Dooley didn’t step forward, but he gave his two cents’ worth. “I agree it’s a dirty rotten shame, your girl. But I also agree it’s between you and the Comforts. Why don’t you keep Cole and his kid, and let the rest of us go, and send the Leech boys on to Omaha where our fence is waiting. We can all retire on this one, Nolan. You, too.”
The Leech who stood outside the truck spit on the pavement. “Who gives a shit who Comfort killed or didn’t kill. We been workin’ all fuckin’ night. And this is one big fuckin’ haul. Fuck it!”
“Yeah,” one of his brothers said, leaning out of the back of the truck. “Fuck it! Let’s go.”
Comfort’s rage had subsided; he was smiling—lapping up the way the crowd had turned against Nolan. His blue eyes fairly twinkled in the leathery face and he smoothed back his white hair with one hand and walked a few paces toward Nolan.
With mock diplomacy, he said, “I gotta throw in with the Leeches, on this one. You can’t undo this thing, at this point. Even your friends are lining up against you. Listen to ’em, Nolan—they’re telling you fuck it. Fuck it, Nolan. Hell, fuck you.”
Nolan shot him in the head.
It lifted Comfort off his feet and knocked him flat on his back, with a splintering splat; his skull was cracked open—whether from the shot he took in the forehead, or the fall to the cement, Nolan couldn’t say; maybe a little of both. At any rate, the blue eyes stared up at nothing and his arms were splayed out and his legs asprawl and the top of his head began emptying, as if all the meanness was oozing out, a slimy trail of blood and brains draining toward the truck.
“Pa!” Lyle shouted. He ran to the body, slipped in his father’s brains and fell; then he picked himself up and kneeled before the corpse, and stared at it openmouthed. “Pa?”
The rest of them stood there, on the pavement, inside the truck, mouths open, eyes wide, breathing in the smell of cordite.
Nolan, a question mark of smoke curling out his gun barrel, said, “Put it back. Please.”
“Well, since you put it that way,” Winch said, and he headed back toward the truck.
“No problem,” Fisher said, and joined Winch.
Dooley said, “I can handle it,” and reached for the nearest box.
But the Leech brothers had other ideas, at least the two inside the truck did, because they burst out the back of it like commando jacks-in-the- box, guns in hand; they’d had them stashed within the trailer, apparently, big blue-black .357 mags that spewed noise and flames and more, exploding at Nolan and Jon, the Leeches screaming their anger, no words, just anger, gunfire ringing in the concrete room.
Nolan yelled, “Hit the deck,” in the process of doing so, and Dooley and Winch and Fisher did so too, even as they scrambled toward the sidelines, for cover, though all it was was boxes, but Jon just crouched and opened up with the UZI while Nolan, on his belly, fired the .38 and bullets zinged and danced across the filthy sweaters of the two men, who pitched forward and landed face-first, not far from Jon’s feet, deader than dirt.
The third Leech had grabbed up one of the guns from the pile Nolan disarming them had made, and scrambled off into the warehouse and Nolan pursued him, telling Jon to cover Lyle, who through all this, impervious to it, remained crouched over his father’s body, apparently wondering what life would be like without someone to tell him how to live his.
Nolan ran after the final Leech, who hurtled down one and then cut over to another backroom aisle, and was nearing the double doors that led out into the department store, when he wheeled to throw some gunfire Nolan’s way.
It was wild gunfire, though, chewing up some shelved merchandise at left, and Nolan shot him once, in the chest, and the bullet burst bloodily through the Leech and the Leech burst bloodily through the double doors, flopping on his back in ladies’ wear, dead as his brothers.
When Nolan returned, Jon was guarding Lyle, and the three men were dutifully unloading the trailer.
“Forget it,” Nolan told the three. He allowed himself a sigh. “It’s fucked, now. We’ll leave the trucks loaded—they belong to the Leeches, anyway—and the Leeches aren’t going anywhere.”
Winch put down the box he was unloading. He shrugged. “Maybe if we leave everything, they’ll think a fight broke out. You know, your classic falling out among thieves, and that’ll be the end of it.”
“Yeah,” Fisher said. “Maybe they’ll just write it off as a heist that went sour.”
“Maybe,” Nolan said, nodding.
“Imagine,” Dooley said, dryly, “anybody mistaking this for a heist that went sour.”
“Pa,” Lyle was saying.
The three men exchanged glances, and walked over to Nolan as a group. Winch, who seemed a little pale, remained spokesman.
He said, “Why don’t the three of us split, then. This is no place to be hanging around.” He looked around him. The two dead Leeches. The dead Coleman Comfort. The bashed-up-looking Lyle Comfort, mourning on his knees, a smear of his father’s brains on his left shoe. Blood on the floor and the smell of shit and cordite in the air. Winch shook his head again. “This is what I hate about this business.”
Nolan said, “I promised you money.”
Dooley, who was anxious to go, waved that off. “We trust you.”
Fisher thought about that briefly, then agreed.
“I don’t think you’ll have to wait,” Nolan said, and he went over to Comfort’s body. He took Lyle by one arm and hauled him over by the far wall; told Jon to keep him covered. Jon was doing fine, Nolan thought; he’d come through this like a real pro.
Nolan bent over Comfort’s body and pulled down its coveralls.
Winch said, “Jesus Christ, Nolan—what . . .”
One of the coverall pockets was soaked and the strong sickly sweet smell of perfume rose; a bottle the old man had boosted had broken when he fell, apparently. Nolan ripped open the plaid shirt to reveal longjohns; and, finally, a fat money belt around Comfort’s waist. He unfastened the bulky belt, stood, and extended it toward the three men, like it was some plump, ungainly but rare snake he’d bagged for them.
“You guys carve this up,” he said. “If there isn’t at least a hundred grand here, I’ll eat the fucker. Anyway, I want no part of it.”
Winch took the belt, held it in both hands and looked at it incredulously and said to Nolan, “How did you know he’d have it on him?”
“I didn’t,” Nolan said. “But I noticed he’d put on some weight since Sunday—he must not’ve worn the money belt to that first meeting. Entrusted it to Lyle, in case I pulled something, I guess. Anyway—I never knew a Comfort who believed in banks.”
“This one takes the cake,” Winch said, shaking his head.
“It’s getting light out,” Dooley said, touching Winch’s sleeve. “We better go.”
“My sentiments exactly,” Fisher said.
The men bade brief good-byes to Nolan and Jon, stepped over and around the corpses, collected their guns and left out the back door, going quickly to Fisher’s Buick in the parking lot and disappearing into the sunrise, leaving behind a changed, rearranged Brady Eighty that would, in a short time, surprise those who would come in and take over for them, the day shift who normally inhabited the place, who would not be in for a normal day.
Lyle had said nothing through all this, except an occasional “Pa.” He hadn’t wept. He just stood near the wall, looking stunned, Jon holding the UZI on him, Lyle’s wide eyes staring at his pa’s corpse.
Nolan put the .38’s nose against Lyle’s.
“So you threw her down a well,” he said.
Lyle looked past the gun at Nolan, like a wide-eyed child. Orphan child. He shook his head no.
“What, then?” Nolan demanded.
“She was running. She fell down one.”
Nolan looked at Jon. Jon looked at Nolan.
“Show me where,” Nolan said.
22
FEELING LIKE he was in a dream, an unending awful dream, Jon dr
ove Nolan’s silver Trans Am, following the cherry-red Camaro down Highway 92, woods at left, the Mississippi at right.
He wondered if Cindy Lou was on her bus yet. He had given her the keys to his van, back at Brady Eighty, and told her to leave it at the bus station; he’d pick it up later. Was she sitting in the station even now, waiting for a bus to take her away to L.A., away from the father she feared, and didn’t know was dead?
Jon shook his head; he’d tried to help her. Just like she tried to help him. But she had, not so indirectly, provided the circumstances for her father’s murder—in which Jon was an accomplice.
He wondered about her. He wondered if she would find any kind of life in La-La Land. Waitress? Hooker? Something better, he hoped. He wondered how long it would be before she learned of her father’s death, and how she’d react. How would she feel about Jon, and Nolan? Would she bite her lip and understand? Or would she be the next Comfort to come out of the past and want to kill them?
The sun, not at all high in the sky, glinted off the cold gray choppy surface of the river. Up ahead Nolan was driving. Comfort’s son Lyle was in the back seat, trussed up like something out of a bondage magazine, but sitting up nonetheless, so he could see out the window and give Nolan directions. The excess clothesline, and there was quite a bundle of it, was on the floor in the Camaro’s back seat. So was a flashlight.
“We’re not going to leave her down there,” Nolan had said, with a passion unlike him.
Left unsaid was the faint hope that she might be alive. But both knew that hope was so faint as to be transparent as the wishful thinking it was. The girl was dead. Sherry was dead. Nolan would have to face that.
Recovering a body wasn’t Jon’s idea of a great way to start a day; his bones ached, he was so tired, and he supposed hunger was behind the grinding pain in his stomach, but after his session with the UZI, eating was out of the question—the idea of ever eating again seemed in fact abstract.
He’d killed those men, those two Leeches. Nolan’s bullets had been in there, too, but Jon had seen the UZI bullets zing across the chests, going in black, coming out red. His mouth was dry.
They were murdering lowlife sons of bitches but he had killed them. Self-defense, but he had done it. He had killed them. He could face that.
He could live with it.
What he wasn’t sure about was whether he could live with murdering Lyle Comfort.
Nolan had left his unregistered long-barreled .38 back with the dead bodies (Jon’s UZI too)—the revolver was, after all, the gun Comfort was killed with; Nolan had even placed it in the hand of a dead Leech. In return he’d taken the unfired Colt Woodsman that had belonged to Comfort; that was the gun Lyle would be killed with, Jon assumed. Nolan would do it. Dumping Lyle’s body on a roadside in his cherry-red Camaro. He was planning to do it. With luck Jon wouldn’t have to watch.
But he’d be a part of it, just the same, and he wished he’d never met Nolan, and wished this dream over, this nightmare which at the moment was a strangely lyrical one, sun-dappled Mississippi, starkly beautiful snowy woods, please God let it end.
They passed a sleazy little motel, the Riverview, with signs boasting water beds and XXX movies in rooms; so much for lyricism.
Up ahead the red Camaro’s brake lights indicated a slowing down, and soon Nolan pulled off to the right, into one of many little picnic areas along the river. Jon pulled in behind him. The road seemed deserted; it was 6:37 A.M. Friday.
Jon got out, wearing his long navy coat, and gloves, but unarmed. Nolan got out of the Camaro, wearing no jacket or even sport coat, the Colt Woodsman stuck in his waistband, looking black against the light blue shirt, a shirt Nolan seemed to have been wearing constantly (the shirt Sherry bought him, Jon suddenly realized, the afternoon she was kidnaped!) and went around on the other side and opened the door and took out a knife and leaned in the back seat. Christ! Jon thought, but then realized Nolan was only cutting the ropes.
Jon walked over to the Camaro, wishing he were anywhere else, except perhaps that bloody loading dock which awaited some hapless I. Magnin employee.
Nolan hauled Lyle out of the back seat; the boy looked pale and confused but, oddly, not frightened. His expensive brown jacket and gray slacks looked a little the worse for wear. He wasn’t bound in any way.
Nolan held him by the crook of one arm and smiled tightly. “You’re sure this is the place, Lyle?”
Lyle nodded. “Not far from here.”
A car went past.
Without looking at him, Nolan said to Jon, “Get the rope and the flashlight.”
Jon got them out of the back.
“Let’s go,” Nolan said. Keeping his gun in his waistband, he guided Lyle by the arm like a child, across the highway. Jon trailed after, carrying the thick ring of clothesline in one hand, the flashlight in the other.
They walked up a snowy slope; leaves under the gentle layer of snow crackled beneath their feet. The sky was a slate blue and nearly cloudless. Wind whispered, but it was a chilly whisper, a ghostly kiss.
At the edge of the woods, Nolan said, “Do you know where she is, Lyle?”
He nodded.
“You wouldn’t play games with me, would you?
He shook his head no.
“Good,” Nolan said. “Now lead the way.”
He let go of Lyle’s arm and withdrew the Colt from his waistband and walked just a few steps behind Lyle, who led them into the woods; he wasn’t moving quickly. He seemed defeated. Near catatonic. And, as Jon knew, and as Nolan most certainly knew, he was thick as a post. He wasn’t planning anything. Or if he was, it wouldn’t amount to much.
They hadn’t walked far when Lyle stopped. He pointed up ahead, through the gray trees, where it seemed slightly more open.
“Over there,” he said.
Nolan poked him in the back with the .38. “Show me.”
Soon they could see it, where the sharp angles of broken planks jutted up like strange weeds. Nolan shifted the gun to his left hand and grabbed Lyle’s arm and pulled him along and ran. Jon ran, too. He stumbled once, over a root, but didn’t fall.
You couldn’t tell what it was, at first. Weeds and leaves and snow still covered most of it, but in the center a jagged hole yawned, where the rotted planks had given away. Nolan put the gun in his waistband and cautiously crawled out to where she’d fallen through. He was on his side, his feet on the snowy ground, his trunk on the rotted wood.
“Can’t see anything,” he said, looking in. “Give me the flashlight.”
Jon handed it to him. Lyle was just standing there, glum, obedient.
Nolan shot the light down there and said, “I think I see her.”
He moved back off the planks. On his hands and knees at the place where the snowy earth met the planks, he started tearing the rotten boards away.
“Help me clear these goddamn things out,” Nolan said, and Jon slipped the ring of rope around his shoulder and helped. The wood was so old, so weathered, so decaying, it almost crumbled in their hands.
“You help, too,” Nolan demanded of Lyle, and Lyle did. He got on hands and knees and tore at the wood. Just one of the guys.
Then the opening of the old well was exposed. It was about four foot in diameter. It was quite deep; with the sun as low in the sky as it was, there was no hope of seeing down there without a flashlight. Nolan shined his down.
“I see her,” he said, leaning in one side.
“I do too,” Jon said, leaning in opposite him.
She was down there all right; on her back, her head to one side. She was in a lavender outfit. That was all they could make out.
“How the hell deep is this thing?” Jon asked.
“Probably thirty feet,” Nolan said. His voice was quavering.
Jon looked at Nolan; a single tear streaked the man’s left cheek. Nolan looked at Jon and wiped away the tear, leaving some dirt from a hand that had been tearing away rotten planks. It was a moment neither would ever forg
et. Or mention.
Now Nolan stood and looked to Lyle. Nolan started to smile; it was an awful smile. He walked over to the boy and gripped him with one hand by the expensive leather coat and said, “You killed her, you little cocksucker.”
He shook his head side to side. “No, she fell.”
“Running from you. Why don’t you run from me, now?” And he got out the Colt.
“That’s Pa’s gun,” Lyle said, stupidly, recognizing it.
“Nolan,” Jon said. He was on his knees, leaning over the well, using the flashlight. “I think I saw her move.”
Nolan stuck the gun back in his waistband and bent down and took the flashlight and shined it down there.
“Sherry!” he called.
His voice echoed down the well, the beam of the flashlight touching her body. Her motionless body.
“Sherry!”
Nolan’s voice reverberated off the brick walls of the old well.
Nothing.
“Sherry!”
And thirty feet down, something—someone—stirred.
“Goddamn,” he said, a disbeliever in the presence of a saint, “she did move.”
He stood up. “Give me that rope.”
Jon did.
Nolan looped one end of it around the nearest sturdy tree, knotted it firmly; then, he looped the other end of it around his waist.
“You’re going down there?” Jon asked.
Nolan didn’t bother answering.
“I don’t know if you’ve got enough rope,” Jon said.
“I always allow myself just enough rope,” Nolan said. He walked to the edge of the well.
“This is a hand-dug well,” he said. “They laid these bricks as they went. Look—you see? There’s plenty of lip on most of those bricks, to cling to. That should allow me to pretty much climb down the side.”
Jon was shaking his head doubtfully. “It’s an old fucker. Some of those bricks’ll give.”
“That’s why you’re going to have to brace me.”
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