Max Collins - Fly Paper

When he rejoined Breen, the man was asleep and snoring. Jon was at first relieved that he wouldn’t have to listen to any more of the talkative man’s ramblings, but then he thought better of it, shook the guy awake, and told him about the brush with the Comforts.

“You’re okay, kid,” Breen said, grinning. “You handled old Sam beautiful, sounds like.”

“Why don’t you show your gratitude,” Jon said, “by telling me what all this is about.”

Breen did. He told Jon he’d been working a month of parking meter heists (“Small potatoes, kid, but over the long haul, she adds up!”); told him old man Comfort had over a hundred and fifty gees, cash, from several such runs of meter heisting in the area, and had tried to kill Breen less than an hour earlier, to avoid paying Breen’s $12,000 share.

“Listen,” Jon said. “I’m going to call Nolan. I think maybe he’ll have some ideas concerning the Comforts.”

Breen thought that was fine.

Jon went out to the phone that sat on the long counter behind which Planner had constantly sat puffing expensive cigars. Jon sat on the counter, dialing the phone, thinking of his uncle’s violent death, wondering if he was being a fool to follow in those bloody footsteps. But he forgot that when he heard Nolan’s, “Yeah?”

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

“What’s the problem, kid?” Nolan’s voice was calm, but Jon seemed to detect a note of enthusiasm in it.

“You know a guy named Breen?”

“I do.”

Jon filled Nolan in on what had happened to Breen, and how he’d come bleeding up to Jon’s doorstep.

“What about a doctor?”

“I bandaged him up, Nolan. He’ll last okay. Maybe tomorrow we can get Doc Ainsworth in for a look at him. So far, I been more concerned about the Comforts than anything.”

“Rightly so. And you were right not bringing in a doctor, because the Comforts might be watching. You locked the doors, of course? And moved Breen’s car?”

“Of course. And the Comforts have already come around once.” He’d held that back to shock Nolan with — saved it for effect.

But he should have known better with Nolan, who just said an emotionless, “Well?”

And Jon told him about the run-in with Sam Comfort.

“You’re doing better all the time, kid. In fact, what do you need me for there? You got things under control.”

“Well, for one thing, these damn Comforts got me sweating. They’re unpredictable, judging from what Breen says, and from what I saw of them.”

“Did you fool old Sam, you think?”

“I got an idea what was going on in that head. He could come barging in with a gun right now and I wouldn’t be surprised. You know the Comforts pretty well, Nolan?”

“I worked a job with that crusty old son of a bitch, years ago. He didn’t cross me, because I didn’t give him the opening. But if my back had been to him, he’d have put the knife in, no doubt about it. Breen was stupid to work with him in the first place. Everybody knows Sam is as crazy as he is unreliable.”

“Well, Nolan, what do you think?”

“I’ll come, yeah.”

“It’s not that I need help, exactly...”

“I know, kid. You just like having me around.”

“That’s part of it.”

“And that hundred and fifty thousand of Comfort’s is another.”

“Right.”

“We’re about due, Jon. Maybe we can help my old buddy Breen and do ourselves a favor, too.”

Jon grinned into the phone. “Right.”

The riots could have been last week, the way this neighborhood looked. Buildings stood black and gutted from flames; no one had even bothered boarding up the broken-out, blown-out windows, which stared from the buildings like the empty sockets of gouged-out eyes. Other blocks had fared better, their buildings untouched by flame, some stores none the worse for wear, open for business. But even these more fortunate blocks showed the scars of violence, their wounds no less ugly for the pus being dried up and crusted over. The sites of many small businesses were vacant now, abandoned by their white proprietors in the wake of black unrest, leaving behind storefront windows broken out and never replaced, nothing remaining but jagged edges of glass, like teeth in the mouth of a screaming man. Outrage had fired this violence, from which had come further outrage: one emigrant had boarded up his storefront window and written, in an angry red scrawl: “AFTER 20 YRS. SERVICE, CHASED FROM OUR HOME,” a star of David beneath the words like a signature. Passing by the boarded-up store was a thin black woman in a pale, worn, green dress, trudging along like a parody of a weary darkie, pulling a child’s wagon filled with groceries, and her face told the whole story: she’d had to walk blocks and blocks to a grocery store, and hoped like hell nothing spoiled. She seemed to shake her head a little as she moved along past her neighborhood corner grocery, which was an empty, burned-out shell.

Nolan sat in the back of the taxi cab, listening to the meter tick his money away, and half listening to the cabbie, who’d been pointing out the sights like a cynical tour guide. The cabbie had grown up in this part of Detroit himself and was saddened and somewhat pissed off about what had happened here since he’d left it for a better neighborhood.

Back at the airport, Nolan had chosen this black cabbie over a white one, because he wasn’t sure if the white cabbie would’ve wanted to drive him into this neighborhood. Matter of fact, Nolan was a little ill at ease himself; he’d feel a hell of a lot better armed, but he hadn’t been able to carry heat on the plane because of skyjacking precautions. He’d brought a gun along, of course, a pair of them in fact: two S & W .38s with four-inch barrels. But they were packed away in his suitcase (no sweat from airport security on that — only hand-carried bags routinely got checked), and a .38 nestling between his fresh socks and change of underwear wouldn’t do him much good down here. The suitcase, and Jon, ought to be at the hotel by now; this taxi ride had been one that Nolan felt better taken alone, so he’d sent the kid on ahead with the luggage on the airport-to-hotel shuttle bus.

Which was considerably cheaper than this damn taxi, but then, you didn’t find a shuttle running from airport to ghetto and had to expect to pay the price. The price in this case was double stiff: the tinny racket of that disembodied mechanical head hooked to the dash, wolfing down Nolan’s money, was depressing enough, let alone having to put up with the cabbie’s gloomy line of patter.

The cabbie was a thickset, very black man with white hair and white mustache, and was maybe a year or two older than Nolan. “Yessir,” the cabbie was saying ( why couldn’t I get a sullen one, Nolan thought, or at least one of those mumble-mouths you can’t make heads or tails of ), “this neighborhood was hit super-bad, rioting and lootings and snipings and you name it. Bad hit as any place in the country.”

Nolan grunted, to show he was paying attention. He glanced at the meter and winced: attention wasn’t all he was paying — fourteen bucks and climbing. Christ!

The cabbie rambled on. “Martin Luther King weren’t the only thing got killed, that time. This whole neighborhood went down with him. Look at it. You ever seen a place so tore-up?”

“No,” Nolan said, though it wasn’t true. Berlin had been like this, after the war.

“You know, where I’m taking you, it’s about the only business in the area didn’t get hurt. All them cars, and not even a antenna busted off. And a white fella runs it, can you beat that?”

“No.”