Макс Коллинз - Spree

Harris shrugged. “The cops always stop for coffee and doughnuts, my girls tell me. Once around midnight, and again around four. Then they make a run around the mall.”

“Every night?” Nolan asked.

Harris swigged some Coors. “Not at all, since this cold weather and snow; they haven’t eaten a doughnut in a month. They just don’t get out that far. There’s nothing else for them to patrol out so close to the Interstate, no housing developments, so few other businesses. I don’t like it. I’m easy prey for stickup guys, dope addict crazies; I like having the cops drop by for doughnuts.”

“Well, at the mall we’re tied into A-1,” Andy said, hoping to close out the subject. “They patrol.”

“No,” DeReuss said, shaking his head. “They did, for a time. But they wanted more money to continue it. The Mall Merchant Association voted it down.”

“A mistake,” Nolan said. “Ante up, gentlemen.”

An hour later, Nolan brought the dull subject up again; Andy couldn’t believe this guy.

“You have a lot to lose,” he said to DeReuss. “All your diamonds and such.”

DeReuss, who was shuffling, shrugged facially. “Our inventory is considerable, yes.”

“I can imagine.” He began dealing Black Maria. “How much?”

“Approaching three hundred in jewels and merchandise,” he said, adding, “Thousand,” to clarify three hundred what.

Jesus , Andy thought, and I thought I was in a lucrative line .

“The other jewelry store carries somewhat less,” DeReuss added, faintly regal.

Nolan smirked darkly. “And you’re protected, if you call it that, by an alarm on one easy-to-snip phone line.”

DeReuss looked at his hole cards. He smiled on one side of his face; whether it had to do with his cards or the subject at hand, Andy couldn’t tell. “I have my own security measures.”

“Oh?”

“Tear gas. Anyone opens my vault, he’ll cry all the way — and not to the bank.”

“Good idea,” Nolan said. “But I’d still appreciate your support at the next meeting.”

“What,” Andy said, “are you running for office?”

“I just think we need an armed guard on duty, twenty-four hours a day. Preferably two guards.”

God, this guy was a stick in the mud.

“Let’s play cards,” Andy said. “Fuck business.”

DeReuss said to Andy, “How’s your assistant manager working out? What’s her name?”

“Heather. Fine. I’ll open for a buck.”

DeReuss looked at his hole cards again, smiled privately. Did the Dutchman suspect about him and Heather? Andy hoped to hell not; he’d tried so hard to be careful. He wished he were with her. He was losing heavily tonight. Twenty bucks in the hole, only three hours into the game.

The game broke up around one-thirty. Nolan had cleaned up. On the last hand, which he dealt, a hand of Black Maria, he’d had the ace of spades in the hole and won the poker hand as well; it was a big pot, biggest of the night. He seemed embarrassed about it, as he was showing them out.

“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.

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.