Spree

by Collins, Max Allan

  “What?”

  “I think she was dragged through here.” He pointed to the brush; a sort of path had been made, if you looked close: bushes were bent back, branches broken, snowy earth disturbed.

  Nolan followed the path, pushing roughly, impatiently, through the foliage, twigs and branches snapping like little gunshots. Jon followed, sometimes taking a branch in the face, as it boomeranged back from Nolan’s forward push.

  At the bottom of the incline was the curve of the road that went up into Nolan’s exclusive little housing development; of course that road went in the other direction as well, and the other direction was where Sherry had been taken.

  And she had been taken.

  “Oil,” Nolan said, pointing to a black puddle glistening on the icy pavement. “A car was parked here awhile. She should have noticed it when she drove by. They were waiting for her.”

  “Waiting? Who? What are you talking about?”

  Nolan bent and poked around in the snow at the edge of the curb. He found what seemed to be a frozen wad of white tissue or cloth; he picked it up, sniffed it.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  Jon said, “Will you please quit saying ‘fuck’ and ‘Jesus’ and tell me what the hell is going on?”

  He held the thing under Jon’s nose. “Sniff,” he ordered.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Jon said. “Chloroform.”

  “They snatched her,” Nolan said.

  “Who snatched her?”

  “If I knew that,” Nolan said, “I’d know who to kill.”

  Cars were streaming by on the nearby cross street, Thirty-fourth, a main thoroughfare. The world was going on as usual.

  “Why would anybody kidnap Sherry?” Jon asked, his face contorted with confusion.

  “Ransom,” Nolan said. “Somebody thinks I’m rich.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Pay them off.”

  “In what sense do you mean?”

  “Every sense you can think of. Let’s go back up to the house. It’s cold out.”

  They didn’t walk back up the wooded slope; they walked up the slickly icy street and cut to the right, up Nolan’s drive.

  “Are we going to call the police?” Jon said.

  Nolan just looked at him.

  Jon squinted at him. “Why, do you think this might be something from the past?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “Wait. They’ll call.”

  The phone on the kitchen wall rang at 9:37.

  “Nolan,” Nolan said.

  “Lose something?”

  The voice was male, rather soothing; an older man. With a faint, very faint southern accent. Nolan felt sick to his stomach; it was an alarm bell of sorts.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Do you know who you’re speaking to?”

  “No,” he said.

  A warm chuckle. “You will soon enough. Is there some . . . neutral place we can meet? To discuss terms?”

  Nolan thought for a moment. Then he said, “Downtown Rock Island, the Terminal Tap. Next to the bus station.”

  “That sounds nice and public. Bring your little friend.”

  “My little friend.”

  “That curly-headed kid. He’s part of the deal.”

  “I can’t speak for him.”

  “You better. Twenty minutes?”

  The line went dead.

  Jon was sitting nearby, perched on the edge of the kitchen table. “Nolan . . .”

  “Sherry is in very deep shit.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “That was Coleman Comfort.”

  Jon’s brow knit a sweater and his mouth dropped to the floor but he said nothing.

  “Sam Comfort’s brother,” Nolan explained.

  “I didn’t even know Sam Comfort had a brother!”

  “Now you do. Cole makes Sam look like Sister Mary Teresa.”

  “Oh, Jesus . . .” Jon’s head was lowered and he was running a hand through his hair.

  “He wants you to come to the meet.”

  Jon looked up and his eyes were round with fear, panic. “Me?”

  “You don’t have to.”

  Jon twitched a half smile. “Sure I do.” Then, trying to build Nolan’s confidence back up in him, said casually, “I don’t get invited to enough parties to afford turning down any invitations.”

  “Right.”

  They took Nolan’s silver Trans Am and on the way he filled Jon in on Coleman Comfort.

  “I did one job with him and Sam both,” he said, as they rolled by a peaceful snowy park. “A long time ago. I always felt they would’ve crossed me if they weren’t a little afraid of me.”

  “But you never had any real trouble with him,” Jon said, meaning Cole Comfort.

  “None before now. But Jon—remember: he thinks we killed his brother.”

  Bitterly, Jon said, “Even though we didn’t.”

  “He also thinks we killed his two nephews, and he’s a little more justified on that score.”

  “Shit, that’s right.” Jon shook his head.

  Nolan knew that the kid had done his best to put this part of his life behind him, to forget about the darkness there.

  “God help us,” Jon said, “we did kill one of them.”

  “Not ‘we,’” Nolan said. “I killed him.”

  “Same difference.”

  “In Cole Comfort’s mind, yes.”

  Jon sighed. Weight of the world.

  “Anyway, that’s what this is about,” Nolan said. “Revenge. Sherry may be dead already.”

  Jon looked over with some panic back in his face. “But he’s set up a meet in a public place . . .”

  “That may be to throw us off. He’s crazy. He may pull a shotgun from under the table and start blasting.”

  “Oh, wonderful. And us unarmed.”

  “No,” Nolan said. “There’s a .38 in the glove box. Get it.”

  Jon opened the glove box and rustled around; under several maps and behind sunglasses and a flashlight he found a .38, a snub nose.

  “Short barrel,” Jon said, checking to see if it was loaded, which it was. “Not your style.”

  “Good enough for the car,” Nolan shrugged.

  “What about you?”

  He took his right hand away from the wheel and patted his gray leather topcoat, where his left arm met his shoulder.

  “Is it going to come down to that?” Jon asked. “Shooting it out with some crazy old fucker in a bar?”

  “Maybe,” Nolan said.

  “And you think she may be dead already.”

  “Yes.”

  The Terminal Tap was a dump—a narrow dingy dark hole where stale, smoky air mingled with loud country western music; half of the usual neon signs and plastic beer signs were burnt out. So was most of the clientele, which seemed largely blue-collar, probably out-of-work blue-collar mostly, considering the Quad Cities economy. Comfort wasn’t there yet, at least not at a booth or table or at the bar. Nolan checked both the men’s and women’s cans, his gun in his overcoat pocket, and a woman fluffing her bouffant glared at him in the mirror and said, “Do you mind?”

  Then Nolan and Jon took a back booth. A pockmarked barmaid of thirty-seven or so in a checked blouse and too much makeup and badly permed mousy brown hair took time out from chewing her gum to take their order. Nolan said, “Anything draw,” and Jon nodded the same.

  “Okay,” she said, but Nolan grasped her arm. He held up a ten-dollar bill for her to see.

  “What’s that for?” she asked. She had brown eyes. Pretty eyes under a shitload of makeup.

  “This booth next to us, and this table,” Nolan said. “They’re empty.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “right. So?”

  “So keep it that way,” he said, and pressed the bill into her hand.

  “Sure,” she shrugged, smiled briefly at Nolan. It wasn’t busy. She’d have no trouble keeping them clear.

&
nbsp; The beers arrived in five minutes, and in ten so did Coleman Comfort.

  He was a tall, lean, white-haired man with a craggy but almost handsome face. He was wearing a western-style denim jacket with yellow pile lining and an off-white Stetson-type hat with a rattlesnake band; he stood just inside the door, pulling off heavy gloves, stamping the snow off his cowboy boots, unsnapping the denim jacket, revealing a blue plaid shirt, looking for Nolan.

  Nolan leaned out of the booth and crooked a finger.

  Comfort grinned like a wolf and came to them, slowly, holding his fur-lined leather gloves in one hand, slapping them into the palm of the other.

  Comfort stood next to their booth and gloated. His blue eyes crinkled at the corners as he said, “Nolan. Been a long time.”

  The jukebox, which was in the corner just across from them, blared a Gatlin Brothers song.

  “Sit down,” Nolan said, and motioned for Jon to slide over and make room. That put Jon and the snub nose to Comfort’s right, and Nolan and his long-barreled .38, which was in his left hand, under the table, directly across from Comfort.

  “You might’ve ordered me a beer,” Comfort said, eyes narrowed, affecting a mock sad expression, like a friend just a little disappointed in another.

  “Don’t fuck around,” Nolan said.

  The smile returned, and it was colder than outside. “I’ll do what I please. It’s my goddamn show.”

  The pockmarked barmaid came over and Comfort ordered a shot of whiskey. Old Grand-Dad, he insisted.

  “Your little girl is just fine,” Comfort said, slapping the gloves nervously against the cigarette-scarred, graffiti-carved wooden tabletop between them. He was still wearing the rattlesnake-banded hat. “Tucked away in a quiet spot, safe and sound. I’m not going to hurt her.”

  “Good. What do you want?”

  He leaned back against the booth and gestured with a thick, gnarled hand. “You know, when my boy Lyle spotted you—he stopped by your fancy joint, you know, not so long ago—and told me he seen you, well, first thing I thought about was getting even.”

  So that was it. You couldn’t live the straight life without something from the past, something bent, turning up now and then. And this time, it was a Comfort.

  Nolan said, “I didn’t kill your brother.”

  The smile faded. “Don’t shit me, Nolan. You ain’t in any position to shit me.”

  Nolan knew trying to reason with a Comfort was like lecturing a tree stump, but he tried anyway. “Your brother and his son Terry tried to hijack a job of ours; they got killed trying, but it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t Jon, who pulled the trigger. It was somebody else on that job, who’s dead, now. So you’re trying to settle a score that doesn’t need settling.”

  “Let’s suppose you’re telling me the truth,” Cole Comfort said, his eyes slits. “Even so, it don’t justify you trying to heist Sam at his house that time; you killed Billy in the process, so don’t go talking about scores that don’t need settling.”

  Billy Comfort. The redneck pothead who’d been poised to stick a pitchfork in Jon outside Sam Comfort’s rustic digs, when Nolan put two .38 slugs in him, killing him.

  “Sam ripped off a partner of mine,” Nolan said, knowing he was fighting a futile battle, but trying anyway. “I was getting his money back for him.”

  Comfort slammed a fist on the tabletop; the beers jumped, and Cole’s smile, his cool attitude, fell away to show the rage beneath. “Bullshit! It was no business of yours. You don’t steal from your own kind! It ain’t done. You don’t fuckin’ do it!”

  The barmaid brought Cole his whiskey. He paid her, then gulped it down like medicine.

  “A lot of people who worked with your brother, over the years,” Nolan said, “just flat out disappeared. The same is true of people who worked with you.”

  Cole shook his head, his expression now stern. “I’m a businessman, don’t you forget it. I treat my business associates fair and square.”

  The Statler Brothers were booming out of the jukebox.

  “What do you want for the girl?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  Astounded by all this, Jon entered the conversation: “Then why in hell did you take her?”

  “Inducement,” Comfort said, looking at Nolan, not Jon.

  “Inducement,” Nolan said.

  “You see, we’ve had some bad blood, you and me—all three of us, matter of fact. But that’s bad blood under the bridge, far as I’m concerned.”

  “Really.”

  He folded his hands. “I have a business proposition for you, Nolan.”

  “An offer I can’t refuse.”

  “That’s right. Not if you want to see that little piece of tail again.”

  “Don’t even think about hurting her.”

  Comfort took off the Stetson-like hat and scratched his head, fingers lost in the thick pure white hair. Then he put the hat back on and said, “Oh, I don’t think it’s gonna have to come to that. I think you’d have wanted to go in with me on this job in any event—but, just in case, because of the bad blood, I took the girl for inducement sake.”

  “Get to the point.”

  “Like I said—revenge crossed my mind. I won’t lie to you and say otherwise. But then I thought, Cole—stealing well is the best revenge. Ain’t that the truth?”

  “Point being?”

  Cole Comfort’s smile was a crease in his leathery face; his eyes twinkled, like a psycho Santa Claus. “I spent some time, recently, at that fancy mall of yours.”

  “It’s not mine.”

  “Sure it is—you got your restaurant there. You know all about that place, and what you don’t know, you can find out. I watched you. You got friends. You’re a regular pillar of the community, ain’t you, Nolan? They love you—butchers, bakers, candlestick makers. Bankers, too.”

  “So what?”

  “I have a dream,” he said, and it wasn’t Martin Luther King’s. “I think maybe everybody who ever was in a shopping mall has had this dream—namely, what would it be like to have the place to yourself some night? To just go shopping from store to store, taking what you want, and best of all—not paying for anything.”

  “That’s an interesting dream. But maybe it’s time you woke up, Cole.”

  He smiled big. “Dreams come true, sometimes. You’re going to help me make mine come true. You’re going to help me go shopping at Brady Eighty. We’re going to loot the entire goddamn place.”

  Jon said, “You can’t be serious.”

  But Nolan knew he was.

  Cole Comfort, waving a hand in the air, grandiosely, said, “We’re going to bring trucks in, semis, right into loading docks. We’re going to steal every appliance and electronic plaything in the place. We’ll hit the bank; the jewelry stores. We’re going to empty everything but the pet store, and if one of us wants a goddamn dog, well, we’ll take that, too.”

  “It can’t be done,” Nolan said.

  “Sure it can,” Cole said. He painted an air picture with a sweep of a gnarled hand. “Think of it—an all-night shopping spree—and we leave without paying the bill.”

  Silence; silence but for the Oak Ridge Boys, blaring.

  “Let the girl go and I’m in.”

  “No. First we loot the mall. Then you get the girl.”

  Nolan looked at Jon. Jon rolled his eyes.

  Nolan said, “When did you plan on taking this shopping spree?”

  “Thursday night.”

  “What Thursday night?”

  “Next Thursday night.”

  Jon said, “You’re nuts. You’re fucking nuts.”

  Comfort smiled at Jon, a nasty smile. “Children should be seen and not heard,” he told him.

  “How do you plan on going about this?”

  “Oh, I got some ideas, but most of it, you’re going to figure out, Nolan. You got the inside track, after all. You’re going to run the show, like always.”

  “I’m the director,” Nolan said, �
�and you’re the producer.”

  Comfort grinned like a good ole boy. “That’s right. Now, I’ve spent two weeks doing my own homework, and putting things in motion. We’ll have three semis and ten men, ourselves included. Everybody’ll be in town by Tuesday night. We’ll have a great big get-together and you can tell us just how we can get this turkey shot.”

  “It’s not enough time.”

  “It’ll just have to be. Besides, sooner the job goes down, the sooner you get your piece of tail back.”

  “Don’t call her that.”

  “I’ll call her what I like.”

  “You do what you think is best, Cole.”

  “You’re in, then?”

  “I’m in.”

  “And the kid?”

  “Ask him yourself.”

  Comfort looked at Jon and Jon said, “I’m in.”

  Comfort put both hands on the table and pushed out of the booth, smiling. He tipped his snake-banded hat to them. “Thank you, gentlemen. You’ll be hearing from me.”

  “Cole.”

  “Yes?”

  “If the girl is returned with so much as her hair mussed, I’ll shoot you in the head.”

  “Will you, now?”

  Nolan just looked at him.

  Comfort’s smile disappeared, and then so did he, out into the cold night.

  Part Two

  9

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

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