbling across what Lyle intended as her permanent home — was this so bad? There was the shovel again, sprawled half in, half out of the would-be grave, much as Lyle had been when she tried to bash him. It was a weapon. She picked it up.

And just in time, because Lyle stepped out into the moonlight and his handsome blank face squeezed in something like thought and he aimed the .38 at her and she swung the shovel like a bat and caught his wrist and the gun went flying.

“Don’t fight me,” Lyle said, reaching his hands out toward her as if she should embrace him. There was no malice in his voice at all.

“Fuck you, asshole!” She swung the shovel at him and caught him in the side and he went down, moaning. She moved toward him quickly, the hurting ankle slowing her just a bit, and raised the shovel to deliver a finishing blow, and the bastard reached out and grabbed that bad ankle and pulled her legs out from under her. She fell back, tumbling.

Tumbling into the grave.

It was shallow, but it was her grave, and it was no place she wanted to be; her mind filled with horror. The shovel was no longer in her hands. She was on her back in her own grave. A scream caught in her throat.

And Lyle was standing at her feet, in the grave, looking down at her, with his blank, banal pretty-boy face marred by one of her shovel blows. Good. She kicked a field goal with his nuts and he grabbed himself with both hands, howling, and pitched forward on her.

He wasn’t unconscious, but he was in pain, enough pain that he couldn’t do anything about her scrambling frantically out from under him, cursing him, hitting at him, clawing at him, and then scurrying off, back into the woods, a different direction this time.

Running again, hobbling on the ankle, but running, hearing nothing but her own panting, her stomach aching, her feet numb, her legs aching but pumping, like her heart keeping the blood going; she wasn’t dead yet.

She paused against a tree, panting. Wondering how long she could keep this up; when her legs would go out on her. She couldn’t hear him back there. That was something, anyway. Couldn’t hear him shambling after her.

But then she did hear something else:

A honking horn.

Car horn; distant, but she had a good fix on what direction. She smiled tightly and began to run. Even the ankle stopped hurting, stopped hurting as much, anyway.

She was no fool. She knew that that car could belong to Lyle’s father or somebody else involved in this foul fucking thing. She would have to be careful as she neared the highway. But once to the highway, she would know where she was. She could cling to the woods and bushes along the side of the road and follow it and if she saw a car that didn’t have Lyle or his pa in it, she would go for it.

She began to smile again. She was going to make it. Nolan was a survivor and so was she.

He’d be proud of her. And they’d be together.

But the euphoria passed as reality set in: Nolan was in trouble. Her thoughts raced ahead of her churning legs. He was pulled in on some elaborate heist at the mall and Lyle’s father was there, intending to kill him when it was over. That was obvious: she’d been the hostage. She’d been the leverage to make Nolan jump. But Lyle’s father had given the order to Lyle to kill her.

Which meant Nolan would be the next to die; he was still under that sentence of death they’d both sensed, on the phone, in what might be the last time she heard his voice.

Tears streaked her face.

She had to reach him, somehow, before the heist was a wrap. She had to let him know she was okay. She had to get to him before Lyle’s father blew him away.

More than her own life was at stake here; Nolan’s was too.

She picked up speed. Somehow she picked up speed. The highway was up there. She knew it was. She’d take a chance. She’d try to flag the first car that came along. Hell, Lyle’s father would be at the mall, and Lyle was lost somewhere in the forest. She could risk it. She ran.

She ran, and as she crossed what looked like so much snow and leaves and weeds, she felt something give beneath her. Then the ground under her broke open like thin ice, and she went crashing through rotted planks and plummeting down an endless drop, hitting her head on something hard along the side, halfway down, blacking out, landing hard on her back, with a whump, which she neither felt nor heard.

Sometime later, however, her eyes opened momentarily and she looked up and thirty feet above her, looking down into the abandoned, brick-lined well, was Lyle. With a face blank as the moon. Peering down to see if she was alive.

He was the last thing she saw.

20

Jon sipped hot chocolate from the Thermos cup, wondering how it had suddenly become his lot in life to sit on watch in parked vehicles. It was a little after 2:00 A.M., and a long night (long morning, actually) stretched out ahead of him; hell, they wouldn’t be out of here till 6:30. Despite the work involved, he would have much rather been inside, helping load up the semis — this one in whose cab he sat was just in the process of being loaded. The Leeches and the others were piling on and stacking up washing machines and other appliances in the trailer behind him, much of the stuff still in cartons and taken from the back room of the J. C. Penney’s whose adjacent loading dock the truck was backed up to.

Out in front of him was the wide, nearly empty parking lot, dusted with snow, and beyond it a line of evergreens and some gray trees and not much else. They really were alone out here, on the edge of the city, a whisper away from the Interstate — just a bunch of thieves and the vast storehouse of goods that was Brady Eighty mall.

The sounds of activity back there in the trailer behind him were strangely calming — particularly the occasional sounds of voices. Sitting here, watching for cops or anything else unexpected, was unnerving as fuck. All he had to keep him company was the walkie-talkie, which he used to check in with Nolan, and the truck’s scanner, which was keeping track of the half-dozen frequencies in use by the Davenport police, as well as the county sheriff department and the Highway Patrol. From the silver and blue scanner box on the dash, the tinny, barely understandable cop chatter went back and forth about domestic disturbances and drunk and disorderly and cars that slid from icy roads into ditches, on what appeared to be (in every cop’s opinion) a “real slow” night. Without the constant squawk- box noise, he’d have long since gone nuts.

At least he was warm. The semi’s heater made it possible for him to sit there without his coat on, even if the interior of the truck was as dusty and scruffy as the Leech Bros, themselves. When Nolan first told him about this duty, Jon had assumed he’d be freezing his ass off till dawn in a cold truck cab. He didn’t realize he could keep the diesel motor running virtually all night. The exhaust pipes on a semi weren’t snaked under the truck, meaning no carbon monoxide danger for the men in the loading dock behind him.

He’d never been in a situation like this before — one that mingled boredom with anxiety. It was weird beyond words to sit and tremble with fear, fear generated by the sure anticipation of violence, while at the same time being bored to fucking tears. It was at times like these that he wished he’d never met Nolan. He wondered if Sherry might be thinking the same thing.

If she happened to still be alive.

He was trying to get his mind off that when, shortly after two-thirty, a cherry-red Camaro roared into the parking lot and skidded and slid to a stop. A frantic-looking Lyle Comfort climbed out of the car. He was wearing a brown leather jacket and gray jeans and the side of his face was bruised and puffy and scraped-looking. Somebody had tried to knock some sense in the dumb a-hole; futile effort, Jon thought, then quickly wondered: was this Sherry’s work?

Lyle saw Jon sitting in the truck and came quickly over, slipping on the ice a little; he knocked on the cab door, as if Jon hadn’t seen him coming. Jon swung the door open and looked down at Lyle, who stood there with hands in his jacket pockets, breath smoking, eyes wild; he really had taken a nasty bash.

“How do I get in?” he asked.

He seemed upset.

“They’re loading this trailer up right now,” Jon said, and pointed back with a thumb. “Go to the side door — I’ll raise ’em on my walkie-talkie and somebody’ll let you in.”

Lyle nodded and headed that way and Jon shut the door and did as he’d promised.

Then he used the walkie-talkie again — to check in with Nolan. On their private channel.

“How are you doing?” Jon said. The greeting was a sort of code, in case the other wasn’t alone.

“I can talk,” Nolan said; the metallic ring of the walkie-talkie only intensified the hardness of his voice. “I closed up the club a few minutes ago. I’m in the process of checking in with everybody, seeing how their individual gigs are going.”

“Well, you can check in with Lyle too if you want,” Jon said. “He just showed up — entering at the Penney’s loading dock.”

“Let’s hope your girlfriend’s sitting with Sherry.”

“I don’t know. Something’s wrong.”

“You want to tell me, or play twenty questions?”

Jon sighed. “Lyle’s face was bunged up. Somebody smacked him with something.”

“Could be her. Could be she got away.” There was urgency in his voice, and something else — hope? Anyway, it was an emotion, and Jon wasn’t used to hearing emotion in Nolan’s voice.

“Nolan, we got to face the possibility she made a break for it and didn’t make it.”

“Of course.” No emotion now.

“Lyle looked kind of dazed,” Jon said.

“Lyle always looks dazed.”

“Not really, Nolan. He usually doesn’t look any way at all.”

Silence for a few beats — no, not silence: Nolan was there, the walkie-talkie static said so. He just wasn’t saying anything.

Then he did: “I’ll spend some time around him and his father.” Nolan paused. “Maybe I can read it.”

And clicked off.

Nolan entered DeReuss Jewelry, which like most of the stores at Brady Eighty was trimmed festively for the season, and walked past the mostly empty display cases (their contents kept in the store’s vault overnight — though some inexpensive items remained on display, like a countertop spinner with Caravelle watches) and found Dave Fisher in back, facing a side wall, prying something off it with a screwdriver, while Roger Winch, wearing old clothes and shoes that were obvious veterans of odd around-the-house painting jobs, leaned against a nearby display counter, arms folded, waiting, his duffel bag of tricks at his feet.

“How’s it going?” Nolan asked.

Fisher glanced over his shoulder. “Just need to defeat this tear-gas gimmick before our friend here blows their safe.”

Nolan turned to Winch. “What are you up against?”

Winch shrugged. “Standard J. J. Taylor. Built into the wall. Jam shot. It’ll make some noise.”

“Nobody here to hear it but us crooks,” Nolan said. “Did you hit the luggage shop like I said?”

“Yeah,” Winch said. He nodded behind the counter he leaned against. “I got a nice big Samsonite over there, which I intend to fill to hell and back with sparkly stuff.”

“Do that,” Nolan said.

Fisher had the metal facing plate off the wall alarm and was again scraping insulation from wire with his pocket knife.

“Nolan,” Winch asked, “any word on your girl?”

Nolan shook his head no. “Your concern’s appreciated, but don’t mention it again. You never know when there’s a Comfort in the woodpile.”

“Or a Leech,” Fisher said.

Winch nodded, winked, pointed a forefinger fleetingly at Nolan, in an affirmative gesture.

Nolan turned to go, then stopped and said, “Hit the bank last, remember.”

“No problem,” Winch said.

It was shortly after three when the explosion jolted Jon in his seat, and rattled the building and truck trailer behind him, causing him to say, “Holy shit!” For a second he didn’t know what it was, then he remembered: the jewelry store safe. This would be the first but hardly the last of such shocks to his nervous system tonight (this morning), what with another jewelry store to go, and the bank’s money machine and several night deposit safes.

The thought then occurred to him — for the first time — that he stood to get rich from tonight’s haul. As much as he’d wanted to leave this life behind, he was caught up in a heist that should make all involved a bundle. Those that lived through it, that is. Small detail.

He poured himself some more hot chocolate — he’d brought along two Thermoses — but with a shaky hand. The explosion had rocked his nerves a little. He sipped the warm liquid. He stared out at the snowy parking lot with its handful of vehicles belonging to those at work inside.

Pretty soon he finished the cup, pondering whether he could get away with turning on the truck’s radio for a while and listening to some music. But that might keep him from being able to follow the nonadventures of the Davenport cops and company on the scanner; and he had strict orders from Nolan to keep monitoring that, so to hell with it. Besides, he had to pee.

He put his coat on and climbed out of the cab and went back near the loading dock and had just unzipped his pants and exposed his member to the shriveling night cold when he realized he could hear voices, just inside.

Father and son voices.

Cole and Lyle Comfort.

They were talking as they stood in there, by the mouth of the trailer, which was still in the process of being loaded up. Though the truck was backed fairly flush up against the loading dock, the voices squeezed through.

“You lost it?”

“I’m sorry, Pa.”

“Well, get another one from one of the Leech boys.”

“I will. Pa, I looked all over for it.”

“Is that why you were so late?”

“Well, she gave me a little trouble. That’s how I lost it.”

“But you did do your job?”

“Sure, Pa.”

There was a pause; Jon stood there, dick in hand, bladder about to burst, and listened.

“You did good, son,” Comfort said, the anger out of his voice.

“I hate to lose my birthday gun,” Lyle said, woefully.

“It’s all right, son. I’ll buy you a new one. Too damn bad there ain’t a gun shop in this fucker, or we’d just steal you one.”

“Thanks, Pa.”

“Here comes the Leeches. Better pitch in some.”

Jon, feeling shell-shocked, moved away from the loading-dock area, and stood facing the back wall of the mall and when his urine hit it, steam rose.

Nolan did his share of loading, but mostly he supervised, making sure the right things were being taken.

For example, he put Dooley in charge of the collectibles shop. He knew the locksmith would have the right touch to handle the Hummels and the collector’s plates and other valuable knickknacks; those on display had to be put in their boxes — original-boxed goods were always easier to fence, and with collectibles like these that was especially true.

In the camera shop, he directed two of the Leeches, each lugging a couple of footlockers they’d found at Penney’s, to take nothing under a hundred dollars, and later gave them exactly the same advice in the Singer outlet, where they loaded their hand trucks with sewing machines in cartons.

In the department stores, he had various of the players strip items off wheeled clothing racks to make room for some selective shopping, loading up on designer clothes. I. Magnin, though, had whole racks of designer duds just waiting to be wheeled out, and easily matched the Haus of Leather where furs were concerned — also, several display cases of jewelry (no vault there) were broken into and emptied into waiting luggage, some of it imported leather pieces from Magnin itself.

Nolan by no means lost himself in the work, however: he kept an eye on Comfort and Lyle, both of whom kept their distance from him. He had been thinking over what Jon had told him of the conversation between Lyle and his pa. Behind his cool supervisory demeanor, a storm brewed.

It was just after four when Nolan cornered Comfort in Magnin’s, where the coveralled, white-haired bandit was walking down the aisle with a suitcase in either hand, crammed with who knew what, thimbles and Snicker bars maybe, heading through ladies’ wear toward the double doors that would lead into the storeroom and the final loading dock.

Nolan smiled. “Satisfied with your shopping spree so far, Cole?”

Comfort stopped in the aisle, did not put down the bags; smiled back, rather nervously, Nolan thought. “I surely am. You and me, we’ve had our differences. But you come through for me on this. And I ain’t gonna forget it.”

“Good. That’s quite a wallop your boy seems to have taken.”

“He fell on the ice.”

“Looks like he got hit with something.”

“He fell on the ice. Excuse me, these is heavy.”

“I keep my promises, Cole. Remember that.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah — look. We’ll shoot the fuckin’ breeze some other time. Time is money, Nolan! We’re running out of time, here.”

“Yes we are,” Nolan said.

At four-fifteen, two jewelry stores under his belt, a tired but self-satisfied Roger Winch walked into the First National branch bank, duffel bag in hand; he looked like a bum, in his old clothes, but that just went with the territory: you had to be able to discard your clothes, after a job, as the telltale dust from a safe blowing clung to clothes, making prime evidence for the prosecution. Roger had never done time and had no intention, at this late date, of ever doing so.

A few lights were on, behind the row of teller cages, which were decked with holly and some twinkling Christmas lights. The big NCR safe, olive-colored, stucco-surfaced, was at his left as he entered, on a pedestal; this was to help facilitate its use as a card-activated cash machine, outside. A fully trimmed Christmas tree, under which were bogus gifts, stood next to it.

This automated teller machine — which was called Presto-Change-O, the sort of cutesy name these bank cash machines always seemed to have — was open twenty-four hours. That was one of the reasons Nolan had suggested doing the bank safes last — later at night, the less likely many (if any) customers would be hitting up Presto-Change-O for cash.

The computer within the safe would probably shut down, once Roger blew the door; but ATMs going on the blink was nothing new — though an answering service would automatically be called by Presto-Change-O in the machine’s last breaths before doing its disappearing act, no one would service the thing till tomorrow. And any stray, late-night/early-morning customers encountering the uncooperative machine would dismiss it with a “goddamn.”

The face of Presto-Change-O was actually the ass of the safe, extending out of the bank’s brick outer wall to greet the public in such a way that even if some customer did come along at four- fifteen this morning, he or she wouldn’t see Roger Winch in the process of performing what was known in the trade as a jam shot.

Normally Roger would have laid out all of his tools and equipment on the top of the safe; but, due to the pedestal it was on, the NCR was too tall for that. So Roger pulled a desk around and removed items from his duffel bag, arranging his things carefully, in order, on the desktop, like a chef assembling his ingredients. These included: soap, Fels Naphtha brand, which was malleable and just the right consistency to keep the grease (nitro) from draining through; the grease, a couple of ounces in a medicine bottle, cushioned by twice as much water; a folded strip of cellophane, eight inches long, half an inch wide; a box of wooden kitchen matches, four of which he removed and set out; a knocker — a small metal cap with fulmonite of mercury in it (a lot of guys these days used electric detonators, but the art of this game, Roger felt, was knowing how to properly use a fuse-type knocker) with five inches of fuse crimped in the knocker’s open end; a razor blade; a flashlight; a crowbar; and some rubber gloves, which he now put on.

Whistling “Strangers in the Night,” Roger inserted the strip of cellophane lengthwise into the space between the safe’s door and door frame. Then he took the soap, which he’d already limbered up at the motel before coming, and sculpted a funnel-shaped cup around the cellophane strip. He made it fit nice and snug; mustn’t allow any grease to trickle down the front of the door. Then he gently withdrew the cellophane, which left a narrow passage through the soap where the grease could flow.

He placed the knocker carefully in the cup, so as not to jar it, the fuse dangling about three and a half inches over the lip of the cup, about five seconds’ worth. With the razor blade he split the end of the fuse, spreading it like a flower till its central vein of black powder showed.

He reached for the medicine bottle of grease. He began to pour it slowly into the soap cup — smiling to himself as he did; here was where Roger shined — here was what separated the pete-men from the boys: you had to have timing better than Bob Hope, to judge if the safe was drinking the grease right. And Roger had that sense of timing. The ability to make sure the knocker went off just as the last of the nitro was draining from the cup into the safe door.

Quickly, he lit three kitchen matches at once, producing a prodigious flame, which he touched to the fuse, and took cover twenty feet away, behind a desk.

He sat on the indoor-outdoor carpeting, his back to desk drawers, and covered his ears with pressed fingers; but he enjoyed the ka-WHOOM of the safe blowing.

He stood. He walked through the smoke to the safe. Its doors were swinging on its hinges. He smiled. Perfect. He wouldn’t be needing the crowbar.

He glanced inside at the two bins of cash, tens and twenties, amid computer circuitry. The money could be gathered later. Right now he had two more safes to blow, the little night deposit safes which Nolan said would probably hold more money than Presto-Change-O, given the Christmas shopping season.

He put his tools back in the duffel bag and moved to the next safe and began again.

The explosion, the third of the night, was the loudest yet, and jarred Jon, who was out of hot chocolate and a little drowsy in the cab of the Leech Bros, truck. He decided there was no getting used to occasional explosions. No way not to jump in his seat.

A face appeared in the window next to him and he jumped in his seat again. It wasn’t an explosion, but it sure was surprising.

It was also Cindy Lou.

Her big blue eyes were red and puffy, apparently from crying, and she seemed about to cry again. Then she disappeared, hopped back down to earth, or anyway the pavement of the mall parking lot.

Jon rolled down the window and cold rushed in as he looked out, looked down at her. “What are you doing here?”

She was in the denim jacket again, which against this cold snap was no defense, and her hands were buried in its pockets, and her teeth were chattering.

“We gotta talk,” she said, looking up at him.

“Get in on the other side,” he said, and rolled the window back up.

He reached over and opened the door for her and she climbed aboard.

“It’s warm in here,” she said.

“But it’s a cold world, Cindy Lou,” he said. “How did you get here?”

“Walked.”

“From where? The Holiday Inn?”

She nodded curtly. Added, “It’s not far.”

“Why did you do that? Why are you here?”

She looked at him and her lower lip was trembling. The cold had nothing to do with it.

She said, “I’m afraid... I’m confused... I been up all night... thinking...”

He touched her nearer arm. “Cindy Lou — what is it?”

She gave him a look that was part innocence and all yearning. “Did you buy that bus ticket like you said? Or were you shinin’ me on?”

“I bought the ticket. One-way to L.A.”

She pouted. “I probably missed the bus. I already missed the boat.”

“It’s an open ticket. It’s waiting at the window for you. You can take the first available bus out.”

Firmly, now, she said, “I’m gonna use that ticket.”

“Good for you.”

She looked at her lap. “My daddy’s a terrible man. It’s a hard thing to know, but I know it. Part of me still loves him, and maybe that’s why I’m scared to stick around with him. Maybe... maybe I’d like it, if he did it to me.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I don’t either. Ah, shit, I don’t know what I think. I just know I gotta leave.”

“What’s going on, Cindy Lou?”

She squinched her face up. “Way after midnight, Lyle come back to the motel room. He was bleeding. He had me help him wash up some.”

“He looks pretty bad, even so.”

“He was all bloody on his face.”

“Cindy Lou. Did he kill her?”

She paused. Then she nodded.

“Shit,” Jon said. Tears came, at once; he fought them.

“I asked him what happened to the girl,” she said, a whimper in her voice, “and he said she was dead. I asked him if he killed her and he tried at first to make out like it was an accident. But then he owned up to it.”

“Jesus fuck.”

She raised her hands — they made tiny fists and she pummeled the air. “I started to hit him and hit him and he got all confused. He didn’t understand why I was so mad at him. Then he said he was afraid Daddy was going to be mad, too.”

“Yeah. Lyle lost his birthday gun.”

That startled her. “How did you know?”

Jon just shook his head. He wiped the wetness from his eyes.

“He said he’d tell me the truth,” she said, “if I didn’t tell Daddy.”

“What’s the truth?”

“He was supposed to kill the girl, but she ran away. She put up a struggle, and he lost his gun. But he finally caught up with her. He left her body at the bottom of a well.”

“Goddamn!” Jon said, and smashed a fist heel-first into the dashboard.

“Don’t be mad at me,” Cindy Lou said, pitifully. “I didn’t do it.”

Jon swallowed; worked at controlling himself. He looked at her and she was a cute kid, a good kid, in spite of it all; he felt a sudden rush of warmth toward her and touched her face with his hand.

“You didn’t have to come tell me, Cindy Lou. You didn’t have to come here and tell me at all.”

She shrugged, rather helplessly. “I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid I waited too long. See... Lyle admitted him and Daddy were going to kill you and the other man, too. Real soon.”

21

Five A.M.

It would be dawn soon.

They were gathered at the final loading dock, an open cement garagelike area within the sprawling I. Magnin warehouse, a back-room catacomb of boxed merchandise, stacked and shelved. The last dollies and hand trucks and carts bearing microwave ovens and VCRs and TVs, taken from this department store, were being wheeled toward the trailer of the third, the final, semi. Cole Comfort stood at the right of the truck, watching, relishing it; you could see in his face, in his eyes, that this night had been his life’s dream come true. Lyle was at the wheel of a hand truck of unidentifiable boxes. Fisher had a cart piled with boxed Cuisinarts and other small but relatively big-ticket kitchen appliances. A pair of Leeches were within the truck, packing things tight, making as much room as possible for still more stolen stuff. Another Leech was having a smoke over at left. Winch and Dooley had one of the several suitcases of cash from the bank up on a waist-high stack of boxes, looking in at the green stuff, contemplating how much it would all add up to — checks had been left behind at the bank, just so much worthless paper on the indoor-outdoor carpeting, some of it scattered under the Christmas tree as if by a sloppy Santa. Everybody seemed sort of wasted, understandably so, but a little high, as well. Things were winding down.

Nolan accessed the scene. He stood at the outer edge of the open cement area, I. Magnin boxed merchandise stacked on rows of ceiling-high shelving behind him. One hand, his right, was behind him, too.

This, he thought, would be as good a time as any.

“Gentlemen,” he said. Loudly.

They stopped in their tracks. Comfort seemed puzzled — probably he wasn’t used to hearing the word “gentlemen” used in reference to him. Lyle seemed stunned, but then he’d seemed stunned all night. A Leech poked his head out of the back of the van, like a groundhog checking to see if this was his day; it wasn’t. Fisher looked at Nolan, not making anything of it. But Winch and Dooley seemed to sense something.

“I’ve got something to say,” Nolan said. “I’d advise you listen carefully.”

Comfort glared at Nolan. The old man’s usually disconcertingly pleasant face became a sphincter of irritation as his mouth squeezed out the words: “What the fuck’s the idea? Don’t interrupt the work!” Then to everybody else, including the loitering Winch, Dooley and the smoking Leech, he waved his hands like an insane traffic cop and said, “Get back to it. We gotta get out of this place.”

“If it’s the last thing we ever do,” Jon said, stepping out from an aisle between shelves and stacked boxes, UZI in his hands.

Comfort’s eyes were saucers, flying from Nolan to Jon and back again. “What the fuck is this?”

“No sudden moves,” Nolan said, and showed them all the long-barreled .38 he’d had behind him.

“What the fuck is this?” a Leech within the truck said, poking his head out next to his brother’s. They looked uglier than groundhogs.

With his left hand, Nolan gestured gently toward the truck.

“Put it back,” he said.

The men looked at each other; confusion turned to smiles. Even Lyle smiled. Heads were shaking.

Only Comfort showed no signs of amusement.

“What is that supposed to mean?” he said, spitting the words.

“It means,” Nolan said, “put it back.”

He and Jon were spread apart enough to keep the men covered. The UZI could kill them all in a matter of seconds. Despite their smiles — their nervous smiles — these men knew that. Even Lyle.

Fisher, with a tiny one-sided smirk, said, “Surely you’re not suggesting we put back... what we... took.”

Nolan nodded.

“The merchandise?” Fisher said, eyebrows raised over dark-rimmed glasses. “The money... the diamonds... all of it?”

Nolan nodded.

“Nolan,” Winch said, stepping forward, looking like a raggedy man in his dusty work clothes, “it took us all night to do this job. We don’t have time to put everything back, even if we wanted to. What am I supposed to do, unblow five safes? Come on, man — the deed is done. So’s the damage. Let’s all let bygones be bygones and enjoy this coup we pulled.”

“We have plenty of manpower,” Nolan said, “and plenty of time. Merchants don’t get here till eight-thirty. The maintenance guy comes on at seven, and if we aren’t done by then, we can do something about him. We’re going to work very hard, unloading these trucks. But the first thing I want you all to do is toss your guns on the floor. No offense, but do it. Toss ’em right over by Jon. Now.”

There were grumbles, but they complied — all but Winch, who didn’t carry a piece. Fisher threw on his clunkily futuristic-looking stun gun. Even the Leeches coughed up weapons, surprisingly small ones, 22 revolvers, Saturday night specials. Nolan kept a close eye on Cole Comfort, who tossed a Colt Woodsman .38 on the silvery pile.

“Nolan,” Dooley said, “why are you doing this?”

“You all know why,” Nolan said. “The Comforts took a hostage. The woman I live with. That’s how they forced my involvement here. I work here, gentlemen. My friends own and operate the stores we’ve looted. I’ve been made to do two things I don’t as a rule do: steal from my friends; and shit where I eat. Start unloading.”

Fisher said, “Isn’t this a little late...”

“You’ll all be paid for your trouble. I’ll even extend my offer to the Leech brothers...” He directed his words toward them: “I’m kicking in fifteen grand apiece for your trouble here tonight.”

A Leech scowled from the back of the truck and said, “This is a million-dollar score. What the fuck kind of insult is fifteen gees?”

“You’re wasting time. Start unloading.”

Winch stepped forward. “Nolan, we worked a lot of jobs together. I got a lot of respect for you. But this isn’t right. This isn’t fair.”

“They killed the girl,” Nolan said. He didn’t like saying it. Saying it was admitting it.

Winch shook his head, made a clicking sound of sympathy in his cheek. “That’s a shame. The dirty bastards.” He glanced at Comfort, who was standing near the semi, boiling, and Lyle, who was frozen at his hand truck, and shook his head again. Then he looked at Nolan and shrugged, “But really, Nolan, that’s between you and Comfort, here.”

Fisher stepped forward, too. “It’s an awful thing. But, Nolan, frankly — it doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of us. We worked our tails off, all damn night.”

Dooley didn’t step forward, but he gave his two cents’ worth. “I agree it’s a dirty rotten shame, your girl. But I also agree it’s between you and the Comforts. Why don’t you keep Cole and his kid, and let the rest of us go, and send the Leech boys on to Omaha where our fence is waiting. We can all retire on this one, Nolan. You, too.”

The Leech who stood outside the truck spit on the pavement. “Who gives a shit who Comfort killed or didn’t kill. We been workin’ all fuckin’ night. And this is one big fuckin’ haul. Fuck it!”

“Yeah,” one of his brothers said, leaning out of the back of the truck. “Fuck it! Let’s go.”

Comfort’s rage had subsided; he was smiling — lapping up the way the crowd had turned against Nolan. His blue eyes fairly twinkled in the leathery face and he smoothed back his white hair with one hand and walked a few paces toward Nolan.

With mock diplomacy, he said, “I gotta throw in with the Leeches, on this one. You can’t undo this thing, at this point. Even your friends are lining up against you. Listen to ’em, Nolan — they’re telling you fuck it. Fuck it, Nolan. Hell, fuck you.”

Nolan shot him in the head.

It lifted Comfort off his feet and knocked him flat on his back, with a splintering splat; his skull was cracked open — whether from the shot he took in the forehead, or the fall to the cement, Nolan couldn’t say; maybe a little of both. At any rate, the blue eyes stared up at nothing and his arms were splayed out and his legs asprawl and the top of his head began emptying, as if all the meanness was oozing out, a slimy trail of blood and brains draining toward the truck.

“Pa!” Lyle shouted. He ran to the body, slipped in his father’s brains and fell; then he picked himself up and kneeled before the corpse, and stared at it openmouthed. “Pa?”

The rest of them stood there, on the pavement, inside the truck, mouths open, eyes wide, breathing in the smell of cordite.

Nolan, a question mark of smoke curling out his gun barrel, said, “Put it back. Please.”

“Well, since you put it that way,” Winch said, and he headed back toward the truck.

“No problem,” Fisher said, and joined Winch.

Dooley said, “I can handle it,” and reached for the nearest box.

But the Leech brothers had other ideas, at least the two inside the truck did, because they burst out the back of it like commando jacks-in-the- box, guns in hand; they’d had them stashed within the trailer, apparently, big blue-black .357 mags that spewed noise and flames and more, exploding at Nolan and Jon, the Leeches screaming their anger, no words, just anger, gunfire ringing in the concrete room.

Nolan yelled, “Hit the deck,” in the process of doing so, and Dooley and Winch and Fisher did so too, even as they scrambled toward the sidelines, for cover, though all it was was boxes, but Jon just crouched and opened up with the UZI while Nolan, on his belly, fired the .38 and bullets zinged and danced across the filthy sweaters of the two men, who pitched forward and landed face-first, not far from Jon’s feet, deader than dirt.

The third Leech had grabbed up one of the guns from the pile Nolan disarming them had made, and scrambled off into the warehouse and Nolan pursued him, telling Jon to cover Lyle, who through all this, impervious to it, remained crouched over his father’s body, apparently wondering what life would be like without someone to tell him how to live his.

Nolan ran after the final Leech, who hurtled down one and then cut over to another backroom aisle, and was nearing the double doors that led out into the department store, when he wheeled to throw some gunfire Nolan’s way.

It was wild gunfire, though, chewing up some shelved merchandise at left, and Nolan shot him once, in the chest, and the bullet burst bloodily through the Leech and the Leech burst bloodily through the double doors, flopping on his back in ladies’ wear, dead as his brothers.

When Nolan returned, Jon was guarding Lyle, and the three men were dutifully unloading the trailer.

“Forget it,” Nolan told the three. He allowed himself a sigh. “It’s fucked, now. We’ll leave the trucks loaded — they belong to the Leeches, anyway — and the Leeches aren’t going anywhere.”

Winch put down the box he was unloading. He shrugged. “Maybe if we leave everything, they’ll think a fight broke out. You know, your classic falling out among thieves, and that’ll be the end of it.”

“Yeah,” Fisher said. “Maybe they’ll just write it off as a heist that went sour.”

“Maybe,” Nolan said, nodding.

“Imagine,” Dooley said, dryly, “anybody mistaking this for a heist that went sour.”

“Pa,” Lyle was saying.

The three men exchanged glances, and walked over to Nolan as a group. Winch, who seemed a little pale, remained spokesman.

He said, “Why don’t the three of us split, then. This is no place to be hanging around.” He looked around him. The two dead Leeches. The dead Coleman Comfort. The bashed-up-looking Lyle Comfort, mourning on his knees, a smear of his father’s brains on his left shoe. Blood on the floor and the smell of shit and cordite in the air. Winch shook his head again. “This is what I hate about this business.”

Nolan said, “I promised you money.”

Dooley, who was anxious to go, waved that off. “We trust you.”

Fisher thought about that briefly, then agreed.

“I don’t think you’ll have to wait,” Nolan said, and he went over to Comfort’s body. He took Lyle by one arm and hauled him over by the far wall; told Jon to keep him covered. Jon was doing fine, Nolan thought; he’d come through this like a real pro.

Nolan bent over Comfort’s body and pulled down its coveralls.

Winch said, “Jesus Christ, Nolan — what...”

One of the coverall pockets was soaked and the strong sickly sweet smell of perfume rose; a bottle the old man had boosted had broken when he fell, apparently. Nolan ripped open the plaid shirt to reveal longjohns; and, finally, a fat money belt around Comfort’s waist. He unfastened the bulky belt, stood, and extended it toward the three men, like it was some plump, ungainly but rare snake he’d bagged for them.

“You guys carve this up,” he said. “If there isn’t at least a hundred grand here, I’ll eat the fucker. Anyway, I want no part of it.”

Winch took the belt, held it in both hands and looked at it incredulously and said to Nolan, “How did you know he’d have it on him?”

“I didn’t,” Nolan said. “But I noticed he’d put on some weight since Sunday — he must not’ve worn the money belt to that first meeting. Entrusted it to Lyle, in case I pulled something, I guess. Anyway — I never knew a Comfort who believed in banks.”

“This one takes the cake,” Winch said, shaking his head.

“It’s getting light out,” Dooley said, touching Winch’s sleeve. “We better go.”

“My sentiments exactly,” Fisher said.

The men bade brief good-byes to Nolan and Jon, stepped over and around the corpses, collected their guns and left out the back door, going quickly to Fisher’s Buick in the parking lot and disappearing into the sunrise, leaving behind a changed, rearranged Brady Eighty that would, in a short time, surprise those who would come in and take over for them, the day shift who normally inhabited the place, who would not be in for a normal day.

Lyle had said nothing through all this, except an occasional “Pa.” He hadn’t wept. He just stood near the wall, looking stunned, Jon holding the UZI on him, Lyle’s wide eyes staring at his pa’s corpse.

Nolan put the .38’s nose against Lyle’s.

“So you threw her down a well,” he said.

Lyle looked past the gun at Nolan, like a wide-eyed child. Orphan child. He shook his head no.

“What, then?” Nolan demanded.

“She was running. She fell down one.”

Nolan looked at Jon. Jon looked at Nolan.

“Show me where,” Nolan said.

22

Feeling like he was in a dream, an unending awful dream, Jon drove Nolan’s silver Trans Am, following the cherry-red Camaro down Highway 92, woods at left, the Mississippi at right.

He wondered if Cindy Lou was on her bus yet. He had given her the keys to his van, back at Brady Eighty, and told her to leave it at the bus station; he’d pick it up later. Was she sitting in the station even now, waiting for a bus to take her away to L.A., away from the father she feared, and didn’t know was dead?

Jon shook his head; he’d tried to help her. Just like she tried to help him. But she had, not so indirectly, provided the circumstances for her father’s murder — in which Jon was an accomplice.

He wondered about her. He wondered if she would find any kind of life in La-La Land. Waitress? Hooker? Something better, he hoped. He wondered how long it would be before she learned of her father’s death, and how she’d react. How would she feel about Jon, and Nolan? Would she bite her lip and understand? Or would she be the next Comfort to come out of the past and want to kill them?

The sun, not at all high in the sky, glinted off the cold gray choppy surface of the river. Up ahead Nolan was driving. Comfort’s son Lyle was in the back seat, trussed up like something out of a bondage magazine, but sitting up nonetheless, so he could see out the window and give Nolan directions. The excess clothesline, and there was quite a bundle of it, was on the floor in the Camaro’s back seat. So was a flashlight.

“We’re not going to leave her down there,” Nolan had said, with a passion unlike him.

Left unsaid was the faint hope that she might be alive. But both knew that hope was so faint as to be transparent as the wishful thinking it was. The girl was dead. Sherry was dead. Nolan would have to face that.

Recovering a body wasn’t Jon’s idea of a great way to start a day; his bones ached, he was so tired, and he supposed hunger was behind the grinding pain in his stomach, but after his session with the UZI, eating was out of the question — the idea of ever eating again seemed in fact abstract.

He’d killed those men, those two Leeches. Nolan’s bullets had been in there, too, but Jon had seen the UZI bullets zing across the chests, going in black, coming out red. His mouth was dry.

They were murdering lowlife sons of bitches but he had killed them. Self-defense, but he had done it. He had killed them. He could face that.

He could live with it.

What he wasn’t sure about was whether he could live with murdering Lyle Comfort.

Nolan had left his unregistered long-barreled .38 back with the dead bodies (Jon’s UZI too) — the revolver was, after all, the gun Comfort was killed with; Nolan had even placed it in the hand of a dead Leech. In return he’d taken the unfired Colt Woodsman that had belonged to Comfort; that was the gun Lyle would be killed with, Jon assumed. Nolan would do it. Dumping Lyle’s body on a roadside in his cherry-red Camaro. He was planning to do it. With luck Jon wouldn’t have to watch.

But he’d be a part of it, just the same, and he wished he’d never met Nolan, and wished this dream over, this nightmare which at the moment was a strangely lyrical one, sun-dappled Mississippi, starkly beautiful snowy woods, please God let it end.

They passed a sleazy little motel, the Riverview, with signs boasting water beds and XXX movies in rooms; so much for lyricism.

Up ahead the red Camaro’s brake lights indicated a slowing down, and soon Nolan pulled off to the right, into one of many little picnic areas along the river. Jon pulled in behind him. The road seemed deserted; it was 6:37 A.M. Friday.

Jon got out, wearing his long navy coat, and gloves, but unarmed. Nolan got out of the Camaro, wearing no jacket or even sport coat, the Colt Woodsman stuck in his waistband, looking black against the light blue shirt, a shirt Nolan seemed to have been wearing constantly (the shirt Sherry bought him, Jon suddenly realized, the afternoon she was kidnaped!) and went around on the other side and opened the door and took out a knife and leaned in the back seat. Christ! Jon thought, but then realized Nolan was only cutting the ropes.

Jon walked over to the Camaro, wishing he were anywhere else, except perhaps that bloody loading dock which awaited some hapless I. Magnin employee.

Nolan hauled Lyle out of the back seat; the boy looked pale and confused but, oddly, not frightened. His expensive brown jacket and gray slacks looked a little the worse for wear. He wasn’t bound in any way.

Nolan held him by the crook of one arm and smiled tightly. “You’re sure this is the place, Lyle?”

Lyle nodded. “Not far from here.”

A car went past.

Without looking at him, Nolan said to Jon, “Get the rope and the flashlight.”

Jon got them out of the back.

“Let’s go,” Nolan said. Keeping his gun in his waistband, he guided Lyle by the arm like a child, across the highway. Jon trailed after, carrying the thick ring of clothesline in one hand, the flashlight in the other.

They walked up a snowy slope; leaves under the gentle layer of snow crackled beneath their feet. The sky was a slate blue and nearly cloudless. Wind whispered, but it was a chilly whisper, a ghostly kiss.

At the edge of the woods, Nolan said, “Do you know where she is, Lyle?”

He nodded.

“You wouldn’t play games with me, would you?

He shook his head no.

“Good,” Nolan said. “Now lead the way.”

He let go of Lyle’s arm and withdrew the Colt from his waistband and walked just a few steps behind Lyle, who led them into the woods; he wasn’t moving quickly. He seemed defeated. Near catatonic. And, as Jon knew, and as Nolan most certainly knew, he was thick as a post. He wasn’t planning anything. Or if he was, it wouldn’t amount to much.

They hadn’t walked far when Lyle stopped. He pointed up ahead, through the gray trees, where it seemed slightly more open.

“Over there,” he said.

Nolan poked him in the back with the .38. “Show me.”

Soon they could see it, where the sharp angles of broken planks jutted up like strange weeds. Nolan shifted the gun to his left hand and grabbed Lyle’s arm and pulled him along and ran. Jon ran, too. He stumbled once, over a root, but didn’t fall.

You couldn’t tell what it was, at first. Weeds and leaves and snow still covered most of it, but in the center a jagged hole yawned, where the rotted planks had given away. Nolan put the gun in his waistband and cautiously crawled out to where she’d fallen through. He was on his side, his feet on the snowy ground, his trunk on the rotted wood.

“Can’t see anything,” he said, looking in. “Give me the flashlight.”

Jon handed it to him. Lyle was just standing there, glum, obedient.

Nolan shot the light down there and said, “I think I see her.”

He moved back off the planks. On his hands and knees at the place where the snowy earth met the planks, he started tearing the rotten boards away.

“Help me clear these goddamn things out,” Nolan said, and Jon slipped the ring of rope around his shoulder and helped. The wood was so old, so weathered, so decaying, it almost crumbled in their hands.

“You help, too,” Nolan demanded of Lyle, and Lyle did. He got on hands and knees and tore at the wood. Just one of the guys.

Then the opening of the old well was exposed. It was about four foot in diameter. It was quite deep; with the sun as low in the sky as it was, there was no hope of seeing down there without a flashlight. Nolan shined his down.

“I see her,” he said, leaning in one side.

“I do too,” Jon said, leaning in opposite him.

She was down there all right; on her back, her head to one side. She was in a lavender outfit. That was all they could make out.

“How the hell deep is this thing?” Jon asked.

“Probably thirty feet,” Nolan said. His voice was quavering.

Jon looked at Nolan; a single tear streaked the man’s left cheek. Nolan looked at Jon and wiped away the tear, leaving some dirt from a hand that had been tearing away rotten planks. It was a moment neither would ever forget. Or mention.

Now Nolan stood and looked to Lyle. Nolan started to smile; it was an awful smile. He walked over to the boy and gripped him with one hand by the expensive leather coat and said, “You killed her, you little cocksucker.”

He shook his head side to side. “No, she fell.”

“Running from you. Why don’t you run from me, now?” And he got out the Colt.

“That’s Pa’s gun,” Lyle said, stupidly, recognizing it.

“Nolan,” Jon said. He was on his knees, leaning over the well, using the flashlight. “I think I saw her move.”

Nolan stuck the gun back in his waistband and bent down and took the flashlight and shined it down there.

“Sherry!” he called.

His voice echoed down the well, the beam of the flashlight touching her body. Her motionless body.

“Sherry!”

Nolan’s voice reverberated off the brick walls of the old well.

Nothing.

“Sherry!”

And thirty feet down, something — someone — stirred.

“Goddamn,” he said, a disbeliever in the presence of a saint, “she did move.”

He stood up. “Give me that rope.”

Jon did.

Nolan looped one end of it around the nearest sturdy tree, knotted it firmly; then, he looped the other end of it around his waist.

“You’re going down there?” Jon asked.

Nolan didn’t bother answering.

“I don’t know if you’ve got enough rope,” Jon said.

“I always allow myself just enough rope,” Nolan said. He walked to the edge of the well.

“This is a hand-dug well,” he said. “They laid these bricks as they went. Look — you see? There’s plenty of lip on most of those bricks, to cling to. That should allow me to pretty much climb down the side.”

Jon was shaking his head doubtfully. “It’s an old fucker. Some of those bricks’ll give.”

“That’s why you’re going to have to brace me.”

“No problem,” Jon said. He wasn’t worried: he’d been into bodybuilding since he was eight years old and clipped a Charles Atlas coupon off the back cover of a Superman comic book.

Jon dug his feet in and gripped the rope with his gloved hands, as Nolan eased himself down into the well, and Jon put his back into it, pulling away as Nolan went down.

As they’d thought, a brick gave every now and then, and threw them a scare, and strained some of Jon’s muscles, back muscles particularly, but about five minutes later, Nolan was down there. Kneeling beside her. Cradling her in his arms.

Jon called down: “How is she?”

Nolan shouted up: “Breathing!”

That was a start.

Then Jon could hear a voice; not Nolan’s: hers.

Soft, so soft he could barely hear her, and he couldn’t make it out at all. But she was saying something to Nolan.

Then he understood a word; her voice had managed to be loud enough to echo faintly up the well: “Nolan!”

And they were embracing down there.

“You want me to come back later?” Jon called down.

Nolan didn’t respond.

He and Sherry were standing now. He was helping her, but she was standing, too. So nothing major was broken. Good. They both stood and embraced and then Nolan seemed to have his hands on her shoulders, looking right at her, telling her something.

“I’m coming back up!” Nolan shouted.

And Jon braced the rope, pulled as Nolan climbed the bricks. The trip up took a little longer, but there were no slips, no scares. Jon pulled him up over the edge of the well, and Nolan, a little winded, sat there and smiled.

“There’s a soft bed of sand and leaves down there,” he said. “She landed on her back, her weight evenly distributed. Nothing broken, looks like.”

“That’s great.”

“That’s lucky. She hit her head pretty bad, though. On the way down, probably. Concussion, I think. She’s cold, but not frostbitten, I don’t think. She was better off down there than out on this snowy ground. She was away from the elements.”

“What do we do now?”

Nolan frowned. “Where’s Lyle?”

“Huh?”

Jon looked around. No Lyle.

“Oh. Shit. I sort of forgot about him.”

Surprisingly, all Nolan did was shrug. “Well, we’ll find him. He’s not going anywhere. I got the keys to his Camaro.”

Jon shrugged back at him. “I got your Trans Am keys. Think he’s dangerous?”

“Is he going to go find a gun and come after us? No. He’s nothing, without his ‘pa.’ He’s just a bug. He’ll get stepped on sooner or later.”

“What about Sherry?”

Nolan untied the rope from around his waist, then tossed it gently into the well like a fisherman casting his line. “I told her to tie it around her waist,” he said. “We’re going to haul her out.”

And they did. Sherry didn’t try climbing the bricks, but she held on to the rope firmly and, with both men pulling, they had her out of the ground and back among the living in a matter of minutes.

Her face was smudged and bruised, her clothes torn and dirty, the socks on her feet shredded and caked with blood, but Jon didn’t remember ever seeing a more beautiful woman.

She didn’t say anything; she just hugged Nolan and wept into his chest.

Then pulled away and looked at Nolan and said weakly, but wryly, “I suppose you think I’m a sissy, crying like this.”

Nolan glanced at Jon, who just shrugged.

Then Nolan, noting her lack of shoes, lifted her in his arms and carried her out of the forest, like a groom carrying his bride over the threshold.

23

Lyle pulled off the main drag onto the asphalt, and for the first time today, he smiled. He was close to home.

Then the smile went away, as he remembered there wouldn’t be nobody there. Pa was dead. Cindy Lou took off someplace. And it was just him, now.

Just him.

And he couldn’t stay long at home, no. He knew that murderer who killed Pa would come after him. Maybe he should go after them himself — Nolan and that curly-haired kid, he was partly responsible, too. Maybe Lyle should find a gun and go kill them both.

But he wasn’t sure. There was no one to ask about it.

Lyle had made about all the decisions in one day he was capable of. He felt good about that; he felt good about how he got away from Nolan and the kid. They’d been busy trying to get that girl out of that well. It occurred to Lyle, in an insight that came as close to irony as he was capable, that his fucking up and not killing the girl had turned out to be something good — without her still being alive, those two wouldn’t have got distracted, and he couldn’t have made a quiet break for it.

He’d outsmarted them, and he nodded to himself, flushed with self-satisfaction, as he drove, his mouth a tight smug line as he pondered all the people in his life who’d told him he was stupid, including Pa sometimes, and how he’d pulled one over on that supposedly real smart Nolan.

Nolan didn’t know Lyle had a little magnetic spare-key box tucked under the Camaro. Lyle had run across the road to the car and reached under for the key and there it was: right where Pa had had him put it — after Lyle locked his keys in the car half a dozen times or so, and Pa got tired of getting calls to come drive out in the truck to wherever and use the shim to unlock the car door.

First Lyle went to the Holiday Inn, to pick up Cindy Lou, only a note was waiting, for Pa and him. It said: “Good-bye, Daddy. Good-bye, Lyle. I have went to find a new life. Please don’t come looking. I will try and call Christmas. Love and kisses, Cindy Lou Comfort.” She had real good handwriting.

He lit out of there. Part of him wanted to crawl in that motel bed and sleep forever and a day; but he knew Nolan and the kid would be coming after him. He threw all his clothes and things and Pa’s too in the Camaro trunk and took off.

When he went by the Brady Eighty mall, he said, “So long, Pa.”

Then he caught Interstate 80 west, and kept the speed at fifty-five. He wanted to go faster, but Pa said never break little laws when you’re on your way home from breaking a big one. Even though the mall haul, as Pa liked to call it, sort of was a bust, Lyle supposed that rule still applied.

He was headed for home. He knew that might be a mistake — Nolan maybe could find out where the Comforts lived — but Lyle just had to go there. All his things were there. All of his clothes, except the few he had with him; all his records and tapes. He’d gather his things and take off somewhere. Hide or something. He supposed he’d have to leave the big-screen TV behind.

A little after eight, the morning still young, he stopped at the Howard Johnson’s near Iowa City and ate some breakfast, eggs and bacon and toast and juice. He was real hungry, but afterward, waiting for the girl to bring him his ticket, it hit him all of a sudden. Pa was dead. Pa wasn’t never coming back. Ever.

He started to bawl, right there in the Howard Johnson’s.

And then he ran to the can and puked up his whole breakfast.

Then he had to pay for the breakfast, talk about gyps.

He felt ashamed, as he drove away from the HoJo’s. Here he’d been by himself in the car, where he could’ve cried and nobody seen him, and he waits till he’s in a damn restaurant to break down like a baby. Pa wouldn’t be pleased.

He caught 218 and headed south. He was traveling through farmland and, even covered over by snow, the friendly terrain made him feel better because it made him think of home.

He knew he ought to feel angry about what they done to Pa, but mostly he just felt sorry they done it. What Pa said about it not mattering when somebody died, ’cause everybody died sooner or later, didn’t seem to make so much sense to Lyle now. Maybe Pa meant, where other people was concerned.

He’d miss Cindy Lou, too, but at least she wasn’t dead. He wished he could join her, wherever she was; it was too bad she was his sister, ’cause no girl fucked and sucked like Cindy Lou. Not that he was sorry she was his sister — with Pa gone, her (and Willis, who was in the pen) was all the family he had left. If she tried to call at Christmas, though, nobody’d be home. Lyle had to stay away from the house, after today, in case Nolan tracked him down.

Lyle thought of Willis again, when he saw a sign that said eighteen miles to Fort Madison at the junction of 218 and 2. He was tempted to stop by, but he didn’t know whether it was visiting day or not.

And then about the time Lyle crossed over the Iowa/Missouri border, he remembered his Uncle Daniel. That was what he’d do! He’d stop for his things at the house and go right on down to Nashville. Uncle Daniel and the boys would take him in. And his Uncle Daniel could tell what to do about those murderers! His mouth was pinched with decision. He pounded the steering wheel with a fist. That was it. That was the answer. Uncle Daniel.

He wondered if they still had their record business; that’s where all their moonshine money went, Pa said. It had something to do with people paying them to make records, which never got released or something. Pa said it was Vanity, but Lyle didn’t think she recorded in Nashville. Pa also said it was a sweet scam. Anyway, Lyle’d have to learn to put up with country western, but that was all right. Small price to pay for a home.

And they had good-looking gash in Nashville; he’d been there before. A real foxy singles scene. He’d fit in just fine.

He had relaxed after that. He had, for the first time, hours into the long drive, pushed a tape into the cassette deck. He turned the music up real loud and filled his brain with Billy Idol. He was tired of thinking.

He ate lunch at a truck stop outside of Kirksville; he was on Highway 63, now. He didn’t bawl and he kept the lunch down — two cheeseburgers and a load of fries and a Cherry Coke. Uncle Daniel. That was the ticket.

Now, hours later, midafternoon, sun reflecting off the snowy ground, he turned off the asphalt road onto the familiar gravel one. Almost home. He felt a bittersweet twinge. It would be great to be home, but sad to go in an empty house, nobody waiting for him.

Well, he’d just pack his stuff and go. He hoped he could get all the clothes and records and tapes and stereo stuff in the car. He shrugged. He’d just have to make do.

He pulled onto the cinder path, enjoying the crunching sound the tires made; he’d heard it so many times before. Then, like something on a Christmas card, there was the house — the aluminum siding Pa conned that guy out of was holding up real good. After some time passed, maybe Lyle could sell the place; his uncle would know. The old homestead looked real homey, snow touching the rusty vehicles on the overgrown lawn. The silo and the barn reminded Lyle that his were farmer roots; of course, Pa taught him early that farming was a fool’s game.

He pulled up in front and locked up the Camaro — Pa taught him that; some people just can’t be trusted — and headed up the steps onto the porch. He felt sad being here but a little happy, too, even if it turned out to be the last time.

He had a house key tucked away in his billfold, and he used that, but the door wasn’t locked. That struck him as funny. He went on in, and the first thing he saw was the big-screen TV, and he sighed and shook his head about having to leave that behind. Then he saw the man, a stranger, sitting over at the left, on the couch, under a John Wayne western velvet painting, the real big one, right where Pa always sat.

The man was heavyset and wore white, like a doctor; but his face looked funny — first off, he hadn’t shaved in a long time, his cheeks were real stubbly; second off, his eyes were puffy and red. And he looked kind of familiar, even though Lyle was pretty sure he never saw him before. There were empty beer cans on the floor, a lot of them, all of them crushed by a hand that didn’t give a shit about nickel deposit. Next to the stranger, on the couch, was an ashtray that was overflowing from crushed-out cigarettes and ashes. But the man wasn’t smoking right now.

“Who are you?”

“Are you Lyle Comfort?”

“Yes, sir. Are you a doctor?”

“I’m a butcher.”

That’s when Lyle saw the knife in the man’s lap. A long knife. A shiny knife.

“I don’t understand,” Lyle said.

The man smiled, but it wasn’t at all friendly.

“My name’s McFee,” he said.

“Huh?” Lyle said.

The man rose; the knife was so long he held it by the handle with one hand and cradled the blade in the other.

“I’m Angie’s father.”

And as the blade came down, Lyle understood. He finally understood.