Макс Коллинз - Spree

Jon found a smile. “Who isn’t at all dangerous — who wouldn’t begin to hurt her.”

“I’ll take your word for that. Like I got to take your word she won’t sell us out, after what you told her. There’s no other Comfort or Comfort crony in the woodpile, is there?”

“No. From what Cindy Lou said, it’s just the three of them — father, son, daughter.”

Nolan shrugged with his eyebrows. “Then once Lyle is here, all we have to do is get him and Cole together and under gunpoint and make them take us to her.”

That sounded like fun; if you liked skydiving without a parachute. “And we do that as soon as Lyle shows?”

Nolan shook his head. “Once the heist is under way, it’ll be hard to stop. Even though they’ve lined up with us, Fisher and Winch and Dooley aren’t going to relish working half a caper and then having it get shut down. They could even turn on us.”

“You promised them fifteen grand...”

“They could take home a hundred grand each from this job, if it goes the way it could.”

“Nolan — there’s no part of you that wants to do this job, is there?” Jon hated to say it, but Nolan did seem caught up in the momentum of it; could it be, now that he’d planned it, he couldn’t stand not to see it go down? To see if an entire shopping mall could be looted?

“All I want is Sherry back,” Nolan said.

And Jon dismissed those other thoughts; he believed Nolan. Sherry was what this was about.

“We wait till the Leeches have their trucks loaded up and have taken off,” Nolan said. “Then it’s just the two Comforts against our side. We grab father and son, and they show us where they’re keeping my girl. Or we kill one of them.”

Where Cindy Lou was concerned, an innocent kid, Nolan didn’t have it in him to kill or maim her; that Jon was certain of.

“After we kill one,” Nolan said, “the other loosens up and shows us. And if he doesn’t, we start cutting fingers off.”

As for Nolan killing/maiming the male, anything-but-innocent Comforts... Jon’s certainty ran in the other direction.

He walked down the empty mall, footsteps echoing; the lights in the stores were off. All the Christmas lights were off as well. But the mall was otherwise, albeit dimly, lit. The red and green banners hung limply now, no breeze from the coming in and out of mall shoppers to make them sway; they seemed faded and decidedly un-Christmasy in the dim light. The aisle carts of Christmas knickknacks and such had been abandoned by their teenage elves, empty of their goods, presumably stored away underneath someplace. Santa’s cotton and Styrofoam kingdom was deserted, too.

It reminded Jon of a time he and some friends had sneaked into their junior high school after dark for a little good-natured vandalism; it had been strange, thrilling, frightening. The school was simply a different place at night. What during the day had been a building bustling with people and activity was at night a sprawling barren place filled with echoes and not much else.

Soon, however, this mall would come back to life — night or not.

He turned left at Santa’s abdicated kingdom, skirted the red and green Our Merry Best sign, and used the key Nolan had given him to enter the mall entrance of Nolan’s, which had been locked to customers since nine.

He entered through the closed restaurant side and found Nolan and Comfort facing each other in the back room; Nolan sitting quietly, expressionlessly at the desk, Comfort sitting on a case of whiskey, arms folded, grinning at Nolan like a skull.

“She’s a sleeping beauty,” Jon said, meaning the janitor.

Nolan stood. “Stay here and keep Mr. Comfort company.”

And he left them together, and Jon took Nolan’s place at the desk, but didn’t speak to Comfort. After a while Comfort asked him if a cat caught his tongue.

“No,” Jon said. “I’m just taking your advice about children.”

Dave Fisher, Roger Winch, and Phil Dooley sat in a gray Buick which belonged to Fisher but was officially owned by a nonexistent person named Bernard Phillips. The Buick, which was parked in the Brady Eighty back parking lot, motor running, had Alabama license plates. Fisher had written to the Alabama Department of Motor Vehicles for the plates, fulfilling the requirement of a description of the car, vehicle identification number and registration fee. The Buick was a stolen car which Fisher, who lived in Minneapolis, had bought from a friend in St. Paul, who ran a chop shop. The Buick had a new VIN (vehicle identification number) and new tires; it did not have much of a heater, as the three men were finding out.

None of them was wearing a heavy winter coat — Fisher wore a dark blue polyester jacket, Winch, a brown corduroy sport coat over dingy work clothes, Dooley, a sand-color suede jacket. They needed jackets light enough to keep on, inside, during a long night of work, but protective enough to keep them from freezing when toiling in the chilly loading-dock areas.

“If I’d known this heater was down,” Fisher said apologetically to Winch, in the rider’s seat beside him, “I’d have fixed it.” Dooley was in back.

“Fuckin’ cold out there,” Winch said, rubbing his hands together. “At least it isn’t snowing now.”

Their breath was smoking, clouding up the windows.

Dooley said, “We only got a couple inches. I think it’s lovely.”

Fisher said, “What’s taking so long? It’s twenty after ten, already.”

“There he is,” Winch said, pointing toward Nolan, who could be seen behind the glass doors of the mall’s east-end rear exit. He was crooking his finger at them, like a parent summoning his children.

Fisher admired Nolan; he’d done several jobs with him, oh, probably half a dozen years before, and he’d come to admire the man’s logic and discipline. He had no such admiration for Comfort, with whom he’d worked on a Mickey Mouse house burglary about ten years ago — a rich guy in St. Louis with an elaborate alarm system, or so Comfort said; Fisher had no difficulty getting around it. The job wound up paying a couple grand. Whoop-de-do.

When he heard how Nolan had been forced out of retirement by Comfort, Fisher hadn’t been surprised exactly, although kidnaping Nolan’s lady seemed extreme even for Comfort. Fisher was on Nolan’s side in this, although he was eager to do this job and even more eager for the money. This was a challenging score (because of the size of it — the alarm system would be nothing) and would bring in a sizable piece of change, one that should indefinitely underwrite him as he continued developing the computer software he knew would one day make him a millionaire.

They piled out of the car. Fisher opened the trunk and took out a large square suitcaselike affair. Winch took out a duffel bag which made metallic clinks and clunks as the tools within bumped against each other; not to worry: the safecracker’s partner, Dooley, carried the knockers and grease, in his jacket pockets. Nothing was going to blow up tonight except some doors on safes, Fisher thought, smiling to himself — and, possibly, this job in Comfort’s face, if the old fool crosses Nolan.

Nolan let them in, locked the door behind them. He said to Fisher and Dooley, the men upon whom the job depended, “The Leeches will be here with the trucks at eleven. We got enough time?”

“Sure,” Fisher said, referring to the alarm system.

“Sure,” Dooley said, referring to the minimum eighteen locks he’d have to pick in the next few hours.

Nolan directed Winch and Dooley down to the mall entrance to Nolan’s, where Jon would be waiting to let them in — they’d be entering the restaurant side, which was closed; they would join Comfort in the back room, where all would wait till Nolan gave the go. The go was contingent upon Fisher’s success in jumping the alarm system.