This week wouldn’t quite work that way.
For one thing, he was in no frame of mind to think up funny stuff—and for another, his time wouldn’t be his own for a while, not till Friday, and chances were Friday wouldn’t find his frame of mind any more conducive to thinking up funny stuff than it was today.
This week was spoken for; his time was taken up.
He had a mall to help heist.
This mall he was strolling through right now, Casual Corner, Radio Shack, Mrs. Field’s Cookies, Kroch & Brentano’s, Barb’s Hallmark, weaving through the swarm of seasonal shoppers, in and out and around the mock rustic carts perched periodically in the middle of the wide mall aisle, cute carts filled with Christmas knick- knacks, quilted Christmas stockings and little wooden reindeer and lots and lots of candles, seasonal shops on wheels overseen by teenage girls dressed as elves. In the central area of the mall, where the ceiling rose an extra half story to a mirrored height, tiny twinkling white Christmas tree lights, arranged in circular chandeliers, hovered like plastic ghosts; a white picket fence decorated with gay red bows surrounded Santa’s cotton-covered slope, in the midst of which steps rose to the Christmas occasion. The fat man in red and white sat on a red and white throne with an eight-year-old girl in his lap; you can be arrested for that in some states, Jon thought. Teenage girl elves atop the slope were charging four bucks per Polaroid with Santa. Maybe stealing was in season.
Ho ho ho.
Christmas was Jon’s favorite holiday, favorite time of year, for that matter; usually the commercialism didn’t get him down, it was just part of the Christmas package—only this year he felt cynical and angry, because Nolan’s Sherry was in the hands of that crazy murderous son of bitch Comfort. Maybe she was dead already.
He had thought he’d left this behind him. He had thought those days, with Nolan, were over. He liked Nolan. He respected him, and supposed he felt something like affection for the guy, though you’d have to take Jon’s toenails out with pliers to get him to admit it.
But those days with Nolan seemed a nightmare to him now. A vivid nightmare, easily recalled, but nothing he wanted to dream again. He had seen people die, violently; he had done violence himself. He had felt no exhilaration during the handful of heists Nolan had taken him on—only nausea and cold, clammy fear.
Already, he had the butterflies; like he always had before a performance. The trouble was, the resemblance between rock ’n’ roll and heisting ended there: once on stage, music all around him, the butterflies flew; on a heist, impending violence around him, the butterflies grew.
How did he ever get mixed up with a guy like Nolan? He had his criminal uncle to thank for that; thanks, Unc. RIP. Merry Christmas.
He turned left at Santa’s Kingdom and walked down a wide short corridor where, near the front entrance and separated by another Our Merry Best stop sign and a fenced-in patch of cotton snow with electronic big-eyed smiling-face rosy-cheeked puppets riding a sleigh, was the First National Bank branch, on the right, and at left, Nolan’s. The restaurant wasn’t open yet, but Nolan was waiting there for Jon. When Jon raised his fist to knock, in fact, Nolan’s face appeared in the glass door and he opened it up.
Jon stepped inside, glanced around the place. This room (one of two, not counting the kitchen) seemed to be largely a bar, and there was a nice parquet dance floor, room for a band to play, if some tables were moved out. The walls were busy with nostalgic bric-a-brac and lots of yuppie-ish hanging and potted plants; it wasn’t much like Jon pictured a place called Nolan’s would look. Sherry’s touch, he supposed.
“Nice place,” Jon said.
“It’s a living,” Nolan said. He was wearing a pale blue dress shirt and black slacks; no tie or jacket. He pointed to a nearby table, and they sat.
“You want a beer or something?” Nolan asked.
“No.”
“Did you take a look around?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think?”
Jon gestured with two cupped hands, as if grabbing the balls of a giant. “I think this is nuts. Heisting a goddamn shopping center? It’s looney! Why not Fort Knox, other than Goldfinger already tried it. And, shit, man, Comfort’s crazy. As a fucking bedbug.”
Nolan moved his head to one side, slightly; that was his shrug. “You’re right and you’re wrong. Right about Comfort. Wrong about the mall heist.”
Jon looked at Nolan carefully; the lighting was dim, and Nolan seemed even harder to see than usual. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I don’t kid, kid.”
Jon smirked. “Really? I seem to recall a few thousand sarcastic remarks directed in my general vicinity.”
“Sacking this place can be done,” Nolan said. “It’s nagged at me ever since I took space here, how easy it would be.”
“Nolan, this place is fucking huge. And now this alternate-universe Jed Clampett wants to pull a couple of trucks up to the back door and go shopping? A couple days from now? And you think that’s a good idea?”
Nolan folded his hands on the table and looked at them. “It doesn’t matter what I think; it’s Comfort’s party. But the job is workable. It’s also nothing I want any part of. It endangers the life I got going here.”
Jon sat forward. “You mean, you figure an investigation after the robbery might be serious enough that somebody could uncover your checkered past?”
“Investigation is hardly the word. And neither is robbery. There are fifty shops in Brady Eighty. Two of them are jewelry stores. Plus three major department stores—Petersen’s, J. C. Penney and I. Magnin. There’s also a bank.”
Jon shrugged. “Sure there’s a bank, but there’s no way to get in the vault. They’re sure to have a big mother with a time lock. Right?”
“Right. But they got two night deposit safes, and an instant-cash machine. That’s three safes—modest-size ones. You know what they got in in ’em?
“No idea.”
“I’d say, twenty grand in the instant-cash machine. And as for the night deposits, you were out in that mall. You saw the kind of business they’re doing.”
“It’s crowded, all right.”
“It’s December. The month that makes the rest of the year possible, for businesses. There could easily be fifty grand in night deposit money—not less than twenty-five.”
Jon shrugged again. “So there’s serious money, in this. But there’s also a ten-man string. Assuming Comfort won’t pay the two of us, that still leaves eight, which is a lot of ways to split the take.”
Nolan got up. He paced slowly beside the table. That bothered Jon; Nolan wasn’t the pacing type.
“I don’t want to go into it in detail right now,” Nolan said, still pacing, “but I figure this for a half-mil haul, conservatively, after goods are fenced.”
This time Jon didn’t shrug. “So if this goes down, it’s going to be major. Major media coverage; serious cop action.”
“Yes. My being the inside man on the heist could well come out. So could my ‘checkered past.’”
Jon was nodding. “The bank robbery will bring in the feds; state and local police will enter the other robberies; the department stores will have insurance investigators on the case . . .”
Nolan stopped pacing, looked around him. “I could lose everything.”
“Is this place what’s important to you?” Jon said, disgustedly. “What about Sherry?”
Nolan looked at the floor. “I said I could lose everything.”
Jon sighed. “I’m sorry. I know she’s what’s important in this.”
“She’s more important to Comfort than she is to us.”
“How so?”
“She’s what’s keeping him alive.” Nolan checked his watch. “Come on. I’m having coffee with a guy at two-thirty. I want you to meet him.”
They turned right at Santa’s Kingdom toward the Walgreen’s, half of which was drugstore, the other half cafe, whose outer wall was lined with booths looking out on the mall. Jo
n followed Nolan into the café, where they joined a ruddy-cheeked balding blond man of about twenty-five, who wore an expensive-looking gray suit and a red-and-green-striped tie; the gray coat was supposed to say executive, and the tie was supposed to say Christmas, or so Jon assumed. The guy wanted it both ways: authority figure and nice, regular guy.
“Nolan,” he said, putting down the coffee cup he was sipping from, half rising, extending a hand to shake. “Good to see you.”
“How are you, Stan? Stan, this is Jon Ross. He’s an old friend of mine.”
Stan half rose, grinning, extended a hand to Jon and they shook; too firm a grip, Jon thought, an overcompensating grip.
“Old friend?” Stan said. “He’s as young as I am.”
“We’re none of us getting any younger, Stan,” Nolan said, smiling faintly. “Jon’s the nephew of a friend of mine. Late friend. Neither of us have much family, so we like to spend Christmas together.”
“Right,” Jon said, smiling blandly at the guy, thinking, gee, Nolan, what a crock of shit.
Nolan gestured toward Stan and said, “Stan Jenson is our new mall manager.”
“Well, six months new,” Stan said, embarrassed, as if Nolan had been praising him effusively, as if “mall manager” were a designation on a par with “ambassador” or “astronaut.”
“He’s the guy who thought up that ‘Our Merry Best’ slogan,” Nolan said to Jon, deadpan.
“Really,” Jon said.
“No big deal,” Stan said, waving it off, as if Jon had said “Wow.”
“Snappy,” Nolan said, nodding.
“The advertising firm said they couldn’t have done it better,” Stan admitted, with a modest little shrug.
A waitress came and Nolan, who hadn’t had lunch yet, ordered the chicken fried steak. Jon, who hadn’t had lunch yet either, was still in no mood to eat; he ordered a Coke.
“Stan,” Nolan said, “I appreciate you getting together with me. I missed last month’s Mall Merchant Association meeting.”
“I know,” Stan said, smiling, “and we met at your restaurant!” He was grinning, as if he’d pointed out the biggest irony of them all. This guy was harmless, Jon thought, but a jerk. If a jerk can ever be harmless.
Nolan said, “What I wanted to talk to you about was mall security.”
Jon squirmed in his seat.
Stan put on an exaggerated “oh no” look, shook his head. “Not that again. Are you singing the same old song, Nolan?”
“I think security here is lax, Stan.”
Stan’s expression turned somber. “Nolan, I appreciate your concern. And as a merchant yourself you have every right to voice your opinion. But I wish you wouldn’t denigrate our fine staff.”
“I’m not denigrating anybody. On the other hand, I didn’t want to embarrass anybody, either. That’s why I wanted to talk to you, one on one. Not at a meeting.”
Stan nodded, appreciating that.
“Virtually every store out here, including the bank, is tied into the same security system,” Nolan said.
“A-1 Security,” Stan said, smiling tightly, nodding some more.
“They’re a good outfit. But did you ever stop to think that all of our alarms are carried on one phone line? All it would take is for a thief to snip that one phone line and he could have carte blanche.”
Stan smiled wide now, shaking his head, waving a hand as if to quiet a child. “That’s not the way alarm systems work, Nolan—if the wires are cut, the alarms are activated—at both the A-1 office and the police department.”
“It’s possible to jump the alarm, Stan.”
“Jump the alarm? You mean, cross the wires to bypass the alarm?”
“Yes.”
“Wrong again, Nolan. This just isn’t your area.”
“How am I wrong?”
“Well, this is going to get a little technical. But bear with me.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“A-1 tells me that if their alarm is jumped, the ‘pulse rate’ of the current flowing through it will set off the alarm.”
The waitress put Nolan’s chicken fried steak platter down in front of him; it included a generous portion of mashed potatoes with brown gravy, and Jon, whose Coke she also delivered, thought it was no wonder Nolan was getting a belly on him.
“Well, that’s reassuring,” Nolan said, cutting a bite of meat. “But I’d like to put another alarm system in, at the restaurant—not just a silent one, connected to A-1, but something nice and loud.”
Stan lectured with a pointing finger, friendly but firm. “Check your lease. We don’t allow any audible alarm systems.”
Jon couldn’t stay out any longer. He said, “Why not?”
Smiling, Stan looked at Jon patronizingly. “It’s been our experience, in our other malls, that when such alarms go off during business hours, by accident, as they sometimes do, it can be very unnerving, alarming, if you will, to the shoppers.” He stopped to chuckle at “alarming.”
“With our location, on the edge of the city, with so little else around, who would hear such an alarm after hours, except the burglar himself, who would beat a hasty retreat? A silent alarm, on the other hand, which A-1 assures us that it can react on within minutes, will keep the burglar there and unaware.”
“What’s wrong,” Jon asked, “with scaring him away before he has time to take anything or do much damage?”
Stan shrugged matter-of-factly. “What’s wrong with capturing him? The five minutes it would take A-1 to dispatch a car, not to mention the police who may well be there just as soon, isn’t that big a deal.”
“Okay,” Nolan said, his chicken fried steak eaten, just starting his potatoes, “you’ve convinced me. But one thing you will never convince me on . . .”
Stan laughed softly, shaking his head in friendly frustration. “You still think we should have a security man on duty twenty-four hours a day.”
Nolan nodded, swallowed a bite, said, “I think you should hire four more men, and two should stay on night shift. Patrolling inside and out.”
“That’s simply not necessary. The corporation has malls all over the Midwest, and security measures in those malls are exactly like those here. When was the last time you heard of a robbery at a mall?”
“Hell,” Nolan said, grinning, which was something Jon had rarely seen, “maybe I’m just paranoid.”
“Well,” Stan said, finishing his coffee, “at least you didn’t suggest our security guard be armed, for pity’s sake, like you did at that one merchants’ meeting.”
“I just suggested that for after hours,” Nolan said. “And by the way, that kid you have on the job just doesn’t have the experience.”
“He was an M.P. in the service.”
“You should hire some retired ex-cop to work with him.”
“How is some paunchy old guy going to do going up against the young punks who cause problems in a modern mall?”
Nolan pushed his clean plate away from him. “If you had a young guy plus an old pro, you might come up with a winning combination.”
“It would never work,” Stan said. He glanced at his watch. “Got to run. Have a meeting with the marketing director at three.” He got up and out of the booth, shook Nolan’s hand, thanked him for his concern, shook Jon’s, smiled, said it was nice meeting him, left.
“Jesus,” Jon said.
“His father is vice-president in charge of personnel for the home office, by the way. Not that security would be any better around here if somebody competent were in his job.”
“No armed guard at night?” Jon said, dumbfounded.
“No guard at all, after ten P.M. One maintenance man, who’s a woman, who mops and does windows. Who could Windex a ‘burglar,’ if she ran into one, I guess.”
“What about that ‘pulse rate’ business?”
“He’s right, but it can be got around.”
“Are you saying this is going to be easy?”
“No. There are plenty of
problems. But problems can be solved. That’s what our business is about.”
“Are we back in that business?”
“Yeah. Just in time for Christmas, too. Come on. Let’s walk.”
They walked the mall, tinsel and plastic greenery all around them. Hickory Farms. Record Bar. Ann Taylor.
“Comfort called this morning,” Nolan said.
“Yeah?”
“He told me some of the people he has lined up. I know two of them. Pete-man named Roger Winch, who usually works with a locksmith named Phil Dooley—Comfort didn’t mention Dooley’s name, though, and I didn’t ask if he was a player; and an electronics guy name of Dave Fisher. Good people. That may make the difference for us.”
“Well, good.”
“I told Comfort that getting Sherry back wasn’t enough. That I had to be in for a full share. And you, too.”
“Well . . . uh, why did you do that?”
“I want him to think I buy into the notion that all he wants out of this is my help on the heist.”
“And you don’t?”
“Of course not. I’m convinced Comfort intends to keep Sherry alive only till after the job goes down. You see, I told him I wouldn’t play unless I talked to Sherry on the phone right before the heist happens. That keeps her alive till Thursday, anyway.”
“Damn.”
“We’re going to try to find her, Jon.”
“I figured as much.”
“Because once we’ve helped Comfort, he’ll kill her. And me.”
“Don’t say it.”
“And you.”
“I asked you not to say it.” Muzak played “Jingle Bells.” Jingle all the way.
10
Spree Page 9