Макс Коллинз - Spree

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.

Feeling like he was in a dream, an unending awful dream, Jon drove 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?