Max Collins: Fly Paper

At eleven, he was taking a shower and the phone rang.

“Logan?”

It was Sherry. The image of her face flashed through his mind: gentle, little-girl features framed by arcs of blonde-frosted brunette hair...

“Where you calling from, Sherry?”

“Home. Ohio. I miss you.”

“Yeah. I’m stir-crazy myself, in this room alone.”

“My mother’s real sick, Logan.”

Logan was the name she knew him by, the one he was using at the Tropical.

“Logan?” she said again. He’d been quiet for a moment, his mind full of her naked: her skin coppery from all that summer sun, except for the stark white where the bikini had half-heartedly covered the best parts, the breasts tipped as deep a copper as the sun-tanned skin; the light brunette triangle forming a similar contrast below...

“Yeah, I’m here,” he said. “I’m sorry to hear your mother’s sick.”

“She’s going to be bedridden a long time.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I got a job today.”

“What kind?”

“Waitress.”

“Oh, Christ.”

She laughed. “I’ll be careful. I haven’t scalded anybody’s nuts with hot-coffee-in-the-lap yet.”

“Oh, then all your customers were women today, huh?”

She laughed some more and then said, “I miss you.”

“You said that.”

“I know. I want to see you again, Logan.”

“Sure. Next summer.”

“I don’t think you’ll still be there. At the Tropical, I mean. You been restless lately.”

“Well.”

“Let me give you my address. Come and see me when you can. Tell me where you end up, if you end up anywhere.”

“I’d like that, Sherry.”

She gave him the address, and he wrote it down.

“Logan?”

“Yeah?”

“Take care of yourself. Be happy.”

“You too, kid.”

They hung up.

Nolan sat there, dripping wet from the shower, getting the bed damp, feeling pissed off and, dammit, lonely. He couldn’t understand it, because he’d been self-sufficient for a lot of years, hadn’t ever been one to shack up with a broad for more than a day or two.

But he was fifty, and this goddamn life at the Tropical was goddamn getting him down.

He sat there a while and the phone rang again. It was Jon. Calling long-distance from Iowa City.

“Nolan? You got to come here, right away.”

Life pumped into his veins; he didn’t know what Jon wanted, but whatever it was, Nolan was game.

Breen never thought it would come to this. Stealing nickels and dimes. Christ! He pulled into the driveway of the little farmhouse where old Sam Comfort and his son Billy were waiting. At least this would end it, he thought. He would be glad to be done with this one; it certainly hadn’t been the normal sort of heist he worked. In fact, it hadn’t been one heist at all, but a series of thousands of little ones, infinitesimal heists, nickel-and-dime stuff. Literally. Because Breen had been helping the Comforts heist parking meters.

He was a stocky guy of forty-two, black hair cut military-short, his fleshy cheeks covered with a perpetual five o’clock shadow. His eyes were wide-set and dark blue, his nose bumpy and squat in the middle of a rough but intelligent face. Right now, as he sat in his battered green Mustang in the farmhouse drive, Breen’s often intense features were softened in pleasant anticipation of severing the alliance with the Comforts.

He guessed he’d been lucky till now. Before this, he’d worked with only the best people; never before had he stooped to the level of the Comforts. He was spoiled, he supposed, from years of working with guys the caliber of Nolan. Used to be, Breen would work at least one job a year with Nolan, picking up one or two more with somebody else reliable. But Jack Taylor and a whole string of good men got busted two summers ago heisting an art gallery, and last year Laughlin and three others were killed after that Georgia armored-car job went sour and they’d been caught between state and local cops in a back-roads chase that turned fucking tragic. Worst of all, about two years ago this time, Breen had been in Chicago with Nolan and several others, planning a bank heist, when some syndicate guy shot the job right out from under them. Word got out later that though Nolan wasn’t dead after all (surprising, as that syndicate guy nailed him a couple times; Breen had seen it happen), the Chicago Family was definitely declaring open season on Nolan. Which made it less than healthy to keep company with the man. So what was a guy to do? You had to work with somebody. And if you were desperate enough, you worked with the likes of the Comforts.

Old Sam Comfort’s reputation was bad; it went back years before Breen had gotten into the business, and he’d never heard any specific stories about the old man, just that Sam Comfort was not to be trusted. In recent years Sam had worked strictly with his two sons, Billy and Terry, but last year Terry drew a short term for statutory rape, and the Comforts had been lacking a man on their string. And according to Morris (a pawn shop fence in Detroit, whom Breen used as a sort of underworld messenger service), the Comforts had a racket going that required a minimum of three, and they’d been using a fill-in man for Terry Comfort but weren’t satisfied with him. Morris suggested that Breen go see the Comforts.

Breen would’ve dropped the whole thing right there, would’ve read the handwriting on the wall and just got the hell out of heisting, but he needed the money too bad. Breen was from Indianapolis, where he had a little bar he owned and operated with the help of his wife and brother-in-law. He would’ve made a good enough living with just the bar, but he was a horse-player; Breen played the horses like an alcoholic drinks and a nymphomaniac screws: in dead earnest, with little joy and less success. He was trying to give it up, but he was into his bookie for four gee’s worth of markers, and there was the alimony and child support for his first wife, that blood-sucking bitch; he was way behind on that, and wouldn’t it be shit if that was the way he finally ended up in stir.

So he’d left the bar in the hands of his wife and brother-in-law and gone to see the Comforts. It was almost a whirlwind trip: when Sam explained they were heisting parking meters, Breen damn near left without sitting down.

But the parking meter deal wasn’t as ridiculous as it first sounded. Old Sam had done his homework, no question about it. He’d put together a route: Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, and the Quad Cities, all linked by Interstate 80. He’d spent time in each town tracking prowl car runs, and pinpointed the most untraveled, poorly lit streets, and such prime targets as waterfront parking lots and parking ramps, with thousands of meters for the picking, virtually unattended in the pre-dawn morning hours. He had keys to open the meters, and son Billy (decked out in olive-green uniform with the words “Meter Maintenance” stitched across the back) would go about draining the meters, while Sam stayed around the corner in the car, motor going, Citizen Band radio on to monitor the cops. Breen’s role was to empty the buckets of coins that Billy brought him and hand him back a fresh one; Breen would pour the coins into a large, rubber-lined metal tray built down in the floor of the trunk. A lid flopped down over the tray when the night’s work was done, a false bottom that made this trunk look like any other in a Buick Electra. No one questioned the maintenance man working the meters (traffic was slow in the wee hours), and most people probably just went by muttering, “Always wondered when they emptied those damn things.”

Even with cities as small as those that comprised the Iowa-Illinois Quad Cities, they could pick up several thousand a night, easy, and that was playing it Sam’s safe, cagey way, leaving enough coins in each meter to fool the actual maintenance people. That way they could go back for more periodically, and no one would be the wiser, not till the monthly tally for meter earnings came in. Even then, the city might not figure it out: maybe meter revenue was just down that month, who could say?