Max Allan Collins

Hard Cash

1

Breen’s first reaction, when he saw the gun, was to laugh.

A nervous laugh, to be sure, but Breen had an ability to look at himself in a detached, ironic sort of way in stress situations, and the thought of him getting robbed tickled his perverse inner funnybone.

He sat up, jarring the naked barmaid on top of him. He eased her off to one side. She was a cute, plump, German-looking girl with lots of yellow hair. Her lips were a blush-pink color. So were her nipples. She tried covering herself with the little black skirt she’d climbed out of moments before; it was like hiding behind a stamp. Breen was naked too, but he didn’t bother covering up. He got a carpet burn on his butt, though, sitting up so fast, surprised.

And the only thing he could see, at first, was the guns — one of them a .45, the other a shotgun, Jesus! — and the long black woolen overcoats, filling the doorway of the back room like two long shadows. The faces of the men were lost, for the moment, in the darkness and the turned-up overcoat lapels, but Breen remembered them immediately, remembered seeing the two men come into the bar an hour or so ago. Remembered the full-length dark coats and turned-up lapels and remembered how stiffly one of the men had walked, almost limping. Limp, hell — that had been the goddamn shotgun strapped to somebody’s thigh.

Which explained why the pair hadn’t bothered shrugging out of their heavy, wet coats to hang them up as they came in; why they retreated at once to the rear of the place, to a back booth near the men’s can, out of Breen’s sight.

And he hadn’t gotten a close look at the pair, either. The yellow-haired barmaid and another waitress, a sexy brunette who had resisted Breen’s advances and just worked there, took care of the customers in the little bar, while Breen just stayed back behind the counter mixing drinks, making occasional conversation. He’d had no contact with the two men, and probably wouldn’t even have noticed them particularly if it hadn’t been such a dead night.

Tonight, the late December freezing rain that had begun to turn to snow around seven was keeping everybody at home. The bulk of drinking done in Indianapolis tonight would be guys sitting in their kitchens with a bottle and glass, or in an easy chair with beer and pretzels and the boob tube for company. The night was so slow, in fact, the snow looking so blizzardlike, that Breen had closed up early, just after midnight. He was losing money staying open, it was so dead, and besides, that would give him two full hours with that Playboy Bunny of a barmaid and the wife none the wiser.

Women were a weakness of Breen’s. Not his worst weakness, but an easy second place. Gambling was his first love, of course — or lust, rather: Breen was a gambler the way a nymphomanic is a lover, never quite getting out of it what was put in. But he’d kicked the habit, or anyway hoped he had; he hadn’t indulged in anything even as harmless as a penny ante poker game these past three months or so. The trick, of course, would be if he could resist the damn horses. It was easy enough to go cold turkey in December, when there was nothing doing but damn harness racing, which wasn’t racing at all, in his mind. But what about next summer, when the Chicago tracks started up, and he’d have the old itch to drive in on the weekend? December, sure, but what about fucking May?

Anyway, he was paid up. Didn’t owe no bookie no nothin’. Thanks to Nolan, Breen had been able to pay off those four gees he owed that pig bookie of his, and catch up on some of the back alimony and child support he owed his first wife, besides. Things were looking good. The world was spreading its legs for Breen. So was the yellow-haired barmaid, when the guys with guns came in.

She’d been on top of him. Doing her Linda Lovelace imitation and not a bad one at that, after which she’d started settling that sweet German ass down on him, and that’s when those fuckers came in.

Thieves, no less.

And he laughed.

Couldn’t help himself.

For a second, he laughed. Man bites dog. Thief gets ripped off.

That was Breen, that was what he was: a thief. A stocky, forty-two-year-old, black-haired, crew-cut, fleshy-cheeked, twice-married thief. Who ran a bar in Indianapolis with his brother-in-law Fred (the nights Fred had off were the nights Breen had on — on the plump, sexy waitress, that is) and lost more money on the horses than any bar, let alone one small, quiet, out-in-the suburbs neighborhood bar, could take care of. The only way Breen the gambler could survive was if Breen the thief got out and hustled.

And in the old days, the fifties, even on into the sixties, it hadn’t been so bad. It had been good, as a matter of fact, very good. He had worked with the best: guys like Laughlin, Metesky, Randisi, Nolan. Especially Nolan. Nolan was the best organizer in heisting, a real leader, somebody you felt confident working with. But things had started going to hell these last few years. Laughlin and Matesky and a couple of other good men were killed in Georgia little over a year ago, in a back roads chase like something out of the movies, only no happy ending: the damn car went off the side of the road, rolled, blew the fuck up. And Randisi, Christ, he’d just heard about Randisi the other day: shot through the throat, dead before he hit ground, and the sad part was Randisi was robbing a fucking liquor store. A guy like Randisi robbing a liquor store, shit. That alone was enough to make you sick.

Christ, for a while there, seemed like everybody in the business was either shot or in stir or otherwise out of commission. Even Nolan.

A couple of years back, Breen and Nolan and some others had been in Chicago (Cicero, to be exact) getting a bank job together, when some syndicate guy shot the job right out from under them. Nolan had had some trouble with the Chicago Family years before, but everybody — including Nolan — had thought that to be past history. Well, it wasn’t, it was here and now, and Nolan and Breen and the rest of the string found out the hard way. Luckily only Nolan got tagged with a bullet, but the job went blooey, and Nolan was out of action for a time.

Initially Breen figured Nolan for dead, and so did about everybody else in the business. When Nolan turned up alive, several months later, no heist man worth a shit was willing to come near Nolan, who might as well have stayed dead. Even Breen had stayed clear of his old friend. The risks of the profession were great enough already without including somebody who was wanted by the Family on a job.

Breen had always worked with Nolan as often as possible, but with Nolan and so many other good people out of circulation, Breen had to take what he could get.

And what he could get, it turned out, was the Comforts.

That was what Breen called really hitting the bottom. About as bad as Randisi and the fucking liquor store. Stealing nickels and dimes, that’s what Breen was reduced to. Literally. Heisting goddamn parking meters with the goddamn Comfort family.

Crazy old Sam Comfort usually worked exclusively with his two sons, Billy and Terry, but Terry drew a short term for statutory rape a while back, and Comfort asked Breen to fill in till the boy got out. Breen had gambling debts to pay, and back alimony and such, and even though he knew old man Comfort had a reputation just slightly shadier than a two-dollar whore, Breen accepted Comfort’s offer. When you’re desperate, you’re desperate.

Actually, he had to give old Sam credit: the parking meter angle wasn’t such a bad one. Comfort had worked out a route along Interstate 80, of good-size cities with poorly lit sections of town where parking meters were ripe for picking; Breen and Billy Comfort wore khaki green uniforms with the words “Meter Maintenance” stitched on the back, and Billy would go around emptying meters with keys old Sam provided, bringing back buckets of coin for Breen to empty into the trunk of the Buick, behind the wheel of which sat Sam Comfort, monitoring police calls on a citizen’s band radio.

It had been a solid month of six-days-a-week hard work, and when he went to the Comforts’ rented farmhouse in Iowa City to collect his share of the nearly fifty thousand bucks that the unofficial meter maintenance team had taken in, Breen had discovered that all the bad things he’d heard about the Comforts were true, and more. Old Sam paid Breen his share by shooting him.

Once in the side, once in the leg.

But Breen had managed to get away, despite the pain and inconvenience of the two wounds. The Comforts, in their quaint, folksy manner, had gotten drunk before Breen showed up, which made evading them no great trick. The trick had been not getting killed by those first unexpected blasts.

Breen had scrambled to his car and got it going, while behind him the back windshield had turned into a big lacy glass doily, thanks to the hole punched in its middle by Sam Comfort’s handgun. He had driven the car to Planner’s, Planner being an old heist guy who was a good friend of Nolan’s. It turned out that Planner had died not long ago, and Nolan and a lad named Jon were presently staying in Planner’s place, getting the estate settled or some damn thing.

Anyway, Nolan helped Breen get on his feet, or rather on his back, providing a bed and patching him up and letting him stay there and heal a while. Furthermore, it turned out that Nolan’s troubles with the Family were really over this time, and Nolan was evidently thinking about getting back into circulation. On hearing of the Comforts and the double-cross, Nolan offered to get the money back for Breen.

Breen hadn’t been too hot on the idea. He was never one for revenge, placing his ass first on his priority list. Fuck, he was grateful just to be alive. Let bygones be bygones. He didn’t hold any grudge against those goddamn fucking asshole Comforts. But at least, he had told Nolan, if you do rip them off, kill them too. If you don’t, he’d told Nolan, you might as well kill me now, because the Comforts are going to figure me for this and come around and feed my balls to me, à la fucking carte.

But Nolan was hard to sway once he got an idea in his head, and Breen stayed behind, resting up in bed, while Nolan and Jon went off to the Comforts’ home territory — a farm in Michigan, near Detroit — and got the parking meter money back. Breen’s share and all the rest of it, too.

And the really nice thing was the Comforts — Sam and Billy anyway — had been killed in the process.

It wasn’t Nolan’s style, killing people, or anyway, it wasn’t his style to kill people needlessly. But here there’d been a need: the old man and his son got wise to the heist and came out with guns. So Nolan and this kid Jon had killed them both.

Or anyway, that was what Breen had been told.

Because now, several months later, as he sat naked on the floor of the cramped, closetlike back room, on the soft carpeting he’d installed with cute, plump barmaids in mind (a German-looking, yellow-haired example of which was next to him, huddling in wide-eyed fright against stacked boxes of booze, a young girl as naked as he was and trying to hide behind an inch or so of black cloth), after he’d laughed momentarily at the thought of being caught with his pants down, of being a professional thief about to be robbed by some petty cheap-ass punks, Breen wondered if there was such a thing as ghosts.

Because one of the men aiming the ugly round, hoglike nostrils of a shotgun at him was a white-haired, gray-eyed old man with sardonic smile lines worn into his face, an ambiguously evil/innocent-looking old man named Sam Comfort. The other man, the one with the .45, wasn’t a man at all — he was a boy. At first Breen thought it was Billy Comfort. He thought both dead Comforts had come back from the grave after him. But it wasn’t Billy; it was Terry. Thin-faced, fair-haired Terry. The sole surviving Comfort, Breen had thought.

Till now.

And the laugh, that ironic laugh at the thought of man bites dog, caught in Breen’s throat like a chicken bone, and he felt naked. Naked as hell, more naked even than he was.

“No,” old Sam said. “I ain’t dead. But you are.”

And the old man swung the shotgun, firing, noise and smoke and fire exploding out one barrel, and the sound was a sonic boom in the little room, rattling the boxes of liquor, breaking bottles, shaking everything.

Breen swallowed, wondering why he was alive.

Then he looked to his right, looked over to where old Sam had swung the shotgun.

Looked over in the thankfully shadowy corner of the back room where the plump body of the barmaid had been tossed, flung, like a life-size inflatable doll with the air slowly seeping out of it. He looked at yellow hair and blood and the rest of what used to be a head with a pretty face on it, dripping down the side of the wall.

“Where’s Nolan?” old man Comfort said.

2

“I know who you are,” the man said, sitting down. He was an executive type, in his mid-forties, wearing a powder-blue pinstripe suit with matching vest and soft-yellow shirt and powder-blue tie, none of which had been ordered out of a Sears catalog. His hair was dark, untouched by gray (or retouched by something else) and had been cut — no, styled — by a barber who considered himself an artist. His eyes seemed the same color as his suit, but in the dim light it was hard to tell, exactly; maybe they were gray. A handsome man, in a cold, sterile, dull sort of way, like an aging male model or over-the-hill pretty boy actor who would never make it in character roles.

Nolan said nothing. He just folded his hands and looked out across his knuckles at the man across the table.

They were in the Pier, a seafood restaurant on the banks of the Iowa River, in the cocktail lounge, a long, rectangular dark-paneled room with lots of black vinyl-covered furniture and some oil paintings of steamboats, ship captains, and Mark Twain at various stages of life. The main floor, above them, was a tribute to the ingenuity of Nolan’s friend Wagner, who had bought the building left vacant when the Fraternal Order of Elks, Iowa City Lodge, moved to newer, larger digs out in the country; the big dining room, with several other, more intimate rooms off to either side, was given a twenty-thousand-leagues-under-the-sea atmosphere via black light and other other-worldly lighting effects that played tricks with Day-glo wall murals. An oddly-illuminated aquarium built into and running the length of one wall furthered the underwater feeling, while menus printed in fluorescent ink glowed the various seafood and steak selections to customers who had by now completely forgotten they were sitting in the old, mostly unremodeled Elks Lodge. The upper floor, a ballroom, was rented out occasionally but otherwise went unused, and the lower, which housed the cocktail lounge, was pretty much the same as it had been when the Elks were loose in it, except for the nautical oil paintings.

The two men had the lounge almost to themselves. It was a cold, snowy Wednesday night, and nobody was there who didn’t have to be: just the help; Nolan, the Pier’s new co-owner and manager; and this man in the powder-blue pinstripe suit, who’d come to see Nolan.

The man leaned across the table, smiling, his teeth so perfect and white, they were either capped or a miracle, and said, “I said I know you.”

Nolan shrugged with his eyes.

“And you know who I am, too, don’t you?”

Nolan nodded.

“Don’t you wonder why I’m here?”

There was something in the man’s voice — what it was, Nolan couldn’t quite pin down... smugness maybe, maybe nervousness.

“Doesn’t it... bother you, my being here?”

Both. It was both.

“No,” Nolan said.

“No? Why not?”

“Because,” Nolan said, leaning forward himself now, returning the smile, whispering, “when you leave here, a friend of mine is going to shoot you, toss you in the trunk of his car, and dump you in a ravine.” And he leaned back and stopped smiling.

A tic got going at the left edge of the man’s right eye, and they were gray eyes, not blue, Nolan decided.

“I... don’t believe you.”

Nolan shrugged again, this time with his shoulders. “Do what you want. All I know is I saw you come in, twenty minutes ago. You sat down and started staring at me. I left the room, used the phone. My friend’ll be outside now. And there’s only the one exit, you know.”

All of that was bullshit, but the man didn’t know it. There had been no phone call. Nolan had left the room — to go up to his office and get a .38 snub out of a desk drawer. The gun was stuck in his belt, under his sport coat, but he of course had no intention of using the thing in a public place like this, even if it was a slow night. And the only friend he had in town who could conceivably help him was Jon, who was as unlikely an assassin as Nolan could think of. Even the bit about the exit was crap: there were three, as a matter of fact.

Not that Nolan wouldn’t kill this man if he had to. And he was starting to think maybe that’d be the case.

Nolan was fifty years old and did not look it, particularly, though at times like this he certainly felt it. He was a big but not huge man, lean but deceptively muscular with a slight paunch one of the few visible signs of his middle age. His hair was dark, slightly shaggy, widow’s peaked, graying at the temples; he had had the permanently dour countenance of a western gunfighter and the thick, slightly droopy moustache to go with it; at the same time he had high cheekbones and narrow eyes somehow suggestive of an American Indian. It was as if somewhere in his ancestry there’d been a Cochise and Doc Holliday both.

He was a professional thief, recently retired but with no pretense of having at last joined the “straight” world. He had been a thief too long to ever think of himself as anything else, and he’d be fooling himself if he tried. He had heard a supposedly true story about a guy named Levitz, who was a very smooth, very successful con man back in the thirties, but who had a complex about being Jewish. One day Levitz was walking down the street with another successful con artist of the era, a hunchback named Lange, and as they went by a synagogue, Levitz said, “Did you know I used to be a Jew?” And Lange said, “Did you know I used to be a hunchback?”

Nolan knew better than to try and con himself; he was a thief and had no pretensions otherwise. Besides, the money he had invested in the Pier was heist money mostly, and if you’re going to build a new, socially acceptable life for yourself on that kind of money, you’re wise never to forget where the foundation came from.

Because forgetting who you were — who you are — could be dangerous as hell.

Take this situation, for instance.

The man in the pinstripe suit, sitting across the table from Nolan, was the president of a bank: the First National Bank of Port City, Iowa, a town of twenty thousand just forty miles southeast of Iowa City. The man’s name was George Rigley. A little over two years ago, the two men had sat across from each other in a similar manner. At George Rigley’s desk. In George Rigley’s bank.

Two years and a month or so ago, Nolan, his young friend Jon, and two others had robbed George Rigley’s bank. Nolan, Jon, and a guy named Grossman had posed as examiners to gain after-hours admittance to the bank, and therefore hadn’t had the luxury of wearing masks. And so it was possible, perhaps inevitable that bank president Rigley would recognize Nolan.

Nolan had considered the possibility, when he chose to live and work in Iowa City just two short years after that robbery, that a problem like George Rigley might crop up. He’d known it was possible for employees of that particular bank to wander into the Pier now and then, and since Nolan had worked extensively in the rural Midwest (where banks were relatively easy pickings, oftentimes not even insured by the FDIC, meaning no FBI), veterans of other Nolan robberies could have possibly turned up as customers at the restaurant and lounge. But he’d been counting on several factors to take care of any such problems — for one thing, the generally lousy memory of most people; people often have trouble recognizing even a familiar face in an unexpected context. And Nolan had been twenty pounds lighter at the time of the robbery, and had been disguised for the occasion: his hair and mustache had been powdered white, and he’d worn tinted glasses. Later, he’d seen the drawings that appeared in the papers, based on the descriptions of the witnesses, and hadn’t recognized himself. So why should any of the witnesses do any better two years later in Iowa City, in an unexpected context?

It was a total fluke, of course, that Nolan had ended up in Iowa City at all. Or a series of flukes, anyway. His connection to Iowa City had been Planner, an old guy who used an antique shop in town as a front for doing what his name implied: planning jobs for guys the likes of Nolan. Planner had been a middleman, a heist broker — an oldtime heist man himself who hadn’t liked the tension and danger of the life but who didn’t know any other so continued dabbling in it into his semiretirement. Planner would use his guise of eccentric old antique dealer to travel around and scout up prospective targets, working out detailed packages to sell to Nolan and a few others like him — that is, a suggested method or methods for pulling the caper off. He also served as a line of communication through whom others in the heist trade could be contacted and with whose help you could assemble a first-rate string.

Two years ago, needing money, the Family hot on his ass and nobody in the trade wanting to share the heat with him, Nolan had turned to Planner for anything Planner could come up with for him. And Planner had given him the Port City job. Seemed that Planner’s nephew, Jon, a kid of nineteen or twenty, was in with a couple of other lads, one of whom was a pretty young bitch who worked as a teller at the Port City bank, which these kids were planning to rob. Nolan decided that having an inside person at the bank was an advantage that might offset the lack of experience and the immaturity of the kids, and out of sheer desperation, he went ahead with the robbery.

And so had begun his relationship with Jon. Jon was a somewhat naive, basically shy kid who had dreams of drawing comic books for a living some day; he was a smart kid, a strong little bastard who lifted weights and all that and had been a state wrestling champ in his high school days. Jon’s only (if overriding) eccentricity was this thing of being a comic book nut: drawing the things, collecting them, talking about them almost constantly. Nolan didn’t mind, figuring everybody had a right to a quirk or two, but in the beginning he certainly hadn’t pictured the boy as someone he’d be entering a long-term partnership with.

But after the Port City bank job, when some Family people caught Nolan with his pants down, it had been Jon who’d hauled Nolan’s ass out of the fire — and a bullet-riddled ass it had been, too. He’d taken Nolan to Planner’s and stayed by him like a damn nurse for six or eight fucking months. Nolan was not the sentimental type, but Jon was no longer just a silly damn comic book freak to him; Jon was a silly damn comic book freak who had saved Nolan’s life, and that was different.

A lot had happened since then. Planner had been killed, shot to death in the back room of the antique shop when some old “friends” of Nolan’s had come calling. Nolan and Jon had evened the score as best as possible, but lost a pile of money in the process. In the meantime, Nolan’s long-standing feud with the Chicago Family finally fizzled out when a new regime came into power; the new Family people even hired Nolan, and he ran a motel and restaurant complex for them for a while. But he soon got a bad taste in his mouth, working for people who were in his opinion just a bunch of pimps and pushers and killers come up in the world. So he’d quit, amicably, and had decided to take the offer made him by another of his old working cronies who was retired and living in Iowa City, a very close friend of Planner’s named Wagner, who was having some health troubles and wanted Nolan to take over his restaurant business for him. Thanks to a heist he and Jon had pulled in Detroit a few months back, Nolan had had the necessary capital to buy in, and now here he was: settled down perhaps too close to the site of a fairly recent bank job, which was a risk, yes, but a risk he’d decided was worth taking.

Now, however, as he stared across the table at George Rigley, president of the First National Bank of Port City, he wasn’t so sure.

And George Rigley didn’t seem so sure of himself, either, at the moment. Nolan’s blunt threat of death had undermined Rigley’s confidence, shattered that slick, obnoxious superiority so many bankers project. For thirty seconds now, the man had just sat there, quietly shaking in his powder-blue pinstripe, the tic at the comer of one bluish-gray eye revealing that he was close to panic.

“You better have a drink, Rigley,” Nolan said. “You look like you don’t feel so good.”

Rigley showed momentary surprise that Nolan remembered him by name, tried to cover it, then went on. “You don’t scare me. I know you won’t kill me or have me killed. Not right away. You’re not a stupid man. Don’t you think I left word where I’d be? Don’t you think someone knows where I am, and why?”

Well, Nolan certainly didn’t know why.

But one thing was becoming clear: Rigley had not just stumbled onto Nolan. He hadn’t just walked in, recognized Nolan, and come over on impulse to confront him. Evidently Rigley had spotted Nolan at the Pier some time earlier, last weekend maybe, when it was so crowded and Nolan wouldn’t have been as likely to notice Rigley as tonight, a slow, snowy Wednesday.

No, not a chance meeting, but a planned confrontation, contrived for some special, specific reason. But what? Nolan wondered.

So he asked, “What do you want, Rigley?”

Rigley smiled his unreal smile. The tic at the edge of his eye stopped.

“I want you to rob my bank again,” he said.

3

Two weeks ago, after the first real snowfall, Jon had gone out and bought a Christmas tree. An artificial one, a two-foot-high affair that was an aluminum tube with holes you stuck plastic piney branches in, but a Christmas tree. Then, when he got home, he got embarrassed thinking about how Nolan would react to any such deck-the-halls bullshit, and he tossed the thing, still packed away in its cardboard box, unassembled, into a closet and forgot about it.

But today it had snowed again, and it was beautiful snow. He had looked out the window, and the world was a damn Christmas card. It had snowed yesterday too, but that was slushy, messy stuff. Today was colder, the snow dry, like a fine white powder, and he had gone straight for his sketch pad and grabbed his winter coat and gotten in the car and driven out into a wooded area and began drawing. At dusk he headed back, with half a dozen detailed sketches under his arm (some in the styles of cartoonists whose winter scenes Jon admired — Milton Caniff, George Wunder, Stan Lynde) and stopped downtown at the Airliner to warm up over something alcoholic. By the time he got back to the antique shop and inside and upstairs in the living quarters that had been his uncle Planner’s and were presently being shared by Nolan and himself, Jon was full of Christmas cheer, and soon he was hauling the artificial tree out of the closet and putting it together pine by plastic pine.

Jon was twenty-one, short but powerfully built, with a headful of curly brown hair and the sort of pleasant, boyish blue-eyed features that made girls want to cuddle him. Which was an asset, of course, but Jon himself didn’t much like the way he looked, and didn’t much care, either, his wardrobe running to sweatshirts with comics characters on the front and old worn-out jeans with patches on the ass.

He was a cartoonist, or anyway wanted to be. He’d loved comic books since he was a kid, and had been trying to write and draw them himself as long as he could remember. He’d kicked around from relative to relative and from school to school while his mother (a third-rate nightclub “chanteuse”) was on the road, and fought the trauma of his fatherless, all but motherless childhood by escaping into the four-color, ten-cent fantasy world of the comics. It was a hobby that grew into a way of life, and would, hopefully, one day become a livelihood.

So far he was unpublished, but he was getting pretty good, so it shouldn’t be long now. But drawing comics was a risky field to try to go into. Right now, with comic books suffering because of distribution problems, and underground comics having run out of steam after the goddamn Supreme Court’s obscenity ruling, and newspaper comics being shrunk down to the size of postage stamps, he’d do better going into blacksmithing.

But what the hell — he loved the comics. He would stay with it.

He put the assembled tree on top of the television set. It looked naked. Pretty girls, Jon thought, still full of Christmas spirit, look good naked; plastic trees do not. He had neglected to buy any decorations or tinsel, but guessed he would get around to that tomorrow. Maybe some gifts under the tree would improve things.

“Yeah, gifts,” he said out loud, tinning on the television. (Some cop show was on — he couldn’t tell which, as they all looked pretty much the same to him, especially the ones with helicopters flying around constantly.) He flopped onto the couch by the wall and watched without watching.

The artificial tree, barren of gifts, made him think how absurd it was of him to decorate the living quarters of a man like Nolan with the sentimental ornamentation of the season. It was equally absurd to think of buying gifts to put under the tree. What did you buy a tough guy for Christmas, anyway? Maybe wrap up a box of .38 slugs in a bright red bow and put it in his stocking mask?

Yes, it was a real problem, buying a bank robber a gift.

And then Jon remembered.

Hey, he thought. Those days are over.

It hit him, perhaps for the first time, and he had the strangest damn feeling: a mingling of glad and sad, loss and gain.

Nolan was retired.

Nolan wasn’t a thief anymore. Nolan had put his long-barrel .38 Colt and shoulder holster away in moth balls, hadn’t he? To help an old buddy run a restaurant. Retired.

Which meant Jon, too, was retired. From that particular precarious life-style, anyway. Heists and guns and bullets and blood were back in the paperbacks where they belonged, back in the movies and comic books, back on the tube, like that mindless cop show he wasn’t paying attention to, and Jon was relieved. The game was over, and he was relieved.

And vaguely sorry.

But mostly relieved, shit, when he thought back on it, on two years of breaking the law and having people shooting at you and, Christ, sometimes shooting back. He shuddered, wondering how he’d ever let himself get mixed up with somebody like Nolan in the first place.

He liked Nolan. He admired him. But he did not worship the man, even if at one time he’d come close to doing so; in the very beginning, he’d seen Nolan as a living personification of the strong, silent heroes of popular mythology — the supermen of the comics, the gunfighters and private eyes of the movies. Nolan was like somebody who’d walked right out of Jon’s fantasy world, and it had been exciting.

Now, however, Jon knew there was a fuck of a lot of difference between fantasy and fact; now he knew the reality of seeing people he cared about — Planner, for instance, and Shelly, a girl Jon’d made love to — die, brutally, cruelly, with hands cupping their own blood, as if they were trying to catch and hold onto the life that was gushing out of them and dripping through their fingers. Jon had known the terror of having the police after you, and he had known what it was like having people far worse than police after you, trying to kill you. And you trying to kill them back.

It wasn’t that he’d grown moral all of a sudden. He still felt being a thief wasn’t any worse than being a politician or a business executive, although he felt thieves were generally more honest. And insurance companies were dens of damn thieves, dealing with customers, trying to screw them like thieves, and who were at least partially dependent on the self-admitted thieves like Nolan to keep in business. No, all of the old rationalizations held up for him. In a corrupt society, his uncle Planner had once told him, a thief at least has a chance to be an individual, to be honorably corrupt. The idea of being a thief didn’t bother Jon.

The idea of killing did. Jon valued human life. He had respect for it, did not believe in hurting people. He did not enjoy seeing people suffer, could hardly bear to see someone suffer.

On the heist in Detroit, two months ago, he had killed a man.

A crazy old man named Sam Comfort, who was pointing a shotgun at Nolan, getting ready to let loose that shotgun straight into Nolan’s guts.

And Jon had shot Sam Comfort.

A man who was a double-crossing, probably psychopathic and wholly corrupt thief, in the worst sense of that word, who had betrayed his compatriots time and time again. Killed time and again. A man who, in the opinion of many, deserved to die anyway.

In this case, however, Jon couldn’t make the rationalizations work for him. He hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since Detroit.

And Detroit wasn’t all He would lie awake and think back to the earlier heist the very first one, the Port City bank job, and realize that that time the same thing could have happened: guns could have started going off. He and Nolan had been holding guns on innocent people at that bank, innocent people who could have gotten in the way of guns going off and been killed.

It was hard enough living with the thought of killing a Sam Comfort. But the thought of even the possibility of causing the death of an innocent person, a “civilian,” as Nolan would put it, was something Jon could not bear.

So he was glad the game was over. He would miss the positive side of it, the excitement, the heady rush brought on by the presence of danger, the satisfaction of working well under pressure, and of meeting Nolan’s high professional standards; but as for the dark side, the blood and killing and all of that, good riddance.

The cop show on the tube seemed to be ending, a shootout in progress. People were dying in that sterile, bloodless way people die on television. He got up and switched the channel and the same thing was going on, but with slightly different faces. He turned it off, got his sketch pad, and began to doodle, finally roughing out a graphic story idea he’d had in the back of his head a while. He lost himself in the drawing, and the upsetting thoughts of death and violence left him.

Around nine he heard Nolan coming up the steps.

“How come back so early?” he asked Nolan as he came in, not looking up from the sketch pad.

“Here,” Nolan said, and Jon looked up.

Nolan was tossing something at him.

“You’re maybe going to need that,” Nolan said.

Jon looked down at what he’d caught: a gun.

Nolan disappeared into the bedroom.

Jon stared at the snubnose .38 as if he couldn’t remember what it was for. In a moment Nolan was coming out of the bedroom, getting into his shoulder holster.

“I had a visitor at the Pier tonight, lad,” Nolan was saying. “George Rigley.”

“Uh, George who?”

“Rigley.” He was loading slugs into the long-barrel .38 now. “President of the Port City bank.”

“Port City... Jesus. Did he...?”

“Recognize me? Like a long-lost identical twin brother.”

Jon didn’t say anything. He was having trouble just thinking. Talking was out of the question.

“He wants us to rob the Port City bank again,” Nolan said

Jon felt his mouth drop open, but nothing came out

“We got two choices, kid. The guy’s evidently been doing some book-juggling, and wants us to rob his bank for him so he can cover, and we can do that. That’s one choice. The other choice is obvious.”

The other choice was to kill the bank president.

“Well, Jon,” Nolan said, shoving the gun down snug in the underarm holster. “What’s your preference? Choice A or B?”

“How... how about ‘none of the above.’”

“That’d be my choice too... if it was a choice.”

“Then... then I suppose we rob his fucking bank. Christ.”

Nolan sat on the edge of the couch. Jon was sitting up now; it wasn’t the land of news you took lying down. Nolan said, “There are some things we have to do tonight. Kid? You listening?”

Jon let out the breath he’d drawn in and had been holding for forty seconds or so. “Yeah. I’m okay. Go ahead with what you were saying, Nolan. Shoot.”

4

Rigley’s cottage was little different from any of the others along the Cedar River. Like most of them, it looked more like a small house than a cottage: an unassuming white clapboard high on a bank that sloped down gently to the river.

Nolan shrugged out of his heavy leather coat as he came in, tossing it on a plaid upholstered couch. Rigley followed, got out of a gray, fur-collared coat, and hung it on the rack by the door; he hung Nolan’s there too.

This front room — which apparently took up at least half the floor space of the cottage — had a comfortable masculine look to it. The walls were paneled in pine, and big pine-shuttered windows faced the river and flanked either side of a central fireplace, a massive affair of rust-color brick with a healthy blaze going in it. The furniture was lived-in looking, and there was no overhead lighting, just a standing lamp here and there. Rigley was an outdoorsman, evidently, or anyway fancied himself one; a mounted fish hung over the fireplace, and some pictures of ducks in flight flew above the couch. And down at the far end of the room, a small but overstocked bar was watched over by one of those big, lighted-up beer signs of an animated outdoor scene — a stream running through lush green woods. A masculine-looking room, all right, but a woman lived here. Nolan could see her in the neatness of the housekeeping; the dazzling polish of the hardwood floor, which was reflecting the glow of the fireplace like a huge mirror; the floral centerpiece of an otherwise rugged-looking picnic-type table. She was here now: Nolan could feel her presence. He could smell her.

But Rigley said nothing about a woman being here, or anyone else, for that matter.

Which didn’t explain why the fire was going when they got there.

The conversation between Nolan and Rigley at the Pier had been a brief one. Rigley had wanted to continue the conversation elsewhere, out of the public eye, a sentiment Nolan couldn’t have shared more. Rigley mentioned this cottage of his as a possible meeting place and Nolan accepted, but suggested that the two of them not be seen leaving the restaurant together. So they’d agreed to meet at ten in the parking lot of the Target store on the way out of town; Nolan would then follow Rigley to the cottage on the Cedar River, between Iowa City and Port City. Which had given Nolan time to stop at the antique shop and fill Jon in.

And now here he was with Rigley, at the cottage, with someone — some woman — listening on in another room.

Rigley was behind the bar, fixing himself something. “What can I build you, Mr. Logan?”

Logan was the name Nolan was using at the Pier.

“Nothing,” Nolan said.

“Come on, now,” Rigley said, with patronizing smile and tone to match. “I see no reason why we can’t be sociable. We’re going to be working together rather closely for the next few weeks, after all.”

Nolan sighed. He plopped his ass down on the couch. The couch was close to the door. He unbuttoned his jacket and folded his arms to prevent the gun under his arm from showing. Between Rigley’s phony pleasant attitude and knowing somebody was in the next room, Nolan felt pretty uncomfortable. Rigley hadn’t turned on any lights yet, so there was just the light from the fire, which was short on illumination and long on creating a sinister, shadow- throwing atmosphere. Nolan said, “Make it a beer then.”

Rigley brought Nolan a beer, pulled a straight-back chair from somewhere, and sat facing him. Looking down at him. All he lacks, Nolan thought, is his goddamn desk.

“Before we begin, I think I should explain something,” Rigley said, sipping his drink, a Manhattan. “I have everything worked out. I know just how we can bring this off... simply, efficiently, safely and, most importantly, profitably. Extremely profitably. All you will have to do is follow my instructions explicitly, and everything will...”

Nolan stood.

He walked to the fireplace, leaned against it, made Rigley turn to look at him. Looking down on Rigley, he said, “Make all the suggestions you want. But no instructions.”

“Mr. Logan, I...”

“You’re a banker. You know everything there is to know about banks. Except one thing. How to rob them. That’s my department.”

“You don’t understand — you see, I have everything worked out...”

“You’re the one who doesn’t understand. Either I’m in charge, or I’m out.”

Rigley thought that over for a moment, then shrugged his acceptance of Nolan’s terms. “You’re right. I came to you because you have expertise in this particular area of endeavor. I wanted a professional on the team... otherwise I could have just as well settled for some lowlife out of a riverfront dive. So I must agree. You are the one most qualified to make the decisions in our forthcoming venture.” He made a toasting gesture, drained the remains of his Manhattan, and rose and fixed himself another.

But when he came back from the bar, he had more with him than a fresh drink: he was carrying a manila folder, which he handed to Nolan, saying, “I think you’ll find this of interest.”

Nolan emptied his beer in two long swigs, set the empty can on the hearth, took the folder. He was getting more and more irritated with Rigley’s constant barrage of bullshit, and was wondering if the guy was a little drunk or was just naturally a pompous ass. With a bank president, it was hard to tell. He looked in the folder.

It contained photographs of Nolan and Jon, separately and together, taken at the Pier, outside the antique shop, and elsewhere around Iowa City. There was also the newspaper clipping that included the composite drawings of both Nolan and Jon (neither very good, but a resemblance could be seen, if you tried hard enough) and a Xerox copy of a signed statement by Rigley in which he stated his belief that “Logan” and Jon were two of the three men who had robbed the Port City bank two years ago.

“My lawyer has a duplicate folder,” Rigley said. “Sealed, of course. He won’t open it unless anything should happen to me, in which case... well, I’m sure you can guess where the contents of the folder would go.”

Nolan said, “I don’t like blackmailers.”

“I don’t mean it to be blackmail. This is simply a matter of business. If it was blackmail, I wouldn’t be offering you money, would I? And there is a great deal of money to be made here for you and that young friend of yours. There were four of you involved when you took three quarters of a million dollars from my bank two years ago. This time, there would be only a three-way split, a third for me, a third each for you and your young friend. The purpose of the folder is one of leverage — to convince you to help me, join me in this undertaking. And to remind you that while I may, in the execution of said undertaking, choose to defer my position of leadership to you, I am still, in reality, in the overview, in charge.”

Nolan folded the folder lengthwise several times and walked over to Rigley and swatted him in the face with it a few times.

“You,” Nolan said, “are in charge of shit.”

And he hit him a few more times with the folded folder.

“Stop it, stop it!” Nolan had stopped slapping him with the folder, but Rigley was cowering anyway, holding his hands in front of his face like a man trying to keep out the sun.

Nolan grabbed a handful of Rigley’s expensive suit coat and lifted him off the couch and shook him a little. “Listen to me, asshole. You’re in so far over your fucking head, you can’t even tell you’re drowning.”

“Don’t... don’t hurt me.”

“Don’t hurt you?” He thrust him back against the couch, and Rigley bounced limply, like someone already dead. “I’m probably going to kill you, you stupid, smug son of a bitch! Can’t you even see that?”

“You’re not... going to kill me,” Rigley said. It was assertion, question, and plea all at once, but mostly the latter; he had seen the gun in the holster swinging under Nolan’s shoulder.

“That remains to be seen,” Nolan said, pacing, deciding.

“You don’t really think I’d be fool enough to bring you out here to a... remote spot like this without having... having someone to back me up, do you, Logan?”

“I think you’re a fool — period.”

“We’re not alone, Logan. I’m warning you. Don’t try anything. We’re not alone; I can have you at my mercy at the drop of a hat.”

Nolan laughed, and the laugh sounded harsh even in his own ears. “It’s too bad you don’t have a hat, then, Rigley. At your mercy, Jesus.”

“Julie,” Rigley called. “Julie, get in here, quick!”

Nolan shook his head and said, “Well, you’re right about one thing, Rigley. We aren’t alone. Come on in, Jon.”

Jon came in through the doorway opposite the fireplace, with Rigley’s partner in tow. He flicked on a standing lamp by the couch, where he deposited his pretty P.O.W., from whom he’d taken a double-barreled shotgun, which was cradled over his left arm, making the snubnose .38 in his hand look like a toy. Meanwhile, the girl was angrily removing the slash of white tape Jon had forced over her mouth a few minutes earlier.

“I hope you don’t mind Jon coming in the back way, Rigley,” Nolan said.

Rigley said nothing. He sat motionless, except for that facial tic that had started up again.

But the beautiful young woman in her mid to late twenties sitting next to Rigley didn’t seem the least bit shaken. Pissed off, yes; shaken, no. She was tall, probably five-ten or more, with dark brown hair that curved around her face in a way that reminded Nolan of the way women wore their hair in the forties, the what was it? — page boy. She had big eyes, huge damn eyes, as brown as her hair and as beautiful; all of her features were beautiful in an exaggerated way. Her mouth was overly large, but nicely so — a sensual mouth that seemed to Nolan designed for any number of erotic pastimes — and her nose was nearly too small and put together so perfectly, it seemed unlikely God could have done it without help. She was full-breasted, small-waisted, lavishly hipped. She wore a matching sweater and pants outfit the color of the rusty brick fireplace; the shadows from the fire were licking her, and he didn’t blame them.

Nolan went over and took the shotgun from Jon, and it was in his arms as he looked at Rigley and said, “There are two alternatives for dealing with blackmailers. Go along with them. Or kill them. I can’t see going along with you, Rigley. For one thing, I don’t think I can stomach your pompous fucking bank president attitude. And I don’t think my temper will last long around stupid goddamn stunts like that folder full of threats you shoved under my nose, or having your busty girl friend cover me with a shotgun from the next room while we talk. I just cannot see getting involved in a heist with irrational, incompetent amateurs the likes of you two. And so I’m left with that other, unpleasant alternative.”

Rigley was pale and looked almost dazed, but the girl, Julie, said, “He’s bluffing, honey. Don’t pay any attention to him.”

Nolan went on, still talking over the twin barrels of the shotgun. “I’m willing to offer you a third alternative, Rigley. I’m willing to let this end right here. Quietly. Without violence. I’ll forget about you, your embezzling, your pipe-dream robbery. And you do likewise where I’m concerned.”

Rigley seemed to be thinking it over, when the girl said, “If they were going to kill us, honey, they would have by now.”

Smart girl. The brains of the outfit. And the balls too, most likely.

But she was still talking. To Nolan now. “Are you going to shoot that thing or not? Or were you planning to talk us to death?”

And for a moment Nolan was ready to kill them both and screw the consequences. He felt his hand tighten around the shotgun stock and was a hair away from it, and it must have showed, because he saw Jon cringe.

He broke open the shotgun and spilled the shells onto the floor. “You’re right,” he told the girl. “I’m not going to kill anybody.” He tossed the empty shotgun on her lap, hard. “Tonight.”

He put the .38 away, sat in the hard-back chair facing the couch. “Okay, then, Rigley,” Nolan said. “What did you have in mind?”

5

It was still snowing, but the roads were clear; the wind was keeping them that way. Jon sat and stared out at the snow swirling in the beams of the headlights and let himself be hypnotized, not wanting to think.

Then he realized Nolan was saying something.

“Uh, what, Nolan? I wasn’t listening.”

“I just said are you okay, kid?”

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

“What did you think of what Rigley had to say?”

“His plan, you mean? It’s all right. Couple rough spots, maybe. How come you didn’t question any part of it? I know you weren’t satisfied with it completely.”

Nolan yawned, sat up in the driver’s seat, leaned over the wheel. “I guess I figured I put him through enough strain for one night. He isn’t the strongest guy I ever saw. So I figured ease off for now, let things ride. We’ll wait till we get together Saturday with them, when he brings that stuff I asked for: timetable of employee activity, photos of the interior and exterior of the bank, the floor plan, and so on. I don’t remember the place all that clear.”

I do, Jon thought. He remembered it all, every sweaty second. To Nolan, the Port City bank job had been just another heist, to Jon it had been the first and, he’d thought at the time, only one he’d ever be involved in.

“Little did I know,” Jon mumbled.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You know,” Nolan said after a while, “I think I had Rigley pretty well bluffed out. Rigley I think I could’ve handled without much trouble. But that bitch. Shit. I wouldn’t want to play poker with her.”

Jon managed a smile and said, “Not even strip poker?”

“And freeze my bare ass off in this snow? No thanks. But I admit she’s something to look at. Looking at her, I begin to understand how a straight the likes of Rigley could get mixed up in something like this. Better men than our bank president have sold their souls for a lot less woman, believe me.”

“Men like you, you mean, Nolan?”

“Well, I’m out of the question,” Nolan said, smiling a little. “I lost my soul at a carnival when I was twelve years old, to considerably less beautiful a Mata Hari than Rigley’s. How about you, kid? She get a rise out of you? Bet you copped a nice feel wrestling with her back at that cottage.”

“Yeah, well, the shotgun she had kind of took the fun out of it.”

“Would you rather been out front getting your ass bored off by Rigley?”

“I don’t know — he doesn’t seem like such a bad guy to me. Victim of circumstances, looks to me.”

“Victim of circumstances, my ass. We’re the damn victims, and he’s the blackmailing little son of a bitch who’s screwing us in the ear with his goddamn circumstances.”

“Come on, Nolan. You know who’s screwing us in the ear, and it isn’t Rigley.”

Nolan yawned again, then said, “Yeah, you’re right. It’s the bitch doing it. Christ, you’d think getting screwed by her would be more fun.”

They drove in silence for a while. Soon the trailer courts on the left-hand side of the highway signaled Iowa City’s closeness, and as they came into town, the clear highway gave way to snow-packed, icy city streets. Then they were turning down the quiet residential lane at the end of which was the antique shop. It was a street of double-story homes with modest, well-tended lawns and lots of trees — a beautiful, shade-bathed street in summer, equally beautiful in winter, with the bare branches of the trees catching handfuls of snow and holding them, occasional white strokes of an artist’s brush in a scene predominantly gray. But right now only the gray seemed apparent to Jon: skeletal, dead branches on skeletal, dead trees, the houses themselves dark and cheerless. Energy conservation was leading to less brightly lit Christmas seasons than those of the recent past: the bright colored lights were at the moment unlit, the nativity scenes on lawns and Santas climbing in chimneys were minus spotlights, and only for a few hours each evening would the seasonal glow be switched on at all. The world still looked like a Christmas card to Jon, but a gloomy one, sent by an atheist.

Nolan pulled the Buick into one of the spaces alongside the antique shop, and they got out. The shop was a two-story clapboard building that looked more a part of the residential area it bordered than the business district it began, with a Shell station next door and various chain restaurants (like the Dairy Queen across from the Shell) nearby. Jon had kept the shop closed since his uncle’s death, and had no intention of continuing in the antique business. There was a guy — a friend of Planner’s — set to come next month and make a bid on all the antiques and junk in the place, and after that Jon was considering turning it into a candle shop, to be run by Karen Hastings, his on-again-off-again girl friend (off-again at the moment, though he felt he could patch things up, if he decided he wanted to) and running a mail-order business himself in old comic books and related items. Actually, things were beginning to settle into place in Jon’s life: he had invested his money in the Pier with Nolan, and it was a good investment that should keep both of them solvent for untold years to come; and he had inherited the antique shop and its contents, which would provide more cash and a place to live and do business out of; and he had Karen, if he got around to patching up their relationship; and his artwork was getting better all the time and getting close to where he really thought he might actually be able to make a living drawing comic books. And a fresh, new year was coming up in a matter of days.

And now this.

Another robbery.

He and Nolan went in. Nolan went upstairs, Jon to the room in back on the first floor, where he slept and kept his studio. It had been a storeroom when his uncle Planner turned it over to him, a dusty, dirty oversize closet that Jon had converted into a shrine to comic art, plastering the gray wood walls with colorful homemade posters of Dick Tracy, Batman, Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and half a dozen other comic heroes, drawn by Jon unerringly in the style of their original artists. A few splashes of bright color in the form of throw rugs transformed the cement floor into something livable; a few pieces of furniture — the genuinely antique bed and chest of drawers given him by Planner — turned storeroom into bedroom. A drawing easel and a file cabinet containing his rarest comic artifacts, and boxes of comic books lining the walls made the room a cartoonist’s studio. He had consciously decorated and organized the room so that it would be a cheerful, constant visual reminder of who he was.

There was also a poster of perennial movie bad guy and sometime spaghetti western hero Lee Van Cleef, wearing his black mustache and dark gunfighter’s outfit, fondling the six-gun on his hip, looking a hell of a lot like Nolan. The six-gun, and the .357 Magnum Dick Tracy was brandishing, and Flash Gordon’s ray gun — these and other implements of the fantasy violence he’d so enjoyed for so many years — irritated and disturbed him tonight, and he thought, What a bunch of bullshit, and left the room.

He went upstairs. The lights were off, but he knew his way around. Nolan was already sacked out. Snoring. Jon stretched out on the couch. He just didn’t want those fucking fantasy faces staring at him, even in the dark; he couldn’t sleep in that room tonight. He didn’t know why exactly, he just couldn’t.

But he didn’t have trouble getting to sleep. It should have been a sleepless night, the way his state of mind was, but he was just too goddamn tired to be an insomniac, after his afternoon of running through the woods with a sketch pad up his butt, and an evening that included riding/hiding on the floor in the back seat of Nolan’s car and sneaking in back of that cottage and wrestling a shotgun away from that damn amazon, and shit... too tired to do anything now but sleep...

And dream.

He dreamed he was on a heist. Not the Port City bank heist, past or future. Nolan wasn’t in the dream, either. And it wasn’t a bank at all. It was a museum. He was trying to steal a diamond. It was like some movie he’d seen once. He was in a museum, trying to steal a diamond, and he had people helping him, people he’d gone to junior high and high school with, people he hadn’t seen in years. One was a kid with greasy black hair and a bad complexion, who’d shared a joint with Jon in the john at a high school dance and Jon had gotten nauseous and afraid of being caught. And now here this kid was, years later, helping him steal a diamond from a museum. And there was a girl, that sluttish girl Jon had taken behind the bleachers at a football game in junior high and gotten his hands in her pants, and a week later, when some skin started peeling off his fingers, he’d wondered if he could have caught some awful disease off her or something, she was here too, with the greasy-haired kid, and they were stealing this diamond. And then cops. Cops came rushing in. The museum was dark at first, just a big pool of black with a circle of light on the display case where the diamond was. But now cops were rushing in, and it was a huge white room, full of light. There weren’t any walls in sight, just blinding white light and cops in blue with guns, rushing at them. He knew some of the cops: one of them was the art professor he’d argued with at the U of I before dropping out — the professor who had told him comics were junk and to whom Jon had said, Who are you to say, with your crappy fucking abstract pretentious art. And another cop was a guy his mother had lived with for a while, an ex-army sergeant who’d hated Jon and got drunk one night and tried to beat Jon up and Jon had cleaned his clock — he was there, a cop, shooting. And old Sam Comfort, the man Jon had killed. He was a cop too. Shooting. And the sluttish girl and the greasy-haired kid, they turned into other people all of a sudden, they turned into Shelly and Grossman, the two friends of Jon’s who’d been in on the Port City heist, who had died in the bloodbath aftermath of that heist, and who were dying again, as the cops, the prof and the ex-army sergeant and Sam Comfort were shooting .357 Magnums at them while Jon tried to run but his legs were rubber and there were no exits anywhere, just smooth white walls, and Shelly and Grossman were dying again, spurting blood in slow motion like the movies, Grossman screaming Jon’s name, Shelly flopping onto the display case with her blonde hair streaked with blood...

“Kid.”

“Uh, what, uh...?”

“Hey. It’s okay.”

“Nolan?”

“You were dreaming.”

“Dreaming?”

“Yeah, dreaming, and making a hell of racket at it. Like to wake the dead.”

He sat up. It was daylight. His mouth tasted foul.

“What the hell time is it, anyway?”

“About ten o’clock.”

“That’s impossible, I just fell asleep here a...”

“Yeah, you just fell asleep. Nine hours ago.”

“Shit,” he said, rubbing his eyes, “I don’t feel like I slept at all. I’m tired as hell.”

“You wore yourself out dreaming and making noise.”

“Goddamn nightmare.”

“I didn’t figure it was a wet dream.”

“Not the one I remember, anyway. I was dreaming all night, I think, but I only remember that last one I was having.”

“Yeah, well, I never dream.”

“Everybody dreams, Nolan. You just don’t remember yours.”

“I don’t dream. You want breakfast? I’m fixing myself some.”

“What, eggs?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll have a couple, over easy.”

“You’ll have them scrambled.”

“Scrambled’s fine. And bacon.”

“Sausage.”

“Sausage. Just what I wanted anyway.”

They sat in the kitchen and ate.

“Kid.”

“Yeah, Nolan?”

“This is really bothering you, isn’t it.”

“What?”

“The idea of hitting that bank again.”

“No. I’m okay. Really.”

“I don’t like it any better than you do.”

“Yeah, sure, I know that, Nolan. Forget it. It’ll be a snap.”

“Look. I think maybe we better call a man in.”

“The way Rigley has it mapped out, just the two of us is plenty.”

“No, I think an extra man would be better.”

“What for?”

“Somebody ought to stay behind and keep an eye on the bitch. I don’t trust her.”

That was bullshit, and bullshitting wasn’t Nolan’s style. Jon didn’t know how to react. “Me, you mean? I should stay behind and watch her?”

“Yeah. We’ll call in somebody else to help on the job itself.”

“You don’t... don’t think I’m up to it, Nolan?”

“You’re up to it. You done fine every time so far, and we been through some rough weather the last couple years.”

“What, then?”

“Nothing. I just don’t trust the bitch, is all.”

“It’ll mean less money.”

“Well pay the guy a flat rate. Anyway, I don’t care about the money so much. The money is fine, sure. A person can always use more money. But I’m more interested in protecting our interests here in Iowa City, seeing to it the job goes smooth so we can come back home and go on with our happy retirement.”

“Whatever you think is best, Nolan.” Jon was ambivalent toward Nolan’s suggestion — relieved to be off the line of fire, hurt that Nolan might not feel him up to the pressure.

“So who you got in mind, Nolan?”

“Well, I pretty well kept a lid on my retirement. Lots of people in the trade think I’m dead, think the Chicago boys got me. And it’s nice being dead, if you know what I mean. Nobody to come ’round tempting me with prospective heists — except for an occasional bank president, of course — and nobody to come ’round looking for a handout. Besides, I don’t have that many friends left. Most of the people I worked with in recent years are punks, present company excepted, who I’d just as soon stay dead to. Most of the good people are dead. It’s that kind of business. So anyway, I’ll call in Breen, since he knows I’m here already and is a good enough man and can probably use the money.”

Jon nodded. “Breen would be fine. Unnecessary, but fine.”

After breakfast they went out in the front room, and Nolan stopped a moment and looked at the Christmas tree on top of the television set but said nothing. Then he sat on the couch and used the phone on the coffee table.

Jon wasn’t paying attention to the conversation at first, but it didn’t take long for it to become apparent something was wrong on Breen’s end. When Nolan hung up, Jon asked him what the deal was.

“Breen’s dead,” Nolan said. “Somebody blew him apart with a shotgun last night.”

6

Nolan had never been to Breen’s house before, but he didn’t have trouble finding it. Indianapolis was an easy town to get around in, for all its size, a town whose streets crisscrossed like a big checkerboard. And anyway, he’d been to Breen’s bar a number of times, and the house was in the same neighborhood.

He parked the Buick in the driveway, behind a battered green Mustang he recognized as Breen’s. There were no other cars in the drive, though there was room; none were parked along the curb in front, either. Which surprised Nolan. Breen’s funeral had been in the morning, and this was fairly early afternoon, so he’d expected a bunch of cars belonging to friends and relatives who’d be making sympathetic shoulders available to the bereaved widow. But then, it would be like Mary Breen to tell everybody to get the hell out. She always was a private person, who at a time like this wouldn’t be about to put up with the hypocritical condolences of, say, her brother Fred, who had never really gotten along with Breen anyway and probably at this very moment was entertaining visions of taking over the bar for himself, or her mother, a café waitress at fifty-four, who felt her daughter had married below her station.

The street was quietly middle class, not unlike the one in Iowa City that the antique shop was on. The house was a brown brick two story, a shade smaller than most in the neighborhood, but then, only Breen and Mary had lived there, so it had been plenty big, Nolan supposed. There was snow on the ground in spots, and the sky was overcast, and he guessed it had been a good enough day for a funeral: a somber day but not a depressing one, really.

There were two sets of four cement steps up a tiny terraced lawn, and another set of four steps to the door, which had a plastic Christmas wreath on it. Nolan knocked.

She answered right away.

She looked good. She also looked sad, of course, but he didn’t think she’d been crying, or anyway not much.

“Nolan,” she said with soft surprise. “I didn’t expect you to come.”

He had said he would try to, on the phone yesterday, but evidently she had figured he was just saying that.

“It’s cold out here,” Nolan said. “I didn’t come all the way from Iowa City to stand on a stoop and freeze my ass off in Indianapolis. Invite me in already.”

She grinned and shook her head. “You’re something. Come on in.”

He did, got out of the coat, and Mary took it and went somewhere with it. He was in a small vestibule. The stairs to the second floor were in front of him, a study to the left, the living room to the right. It was Breen’s house, all right; a gambler’s house. Nothing but the essentials: some serviceable, warehouse sale furniture; bare hardwood floors, not even a throw rug; a console TV that looked ten years old at least and was probably black and white; bare walls. That was the living room, if you called that living. The study was pretty good size but was also mostly empty, just a desk with chair and a single filing cabinet. It was actually a bigger room than the living room, and Nolan thought he knew why: Breen must have done the bar’s bookkeeping out there so that he could call it his office, which would rack out to a sizable tax deduction.

Mary came back from wherever she put the coat and said, “Let’s go out in the kitchen.”

She fixed him coffee out there. It was a bright room, white trimmed in red, with all the necessary appliances and some unnecessary ones too. Mary was not the type of woman who would let Breen extend his gambler’s stinginess where she was concerned, not without a hell of a fight, anyway.

She was a good-looking woman. She looked like what Marilyn Monroe would have if the movie studios hadn’t fixed her nose and bleached her brown hair and told her not to smile with her gums showing. She was Marilyn Monroe at forty-one, a housewife Marilyn, getting a little pudgy.

She sat at the kitchen table with Nolan. She was wearing a dark green turtleneck sweater and dark green pants. Her eyes were light green, not red at all.

Nolan looked into the light green eyes and said, “Isn’t it time you cried?”

She looked into her coffee. She smiled. Her gums showed. It was a nice smile anyway. Fuck the movie studios.

“I’ll get around to it,” she said.

“Tell me about the funeral,” he said.

“Do you really want to hear about the funeral?”

“No.”

“Why did you come?”

“I thought you might want somebody to talk to who knew the score.”

She laughed. Not much of a laugh, but a laugh. “Nobody at the funeral knew what he was, you know. Except for Fred, who knows vaguely. But nobody else. It was mostly his regular customers from the bar. None of you people. Not that I expected any of you. I know it’s a thing you people have, not poking into each other’s private lives. It’s a sensible thing, seeing each other only when you’re working. It’s a cold business. Necessarily cold, I guess.”

“I came.”

“You did come, Nolan. Damn it if you didn’t. But you didn’t come to the funeral. Why?”

“I don’t go to funerals.”

“Neither did he. Till today. Tell me something, Nolan. Do you ever think of me?”

He sipped his coffee. “Every winter. When it first snows. I think of you then.”

She smiled again, faintly this time, and said, “The back seat of a car. Like a couple teenagers.”

“Well, we were younger.”

“Yeah, but not that young. Snowing to beat hell, and we’re out in the country, God knows where, in the damn car parked with the engine going and the heater going, and I’m in that fuzzy coat and you’re dropping your drawers. Christ. Maybe we were that young at that.”

“You got some more coffee for me?”

“Sure.”

She poured coffee, sat back down, and said, “I don’t blame you for skipping the funeral, Nolan. I don’t blame any of those other people who worked with him, either, for not coming. I mean, how the hell are they supposed to know he’s even dead, right? You people don’t keep in such close touch, I mean. If you hadn’t happened to call, even you wouldn’t be here, right? So his bar customers are there. Nobody else, except for his first fucking wife, the bitch who sucked him dry for alimony and child fucking support — she has the balls to be there. With his two kids, who that bitch has already ruined. Jesus.”

“Hey. Take it easy. Who the hell did you think would be there?”

She slammed her fist on the table, and the coffee cups jumped. “Where were those fucking bookies? They’re there when it’s time for Breen to pay up. They’re there with a hot tip for the sucker. They’re there extending credit at shylock rates. But when Breen’s planted in the fucking ground, oh, no. They aren’t there then, even though they fucking put him there!”

So that was why she hadn’t cried: she was too angry. She was too pissed off about her husband’s death to mourn him yet.

“Is that what happened?” Nolan asked. “Do you think it was somebody he owed money to who killed him?”

“Well, the cops say it’s robbery. He probably had, what, fifty bucks in the till, and the cops say his head was blown off for that. Can you buy that, Nolan? Fifty bucks got his head blown off? Not me, no, I don’t buy it, I don’t buy it at all.”

“Mary, people been killed for a lot less.”

“I know, but people like my husband? A guy like him, a professional thief who always dealt in the thousands of dollars, getting wasted by some cheap punk for a few bucks? I mean, it’s too cute, too... you know, ironic, too... it’s bullshit, is what it is.”

“Maybe. Wasn’t there someone with him when he was killed?”

Her jaws clenched. She rubbed her cheek, as if she was sanding wood. “Yeah there was someone with him. There was a bitch with him. But what about this morning, at his funeral, Nolan, where were they then, his bitches, his young goddamn cunts? Where were they? They’d lay him, yeah, but not to rest. Shit”

“Mary.”

“Will you tell me something? Will you tell me something, Nolan? Am I some ugly old woman? Am I a wife you cheat around on?”

“Settle down. You’re not old, and you’re not ugly. But Breen did cheat around on you. You know that. I know it. I also know seven years ago, before you and Breen were married, when you and Breen were just going together, when you were just a barmaid of his yourself, that one time you and I went for a ride when it was snowing out.”

Her mouth quivered a little, and she said, “Yeah, well, I knew then. I knew that he loved me, in his way, that he wanted to marry me, but that he was getting in other girls’ pants every chance he could get and I had to strike back somehow. Not that I told him, or wanted him to find out, Christ no. But after that I could live with it better somehow, live with his running around on me. And what the hell, I liked you, Nolan. But you were hopeless. You were a goddamn wall no woman could hope to get behind and make something at all permanent with you. Maybe now there’d be a chance, but then? No way. And so we went for a ride in the country that time, and it was snowing, and it was something special to me. I never cheated on him again, did you know that? And when he cheated on me, when I knew he was or thought he was, I’d remember that time, hold it close to me like some precious goddamn stone, and... shit I’m going sentimental on you, Nolan. Can a tough guy like you take it? Jesus.”

“Mary. Do you think it could be the barmaid?”

“Do I what?”

“The killing. Could it have been somebody after the barmaid. A jealous husband. Jealous boyfriend.”

“Maybe. Maybe. I hadn’t thought of that but maybe. Or one of his other bitches, jealous of the new one. Are you saying you agree with me, Nolan? That you think something’s strange about his death?”

“Yeah, I agree. Or sort of agree. Coincidences bother me. I know they’re possible. I been caught up in them before. But I never believe in a coincidence till I look down its throat and up its ass. Then I believe in it. Not until. So. Could you give me a list of the people Breen was involved with, with his gambling?”

“Easily. We didn’t have any secrets where his gambling was concerned. Hell, I helped him handicap. I never caught the bug, but I was around the gambling scene too long not to be at least semi-involved.”

“Good. What about his girls?”

“In that case he was a little secretive. Mostly the girls working in the bar, I guess. They would stay on as help till they tired of him, or vice versa, but usually vice. He was not the best lay in the world, you know.”

Nolan smiled. “That’s not the way he used to see it.”

“Well, he wasn’t really in a position to know, if you know what I mean. Hey, Nolan, what are you going to do? Play detective? Find the killer? I didn’t know you read Mickey Spillane.”

“You want me to level with you, don’t you, Mary?”

“Of course I want you to level. Did you come clear from Iowa to bullshit me?”

He spread his hands. “Personally, I don’t give a damn who killed your husband. Matter of fact, he ran out on me one time. Justifiably, but I just mention it by way of showing I don’t owe him any posthumous favors. However. In this business, when somebody you worked with is killed, in circumstances that are even remotely suspicious, it doesn’t pay to ignore the matter. Your husband worked with me on a lot of jobs. Something out of one of those past jobs might have crawled out of the woodwork and killed him. Which affects me, obviously. So I can’t feel comfortable till I find out who was responsible for your husband’s killing. Plus, I admit I got some feelings for you. I figure maybe you would feel better if you knew what was really behind his death.”

“Do you ever think about it, Nolan?”

“About what?”

“Dying. Death.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“When you think about it, you get paranoid. Then you’re slow when you should be fast. Punchy when you should be alert.”

“Is that what happened to my husband?”

“Maybe. Sometimes you can’t avoid it. Sometimes you get hit by a truck even when you look both ways. That’s the way it is. Life. A gamble.”

She smiled, rather bitterly, he thought. “Well, my man never was much of a gambler.”

“I’m sorry about Breen. I really am. He was a good man.”

“Even if he did run out on you once?”

“Even then. I’d have done the same in his place.”

“That’s what it’s about, isn’t it? Survival.”

“You could put it that way.”

“Nolan. Tell me.”

“What?”

“Why did he do it?”

“Heisting, you mean? You know why. To support the gambling.”

“Not the heisting. The women. Why... why wasn’t I enough?”

“Why did he gamble? Why can some men quit smoking and others puff away, even after they’ve seen the X-rays? I don’t know. I don’t understand people. I can barely tolerate them, let alone understand them.”

She sighed. “More coffee?”

“No.”

“I loved him, Nolan.”

“Yeah. Well, you must have. To put up with his gambling and his women both. And not every woman can stand being married to somebody in my business.”

“I thought you were out of the business.”

“You’re never out.”

“I guess not Listen, there’s... there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

“Okay.”

“I want to talk upstairs. There’s something of his I want to give you.”

“Okay.”

She led him upstairs.

Into a darkened room.

The shade was drawn, but some of the light from outside was seeping in; overcast day that it was, the seepage didn’t amount to much. But he could see the bed, the double bed, and he could see Mary, disrobing.

She stood and held her arms out to him.

She stood naked and said, without saying it, Am I so ugly? Wouldn’t I be enough for most men?

She would have been plenty, for just about anybody. Sure, her thighs were a little fleshy, and there was a plumpness around her tummy, and she had an appendix scar. And her breasts didn’t look quite as firm as they once had. But big breasts never do, and they were nice and big, pink nipples against ivory flesh. He walked over and put a hand on one of the breasts, felt the nipple go erect. He put his other hand between her legs. He put his mouth over hers.

There was carpet up here. Downstairs, bare floors. But up here, on Mary’s insistence, no doubt, was plush carpeting, tufted fuzzy white carpeting, and they did it on the floor, and when she came, she cried finally, and they crawled up on the bed and rested.

Outside, it snowed.

7

She walked him out to the car. They had rested for several hours, and then she fixed him something to eat — nothing fancy, just a sandwich — and it was early evening all of a sudden, and he was saying he had to get back. Something doing in Iowa City tomorrow, he said, and she got his coat for him.

She’d been surprised how good he looked. She hadn’t seen him for several years, since the last time he’d stopped at the bar to talk to her husband about some job. She’d heard from her husband of Nolan’s troubles, that he’d been shot damn near to death several times the last couple of years, and she’d expected that to show on him. No. Some gray hair at the temples, but Nolan stayed the same. Handsome, in that narrow-eyed, mustached, slightly evil way of his. His body remained lithe, muscular; scarred but beautiful. He’d felt so beautiful in her...

“You’ll be back then?” she said, leaning against the car, by the window. He was behind the wheel; the engine was going. The snow had let up.

“I’m going to poke into your husband’s killing a little, yes,” he said. “But it’s not the movies. No revenge, Mary. I don’t believe in that. I’m doing it to protect my own ass.”

She smiled. “And my ass has nothing to do with it.”

“Well. Maybe just a little. Take care of that ass, okay, till I get back and can take over?”

“Sure. And watch your own while you’re at it. Next week, did you say?”

“Probably. I’ll probably give you a call.”

And he was gone.

She went back into the house, into the kitchen, and drank the last of the pot of coffee she’d made.

She wondered if Nolan would really find her husband’s murderer, and if he did and took care of whoever it was, would she feel any better about it?

Now she felt very little. Anger, there was anger. Some sorrow. But more than anything there was confusion. Her husband had been blown to hell by a shotgun. In the company of one of his barmaid bitches. Naked, the two of them.

She wondered if there was any significance to the bitch’s body being in the back room, while her husband had been in the outer bar. To open the cash register, she supposed; it would have been locked after closing, and he would have had to reopen it for the thieves. She wondered if she should have mentioned any of that to Nolan. And that one other strange thing: the bottle her husband had had in his hand. He’d evidently grabbed for that bottle off the shelf just as he’d died, or as he’d realized he was about to die. What kind of crazy reflex action was that? To grab a bottle of Southern Comfort off the shelf?

8

Friday, while Nolan drove into Indianapolis to see Breen’s wife, Jon drove to Cedar Rapids in his Chevy II to buy a pair of hunting jackets. He didn’t know why he was buying the jackets, exactly, just that Nolan had told him to.

He was also supposed to stop at a place called Blosser’s Costume Shop and Theatrical Supply to pick up a package for Nolan.

And of course it was like Nolan to give Jon a task or two to carry out without explaining the task or two’s significance. Jon was used to it. But he still questioned Nolan about such seemingly absurd assignments, getting nothing in particular back from the man for his trouble.

“Hunting jackets?” he’d asked. “What for?”

“One for you,” Nolan said. “One for me.”

“Okay, one for me, one for you, sure. But for what purpose, Nolan? I mean, hunting jackets? And why go all the hell the way to Cedar Rapids to get them?”

“Just do it. Yours is not to reason why.”

“I don’t believe you sometimes, Nolan.”

“And buy one of them at one store, and the other at another.”

“Why?”

“Because I want the jackets bought at separate stores.”

“Jesus. Okay. All right. I’ll do it. But what’s the costume thing about? Will you tell me that?”

“Ask for the manager. Blosser, the manager-owner. He’s a friend of mine. He knows about me. You can talk freely. He has a package for me. Oh, he may have you try something on. In fact, maybe you ought to insist on trying one of them on.”

“One of what on?”

“One of what’s in the package.”

“What is in the package?”

“Let me do the thinking.”

“Wait a minute, let me see if I got this straight. I buy the hunting jackets and pick up the packages, you do the thinking. Is that the way it goes?”

“That’s it exactly.”

“Well, I just hadn’t had it explained to me properly before. Once it’s explained to me, then I understand. But would you tell me one thing?”

“What?”

“Why do I still bother asking you questions?”

“Kid, that’s one question I wish I could answer for you.”

And so he had driven to Cedar Rapids, had bought one hunting jacket (a green plaid) in his own size, at a sporting goods store downtown, and another (a red plaid) in Nolan’s size, at a sporting goods store in an outlying shopping center, paying cash in both instances, as Nolan had also instructed.

He realized the hunting jackets had something to do with the robbery. That was self-evident. What galled him was that he couldn’t figure out what, and he knew Nolan wouldn’t tell him till the last moment.

The costume shop was on the way out of town, in a rather run-down section that was commercial along the main strip that ran through the area, but back behind which was a neighborhood that could be called lower middle class if you were in a charitable mood. It was a one-story, faded brick building sandwiched between a bait shop and a used book store that was, damn it, closed. Jon peeked in the windows of the old book store and saw thousands of used paperbacks in ceiling-high bookcases, and what looked like some old comic books and for sure some Big Little Books in locked showcases similar to those in Planner’s shop. He ran across such shops every now and then, and they were invariably closed. He sighed, shrugged, and went on into the costume shop.

The interior was spare but not seedy, with a counter and a waiting room area, similar to a laundry. An attractive if hard-looking woman of thirty or so was behind the counter, with coal-black hair, a beauty mark to the left of a red-painted mouth, and braless bouncing breasts under a satinlike yellow blouse. She looked as though she was preparing to audition for a local production of Carmen.

“Hi, honey,” she said casually, and Jon looked around to make sure she was talking to him.

She was, so he said hi himself, and did his best to return her suggestive smile. Maybe the woman did look sort of cheap and whorish, but she was also sexy-looking, in a second-rate men’s magazine way.

“What can I do you for?” she said. She was chewing gum. Not blatantly, though — not a cow chewing cud — but playing with it in her mouth, playing with it with her tongue.

“Uh, I’d like to see Mr. Blosser.”

“Not here.”

“Oh. You expect him soon?”

“Nope. Won’t be back today.”

“Well, uh, I was supposed to pick up a package for a friend of his. A Mr. Nolan?”

“Oh, sure. Your name must be Jon.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“I’m Connie. The boss’s daughter, in case you was wondering.”

“Oh. Yeah, well, I’m pleased to meet you, Connie.”

“I’m sure. How is Nolan these days?”

“Fine. Fine. I didn’t know you knew Nolan.”

She grinned. She really was a good-looking woman, cheap or hard or not. “I know him. You ask him if I know him or not.” She laughed and her breasts jiggled.

Jon swallowed. “Okay, I’ll tell him you said hello.”

She reached under the counter and flopped two large white string-tied suit-type boxes up in front of her. “Here. This one is yours. It’s a small. You better try it on.” She motioned him behind the counter, and he followed her through a narrow hallway to some dressing cubicles in the rear of the store. She handed him the box marked “Small” and left, pulling the cubicle’s curtain shut on him.

He opened the box.

There was something red in it.

Red and partly white. Trimmed in white.

The red was a cheap but plush-looking velvetlike material; the white was fluffy stuff — cotton, he guessed. There was also red gloves of the same material, trimmed in the same white fluff.

It looked like a Santa Claus costume.

He took it out of the box.

It was a Santa Claus costume.

He put it back in the box and went back out front, quickly, leaving the costume behind.

“That was quick,” the woman said. “Fit okay, does it?”

“No. I mean, I don’t know... I didn’t try it on.”

“How come?”

“Well, there has to be some mistake.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, it’s a... would you come with me a minute?”

He took her back to the dressing cubicle and showed her.

“Yeah,” she said. “A Santa Claus costume. So?”

“This is what is supposed to be in this box?”

“Sure.”

“What’s in the other box?”

“Another Santa Claus costume. That’s a total of two. One small, the other’s large.”

“And that’s what Nolan wanted me to pick up for him?”

“Shit, yes. Didn’t he tell you?”

“I’m afraid he doesn’t tell me much of anything.”

“Yeah, that’s Nolan, all right Listen... you need any help getting into that, honey, just give Connie a call, you hear?” She winked and chewed her gum seductively and left him there with a hard on and a Santa Claus suit.

It fit fine. He looked at himself in the cubicle’s shadowy mirror, and damned if the world’s shortest, most clean-shaven Santa Claus wasn’t staring him in the face. He asked Connie about the lack of a beard, after getting back into his street clothes.

“Oh, the beards are in the other box, with the large suit,” she said. “The caps are in there too.”

“Caps?”

“Caps. You better try yours on.” She opened the other suit box and got out a floppy red cap with white ball on the end. “The beards are adjustable, around the ears, but the caps could be trouble... there, see? You got too much hair for a small. I’ll go back and get a medium.”

She did, and insisted that Jon try that one on too, and he did, and she tweaked his cheek and said, “Gonna bring me anything for Christmas, Santa?”

He grinned, trying to keep the red from crawling up his neck. “We’ll see,” he said.

“I wonder what the heck Nolan wants with Santa Claus suits,” she said, shaking her head. “Somehow he don’t seem the Santa type. Unless he’s gonna empty stockings instead of fill ’em.”

Jon nodded his agreement and watched her put the cap back in the box and tie some string around it.

“Don’t forget to tell Nolan I said hi,” she said. “And maybe I’ll see you when you bring the suits back after Christmas, huh, honey?”

It took him almost an hour to get back to Iowa City. The overcast day had everybody cautious and using their headlights, and he got caught behind some old ladies going forty-five. So did a lot of other cars; the traffic was heavy, and passing was difficult — no, impossible — and he followed the old girls to the Interstate, after which he was back to Iowa City in short order. He parked the Chevy II behind the antique shop and went in the side door, which was unlocked.

That wasn’t right; surely he’d locked the door when he left. Yes, he remembered locking it.

Too early for Nolan to back from Indianapolis. Wasn’t it?

He shut the door. Softly. Silently.

Listened.

Heard nothing.

Quietly he moved behind the long, saloon-style counter behind which his uncle had sat day after day puffing his foul-smelling cigars. He set his packages on the counter. In a drawer, below the cash register, was one of his uncle’s .32 automatics. Jon got it out Softly. Silently.

He explored the downstairs. Nothing in the main room, with its antiques and showcases and counter and all. Nothing in his own room, except half the comic books in the world.

But what about the other back room? The one that had included Planner’s workshop area, as well as where many very valuable antiques were crated away for future sale, and where the big old safe was...

The safe’s door was open.

Otherwise, the room was as empty as the rest of the downstairs.

But someone had been in here, opened the safe and, of course, found nothing in it. There hadn’t been anything of value kept in the safe since Nolan and Jon’s money had been stolen from it months before, the time Planner himself was killed defending that money. Killed in this very room. Jon had, in fact, scrubbed his uncle’s blood from the floorboards of this room...

He felt a chill, and for a moment was very scared, and then it passed. Whoever it was had been here and gone. He walked out into the other room and put the gun back in its drawer.

He was halfway up the stairs, his arms full of the packages with the hunting jackets and Santa Claus suits, when he heard the noise.

Talking.

Someone was talking up there on the second floor. And it sure as hell wasn’t Nolan.

And the talking was coming this way. Toward the stairs. They were going to come down the stairs!

He couldn’t be soft or silent about it now. He had no choice but to clomp down the stairs and head toward that drawer with the gun in it, but they were closer to him than he had imagined, on his damn heels before he was even out of the stairwell. And the packages were flying and he was face down on the floor, one of the men on his back and the other standing in front of him. Jon couldn’t see anything of whoever it was except shoes. Black shoes and white socks. The shoes were old-fashioned, lacing halfway up the ankle. Clodhoppers, shoes a farmer might work in; the socks were loose and dirty.

That’s all Jon saw of the two men, as he later deduced the number of his assailants to be: the shoes and socks of one of them, and nothing of the other, because the other was on Jon’s back, holding him down.

Nobody said a word; certainly not Jon, whose lips and teeth were mashed into the wooden floor.

And then one of the black shoes flew at Jon’s temple, and Jon went away for a while.

He woke up on the couch upstairs.

There was coldness on the side of his head.

“Oh... fuck...” he heard himself saying. He sat up. The coldness, an ice pack, slid off the side of his head.

Nolan handed Jon a cold beer. Jon grabbed at it, guzzling at the can like the Frankenstein monster taking his first drink.

“Aren’t you even going to ask me how my day in Indianapolis went?” Nolan said.

Jon just looked at Nolan. Then laughed. “Hey. You got me an ice pack. For my kicked-in head. You’re some kind of nurse, Nolan. Didn’t know you had it in you.”

“If you want a doctor, I can get Ainsworth over here. That’s a hell of a lump you got. Concussion maybe.”

“No doctor. I’m okay.”

“You mean you think you’re okay.”

“I don’t think anything. I think all my think got kicked all over the floor downstairs.”

“Somebody was into the safe.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I think they were looking around upstairs, too.”

“Nothing valuable taken?”

“Nothing valuable to take. Except some of the antiques, which they didn’t touch. And a couple thousand in the wall safe, which they didn’t find. So you got here before they left, and they kicked you in the head? See who it was?”

“I know exactly who kicked me in the head. We can have the cops put out an APB, my description is so exact.”

“Who, then?”

“A black farmer shoe with a dirty white sock and a foot in it.”

“Terrific. Another beer?”

“No. This one’ll do me. I’ll just lay back down here. What the hell time is it?”

“Oh, around eleven I guess.”

“When did you get back?”

“Not long ago. I hauled you upstairs and got you an ice pack and you woke up.”

“I’m not sure about that last part. Jesus. Now I know what they mean when they say ain’t that a kick in the head.”

“Listen. Breen was murdered.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s why you went to Indianapolis.”

“I mean Breen was murdered, and then you were kicked in the head and our place was gone through. Nothing’s gone, but it was gone through, all right.”

“You think there’s a connection? Between Breen and today?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“Me? You’re asking me, Nolan? For an opinion? Christ, I’m not ready for that. You better just kick me in the head. That I can handle. That I’ve had experience with.”

“This heist. Maybe we should scratch it.”

“Yeah, sure, only we aren’t calling the shots. Rigley is. Or Rigley’s girl friend is.”

“Maybe Rigley and company’ll change their mind when I explain something funny’s going on.”

“Is something funny going on?”

“I don’t know.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I think I better try to talk Rigley out of it. The back of my neck is starting to tingle on this thing, and I think we better get out, if we can.”

“And if we can’t?”

“Go ahead with it, I guess. I think we better forget about bringing in another man. That okay with you? Breen would’ve been perfect, but he’s dead, and with what I got in mind for the heist, there really isn’t the time to recruit anybody else. Or the need either. We can get by, just the two of us. Don’t you think?”

Jon rubbed the lump over his temple. “Maybe I will have another beer.” He got up and went after the beer, then came back and said, “Santa Claus suits?”

9

She got back to the cottage at five-thirty. She was bushed. Fridays at the beauty shop were always busy, but today had really been a bitch; she’d worked all morning without a break and straight through lunch and fought hunger pangs throughout the long and hectic afternoon. And now, home finally, she was so tired, she wasn’t even hungry anymore. Take a bath and get rid of the smell of hair spray and customer (and her own) perspiration and just flop in bed. She unlocked the door, stepped inside, and George was there.

Sitting at the table with glass of booze and accompanying bottle in front of him.

Terrific.

“Hi, baby,” he said. A little sheepishly. A little drunkenly. Sitting in his shirtsleeves, his coat and vest and tie tossed on the couch the way a kid tosses off his jacket after coming in from school. George was a handsome man, in that slick executive way of his, but when he got the least bit drunk, his eyes started drooping, and he began getting a rather stupid look to him. She hated him when he looked stupid like that, which was, unfortunately, a way he’d been looking more and more lately.

She closed the door, slipped out of her cloth coat, hung it on the rack. She was still wearing her white beautician’s uniform. After nine solid hours of doing her best to make other women’s hair look presentable, her own was matted from sweat and generally a mess. She didn’t smell good. Or feel good. And George was here.

Terrific.

She walked over to the table and stood over him as he sat fiddling with his half-drained glass of bourbon. She looked down scoldingly and said, “I thought we agreed not to get together. Until tomorrow, when we meet with your robber friends.”

“Well, baby, I...”

“I thought we agreed you’d spend some time with your wife.”

“Baby, you know I can’t stand being around her when she’s drinking. You don’t know what it’s like being around somebody who’s drinking all the time.”

“Don’t I?”

He looked down into his bourbon, then hung his head. “I... guess I deserve that, don’t I? I have been drinking a lot myself lately, haven’t I?”

She thought, why don’t you shape the hell up, you self-pitying son of a bitch?

She said, “It’s okay, honey. You’ve been under terrible pressure. I understand.”

And as she said that, she patted his head, twisting some of his slightly curly dark brown hair in her fingers playfully, affectionately.

He touched her arm. “Sit down, baby. I’ll get you a glass, if you’ll just sit down and have a drink with me, and we can talk.”

She didn’t sit down. Instead she plucked the bottle off the table and put it behind the bar on a shelf with all the rest of the bottles and came back and kissed his neck, nuzzlingly, and then took him by the elbow, saying, “Now, come on. Be a good boy and shoo. Go home. I want you out of here.”

And he looked at her with tearful eyes, still slightly stupid eyes, but compelling, too, in their way. “Julie. I need you. Let me be with you.”

Goddammit, he was almost whimpering. Seeing him act like this made her want to slap him silly, in a way, and in another, want to hold him.

She did neither.

She went and got his coat, vest, tie, and topcoat and put them on the table in front of him and said, “Go home, George. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“I need you tonight.”

“Tonight I need for myself, George. I need some time to rest, some time to get myself together for what’s coming up. Please.”

“Julie... surely you understand how I feel, how I’m... I’m shaking inside, Julie. How I’m scared out of my mind thinking about... about what we’re going to do and... how I need you. To hold me.”

Shaking inside, he said. And outside, too. He was a wreck, a nervous damn wreck, and she had to do something.

She sighed.

“All right,” she said. “Go on into the bedroom.”

“Baby... it’s not that... We can just talk... I just need to be with you right now, I don’t...”

“Go on in the bedroom and wait for me. I have to take a bath. I have to relax a minute. I’ll be in in a while. Now scoot.”

She drew a hot bath. So hot her skin turned lobster red as soon as she dipped into it. She liked a hot bath. She liked to burn away the dirt, burn away the thoughts. Just settle into a steaming-hot tub. Hot bubble bath — millions of bubbles; she liked the smell of the soap, the bubble bath smell, the slickness and smell of the perfumy bath oil. It was a peaceful experience, the way sleep was supposed to be.

She luxuriated in the tub, sliding her hands over her oil-sleek body, the globes of her full breasts bobbing above the surface of the bubbly water, nipples erect. And she stroked them, soaped them, her breasts, nipples, pussy, thick soapy-silky triangle of hair, sliding hands over firm, muscular oil-slippery thighs. She leaned back and enjoyed herself.

She honestly got more pleasure, more sexual, sensual pleasure out of a good hot bath than the act of sex. Fucking had never been much more to her than a way of pleasing and controlling a man. And she’d gotten even less pleasure from her experimental couple of flings with other women.

But this was pleasurable. Soaking and soaping herself. Indulging that fine body of hers. And it was a fine body; she knew it was. She didn’t really blame men (or anyone) for wanting her.

Conceit? No, not really — at least she didn’t think so. She had an ability, she felt, to assess herself in a detached, realistic manner. She saw her body, for example, as a tool, even a weapon. Nice tits, nice ass, but like all tools (weapons), meaningless without the brains to put them to use.

Take her high school years, for instance. She’d blossomed rather late, well into her teens, and consequently had that muted contempt for her admirers that all former wallflowers feel. She used her good looks to be popular, to date the cutest guys from the wealthiest families, to be a cheerleader and homecoming queen candidate and generally overcome a somewhat poverty-stricken background. (Her father had worked for the railroad and earned a decent wage, but not decent enough to properly feed, house and clothe six kids, a wife, and mother-in-law. As the oldest, Julie had all but raised her two sisters and three brothers, as her mother had had enough to do just to cook, keep house, and look after her own ailing mother.) The highlight of her climb out of the lower middle class muck came shortly after graduation, when she won the home-town beauty pageant that could have led to Atlantic City and beyond, if it hadn’t come out about her and the one judge.

They let her keep her scholarship money (held in trust for use in educational pursuits only), and she eventually used it, to go to beauty school, but first she got knocked up by one of the few nonwealthy guys she’d ever gone out with, a sandy-haired football hero who she figured would probably go on to make a fortune playing pro ball someday. She began to think she’d figured wrong when he flunked out of school the first year, trying to study, play football, hold a job, and be a husband/father simultaneously. He got drafted. Sent to Vietnam.

She divorced him while he was still overseas. It was a gamble, because he still might come back and be a pro ball player and get rich, but then again he might also get his leg blown off over there, so she’d dumped him, left her kid (a girl) with her mother, who had the time to look after a kid now that most of her own were grown and gone and with Grandma dead and gone, and enrolled in beauty school.

That was where she had latched onto Claire. Claire was a rich man’s daughter and hadn’t been smart enough to make it in a real college or university and had ended up at the beauty school in Iowa City. Nobody at the school liked Claire because she was stupid and spoiled and a closet lez. But Julie liked Claire. Or anyway Julie liked Claire’s money, and soon they were roommates; she even gave Claire a free feel now and then. And when they got their diplomas and passed their state boards (the fix had to be in for Claire to pass, the stupid bitch) Claire’s rich old man had given her the beauty shop in West Liberty (which was a small town midway between Iowa City and Port City) as a graduation present And Claire had invited Julie along.

And Julie had gone, figuring it would do till something better came her way.

Like a George Rigley.

She’d known it would only be a matter of time before a George Rigley entered her life. A wealthy, my-wife-doesn’t-understand-me type who wanted some nice, young, sympathetic snatch. And she was eager to fill that role... until the time came when she could take over the wife’s role, and step into the plush, easy life hard cash could bring.

But it had taken her longer than she’d thought: her small-town location limited her prospects, and the two men who preceded Rigley as her benefactors (an attorney from Iowa City and a doctor in West Liberty) had not proven the long-term meal ticket she’d hoped.

Then, finally, three years ago last summer, she met him. She’d been on the prowl, sitting at the bar in that new place in Iowa City, the Pier, wearing as little as possible — baby-blue flimsy halter and short shorts. George Rigley, sitting a stool or two away, asked her if he could buy her a drink; she’d said he could, and it went on from there. He was at first as smooth and superficial as he no doubt was when he was sitting behind his desk at his bank. But later, after they’d taken a table off in a properly dark and secluded corner, he’d blurted out, “Listen, I’m nervous as hell. I mean, I’m new at this, and you’ll have to forgive me if it shows.”

She’d given him a coy smile and said, “New at what? Forgive you if what shows?”

“What I’m saying is it’s been a long time since I’ve tried to make conversation with a pretty girl.”

“Don’t you mean it’s been a long time since you tried to make a pretty girl, period?”

And he’d grinned. An honest and shy sort of grin that had been her first peek behind his executive mask. Her first peek at the insecure child lurking behind his plastic, practiced pose. And a child needs a mother. And a mother can manipulate a child into doing most anything, if a mother is ballsy enough...

So she had listened patiently to the story of Rigley and his wife, and of his recently dissolved affair with a friend’s wife (though she guessed there’d been several of those over the years) and of the unhappiness he was experiencing as he sank deeper into middle age, most of it because of a marriage that had been a good one once but now was stagnant, without even the usual children to hold it together. It wasn’t a new story, or even a very interesting one, but she wasn’t looking for a new and interesting story — just one with money in it.

And money had come her way during her three years plus as George’s secret little girl friend. He provided the cottage (which was, of course, more a house than cottage), and though on paper she paid him rent it was more the other way around. She continued to work with Claire at the beauty shop in nearby West Liberty but only to keep appearances up, only until she could step completely into the wife’s role and trade in the cottage, nice as it was, for a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar home the likes of the one the present Mrs. Rigley was using to do her drinking in.

Julie would have it all, if George held up through the strain of the days ahead.

Well, she thought, rinsing her hair tinder the cold rush of water from the tub’s faucet, I’ll just have to see to it he does.

Because she was not about to spend her life a damn kitchen slave like her mother, or as a lousy shitty working girl slaving her ass off over fat old ladies and their thin gray hair, no goddamn way in hell. She’d have a life worth the living or not at all. A life with money in it. A life that would be one long, luxurious bath.

She stepped out of the tub, then stroked her body dry with a crushed-cotton towel and wrapped another towel, turbanlike, around her damp hair.

The bedroom was dark.

She slipped under the sheets.

She touched the side of his face and said, “Do it to me, honey.”

And let him.

And afterward she cradled him in her arms, patted him, soothed him. He was trembling. The sex hadn’t taken care of his trembling.

“It’ll be over soon, honey,” she said. “We’ll be together and there’ll be no sneaking around and no worries. Just you and me and all that money.”

“Is that... that all I am to you? Money?”

There was no bitterness in his voice; more like fear.

“How can you even think that?”

“Would you... nothing.”

“Would I what?”

“Would you want me, even if I didn’t have the money?”

“You don’t have the money, George.”

“I’m going to. We’re going to. But would you? Love me? Without money?”

Would you love me without my tits, you silly ass?

“Of course I would,” she said.

10

George Rigley’s home was two miles outside the city limits, on a bluff overlooking the winding blacktop road that a mile later connected with the highway to Iowa City. Rigley’s was one of a handful of homes on the three-mile stretch of blacktop, which was a thickly wooded, exclusive area whose beauty was matched only by its real estate value. A gravel drive ascended the bluff to the sprawling wood and brick ranch-style home, with its private tennis court, swimming pool, and separate garage the size of an average house.

Space and privacy. All the space and privacy you could ever want. The nearest neighbor a quarter mile away. Enough rooms to sleep a small army: three bedrooms, a den, a game room, huge living room, kitchen, dining room, TV room, assorted bathrooms. What sane person could want more?

And that was the problem. What sane person could want this much? Certainly not Rigley himself: he preferred the cozy, rustic (rustic compared to this, anyway) cottage. No. It took somebody crazy to want a secluded expanse of loneliness like this. Somebody crazy like Cora. His wife.

What else would you call it besides crazy, to want all this space when there was just the two of them. They had no children — hadn’t been able to — and the bloated house was designed mainly to satisfy Cora’s need for entertaining (but partially, he’d have to admit, to fulfill his own need for status), and if it wasn’t a cocktail or dinner party going on, it was relatives. Relatives meant a lot to Cora. He’d hate to think how many weeks out of an average year they shared with visiting relatives of hers. Rut then, he was in no position to complain, considering what Cora’s family had meant to his career.

Of course it’d been different, these last few years, with her parents dead (killed in a light plane crash, with Cora’s only sister). And with her beloved cousins and uncles and aunts snubbing Cora since her parents had snubbed them in their will. The flow of relatives had subsided somewhat.

But the flow of liquor hadn’t.

That flow had increased.

His wife had always been a drinker, but never a drunk really, not till the death of her parents and sister. She was not a loud drunk. Never a conspicuous drunk at all. Socially, her drunkenness didn’t cause any harm; at a party she just flirted with the men and flattered the women, in a playful sort of way that just seemed to make everyone like her all the more — everyone except Rigley himself, of course. And her drunkenness at home just meant she was asleep most of the time. On the couch in the TV room, usually. Sometimes in bed. He had to have a woman in to do the cleaning for her, but they could afford it. And he’d often come home and find no dinner ready, but they (or he, if she was especially tight) would go out to eat; they could afford that too. And if friends called, Cora would come around, shake off her drowsy drunkenness, and be her charming, if a bit blurry, self. She wasn’t an annoying drunk to be around at all.

Unless you were married to her.

He was standing in his living room, Manhattan in hand, listening to his vice-president at the bank, Shep Jackson, rattle on about local politics. Jackson was a younger version of Rigley: smooth, dark-haired, tan, handsome, and handsomely dressed in a gray tailored suit. Rigley hated him for it. Jackson was the man the board had hand-picked to replace Rigley, and both men knew it and pretended they didn’t.

And Rigley wasn’t really listening to Jackson, either. He was pretending about that too.

What he redly was doing was watching his wife circulate through the small crowd (eight couples who all had season tickets for the Broadway Series at the University of Iowa’s Hancher Hall in Iowa City; it was their ritual to gather at the Rigleys’ for a cocktail party in the late afternoon and then drive, two couples to a car, to the play and have a late dinner out afterwards), and he marveled at how good she looked, for as much as she drank.

Her face, especially, looked good, but maybe that was just the face lift. The smooth skin enhanced the beauty of her large brown eyes and full mouth and small, sculpted nose. She looked something like Julie, as a matter of fact, except in Cora’s case the hair was honey yellow and thickly, if stylishly sprayed. Or he should say it the other way around, shouldn’t he — Julie looked like Cora. He’d picked Julie out because she looked like Cora had when he’d fallen in love with his wife-to-be over twenty-five years before.

They had gone to high school together. A small, small town in northeastern Iowa. Her father was in the banking business. He was principal stockholder of three banks in various small farming communities in that area, and was a landowner, too; he had three or four farms (he was always selling and buying farms like somebody adding hotels in Monopoly) and lived in the biggest house in the county. Rigley’s father was a schoolteacher. So was his mother. Between the two of them, his parents brought in a good living, and Rigley never wanted for anything; he was definitely a boy born on the “right side of the tracks,” a cliché that rang true in their small town. Anyone born on the wrong side would be considered a social climber if he tried to date Cora Pierce.

But that’s just what he’d been, secretly — a social climber. He knew no family fortune awaited him. He knew the limited benefits of schoolteaching were not for him. And he knew Cora Pierce had had her eye on him since the seventh grade, and so in high school he’d latched onto her and never let go.

They went to the same college (Iowa State) and were married after their sophomore year. Cora dropped out at that point and got a job in a bank there in Ames, with her father’s help. Rigley resisted any of his father-in-law’s efforts to pay his way through school, however, knowing that (a) his own parents had saved enough to put him, their only child, through four years of college, and (b) he would want to call on old man Pierce for bigger and better things in the future, after establishing himself in the family eyes as “his own man” and a pillar of integrity.

And old man Pierce had come through. He’d paid Rigley’s way through graduate school in the East (Wharton) and got him his first job, as installment loan officer in a big downtown Chicago bank. And then a vice-presidency at Port City, and finally the presidency, when he’d barely turned forty. Everything had turned out as he’d hoped.

Except maybe the marriage itself.

In the beginning, he had loved Cora. Or anyway he had convinced himself he did. It wasn’t hard to convince yourself you loved the wealthiest and most beautiful girl in the county. And Cora was all of that. She’d been homecoming queen and Representative Senior Girl back in high school. (He’d been Representative Senior Boy and most likely to succeed.) She was also valedictorian, whereas he was barely in the top ten percent of their small class. And to this day she was, in her way, the smarter of the two of them. The brains of the family, and the boss too, never letting him forget where the money came from. Never letting him forget that Daddy had pulled the strings to put George where he was today.

Still, Cora wasn’t the loud-mouth, obnoxious woman most bossy women are. She was dominant, yes, but quietly so. Not a bitch, not even a nag; just a decision-maker. And he didn’t mind being dominated at home; after all, he was dominant at work, wasn’t he? He didn’t mind being second in Cora’s heart to Daddy (no, make that third — her mother came second), and he didn’t mind the way she planned his life for him: parties, vacations, and all. He was too busy at work, making the bank go, to have to worry about anything else in his life; let Cora handle it.

Cora was easy to put up with, as long as the sex was good. And it was good for a long time.

Until they found out, definitely, that they could have no children.

Until she had her “female trouble” and the possibility of having a child (which had always been slim, because of his near-sterility, but still had been at least a possibility) became non-existent. After her “female trouble” (Cora never could bring herself to say “hysterectomy,” just as she always said “poop” instead of “shit,” never having outgrown her goddamned sheltered small-town conservative Iowa upbringing; thank God his parents had been liberals) sex gradually became something that happened only on special occasions, and then wasn’t particularly special for either one of them. Separate bedrooms came about for the stated reason that Rigley liked to read at night and Cora wanted the lights off, and the marriage became as sexually dead as their reproductive possibilities.

Even so, the marriage still seemed okay, superficially. Cora seemed comfortable with him. She liked the security of their life, and now that her parents were gone, she seemed desperately inclined to cling to what remained, which was Rigley and their stagnant marriage together. She surely must have realized just how desperate a deadend it was they were both heading down, and that probably helped explain the drunkenness.

But the possibility of divorce had never occurred to Cora, as far as Rigley knew. And he was glad. Divorce meant disaster to Rigley. He doggedly continued being nice to her. Complimenting the way she looked. Ignoring her drinking, as much as possible. Kissing her cheek goodbye in the moming and hello coming home at night And never, ever arguing with her.

Maybe theirs had always been a superficial marriage. Maybe even before these sexually barren last five years, they had had an empty marriage. Who could tell? Rigly figured he certainly wasn’t the only guy who, with a wife who shared his marital apathy, went through the paces of marriage, putting in time like somebody who keeps at a job he hates in hopes of eventual retirement. He wasn’t the only guy who enjoyed brief, relatively meaningless affairs with the wives of friends. Surely a marriage like this one wasn’t anything out of the ordinary these days.

In fact, the only thing he imagined was out of the ordinary where their marriage was concerned was the lack of arguments.

They almost never argued.

Because Rigley felt he couldn’t risk arguing with Cora.

Divorce was something he did not want to even think about

Not with a wife who was worth well over half a million dollars.

Rigley excused himself with Jackson and walked over to the serving table and nibbled at some chip and dip and made himself a Manhattan.

“You should be playing bartender, honey,” Cora said, coming up behind him.

He turned and looked at her. Her large brown eyes were droopy with drink, but they were still attractive. Her lips were perfectly formed, lovely. The facial skin was smooth, and her low-cut hostess gown gave hints of a body that was still something to see as she lolled around that pool outside all through the summer. Too bad she screwed like a faggot shakes hands.

“I’m sorry, baby,” he said, touching her cheek with Manhattan in hand. “Jackson cornered me and started babbling about the local elections.”

She turned and smiled at Jackson, who was well out of earshot, and said, “He’s such a poop. Why the board hired him is beyond me. If Daddy were alive...”

“If Daddy were alive, he’d be proud to see how pretty his baby looks this evening.”

“Thank you, dear. Hey... what’s the matter? Are you still acting sick? You’re not going to get out of going to this play just by playing sick.”

“I’m not playing sick. I’ve felt lousy all day — you know that.” He had told her earlier that he thought he was getting the flu.

“Now listen to me,” she said, smiling much as she had to Jackson and speaking in the same only-you-can-hear-me-George undertone. “You are not going to spoil tonight for me. You are going to the damn play and that is that.”

And she smiled some more and patted his cheek and threaded her way through the room, talking momentarily with everyone.

At seven people began filing into the den, where they’d left their coats. There was an eight o’clock curtain at Hancher and a forty-five-minute drive, not counting the madhouse of the Hancher parking lot, and the cocktail party was over.

And finally only the Harrisons, the couple the Rigleys were riding with, their oldest and dearest friends in Port City, remained.

Ray Harrison was a lanky bald man who looked like Ray Milland and sounded like Ernest Borgnine; his wife was a vapid, pretty little aging blonde lady who didn’t speak often enough to sound like anyone. Rigley gathered the Harrisons and Cora by the door, everyone having climbed in their coats but him, and said, “I’m going to have to cop out on you tonight, I’m afraid.”

Cora said, “George,” the way a razor slices across a wrist.

“Baby,” he said, “I’m just not up to it. And I’m not going to let myself ruin the night for you by going along and complaining constantly. You go on with the Harrisons. I insist. You’ll have a fine time without me. I’ll just be a party-pooper tonight, and you know it.”

“Well,” Cora said, softening slightly, but still with an edge, “I’m not about to stay home. I’m not going to miss this play. It’s supposed to be one of Neil Simon’s best.”

Ray Harrison said, “I just don’t understand why we should have to drive all the way to Iowa City for a little culture.” He obviously would have liked to stay home himself, but was being bullied into it by his publicly silent but apparently privately vocal wife. He made a plea to Rigley. “This restaurant we’re going to try ought to be worth the trip, George. The Pier. Ever tried it before?”

“Uh, no,” Rigley stuttered. “Never have.”

“Say,” Ray said, “you do look sorta sick at that.”

And then Cora finally gave in, as there wasn’t that much time to waste arguing, with an eight o’clock curtain to make. And, too, she’d buckled under the element of surprise, as she always did when they argued. They fought so seldom that when Rigley did stand up for his rights, he almost invariably won just on the sheer novelty of it. He’d been counting on that.

He was alone in the house now, with the aftermath of the cocktail party: the discarded glasses and napkins and half-eaten sandwiches and the general disgusting mess well-to-do people leave behind them after such affairs. He wandered aimlessly through the rambling house, sipping his Manhattan, thinking about his wife, his life, his situation. He ended up in Cora’s bedroom. Their bedroom, before he started sleeping across the hall. Blue wallpaper with open-beam wooden ceiling. Cream-color satiny spread on the queen-size bed. Nightstand by the bed. Their wedding picture was on it He went to the nightstand and opened its single drawer. Amidst the jewelry boxes was the gun. The .32.

He didn’t touch it He just looked at it, pearl-handled silver .32 automatic there with the jewelry in the drawer, and thought about his wife.

And suddenly he was sick.

Sick with fear and self-hatred and God knows what other wretched emotions, and the emotional sickness brought with it physical sickness as well, and he rushed to his wife’s private bath and heaved into the stool, heaved out all the cocktail-party booze and chip-dip and crust-trimmed sandwiches, heaved till there was nothing left to heave and then heaved some more.

When he was finished, he went across the hall and got out of the suit and took a shower and got into some comfortable, casual clothes. It was Saturday night. He had a meeting to go to.

Bank business, of a sort.

11

Nolan rode. Jon drove. It was Jon’s car, the Chevy II. Thursday night they’d taken the Buick, Nolan’s car or, rather, the car Nolan had been left to use by his business partner, Wagner, who was currently enjoying the Florida warmth while Nolan and Jon froze their asses off in Iowa. Nolan felt it unwise to have one certain car seen several times in the area of the Rigley cottage within these few days, even though the cottage was pretty well isolated and there wasn’t really much chance of anybody seeing either car. When he explained all that to Jon, the boy said, rather skeptically, “Well, I guess it doesn’t hurt being careful.”

And Nolan said, “It’s not that being careful doesn’t hurt, kid. It’s that being sloppy can kill you.” Jon hadn’t seemed so skeptical after that.

Is that the turn up there?” Jon asked

“Is it?” Nolan said.

It was, but he wasn’t about to tell Jon. He’d spent all day with Jon, driving the gravel and blacktop back roads of the area, familiarizing himself and the kid as well with all the possible routes between the cottage and Iowa City and the cottage and Port City. And he had it all down, himself. But Jon would be doing the driving, so it was Jon who had to know where he was.

“It’s the turn,” Jon said. “I recognize that farmhouse over there.”

“Well, then. Turn.”

Jon turned. He said, “I’m only having trouble because it’s dark. It won’t be dark the day of the heist, you know.”

“If you can find your way around these roads in the dark,” Nolan said, “daytime won’t be any problem.”

Jon thought about that, seemed to get the point, yawned and said, “Anyway, they keep this blacktop nice and clear. Not like some of those others we were on today.”

It hadn’t snowed since Thursday, but it had stayed cold, and the ground was snow-covered.

“Some rich bastard farmer owns most of this,” Nolan said, gesturing to the side of the road that was cornfield; trees lining the river were on the other side. “County keeps the roads around here clear for him and a couple others like him.”

“Yeah, well the Iowa City streets are still packed with ice and snow.”

“Maybe if you bought a couple hundred acres of farmland in downtown Iowa City, that’d change. Hey, slow down.”

Jon did, but said, “What for? Rigley’s cottage isn’t for a half-mile or so. And anyway, I’m only doing forty-five in the first place.”

“Stop a second. I want to get a look at that cottage there. Rigley’s closest neighbor. See anything?”

It was a small, paint-peeling clapboard cottage, crowded by trees, close to the river, on stilts — nothing lavish, nothing at all like Rigley’s. No cars were around. No lights on inside.

“Nothing,” Jon said.

“Rigley says the people who own it don’t use it much. Trying to sell it. He says they don’t use it at all this time of year.”

“Looks like he’s right”

“Looks like.”

They drove on.

The little bluff Rigley’s cottage sat on was the only clear spot along a good three-quarters of a mile of thickly clustered trees — long, tall, skinny things growing close to and even in the water like weeds gotten out of hand. Ugly damn trees. Especially in their wintertime gray and skeletal state, though Nolan figured they probably weren’t any beauties even in the green of summer. The close-to-a-mile stretch of land Rigley’s cottage was in the midst of was damn near swamplike, and accounted for the isolation of the cottage in an area otherwise heavily populated with cottages and cabins. The bluff, an island clearing in the sea of tree-littered and marshy land, provided safety from flooding, which made possible the houselike luxury of the cottage. Isolated as it was, it seemed acceptable to Nolan as a meeting place; even suitable, perhaps, as a place to gather after the heist to split up the take.

A gravel drive cut through overhanging trees to the cottage, which wasn’t visible from the blacktop, and as he pulled onto the drive, Jon said, “You think these hunting jackets are really necessary?”

They were wearing the hunting jackets Jon had gone to Cedar Rapids to pick up.

“Yes,” Nolan said. He had already explained that as hunters they wouldn’t raise undue suspicion in the wooded river area.

“So who’s going to see us with all these trees and everything?”

“People in cottages across the river, maybe. Anybody else who happens to be driving along that blacktop back there.”

“But it’s dark out. It’s the darkest damn night I ever saw, Nolan. The river’s right over there, and I can’t even see it.”

Nolan was getting a little bored with Jon’s questions and complaints and said, very deliberately, “It won’t be dark the day of the heist, you know.”

“Oh. Yeah. So we’ll be wearing the jackets then, too.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know that”

“Now you do.”

“That doesn’t explain the Santa Claus suits.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Jon sighed and said nothing. He pulled the Chevy II in beside Rigley’s Eldorado and parked it. They got out. The cottage was dark.

“Listen, kid, I want you to do something for me in there.”

“Sure. What?”

“Don’t be a smart-ass.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass? What do you mean?”

“I mean don’t be a smart-ass in there. Be nice to them.”

“Nice to them! After all that shithead and his bitch did to us, you say be...”

“Nice to them. I’m going to be nice to them. I’m not going to like it, but I’m going to do it. So are you.”

“Why?”

“Think about it. If you can’t figure it out, I’ll tell you later. Now let’s go in.”

He went up four wooden steps and knocked.

The girl, Julie, answered right away. She looked good. Pink fuzzy sweater caressing her abundant boobs, pink plaid slacks hugging the accommodatingly wide hips. She was one fine piece of ass, Nolan had to admit, even if she was kind of heavily made-up, especially around those huge brown eyes of hers, as if they needed any emphasizing.

She didn’t ask them in; she just held open the door and stepped aside. A cold, businesslike bitch, her attitude contrasting with the almost blatant sexual come-on of her makeup and wardrobe. All of which, she seemed to be making clear, was exclusively for Rigley. Nobody else was to get any ideas.

Which normally would have been fine with Nolan. He didn’t believe in getting sexually involved with somebody else’s woman, at least not on a heist, he didn’t. But he didn’t like the bitch’s icy attitude. He wanted to break through that. He wanted to build both her and Rigley’s confidence in him.

And that wouldn’t be any simple task. As he stepped inside, Nolan could feel waves of uneasiness shimmering in the room like heat over asphalt. He got out of his hunting jacket. Jon was doing the same. The girl made no move to hang them up. No hostess-playing for her. Nolan handed his coat to Jon to hang up.

The fire was going. The animated outdoor-scene beer sign was also going. There were no other lights on in the room. All the shutters were shut, as if the overcast, black night out there was high noon or something. Rigley was behind the bar, mixing up a pitcher of Manhattans. He was casually attired, for Rigley anyway: yellow and gray pattern turtleneck sweater and (Nolan saw as Rigley came around the bar to greet them) gray slacks that looked as if they’d never been worn before — in fact, they hardly looked as if they were being worn now.

Pitcher of Manhattans in one hand, Rigley extended the other, giving Nolan a smile as white and perfect as it was insincere. Rigley’s executive cool was even phonier tonight than usual: the tiny ice cubes inside the pitcher were clinking around, keeping time with the banker’s trembling hand, and yes, the tic at the edge of his right eye was going again. Nolan had the urge to take the man by the shoulders and shake him and say, “Settle down, damn it!” But it passed.

Rigley lifted the pitcher as if making a toast, and said, “Can I pour you one, Logan?”

“That’d be fine,” Nolan said. “Jon’ll have one too.”

“I don’t think I want...” Jon began, then caught Nolan’s look and said, “That’d be... nice. Thank you.”

The girl was looking at Jon’s T-shirt, which had some underground comic character on it (a guy with a pointed head and five o’clock shadow in a clown suit, labeled “Zippy the Pinhead”) and she seemed almost on the verge of a smile. And suddenly she was speaking. Saying to Jon, “I like it. Your shirt. It’s really cute.”

“Yeah, well, thanks,” Jon said.

“I wouldn’t mind having one myself.”

“Well,” Jon said, looking at her breasts with a cheerfully awestruck expression, “I’m not sure if they come in your size.”

And the girl smiled. Even showed some teeth. She was proud of those big boobs of hers, and Jon had said just the thing to win her over. A more obvious off-color sort of remark might have soured her, especially had it come from Nolan; but Jon’s boyish, almost naive manner put it over perfectly. Nolan nodded his approval at the lad, who then proceeded to nearly undo the good he’d just done by blurting, “Couldn’t somebody turn on some lights? I’m going fuckin’ blind in here.”

Rigley looked puzzled for half a second, then embarrassed, as evidently he was the one who’d thought dimming the lights would provide the appropriate atmosphere for crime and conspiracy.

Nolan looked at Jon and Jon looked away, and Nolan said to the girl, “Maybe if you could turn on that light behind the bar, there,” and the girl did.

The awkward moment passed, and Rigley went back to what he was doing, which was distributing Manhattans to each of the four seats at the table.

Nolan told everybody to have a seat.

He waited for everybody to get settled and was about to begin when Rigley got up quickly, saying, “Oh, I almost forgot,” and brought back a manila folder, identical to the one he’d shown Nolan Thursday night. The one chock-full of blackmail material. And there was almost another awkward moment, as Nolan felt himself getting mad all over again.

This time, thankfully, the folder contained material of a more agreeable nature: the photographs of the interior and exterior of the bank that Nolan had requested of Rigley, as well as a listing of employees and a timetable of their work activities, plus a floor plan prepared for the occasion by Rigley, which indicated where each person worked and where each alarm button was located, and a wealth of other pertinent information. Rigley had done a good job, and Nolan told him so.

“And I have to admit,” Nolan continued, “your basic plan for the robbery is a good one. Some refinements would be necessary, of course, and I’d need to go over these photographs and plans and such you brought me first, but otherwise I see no reason why your scenario wouldn’t be followed very close. Almost to the letter.”

All of that was true — it was a good plan — but the point of all the compliments was to put Rigley at ease. And it did. Rigley’s tic, his overall nervousness, seemed to have disappeared. He was smiling, sipping his Manhattan.

“However,” Nolan said, “I’m afraid all of your work maybe was for nothing.”

“What do you mean?” Rigley said, brows knitted.

The girl was silent, but her expression asked the same question.

“Now, I don’t want anyone to misunderstand my motives,” Nolan said, “but I think it would be best all around, for all concerned, if we called it off.”

“What?” Rigley said. Almost shouted. “Call it off? Call off the robbery? Why, for Christ’s sake?”

Nolan shrugged. “The only way I can explain it is by saying I’ve reached fifty years of age and never spent a day of it in jail, even though for the better part of the last twenty I was robbing banks like yours, Rigley. And do you know how I managed that? Managed to stay alive and not behind bars? By being careful. By having certain rules. By demanding certain conditions... ideal conditions... for any heist I was part of.”

“What in hell could be more ideal than this?” Rigley demanded. “What in hell more could you ask in a bank robbery than the help of the president of the bank? I mean, I’ve heard of inside tracks, but this is ridiculous.”

“You’re right,” Nolan said, nodding. “But I’m not talking about the job itself.”

The girl, who had the painfully skeptical expression of a doctor listening to a patient explain how he caught clap off a toilet seat, leaned forward and said, “Then just what are you talking about?”

And Nolan told them about the break-in Friday. He told them of two men (neither of whom Jon got a look at) who came in, rummaged through the entire antique shop, including opening a safe, apparently but not necessarily looking for money, and were interrupted by Jon, whom they promptly conked on the head before getting the hell out.

Before Rigley and the girl could begin expressing their obvious disbelief, Jon leaned forward, parted his hair, and showed them the bump. Then he sat back and said, “And that ain’t special effects, boys and girls. I’m too much of a coward to let myself be conked on the head just to back up a phony story.”

“All right,” the girl said, taking over (as Rigley seemed too confused at the moment to actually talk), “suppose it’s true. What exactly does any of that have to do with anything? Two people break into your shop and try to rob you. So what?”

“First let me tell you about something else,” Nolan said. “Something that happened to a friend of mine. A guy who set up a robbery Jon and I were on not long ago, and who worked with me on a lot of things over the years. Real pro. Thursday night he was murdered. For the contents of a cash register, amounting to maybe fifty bucks. He ran a bar, you see, and after closing, somebody came in and blew my friend’s head all over the wall.”

Nolan paused for dramatic effect, but the girl was not impressed. She said, “I still see no relationship to what we’re doing here.”

“Maybe there isn’t any relationship. I’d go so far as to say there probably isn’t. But I don’t like coincidences. A thief, a friend of mine, is killed for nickels and dimes. Call it cute, or ironic, or anything you want. Only the next day, two guys break into where I live, and Jon interrupts them before much damage is done, but anyway they’re apparently trying to rob us. Again, ironic, cute, robber gets robbed. Big laugh. But suppose something’s going on. Some old friends or enemies of mine are in the neighborhood with something in mind.”

“Isn’t that rather far-fetched?” Rigley said, finally regaining his faculty of speech.

“Isn’t it rather far-fetched that within twenty-four hours, a few hundred miles apart, two professional thieves who did a lot of work together are the object of two robberies themselves? One of them killed, head blown off by a shotgun like the one you were waving around the other night, sweetheart.”

“Wait one fucking minute, now,” the girl said. “You aren’t accusing us of having anything to do with...”

“I didn’t say that. Thursday night, we were together, so the shotgun thing is a true coincidence. I grant you that. But from my point of view, why not? Why couldn’t you have hired some people to dig up further blackmail material on Jon and me? That would at least explain the break-in at our place.”

“I think it’s all a bunch of bullshit,” the girl said.

“We had nothing to do with it,” Rigley said. “Any of it.”

“Okay. So who did?”

“You’re making mountains out of molehills,” Rigley said. “You’re desperate to find an excuse to get out of this situation, and so are trying to scare us out, confuse and frighten us into letting you off the hook.”

Nolan smiled. A friendly smile. It hurt him to do it; he hated Rigley and the bitch, and being civil to them would give him an ulcer if he had to keep it up much longer. But he smiled. He said, “I’m not trying to get off any hook. It’s a good heist. It really is. It’ll be easy, fast money for Jon and me. We’ve done it before, so why not again? But don’t you see the reason the two of us are around to rob your bank a second time is that we’re careful, we only work under certain conditions, and that it’s foolish to pull a heist when there’s possibly something going on that could fuck up that heist? Don’t you see that?”

“No.”

“No.”

“Okay. I tell you what. We’ll postpone it. Postpone it a month. Give me time to see what’s going on, if anything. That’s all I ask.”

“No!” Rigley shouted. He slammed his hands on the table, and everybody’s drinks spilled, the pitcher, everything. “No! No, goddammit, you’re just playing with us, I’m not postponing anything, no!”

And Rigley got up and ran behind the bar and got a bottle off the shelf and shakily poured himself a shot and downed it and then another and...

The girl, quietly, leaned over and touched Nolan’s hand. Her touch was warm, and for the first time she extended a trace of sexual promise to Nolan. She said, “Please. Understand. This is hard for George. He’s been a respectable member of the establishment for too many years for this to be easy for him. Do you have any idea how long it took him to gather the courage to approach you at that restaurant? He’s been watching you for months. Planning this, building himself up, gearing himself to be capable of an act that he is barely capable of even now. Asking him to postpone the robbery would be suicidal not only for George, but for all the rest of us, for any of us involved with the robbery. George is an intelligent and capable man in his chosen profession, just as you are in yours. But where crime is concerned, George is an amateur. We have to go ahead with the robbery, and as soon as possible.”

Nolan nodded. “All right. Go settle him down and bring him back here. And get a cloth and clean off this damn table, will you?”

She went to Rigley, and Jon said, “That’s why you wanted me to be nice, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Nolan said. “It’s bad enough working with amateurs, let alone uptight amateurs. If we’re going through with this, our asses depend on George Rigley coming through for us. So we got to make sure he’s comfortable, got to have him confident in us, got to put him at ease.”

“What about the girl? She’s an amateur too, isn’t she?”

“Her? An amateur? Kid, she could give us lessons.”

And then the girl was wiping off the table and Rigley was settling down in the chair, nervous but better.

“There’s one thing I have to ask,” Nolan said, “before we go any further.”

“What is it?” the girl said.

“It’s you,” he told her. Then he turned to Rigley and said, “Your robbery plan includes her. Her role is pretty minor, but she does have a role, or she wouldn’t be here right now, would she? Yet you aren’t asking for a share for her. Three-way split, you say. Why? I’d say she deserves half a share at least.”

“I... I can’t believe what you’re saying,” Rigley said. “You’re complaining because you’ll be getting more money than you have coming to you? Nobody in his right mind would make a complaint like that.”

“Nobody in his right mind would give money away,” Nolan said. “Especially not a bank president. Why are you?”

The girl said, “May I explain? It was meant primarily as an incentive for you. To assure you this arrangement is based not on coercion, but more a business proposition. And George only needs a relatively small amount... around one hundred thousand... to cover what he, uh...”

“Embezzled,” Rigley said. “That’s the word — embezzled. You see, I’m losing my job, Logan. My embezzlement would never have been found out, as long as I was president. But I’m losing my job, and as soon as a new man gets in my chair, my handiwork will be discovered. All I want is to replace what I took — and lost, on the stock market — so that I can leave the bank with my reputation intact. In fact, I already have another position lined up: president of a bank in a little town in New Mexico, and Julie will be going with me.”

The girl cut in, saying, “But that’s getting into areas that are of no concern to you, isn’t it? Does it answer your question?”

“It does,” Nolan said. He thought for a moment, then said, “All right. Why don’t you people have something to drink, whip up a fresh pitcher of booze if you like, Rigley, and everybody relax. Go sit in front of the fire or something I want to study this folder of material for a while and see how it fits in with what I have in mind.”

The girl touched Nolan’s hand again. “How soon do you think we can get on with it? The robbery, I mean.”

“Soon. Sooner than any of you, including Jon, will like, I think.”

Rigley said, “How... how soon do you mean?”

“Well, tonight’s Saturday. You need some time to absorb what I’ll be laying out for you tonight, and also some time to hopefully get some rest, though I doubt any of you’ll get much of that. Anyway, Monday morning.”

“Which Monday morning?” the girl asked, eyes wide.

“Monday morning,” Nolan said. “You know. The day after tomorrow.”

12

The first night Terry Comfort spent in prison, he was raped in the shower by a short, muscular, middle-aged bald black man. Terry was serving a year for statutory rape. He didn’t think of what the black man did to him as poetic justice. He didn’t know anything about poetic justice. He just knew he’d been screwed, a couple of ways.

He was tall, slender, in his mid-twenties; his thin sliver of a face was pale from months inside, and his sandy-color hair was shorter than he would have liked, but it wasn’t bad, considering he’d only been out a few days. They let them wear their hair longer inside these days, and things were generally better in there than Terry had heard from his father and others who’d been in. The food wasn’t bad; the work wasn’t hard; there was TV, and magazines and movies. But they still raped you. Especially if you were skinny and fair-haired and had the light blue eyes and delicate nose and full mouth Terry did.

He got to where he could stand it. Not like it, but stand it. He let the bald black man lay claim to him, since it worked out better for Terry that way; the black man wasn’t queer, really, just naturally horny, and once a week was enough for him, and once a week Terry could stand. At first, he swore the day would come when he’d kill the black man; but then he came to almost like the poor old bastard, who’d been in since he was Terry’s age, having been sent up for killing his wife. Who could blame the guy for that? He’d found his wife in bed with some other nigger and killed them both. Anyone would have done the same. Unwritten law. Of course, it had probably gone hard for him in court because of his using a hatchet to do it and disposing of the pieces down various sewer gutters, but then, a guy will do things that are a little weird when he gets taken advantage of.

Most of the people inside were like the black man and didn’t deserve to be there. Terry himself, for instance, sent up for statutory rape — what a bullshit charge! Who ever heard of a girl thirteen having tits thirty-eight? She’d said yes, hadn’t she? And went down on him and got to teaching him things he’d never even thought were possible, and then started talking that marry-me shit. Jesus Christ, one wham-bam and the little whore’s talking marriage, and he’s telling her to fuck herself for a change, and the next day the law comes around.

After all the robberies he and the old man and brother Billy had pulled together the last six or seven years, with people getting hurt and sometimes killed along the way, for Terry to get nailed for humping a thirteen-year-old, well, it was pathetic. It was more than pathetic; it was downright embarrassing.

But he was out now, sentence shortened for good behavior, and he was ready to get back to the business of making some money with his old man. And to find some more nice young pussy ripe for plucking. He had lost time to make up for on both accounts.

Right now was Saturday night, or more like Sunday morning, going on two o’clock Sunday morning. He was in an attic, a dusty, cramped attic you couldn’t stand up in without banging your head against rafters. He was on his stomach. Next to him was his father. Old Sam Comfort.

Sam Comfort was in his early sixties, had short, unruly white hair, needed a shave, and had the same deceptively kindly features as his son, only Sam’s eyes were a smoke-gray color and his face was wider, with jowls. He was shorter than his son — a little. And he was as skinny as his son, though until fairly recently he’d sported a considerable pot belly. He’d been sick.

They had been in the cramped attic for a long time. Since early evening, when it first got dark. The attic was above the second-floor living quarters over an antique shop in Iowa City. The antique shop was where the two men who had killed Sam Comfort’s other son, Billy, were living. They would not be living for long, however, if old Sam had his way.

That was probably what the old man was thinking about right now, Terry thought, studying those smoky eyes that were hard to read anyway but impossible to scrutinize in the darkness of the attic, which was relieved only by the slight filtering-in of street light through the attic’s single, small window. Still, Terry could pretty well tell what his father was thinking, most of the time. But he could never be sure. You could live with Sam Comfort your whole life and never be able to predict for sure what he’d do next.

And the old man — who had always seemed eccentric, even to his sons — hadn’t been right in the head since Billy died.

Anyway, that was what Lou had told Terry, Lou being the Detroit pawnbroker who fenced what the Comforts stole. Lou was short, chubby, mustached, and dependable. He was the one who had found Terry’s father the night Billy was killed. The one who had come out to the house to talk to Sam Comfort and found the aftermath of a shooting and robbery and managed to get the old man to a doctor and into a private hospital that specialized in publicity-shy (and police-shy) patients.

It seemed a guy named Nolan, and some other, younger guy that hung around with him, had come to the Comfort homestead one night a few months back and tossed in some smoke grenades and made it look like the place was on fire; old Sam had of course grabbed his strongbox of cash — the old man didn’t believe in banks, having spent a good portion of his life span emptying them — and Nolan and this lad were waiting outside to relieve him of it. But brother Billy had caught on to the ruse, and was in the process of doing something about it when Nolan shot Billy in the chest, killing him, and Nolan’s young pal shot old Sam in the chest too, but higher, not fatally.

Only it had looked fatal to Nolan and the kid, who exchanged some bits of conversation (the kid calling Nolan by name) that the semiconscious Sam had heard before blacking out completely. Since the pair had worn stocking masks, this slip was a big help; but the really big help was Lou, who had come along a few minutes later and found the badly bleeding Sam Comfort, left to die by Nolan and company. And he would have died, too. Like Billy had died.

Terry and Billy hadn’t been close. Terry was three years older, and Billy had always been the favored one, the baby, and so had stayed kind of immature. Like, for instance, Billy was into dope — not just smoking it, either, but cocaine, speed, everything but heroin, Terry guessed. Billy had also been into that crazy music that went with the dope thing, instead of country-western, like any sensible person. The brothers hadn’t gotten along, and Terry was sorry his brother was dead, but he was probably more upset about that two hundred thousand bucks of theirs Nolan had stolen.

Terry’s father didn’t share that sentiment. Old Sam, for once in his life, didn’t seem to give a damn about money. He wanted to kill Nolan, and kill Nolan’s kid friend, too. “And that was al. That was all the still-weakened Sam Comfort had on his mind. Kill Nolan. Kill the kid. Kill them both.

Terry had spent the better part of the few days he’d been out trying to reason with his old man. “Killing ’em’s fine, Pop, I’m for that,” he’d say. “But what about the damn money? We gonna just kill the peckerheads and let some damn bank keep our two hundred thousand? That’s all the money we got in the world, Pop.”

And old Sam would say, in a voice soft with traces of the Georgia accent he’d never lost, though he’d only lived there as a child, “We still got the farm. We can work it, if we have to. Don’t give a shit about the goddamn money. We’re going to kill those bastards. Kill ’em slow.”

Work the farm? That was crazy. They’d never worked the farm in their lives. Besides, they just owned a few acres and leased them out to a neighboring farmer and used the farmhouse as their home base. The old man just wasn’t thinking.

Anyway, he wasn’t thinking where the money was concerned. Where revenge was concerned, he was doing fine. Old Sam had figured out that a guy named Breen, who owned a bar in Indianapolis, had been in on the job with Nolan. Not on the scene, probably, but fingered the job. Breen had been working with Billy and the old man, filling in for Terry while he was inside. Sam and Billy double-crossed Breen at a rented farmhouse just outside of Iowa City, Breen’s usefulness having run its course since Terry was getting out soon; but Breen had gotten away, shot-up, but alive. Evidently Breen had gotten to his friend Nolan for help and then told him about how the Comforts had all this money, and given him an inside-and-out description of the Comfort place (where Breen had been several times) and generally helped set the heist in motion. Sam’s deductions were based on Breen and Nolan having worked together a lot of times, and on the fact that Breen, who’d been in debt up to his ass with gamblers and had thrown in with the Comforts to take care of those snowballing debts, was back in Indianapolis, in his bar, with no apparent money problems.

So Terry and his old man had gone to the Indianapolis bar and found Breen humping some plump blonde bitch, who old Sam had shotgunned to make the point of how serious he was. Then he found out from Breen where Nolan was and shotgunned Breen, too.

And of course it had turned out Nolan was in Iowa City, and the old man had cussed himself for not figuring it. It only made sense that Breen, shot up and in Iowa City, would run to Planner’s antique shop, Planner being the old guy who had planned most of the jobs Breen and Nolan had pulled together.

That night, the night they’d double-crossed Breen and let the bleeding man get away from them, the old man and Billy Comfort had gone to the antique shop. The old man had thought of Planner immediately, but when he went there, to the shop, nobody was around except some damn kid about Billy’s age. Planner’s nephew, the kid said he was, and didn’t seem to know anything about the darker side of his uncle’s activities. Sam had chalked that one up as a blind alley, and it wasn’t till he held a shotgun in Breen’s face and heard about Nolan being in Iowa City that the old man linked the kid at the antique shop with the kid who’d been with Nolan that night at the farm, when the air was full of smoke and blood.

Yesterday, when no one was there, Terry and his father broke into the antique shop, to wait for Nolan and the kid and kill them. At least that was the elder Comfort’s concern. Terry convinced him they should make some attempt, anyway, at finding out if any of the money was in the antique shop. Old Sam said that was nonsense. Breen had told them Nolan was running a fancy restaurant/nightclub place, and all the money was probably sunk in that. But Terry had insisted there might be some money in the shop somewhere, as it wasn’t like a thief to keep all his money in a bank, and so they got into the safe, but there was nothing in it; they looked upstairs for a wall safe and couldn’t find one. Terry did find a little notebook, in a drawer in what was apparently Nolan’s room, with a rough sketch of what seemed to be the floor plan of a bank, and a list of “projected expenses” that included the entries “costumes, $100,” “jackets, approx. $60,” “van rental, $1,000,” and other equally confusing items. Terry showed the book to his father and said, “I think they’re planning something,” and his father said bullshit, the man’s retired, and Terry said, “A retired thief? Don’t kid me, Pop.”

He’d gone on to try to convince his father that if Nolan was getting a heist together, it’d be wise for Terry and his father to wait it out, wait till the heist was over and take the proceeds off Nolan’s hands before killing him. But revenge was still foremost in die old man’s mind, and he rejected the notion.

And then the kid had come home, and they knocked him out before he’d seen either of their faces, which was a lucky break. But then Sam wanted to kill the kid then and there, which was stupid, and Terry told his father so.

“You want to kill this kid and sit here waiting with a corpse God knows how long before Nolan shows up? How do we know Nolan is even in town? We got to deal with these two both at the same time, Pop, or else you kill one, and the other finds out and knows something’s up and comes looking for us instead of the other way around. Come on. We’ll leave now and they’ll just think somebody came in off the street and tried to rob them.”

So they left, and waited and watched for Nolan to come back to the shop. Across the street was an old school, which was evidently set to be torn down, but no work was going on, maybe because of the cold, snowy weather; at any rate, it was empty, no one around to stop them from going in and finding a first-floor window to look out of and watch the antique shop across the way. Both father and son pulled up desks designed for grade school children and sat, their skinny frames fitting easily enough.

It wasn’t till late in the evening, around ten, that Nolan came back, and by that time Terry’s father had fallen asleep, and Terry didn’t wake him. Terry wanted to stall his father long enough to find out whether or not a heist was in the offing, and he let his father spend the night in the cold, empty grade school in a third-grader’s desk. In the morning, when old Sam was waking up (and almost immediately began cursing his son for falling asleep on the job), Nolan and the short curly-haired kid drove out from around back of the antique shop, from the garage, in an old and somewhat battered Chevy II. And the Comforts went scrambling out of their third-grade desks, out of the condemned school and into their car, parked in an alley behind and, keeping a discreet distance, followed the Chevy II out of town. Soon the Chevy II disappeared off onto a back country road, and following them became impossible.

They drove back to Iowa City, to their deserted school and the desks by the window. The old man was trembling with near rage, and Terry, who’d been hit by his father on more than one occasion, was afraid a family fight was about to begin. But as weak as the old man was, Terry doubted that would amount to much.

“Pop, don’t you see?” Terry said. “There is a heist coming up. They’re preparing for it. Driving the back roads, figuring out getaway routes. Don’t you see it?”

But the old man didn’t see.

And so they again broke into the antique shop. To wait. For Nolan and the kid to come back together. Sam Comfort was going to settle his score as bloodily as it had begun. And God only knew what the old man would do, what gruesome goddamn lengths he’d go to to avenge the killing of his favorite son. It was like that black guy Terry had known in prison, who’d come in on his wife humping somebody else — people do things that are a little weird when they get taken advantage of.

They had found this attic. The apartmentlike upper floor had a low ceiling, and they could jump down into the kitchen easily from the attic perch. It was the old man’s idea, and for a change Terry liked it: Nolan was just too competent to deal with flat out; better to let him come home and think everything’s cool, tuck himself in bed for a nice night’s sleep, and then boom. Nolan was not the type of guy you could allow any slack. You had to have him cold, and even then better watch yourself.

They waited up there. Flat on their bellies. The lidlike door that opened above the kitchen cracked open a shade, so they could hear Nolan and the lad coming in — hear what they were doing, keep track of them, wait for just the right moment to spring the trap. Furthermore, the attic had a second hatchway over the garage, so if a hasty retreat was necessary, no problem. It was ideal.

It was also stuffy and cramped and hell to spend four or five minutes in, let alone hours. Terry was to the point of giving up on his idea of waiting for Nolan to pull off a heist before killing him; to forget about the money and just get on with it, just let his old man get his revenge rocks off. After all, Terry’d only been out a few days. He was horny. He wanted to be the one who did the screwing for a change, and he didn’t want any damn boy, either. He wanted to get drunk, and he thought he might smoke a little shit, too, a little tokin’ of respect for his late doper brother. Christ, after all those months inside, was this any way to spend his time? Flat on his belly in an attic that had less room to move in than his cell?

Noise downstairs.

Old Sam gripped Terry’s forearm.

Terry patted his father’s hand soothingly.

Between them was the shotgun.

“I’m sorry, Nolan.” Young voice. The lad. Nolan’s buddy.

“It’s okay. You almost killed us, but it’s okay.”

“That’s never happened to me before. Falling asleep at the wheel, I mean, Jesus.”

“Maybe it’s a good sign.”

“How do you figure?”

“Shows you’re relaxed, if nothing else. I doubt Rigley and the girl get that much sleep between now and Monday. No, I take that back — the girl’ll sleep fine. She’ll sleep better than any of us.”

“Listen, Nolan, I’m tired, and I know you are too. I mean, you slept all the way back yourself...”

“Except when you almost ran into the semi. That woke me up.”

“Yeah, except then. Anyway, I wonder if you’d mind going over a few things with me. I feel like there’s a few things you’re going to want me to know that Rigley doesn’t have to. After all, all he has to do is stand there.”

“Couldn’t it wait till morning?”

“I’ll sleep better if we go over it now.”

“I didn’t notice you having any trouble sleeping when you were behind the wheel.”

“I’m wide awake now.”

“Okay. I tell you what. I’ll take it from the top, and you stop me any time you got a question.”

After Nolan had gone over the heist in detail with the kid, the Comforts allowed time for everybody downstairs to go to sleep, then sneaked out through the garage.

13

Most of the downtown Port City buildings were brick and had a decaying look to them. The bank, on the corner, was an exception. It was white stone, two stories of nicely chiseled Grecian architecture dominated by three pillars carved out of its face. Above the pillars the word bank was cut in the stone and the date 1870; the bank’s electric sign, nearby, didn’t date back that far. The sign was attached to the corner of the building and hovered out over the sidewalk; it said first national bank of port city above a field of black, on which white dots grouped to form the time and then regrouped to form the temperature. Right now the sign said the time was 1:27. The time was 7:26. And the sign said the temperature was 98 degrees. The temperature was 20 degrees. The sign was broken.

Jon was nervous. Yesterday, Sunday, had been busy, and he hadn’t had time to be nervous; he’d been moving all the time, almost all night, too. But now he was sitting, and he felt himself trembling, like an alcoholic who needed that first drink.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and almost jumped.

“Easy,” Nolan said. “Easy.”

Nolan’s hand. A reassuring hand. Jon looked at Nolan, who smiled from behind his white whiskers and said softly, “ho ho ho.”

“Yeah?” Jon said. “And I hear your wife puts out for the elves. Stick that up your chimney.”

And they looked at each other in their Santa Claus suits and laughed, a little, and Jon was less nervous. A little.

Rigley was behind Nolan, crouching. The man didn’t seem at all nervous, but somehow he didn’t seem calm, either. He hadn’t said a word since they’d stopped by his house to pick him up a few minutes before.

They were in a red panel truck that was parked in front of the Salvation Army store just down the block from and on the same side of the one-way street as the bank. On the sides and rear of the panel truck it said “TOYS FOR TIKES, Davenport, Iowa” in white letters. Toys for Tikes was an organization of area businessmen whose panel trucks (identical to this one) were a common Christmas-season sight in these parts. The trucks went around to various businesses that served as drop points for the broken and/or discarded toys that Toys for Tikes collected, refurbished, and distributed to needy children. Sometimes, close to Christmas, when there were more deliveries than pickups to be made, the drivers dressed as Santa Claus.

Today was December 24.

The bank was on the corner of Second Street and Iowa Avenue. The panel truck was parked on Second Street. Traffic was less than heavy, more than sparse; at any rate, the Toys for Tikes van attracted no undue attention. The morning was clear, crisp-cold; no overcast sky today; no threat of snow.

At 7:28 a man who looked remarkably like a younger version of Rigley rounded the corner from Iowa Avenue on foot, having left his car in the riverfront parking lot a block down and across the four wide lanes of Mississippi Drive. The man’s name was Shep Jackson. He was a vice-president at the bank; technically, his job was that of auditor. He wore an expensive-looking gray topcoat with a black fur collar. He had short dark hair and a tanned complexion. As he walked, he looked at himself in the reflecting glass of the modern double doors between the first and second pillars and the big curtained window between the second and third. He stopped at the employees’ entrance, the furthermost door, which opened onto a vestibule that joined the stairway to bookkeeping and the side door to the bank lobby. Keys were needed to open both doors, but the outer one he left unlocked, while the lobby door he locked behind him.

The vault’s time lock was set for 7:30, at which time Jackson would dial the combination, whirl the wheel, and open the vault.

Inside the vault was a shiny silver wall of drawers the cast and gloss of newly minted coins, separately locked drawers that held the trays of money for the teller cages, drafts, trust vouchers, money orders, securities, and so on. There was a small inner safe, built into the lower half of the shiny silver wall. The bulk of the bank’s money was in the interior safe. Just under $400,000, Rigley said.

The second safe, the one inside the vault, had its own time lock. At 7:45, Jackson would have four minutes to dial a combination and open the safe. From 7:30 to 7:45, Jackson would busy himself with the menial task of turning off the night alarms and emptying the small night depository vault up front, which would contain twenty-five or so locked, separate bags of coin and cash and checks left by merchants for overnight safekeeping. These he would carry to a teller’s window and leave. That would give him five or six minutes to sit at his desk, relax, have a smoke, and wait for the time lock on the vault’s interior safe to go off.

Jon looked at his Dick Tracy watch. “Seven thirty-eight, Nolan,” he said. “Better get going, don’t you think?”

“Another minute,” Nolan said.

They waited.

Nolan hadn’t told Jon the reasons for going with December 24, Christmas Eve morning, but Jon could figure them out for himself. The bank ran a skeleton crew on December 24; barely half the regular personnel would be on hand. Furthermore, if all went as planned, it would all be over before any (or at least many) of the bank employees had even showed up, the exception being Shep Jackson, who had to be there early to open the vault. Most people resent having to work on a holiday, even on a near holiday like December 24, so it was unlikely anyone would show up early today, and possible most of them would come dragging in five or ten minutes late. Also, the bank vault was overflowing at this busy shopping time of year; the Friday before the weekend was probably one of the biggest days of the season for local merchants. And, of course, there were the Santa Claus suits, which were to keep anybody from getting a look at Nolan and Jon’s true appearance, to keep anybody from realizing the Port City bank was being robbed by the same people again. Jon hadn’t been surprised when Nolan said the robbery would be Monday, because if it was any later than Monday, using the Santa Claus suits would be crazy. Although, sitting here in his false whiskers and red padded suit, Jon felt pretty crazy as it was.

“Okay,” Nolan said. “Let’s go.”

Nolan opened the rear doors of the van as Jon pulled up alongside the bank; Rigley got out first and Nolan, in his Santa Claus suit, followed. They went in the employees’ entrance. Through the glass door Jon saw Rigley working the key in the side lobby door. When Nolan and Rigley were both inside, Jon turned right on Iowa and drove past the bank and into the bank’s customer-only parking lot.

The lot was behind the bank and bordered by the alley, across from which were big empty buildings, a hotel, warehouses, reclaimed for urban renewal. Jon parked in the far corner of the lot, by the rear door to the bank, a metal door at the top of half a flight of metal steps. Nolan would be coming out that door in ten minutes. It would have been a nice way to go in, but it could only be opened from inside; somebody inside had to look through the peephole and unbolt the door and let you in. So Nolan and Rigley had gone through the front.

The lot was recessed, the bank having a neighboring building that extended clear to the alley’s edge, meaning the lot was open to view only on the Iowa Avenue side. Directly across from the lot was another, public parking lot, presently empty. But down the street half a block was a cafe. A police car was parked outside the café.

Jon slumped behind the wheel of the van, sweating in his Santa Claus whiskers and suit despite the cold, wondering what prison was like.

14

Nolan had a laundry bag in one hand and a .38 in the other. The laundry bag was empty. The gun wasn’t. He stood silently beside Rigley in front of Shep Jackson’s desk, at the rear of die bank, near the vault. The bank was silent, too, and dark, only the lights in the rear having been turned on as yet.

Jackson was wearing a money-green sportcoat and pale green slacks, the latter approximating the shade his complexion had turned to a moment before. He had the same sickly handsome look as Rigley, only younger, of course, like someone who had stepped out of an Arrow shirt advertisement. He’d been sitting at his desk, feet propped up, smoking a cigarette, reading yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. He had stood as the bank president and Santa Claus approached; he had smiled, a smile at first amused, then puzzled, and finally not a smile at all, because Santa Claus had a gun.

Three minutes remained before the time lock on the inner vault safe would go off.

“Shep,” Rigley said, emotionlessly, “there is a man at my house holding a gun to my wife’s head. There’s a man with a gun outside, waiting. And, of course, there’s this man. They want the money in the vault. They came to my house this morning and brought me here; one of them stayed behind to hold my wife hostage. I will be leaving with them. I’m a hostage, too.”

“Oh, my God,” Jackson said, touching his cheek.

“Take it easy, Shep,” Rigley said. “I’ve been robbed before. The bank has. My experience is that if we follow instructions, no harm’ll come to anyone. They want the money, and that’s all. But if we don’t follow their instructions, my wife will be killed, and quite possibly so will I.”

Nolan was pleased with Rigley’s words, but not with his performance. There was a mechanical quality to it, a coldness, like a bad actor reading off cue cards. Fortunately, Jackson seemed too unnerved to notice.

“At eight-thirty, Shep, you’ll open and conduct business as usual. This man is going to take all of the money in the vault safe, but will leave the tellers’ money alone. So you should be able to carry on as if all was normal. Sometime around midmorning, they intend to release my wife and me, they say, and you’ll be contacted. I will contact you. And at that time you can call the authorities. But until then any effort to do otherwise, I have been assured, will result in my wife’s death and my own. So please keep everyone away from the alarms. Now. I think the time lock should be open and you can give this man what he’s after.”

Jackson nodded nervously and said, “Uh, people will be coming pretty soon, George. How should we... I... handle that?”

“I’m going up to stand by the front door now, to explain the situation to anyone who might come in early. This will be over, though, before very many, if anyone, shows up. So it’s going to be up to you to gather everyone in the back conference room and explain what is happening.”

Jackson nodded again and walked gingerly toward the vault. He walked inside the vault and crouched to open the safe, then turned to Nolan and said, “All right, it’s open,” And Nolan held out the laundry bag to him, making him come for it, not entering the vault itself where Jackson would have him in a confined area that might lend itself to idiotic heroism.

It took less than three minutes to empty the safe, to make the laundry bag bulge with the packets of money.

Jackson pulled the bag by its neck, out of the vault, and turned it over to Nolan. Nolan slung it over his shoulder, Santa-style.

Rigley, who was standing up front, by the side lobby door, saw that Nolan and Jackson were done, and rejoined them. He had a blank look on his face. It disturbed Nolan somehow that Rigley had taken this in such easy stride, that Rigley’s tic under the comer of his right eye hadn’t been here today.

Nolan motioned with his gun for Jackson to lead them through the back room that led to the bolted back door. The room was lined with filing cabinets and had a Xerox machine and a counter for a coffee pot and a table; a coin- wrapping machine and a couple of other machines Nolan didn’t recognize were grouped around the massive metal back door, which was bolted three times. Bag over his shoulder, gun trained on Jackson, Nolan peered out the magnifying peephole in the door and saw Jon sitting behind the wheel of the red van. No one else was in the parking lot. The alley was empty too.

Nolan motioned to Jackson to unbolt the door.

Jackson did.

Rigley said, “If you haven’t heard from me by eleven, you can call the police.” Rigley turned his blank face to Nolan and asked, “Is that right?”

Nolan nodded.

Jackson said, “If I haven’t heard anything by eleven, call the police. Otherwise business as usual.”

Rigley nodded and said, “Don’t let me down, Shep. It’s not just me, it’s...”

And here was the damnedest thing: Rigley’s voice cracked, as if there was some genuine emotion going on behind that blank mask.

“... It’s Cora’s life too.”

And Rigley turned to the massive door and opened it

Jackson, who seemed pretty calm by now, said to Nolan, “You... you don’t say much, do you? You’re not your everyday Santa Claus, are you?”

Nolan tapped Jackson’s shoulder with the gun, in a not unfriendly way, and said, “It’s better to give than receive,” and went out.

They’d been inside seven minutes.

15

Rigley, feeling as though he were moving through a strange but amazingly real-seeming dream, crawled inside the Toys for Tikes van. The laundry bag of money was tossed in after him. The doors, slammed shut. It was dark inside the van; Rigley sat and looked at the rear doors and saw nothing but darkness. His back was to the kid, Jon, who was getting the engine going, and he heard the door slam as Nolan (who Rigley knew as Logan) got in on the rider’s side. And then the van was moving. Backing out, into the alley.

Nolan said, “Cops over at the cafe, like Rigley said they’d be.”

They ate breakfast there every morning.

Jon said, “You can see their backs if you look through the window there. Sitting at the counter, see? Never even looked over here once.”

“Well let’s not wait till they do. Go.”

And they were driving down the alley, and Rigley bounced in the darkness, wondering if dying was like this, darkness and an empty feeling — as if you were starving to death but felt no hunger. Next to Rigley, the bag of money bounced too.

At the end of the alley, on the right, was a filling station, behind which was a self-service car wash, four stalls, two of which you could enter from the alley. Rigley felt the van swing into one of the stalls, and the van wasn’t yet fully stopped when Nolan was out and pulling down the garage-type door on the stall.

It was a totally private cubicle. Though the filling station adjacent was open, there were no attendants at the car wash — strictly self-serve. It was simply a garagelike stall you drove into, a gray cement cubicle where you deposited fifty cents for five minutes’ use of a long-nosed gun affair attached to a hose, which shot a steaming-hot spray of soap and water; to switch from soapy water to rinse, you just squeezed the trigger again.

The van doors opened.

Nolan was still in the Santa Claus suit, but the whiskers were in his hand now. He said to Rigley, “Shake it.”

Rigley got out.

Nolan joined Jon inside the van, where they began getting out of the Santa Claus suits, under which they wore street clothes. Rigley pushed the doors shut, but not all the way, leaving them slightly ajar so Nolan and Jon could move if they had to. Rigley got out two quarters.

He deposited the coins in the slot and squeezed the trigger on the long-barreled rifle, which immediately spurted hot, soapy water onto the van.

The red van began turning white. The “TOYS FOR TIKES” lettering dissolved. The red color streamed away, melting off the van under the blast of the water rifle, finally being swallowed noisily by the drain beneath the vehicle. It was an easy job. Only the roof was hard.

It seemed absurd to be standing here, hosing down the van, down the block from the bank they had just robbed — his bank. And as the air turned cloudy with steam in the cubicle, Rigley felt more and more that this was a dream, that none of it was happening.

He squeezed the trigger on the water rifle and began the rinse. Red gurgled down the drain, leaving whiteness behind.

This morning, forty-five minutes before Nolan and Jon had come by to pick him up, he had gone into his wife’s room. She was sleeping. Her hair was in curlers; her face was pale, her mouth open. She was snoring, quietly. She did not look pretty. But she didn’t look ugly. She was just Cora, sleeping, snoring, in curlers, in a cream-color nightgown with the covers down around her waist and the plumpness of her bosom reminding him of better times. There was an empty bottle of Scotch on her dresser to remind him of the current state of their marriage.

Julie had been there. With him. Standing behind him. In the bedroom.

She had never been in his house before.

She and Cora had never met.

But now she stood in the bedroom, behind him, Cora snoring quietly in bed a few feet away, and Julie whispered, “Go on. Do it. Now. Here. Take it.”

And he had taken the shotgun from her.

It was heavy. He had never noticed it as being so heavy before. He had gone hunting with it plenty of times. It never seemed heavy to him then.

He raised the shotgun.

He squeezed his eyes shut, felt the wetness dangling between his lids.

He opened his eyes and turned to look at Julie, who was nodding, and back to Cora, who was sleeping, and their images blurred together; they were one person, one beautiful woman he had loved and let dominate him. And he squeezed the trigger.

He squeezed the trigger and squeezed shut his eyes and dropped the gun to the floor and ran blindly out of the room and dropped to his knees in the hallway, sobbing, wanting to scream but the scream getting caught in his chest, as if a webbing in his chest had caught the scream and was holding it there, letting only a rasping, wheezing cough-sound come out of him. And he got to the bathroom in the far part of the house, the one off his study, and hung his head over the stool, but he didn’t vomit. He hadn’t eaten anything for two days; there was nothing there. He just held onto the side of the stool and cried and cried and cried and Julie was patting his shoulder, saying, “There, there.”

Later, moments, minutes — a lifetime later — he looked up at Julie. He was still clinging to the cold porcelain of the stool. His ears rang from the sound of an explosion he hadn’t really heard. He said, “I’m sorry, baby... I’m... I’m sorry... sorry...”

“She never felt a thing,” Julie said.

“I... don’t know if I can go any... further with this.”

She kneeled beside him. She kissed his cheek. She dried his eyes and cheeks with Kleenex.

“We’re going to have to get going, honey,” she said. “You’re going to have to pull yourself together. Jon and Logan’ll be here soon.”

“How... how can I wait in the house here with... her?”

“Wait outside. Go outside and wait for them. Cold air do you good.”

“I... I hate this.”

“The worst is over.”

“Is... it? What about the others?”

“My responsibility. Just lead them to me.”

“Like a... like a... Judas sheep.”

“They’re nothing but thieves, George. Killers and thieves.”

“That... that Jon is just a kid. A boy.”

“The two of them are criminals, George. They’d do the same to us, if they had to.”

“They... they haven’t. They could have, and they haven’t.”

“Why should they, honey? They’re in this for the money.”

“We forced them.”

“No. They’re in this for the money. That’s the truth. Now get hold of yourself. You all right?”

“All... right. I’m all right.”

“Can you compose yourself? At the bank?”

“I’ll be all right.”

“All right. I’ll go get your coat. Stay put.”

She left the bathroom.

He got to his feet.

And walked through the study.

Walked down the hall.

Looked into the bedroom.

At the blue wallpaper. The open-beam wood ceiling. The nightstand with their wedding picture on top. The nightstand drawer was pulled out, to reveal the .32 amidst the jewelry boxes. Julie had thought to open the drawer. The nightmare didn’t touch her, did it? She was. cool, efficient, even in crisis. The girl had a good head on her shoulders.

Which was more than could be said for Cora.

He shuddered.

And looked away.

Then he looked back, and emotion had drained out of him somehow.

Cora wasn’t there. Not really. There was this headless thing in the queen-size bed, a dressmaker’s dummy in a red-spattered cream-color nightgown. And some strange, surrealistic stain of colors — red again was dominant — splashed on the blue-papered wall behind the bed. An abstract painting. Not Cora.

“Don’t,” Julie said.

She was standing behind him again, as she had earlier. She had the shotgun again. She’d be taking it with her. It was part of the plan. To kill Cora and, later, Nolan and Jon, with the same shotgun.

“Don’t look at her,” Julie said.

“Look at who?” he said.

“George. Get out of this room, George.”

“It doesn’t bother me.” His voice sounded remote to him, as though he was speaking down a well and his voice was mingling with its echo. “That’s not her.”

“Come on. Get into your coat and wait outside. They’ll be here soon.”

“Wait with me.”

“George! Snap out of it!” She grabbed his arm and pulled him out into the hall. “Snap out of it. I’ll be here. Inside. But those two can’t see me, George. I’m not supposed to be here! George? We’ve gone over this a thousand times, George. Goddammit!”

“I’ll wait outside.”

She sighed. And smiled. A tight-lipped little smile. “I’ll help you with your coat. Here. Now. They should be along in fifteen minutes or so. Stand out there and relax.”

Julie would wait till Nolan and Jon had picked Rigley up in the van, and then she would leave, out the back way, and walk on foot to where she had left her car.

Rigley went outside and stood in the chill air. The cold felt good. He wished it were even colder. He wished it would freeze him.

The gun was empty. Some more rinse was needed. He deposited two more quarters, then squeezed the trigger on the water rifle. Red gurgled down the drain, leaving whiteness behind.

Nolan and Jon were getting out of the back of the van. Both wore the hunting jackets. Nolan wore tan trousers and a dark blue woolen turtleneck sweater. Jon wore the T-shirt with the cartoon figure of a pinheaded man on it, and blue jeans. Nolan had a green garbage bag; inside the bag were the Santa Claus suits.

“You about done?” Nolan asked Rigley. Nolan was tying a knot in the neck of the big plastic bag.

“Yes,” Rigley said.

The van was white now. It had been painted with a water-base paint, and stencils had been placed on the sides while it was being painted so that the “TOYS FOR TIKES” lettering had been formed from the natural white beneath.

Nolan opened the garage-type door and peeked out into the alley.

“All clear,” he said.

He put the green garbage bag with the costumes in it next to some similar bags set out for trash pickup by the filling station management.

Rigley got back in the back of the van. Nolan shut the doors on him. Darkness swallowed him up again.

Then they were moving. Out of the car wash, out of town. To Rigley’s cottage. Where Julie and the shotgun waited

16

She unfolded the plastic sheet. It had come off a roll and had been folded up like a huge tablecloth. She’d bought it months ago, at a paint store, with today’s purpose in mind. She began spreading the sheet across the floor, and when she was done, it covered nearly half the room — from the doorway, past the couch, on to the edge of the fireplace. She smoothed it, as though making a bed. Then she moved to the other side of the room and sat at the picnic-style table over near the bar. The windows in the cottage were shuttered, and none of the lights were turned on; there was nothing to catch the plastic surface and reflect. They wouldn’t notice the sheet of plastic when they came in, not until they’d stepped on it, heard it crinkle underfoot, and they wouldn’t begin to have time to realize that the plastic was there to catch the bloody mess they’d make, dying. Because they’d be dead already. The moment they stepped in the door.

She got herself a drink.

Her hand was steady, or as steady as could be expected, anyway. She would admit to butterflies in her stomach, but she wasn’t what you’d call nervous, not really; not any worse than waiting to go on stage in one of those beauty pageants she’d been in years before. Anyway, the Scotch and soda felt good going down. Warm, despite the ice. It settled her, calmed her.

She glanced at her watch: 7:55. The robbery itself should be over by now. They’d be getting in the van soon (if they weren’t already) and driving down the alley and into the car wash. They could be here in fifteen minutes. Twenty, at most. At the very most.

The hairy part was she liked them. The young one, especially. Jon. George was right: Jon really was just a boy, a decent kid who’d somehow gotten mixed up with the older guy, the man she knew as Logan. If she could have thought of a way to spare the boy, she would have. And she’d take no pleasure in killing Nolan, either. She felt a sort of kinship with the man, though she didn’t really understand why. She felt she had something in common with him, that they were somehow alike.

But she wasn’t about to let any soft feelings about those two make it hard for her; killing them was an unpleasant but necessary part of what she and George set out to do. So it would be done.

And it would sure as hell be easier than this morning, she thought, sipping her Scotch, shaking her head.

She hadn’t planned to be there with George, in the beginning. Ideally, George should have been able to carry out that end of it himself. But the more she’d thought about it, the more she knew he wouldn’t be up to it without her beside him, supporting him, putting the gun in his hands. All but pulling the damn trigger for him.

It had been a risk, her being there. She’d made sure no one had any chance of seeing her go in or out of the place, but it was still a risk. Though after seeing how George had handled it, she was goddamn glad she’d been there. Oh, he’d managed to do it, managed to shoot the bitch, all right, but he’d gotten flaky as hell afterwards. Off his fucking nut. Thank God she’d been there to soothe him, to get him on his feet for the rest of the ordeal.

She looked at her watch again: not long now. Ten minutes and they could be here.

She finished her drink, got up from the table, and went into the bedroom.

The shotgun lay on the bed.

Twin barrels. Twin triggers. Sleek, black gun with walnut stock.

She’d practiced with it, in the wooded area around the cottage. Nothing elaborate; aim at a tree and hit it, that’s all she needed to be able to do. It’d be close range. Just so she had the feel of the gun — was used to its kick. She’d have to fire twice, after all, and had to be ready to reload and shoot again, if something should go wrong.

In a few minutes, it would all be over — all but the final few grisly steps. She and George would transfer the bodies to the van; George would return to Port City to play bereaved widower; and she, after nightfall, would drive the van and its gory cargo and leave it along the side of a nearby (but not too nearby) back road. The shotgun would be thrown in the river. The authorities would be looking for the nonexistent third member of the robbery team, the man who had “held Cora Rigley hostage” while Nolan and Jon looted the bank, the man who killed Cora Rigley when she tried to take a gun from her jewelry drawer and defend herself, the man who then double-crossed and killed his two partners and disappeared with all that money.

It gave her a sense of satisfaction to have fooled a pro like Nolan. The crucial thing had been to make him accept the idea of Cora Rigley as hostage. George had insisted to Nolan it was necessary; he’d said that a bank president who is the victim of two bank robberies within so short a span of time is going to look somewhat silly and incompetent no matter what, but at least with his wife in jeopardy, some sympathy would be aroused. Besides, it would keep everyone at the bank from contacting the police right away. Nolan, of course, had balked at involving George’s wife, but George had explained she wouldn’t be involved at all — that Cora was a drunk who slept till noon; that he would cut their phone wires the morning of the robbery; that their second car was in the shop, leaving Cora stranded there at home.

“What about later,” Nolan had wanted to know, “when your wife is questioned about being a hostage and knows nothing about it?”

George had explained, “I’ll say you people grabbed me outside the house and that I never actually saw one of the thieves with my wife.”

And, finally, Nolan had agreed the wife-as-hostage angle was worth including.

And it certainly was.

She smiled, sat on the bed, and cradled the shotgun in her lap, thinking about what life would be like as a millionaire’s wife.

When she walked out with the shotgun into the other room, she was totally unprepared for the door to open and the two figures in hunting jackets to enter. It was too early. She hadn’t heard the van approach. They couldn’t be here yet.

But they were.

She fired the shotgun.

One barrel at a time.

And the two men in hunting jackets, the older man and the young one, too, caught the full blast and lifted off the floor and flopped bloodily back down again on the crinkly plastic shroud.

17

Jon was glad it was almost over. Flat, snow-covered farmland glided by as he drove the van along at a leisurely forty-five, the blacktop road not devoid of traffic, but damn near. Nolan sat next to Jon, looking almost bored; he hadn’t said a word since leaving Port City out this back door of a blacktop. Jon’s hands were sweaty on the wheel. The gun in his belt was a lump nudging his belly like something not fully digested. Like a reminder of what might have happened at the bank, had anything gone wrong. Of the ugly kind of things that can happen when a robbery goes haywire.

Like that time, a few months ago, at the Comfort farm. A simple job. Simple and potentially less dangerous than today’s. And yet it had turned into a nightmare of guns going off and people dying. People getting killed.

One of them by him.

He felt the gun in his belt under the jacket, pressing into his gut, and thought, Thank God I’m not going to have to use this fucking thing.

“No shooting,” Nolan had told him last night. “This job’s not worth the risk. We got money. We aren’t desperate. So if we get caught — well, okay, we make bail, get our asses out of the country. But if we start shooting, somebody might get killed, and they don’t offer bail when somebody’s killed.”

“No shooting,” Jon had nodded, relieved. “That means we’ll be getting rid of the guns right after the robbery, then, right? At the car wash, when we hose down the van and dump those Santa suits?”

“No.”

“No?”

“We’ll hang on to the guns a while after that.”

“I thought you said no shooting.”

“Unless somebody shoots at us first.”

“You don’t mean cops...?”

“Christ no! Don’t ever shoot at a cop. Jesus!”

“Then what the hell are you talking about, Nolan?”

“I’m not talking about cops, that’s for goddamn sure.”

“Well, who else is there...? Oh. I see what you mean. You... you really think that’s a possibility?”

“Rigley and his bitch crossing us? Yes. If it was just Rigley, I’d say no. But it isn’t just Rigley. So stay alert.”

Jon’s mental replay of the conversation of the night before ended as he pulled onto the blacktop off of which was Rigley’s cottage. When they passed the run-down shack-on-stilts that was Rigley’s closest neighbor, Nolan said to stop a moment: there was a car, a Buick Electra, parked next to the shack. Then he said go on. Jon did.

Jon was swinging the van down the tree-sheltered drive to the cottage when they heard the sound. “What the hell was that?”

“Gunfire,” Nolan said, getting the .38 out of his belt.

“Gunfire?”

“Shotgun.”

Jon brought the van to a halt alongside the yellow Mustang that belonged to the girl.

“Watch that fucker Rigley,” Nolan said. He hopped out of the van.

Jon did the same. He wiped the sweat off his hand, took the .38 from out of his belt and went around to the back of the van and let a white-faced Rigley out.

“What’s going on?” the banker said.

“You tell me,” Jon said, and motioned at him with the .38.

Nolan had already disappeared inside the cottage, and Jon’s teeth were clamped together in tense anticipation of further sounds from within the cottage.

He grabbed Rigley by the elbow and prodded him with the gun and pushed him forward, toward the cottage. The scary part was Rigley made no protest; a little indignation from the man would have gone a long way toward easing Jon’s fears.

The door was open, but Jon couldn’t see in. The cottage was set up too high for that; you’d have to climb the wooden steps to see what was going on in there.

He stood outside in the cold air for a few long moments, digging the gun barrel into Rigley’s back, wishing to hell something would happen and at the same time that it wouldn’t.

“Come on in, kid,” Nolan’s voice said from inside. “There’s an old friend of yours here.”

Jon shoved Rigley toward the door, up the steps. Inside.

And Jon couldn’t believe what he saw.

Nolan said, “Shut the door, kid. Rigley, sit down.”

Jon shut the door.

Rigley sat down on the couch.

On the floor lay two men. Both of them wearing hunting jackets similar to Nolan and Jon’s. Roth of them dead. They were face up, arms asprawl. A shotgun lay between them. So did a common pool of blood. Jon knew it was gunfire he’d heard, but the wounds looked like something else: it looked as though each of the two men had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest with an ice pick. Their faces were twisted in surprise and, perhaps, disappointment.

One of them was Sam Comfort.

“The other one’s his son Terry,” Nolan said, in answer to the question on Jon’s face.

Across the room, the girl, Julie, was sitting at the picnic table by the bar. She was wearing a red sweater and red slacks; the clothes clung to her lush figure. A shotgun was in her lap.

“But... how?” Jon said, pointing at Sam Comfort’s body.

“Who knows?” Nolan said. “You didn’t kill him after all, that night couple months back. That much is sure. And he’s dead for sure, too, this time.”

Jon still couldn’t believe it, but managed to say, “What... what are... what were they doing... here?”

“It’s obvious they’re the ones who killed Breen,” Nolan said. “And that Comfort and his boy were the ones who broke into the shop the other day, too. They came on a mission of revenge and got wind of this robbery somehow, and decided to wait till we’d pulled it off so they could have the money and their fun both. Our friends the Comforts being here explains a lot of things.”

“They sure do,” Jon nodded, beginning to snap out of it but feeling as though he’d been struck a hard blow in the stomach.

And Nolan looked pointedly toward the girl and said, “But other things remain a mystery.”

“They came in and I shot them,” she said. Coldly. Calmly.

“No kidding,” Nolan said.

“You said it yourself... they were after the money. They thought they’d come in here and take care of me and wait for you. They didn’t expect me to have a gun.”

Nolan smiled. Almost pleasantly. “Neither did we.”

“You knew I had a shotgun here. You expected me to be ready in case something went wrong, didn’t you?”

“Let’s just say I’m less surprised than the Comforts.”

“I have no idea what you mean by that.”

“I mean you were waiting for us. For Jon and me. The Comforts came in in hunting jackets, and in this nice, dim room you thought it was us and emptied your shotgun.”

“That’s silly.”

“Oh? Then explain one thing to me, and I’ll be happy. Well split the money and go our separate ways. Explain the sheet of plastic.”

Jon hadn’t even noticed it, he’d been so dazed, but there it was: a plastic sheet, smoothed across the front half of the room. He wondered what in hell it could be for.

And then he knew.

He looked at the two Comforts oozing blood from their identical clusters of ice-picklike chest wounds, a puddle gathering between them on the plastic sheet, and all of a sudden Jon felt sick and he knew.

Nolan turned to Rigley and said, “Tell me something, George. How’s the wife?”

Jon had almost forgotten about Rigley. The man had been sitting on the couch, hands draped loose in his lap, looking less alive than the Comforts. But as Nolan spoke, something happened in the man’s face. Not much, just a tic, under the right eye. But a sign of life.

“I’m just guessing, of course,” Nolan said. “But she wouldn’t happen to be dead, would she?”

Jon had no idea what Nolan was talking about, but evidently Rigley did. The banker was staring into nothing, the tic jumping under his eye like a hand waving goodbye.

Across the room, Julie was smiling. Her smile was white in the darkness, a Cheshire cat smile. She was smiling at Nolan, who was pointing his .38 at her head.

Even when Nolan thumbed back the hammer, her smile didn’t fade.

“Nolan...?” Jon said.

And Nolan looked at Jon. And sighed. He stuck the gun in his belt and said, “Come on, kid. Let’s get out of here.”

Jon swallowed and said, “That’s a good idea,” and put his own .38 away.

Nolan turned to go.

The girl swung the shotgun up from her lap.

Shit! She must’ve switched shotguns before Nolan came in, switched the one she emptied into the Comforts for the gun the Comforts brought with them. And while those thoughts ran through his head, Jon shouted, “Nolan!” and dove for him, knocked him out of the way as the blast of the gun cut the couch in half and chewed up the wall behind.

And she still had a barrel left.

“No!”

Rigley.

He’d been sitting on the couch before the shotgun cut it in half, and he was on his feet now.

Which was more than could be said for Jon and Nolan, who were on their backs, like the Comforts, looking up into the infinite darkness of the shotgun muzzle, their own guns tucked snugly in their belts. The only thing keeping them from getting blown immediately away was Rigley, who had moved between them and the girl, saying, “No! No more killing!”

And took the other barrel in the chest.

A bunch of Rigley went flying over Jon’s head and splashed onto the wall, and the rest of Rigley, the bloody bulk of him, tumbled onto them, on top of them. But Nolan pushed the corpse aside and made a dive for the girl, whose shotgun was empty now. She swung the big gun at Nolan, and the heavy metal of those twin barrels caught him across the side of the head, and he went down, hard, at her feet.

Jon had lost his gun somewhere in the scramble, but he got himself out from under the dead weight of Rigley and got the girl by the arm before she was out the door. But she still had that damn shotgun, and empty or not, she was making a weapon of it. She caught Jon in the belly with the stock of the gun, and as he doubled over, she caught him again with it, on the back of the neck. He went down, not unconscious exactly, but conscious of nothing but pain.

It lasted maybe a minute, but he thought it was longer, thought it was an hour. He opened his eyes and looked into Sam Comfort’s ghostly pale countenance from a distance of a few inches. He gagged, reeled backwards, and got groggily to his feet. Nolan was over in the middle of the room, on his side, still out. Rigley was over by the bar, where the shotgun blast had blown him. The stench of gunpowder and shit filled in the room. As Nolan had explained to him once, “When people die, they sometimes shit their pants. Wouldn’t you, kid?”

He saw his .38 on the floor, over by the half- couch.

And he heard something outside.

A car starting!

He realized at once that his time perception had been screwed up and that the girl was probably still outside. He went over and scooped up his .38 and ran to the doorway.

She was in her yellow Mustang. The sack of money was in back; he could see it there, behind her, a back-seat driver looking over her shoulder.

He wrapped both hands around the stock of the .38 as Nolan had taught him and aimed and had her pretty face in his sights; all that was left was to squeeze the trigger and blow that pretty face away, in an explosion of windshield glass and flesh and teeth and bone and blood...

She saw him.

She got an animal look in her eyes — a cornered, crazed animal look — and there was no doubt in his mind that had the .38 been in her hand, he’d be dead by now. But she was unarmed and couldn’t do a damn thing.

Except hit the accelerator and back out of there, in a hailstorm of gravel.

He jumped the steps, ran after her, firing, and fired at her tires; might have hit one. He ran into the cloud of her gravel dust and fired again, but she was gone.

He lowered the gun and put it back in his belt.

“Don’t just stand there trying to figure out whether to feel ashamed or proud,” Nolan said.

He was in the doorway, standing in the doorway at the top of the steps. He came down, slowly, rubbing the side of his head where the girl had struck him with the shotgun barrel.

“I’m sorry, Nolan.”

“Sorry you didn’t shoot the bitch? So am I. Get your ass in that van and let’s get after her. I think you got her tire. She won’t be going far.”

18

Coming down the hill they could see the length of the several-mile-long straightaway beyond the Cedar River Bridge. There was no sign of the yellow Mustang. “Shit,” Nolan said.

“Maybe she turned back toward Port City,” Jon said.

“With that fat sack of money sitting in back? Not likely.”

The van rolled across the bridge, and they followed the highway as it curved and straightened out again. Still no sign.

“Maybe I didn’t hit her tire after all,” Jon said.

Nolan said nothing.

The West Liberty city limits were up ahead. The girl worked there, had friends there. If she was anywhere, Nolan thought, that was where she’d be.

The speed limit dropped to forty-five, and Jon complied as the van took the crest of a slight hill and followed the highway as it snaked into West Liberty.

“Maybe she took the Nichols turnoff,” Jon said. “Maybe she turned off on a side road. Maybe she stopped at a farmhouse.”

“Maybe that’s her up there.”

The Mustang was parked on the shoulder of the road, inside the city limits, but just barely — a meat locker was on one side of the highway, a junk yard on the other; ahead were some mobile homes and lower middle-class houses shuffled together as if a tornado had hit and nobody had bothered to put things back in order.

Also parked on the shoulder of the road, pulled in in front of the Mustang at an angle, was a two-year-old blue Ford.

On the side of the Ford, on the door, were big white letters: “WEST LIBERTY SHERIFF’S DEPT.” Nolan doubted those white letters would disappear if the car were pulled into a car wash.

In the back seat of the Ford was the girl Julie. She was looking at the junk yard and either didn’t see Nolan and Jon go by, or pretended not to.

Also in the back seat was the sack of money.

In the front seat was a man of thirty-one or so who had a pudgy face highlighted by a weak chin, close-set eyes, and five o’clock shadow. There was nothing impressive about the man except the badge on his cream-color uniform and the smaller, matching badge on his cream-color western-style hat.

What had happened was obvious: the smalltown sheriff had stopped the girl because she was speeding in a car with a flat tire, hardly the safest and most inconspicuous activity a person in the girl’s position might have done, and had stumbled onto something more than just your average case of reckless driving.

“Jesus,” Jon said. “What do we do, Nolan?”

If it had been out on the highway, Nolan might have chanced it. He might have stopped the van, put the sheriff to sleep, and gotten the money back. But this was in town. By now the sheriff could have radioed for a deputy or the state highway patrol or the Port City sheriff or police department. And there were homes nearby, and people standing out in front of them and out in front of the meat locker too. And there were some guys working in the junk yard, besides.

The van rumbled across the railroad tracks, and Nolan glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that the sheriff’s car had pulled in behind them. Just beyond the tracks was an intersection with a flashing red light. The West Liberty business district, such as it was, was to the left; Iowa City was straight ahead. The sheriff’s car drew alongside the van, in the turning lane. The pudgy-faced sheriff was looking ahead, watching for an opening in the traffic, which was brisk for as small as the town was. Julie was in back. So was the sack of money. She looked over at Nolan and Jon, shrugged, and looked away.

“Nolan?” Jon said again. Almost whispering. “What are we going to do?”

“Go straight,” Nolan said.

Content

Max Allan Collins
Hard Cash

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