Spree

by Collins, Max Allan

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

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

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

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

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

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

  11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Don’t say that,” Roger said.

  “Say what?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Hmmm.”

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

  “Who else is in?”

  “Nolan.”

  That decided it.

  “Count me in,” Roger said.

  “How about the . . . your pal?”

  “He’s in.”

  “You can speak for him?”

  “I can speak for him.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The third Leech merely nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

  Nolan said, “He’s with me.”

  “Does he have a name?” a Leech said.

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

  The Leeches didn’t get it.

  One said, “I’m Ricky.”

  Another said, “I’m Jerry.”

  Another said, “I’m Ferdy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Comfort said, “Nolan?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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