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Permanently.

9

NOLAN CROSSED
the gravel road in a crouch, hopped down into the ditch. It must have rained here recently, as the ditch was damp and got his shoes muddy. When he was safely within the sheltering trees that divided the Comfort land from the neighboring spread, Nolan cleaned his shoes off on the trunk of one of the clustered evergreens.

He was uncomfortable in the nylon mask; the thing was hot, even on a cool night like this. He pulled it off and stuffed it in his pants pocket. He’d put it back on when he got up by the house. Right now, he preferred having his vision completely unimpaired; enjoyed having the clear, crisp country air fill his lungs without a damn nylon filter.

Panty hose, he thought, and grinned momentarily.

In his left hand was the olive-drab canister, the U.S. Army smoke grenade identical to the one he’d left with Jon. With his right hand he withdrew the long-barreled .38 from the police holster; it was going to be necessary to rap a head or two, and perhaps do more than that, should something go out of kilter, despite what he’d told Jon about going easy with the firearms. He’d taught him well, but Jon’s experience under fire was more than limited; if push came to shove, Jon would be armed, would be able to respond, but Nolan didn’t want that kid waving a .38 around frivolously.

He stayed within the thick evergreens, got up parallel to the big gray barn and, crouching again, crossed half a block’s worth of pasture and then flattened himself against the barn’s back side. He could hear cattle or something stirring around in there, but not a Comfort, surely; the Comforts owned this land, according to Breen, but leased both pasture and barn to a farmer whose own property adjoined the Comforts’ in back. Which made the Comforts a part of the landed gentry, Nolan supposed, which was a hell of a thought.

The house was maybe a hundred yards from the barn, maybe a shade more than that. Open ground and, with the moon full and the house fairly well lit up, not easily crossed unseen. He got on his hands and knees and began to crawl, like a commando training under the machine-gun fire of some square-jaw sergeant.

He crawled two feet, and his hand—the one with the gun in it—sank into something soft which, on closer examination, proved to be cow dung. Nolan wasn’t happy about have gunk all over his hand, or his gun either, and wiped both clean on the grass. Holstering the .38, he swore to himself and crawled on. But the pasture was a cow-pattie minefield and, several feet later, the same hand ran into the same substance, a bit drier this time but no less irritating. So he said a mental “Fuck it,” got back up in a crouch, and moved on. What the hell, he thought, it wasn’t like the Comforts were out watching for him, and you can’t expect a city boy to go crawling through cow shit, not for anybody or anything.

A barbed-wire fence separated the Comforts’ yard from the pasture, and Nolan squeezed under the fence without so much as snagging his sweater—a much more successful enterprise than his aborted attempt at crawling across the cow-pattie beachhead. The weeds were waist high in the yard and, keeping in his low crouch, he proceeded until the weeds ended and the gravel drive, which circled the place, took over. The family Buick was parked alongside the house on the left, which meant it would be a toss-up which door Sam would head for—front or back—when the “fire” broke out. Before he left the high weeds to cross the drive, Nolan got out the nylon mask, pulled it on, and drew the .38 again. Down to business, cow shit or no cow shit.

The house had many windows, and lights were on in most of the rooms, but all the window shades were drawn. This was frustrating, because Nolan had to make sure both father and son were present in the house, and where. The shade of one window on the right side of the house allowed an inch or two clearance at the bottom to peer through, and since Breen had given him a full layout of the house, it didn’t surprise Nolan to find that the room beyond the window was the living room. He was, however, slightly surprised to find that Breen’s description of the Comfort place had not been an exaggeration: the house really was as lavishly—and tastelessly—furnished as Breen had said. The living room had wall-to-wall red shag carpeting and a sofa and reclining chair covered in a yellowish leather; there were any number of heavy, expensive wood pieces of various and totally nonmatching styles, as well as a couple of clear plastic scoop-seated chairs. Everything in the room was of high quality, but was slapped together like a furniture store’s warehouse sale. Drab, old, pale wallpaper, faded and peeling, was a backdrop to all this expensive but oddly coupled furniture, and the high point of the room was the Hamms beer sign over the sofa, lit from within, displaying a shifting panorama of shimmering “sky blue waters.” Lying on the sofa, sipping a Hamms, basking in the glow of a color television console the size of a foreign car, was Sam Comfort—a skinny old man with a potbelly, wearing gray longjohns, the buttons open halfway down his chest He was watching “Hee-Haw.”

None of the other, shaded windows around the house afforded Nolan any view, though from Breen’s description he knew where everything was: adjacent to the living room was a kitchen (with space-age refrigerator, of course—stick a glass in a hole in the door and you get ice water) and Sam’s bedroom, which were side by side and together took up the same space as the rather large living room; in there somewhere was a toilet—Nolan didn’t remember exactly where—unless the Comforts still went the outhouse route, or maybe the cows weren’t the only ones crapping in the pasture. According to Breen, the old man’s room was unlike the others in the house, as it alone did not show signs of acquired affluence; the master bedroom was as empty and functional as the old man’s mind. Upstairs was a bedroom for Terry (the statutory rapist presently being rehabilitated) and another for Billy—also an office affair Sam used for planning sessions and the like. Nolan could see colored lights flashing behind the shade on Billy’s window; Breen said Billy’s room was a pot freak’s retreat, water bed and strobe lights and black-light posters and tons of stereo equipment, enough wattage in the latter to power a fair- size radio station. He could hear the faint throb of rock music coming from that upper floor room, and he would have to make the hopefully safe assumption that Billy was mind-tripping up there, as was the boy’s usual practice.

Satisfied that he’d pinpointed both Comforts, Nolan went to work on the basement window in back of the house. The window came open easily, soundlessly, with the proper prying from his knife. He climbed down inside the Comforts’ lowest level, a washing machine right below the window serving as a step down for him, making his entry a quiet one.

He used a pen-flash to examine the room. This end of the long basement was the laundry room; the other was being converted into a bar and recreation area. This was the first remodeling the Comforts had undertaken, and they were apparently doing the work themselves, as it was pretty slipshod: boards, cans of paint, various building bullshit lying around.

Which was good, because this was the makings of a fire hazard; this made a logical reason for a basement fire, and should help to con Sam as he quickly tried to make some logic out of a fire breaking out in his house. The remodeling was almost finished, but not quite: the bar was in and linoleum was on the floor, but the ceiling wasn’t tiled, which was also good: those open ceiling beams would insure the effectiveness of the smoke bomb’s penetration.

Nolan knelt with the canister, pulled the lever, heard its
pop
, left it on the floor, mid-basement, turning his head away even before he’d let go of the can, as already its stream of smoke was shooting out like water from a firehose. The can hissed as it dispersed its contents, and Nolan headed toward the laundry end of the basement, then hopped up onto the washing machine and out the window.

He immediately returned to his view of Sam Comfort relaxing in the living room. A smile formed under the nylon mask as Nolan watched bewilderment grow on Sam’s face, first as Sam sniffed smoke, then as he
saw
smoke. After a slapstick double-take, the old clown jumped from the couch as if goosed and ran upstairs via the stairwell opening in the far corner of the room. The positioning of those stairs was a break for Nolan; with this view of the action, he’d be able to key on whether or not Sam opted for the front door, here in the living room, or the back door, out in the kitchen. Sam was only gone half a minute, then came tumbling out of the stairwell, a man who’d all but fallen down the stairs, coughing from the ever-thickening smoke, showing signs of panic, shaking in his damn underwear. As Sam came into clearer view in that smoke-clogged receptacle of a room, Nolan could see plainly under one of Sam’s arms an oversize green metal strongbox—
Bingo!
— while slung over Sam’s other arm was a double-barreled shotgun. He’s panicked all right, Nolan thought, but the old coot’s as suspicious and crafty as ever.

A sound—
pop!
—turned Nolan’s head, in reflex, before he realized the sound was only Jon’s smoke grenade going off, meaning things were running to plan. When he turned back, the old man was no longer in sight.

Shit! The room was pretty well dense with smoke now, and Nolan couldn’t tell if the front door was slightly ajar, which would have indicated whether Sam had gone out that way. Damn it, there was nothing to do but circle behind the house, and if Sam wasn’t back there, come on around and catch him out the front. Damn!

Nolan ran.

Sam wasn’t in back, nor was the back door ajar.

Alongside the house, where the Buick was, no sign of Sam there, either.

And what about Billy? An ugly chain of deduction was forming in Nolan’s mind. Sam had gone upstairs for three reasons, hadn’t he? To get the strongbox; to grab the shotgun; to warn his boy Billy. But Sam hadn’t been up there very long, barely long enough to do all those things. Why hadn’t Billy been following along on his daddy’s heels, down those steps? Why hadn’t Sam yelled “Fire!” when smoke first began trailing into the room, to warn Billy immediately? Shouldn’t that have been Sam’s natural reaction?

If, then, Billy hadn’t been upstairs, where had he been? And more important, where the hell was he now?

Once around the front of the house, Nolan knew the answer to that. Nolan’s questions about Billy were, for the most part, anyway, answered: Billy had not been in the house; Billy had been outside, Christ knows why or where. And Billy was onto the “burning house” trick. In fact, Billy was right next to the smoke grenade Jon had planted.

And Billy was grinning. The smoke was just as thick out here as in the house, but Nolan could see that Billy was grinning. Billy was laughing, or was doing something like laughing, a combination of rasping smoke-cough and sick snickering. Billy was stoned out of his head, and Billy was standing with one foot on Jon’s chest, getting ready to heave one mother of a pitchfork down into Jon, punching steel teeth through the kid, pinning him to the earth like a scarecrow.

Nolan was still running, a slow but steady jog, and he bumped into Sam, who’d come out the front door, and the two men came face to face and for just a moment. Nylon mask or no, Nolan felt he could sense recognition in Sam’s flat gray eyes.

Nolan slapped the old man across the side of the face with the .38 and Sam said, “Unggh!” and toppled, colliding with Nolan. Nolan hit the ground and was on his feet again within the same second, and he brought up the .38 and fired twice.

The shots broke the country calm like cracks of thunder. The bullets hit Billy Comfort in the chest and rocked him, shook him like a naughty child, exploded through him, blood squirting from the front of him, a spatter of bone and organs and more blood bursting out his back. He pitched backward, gurgling, dying.

Jon was awake now and rolling to one side as Billy Comfort’s last effort in life—the hurling of the pitchfork—came to no account: the fork quivered in the ground, right next to Jon, but not, thankfully, in him.

Nolan looked at Jon and, with their stocking-distorted features, they exchanged a look that had in it any number of things—relief and shock and frustration among them, perhaps regret as well—and suddenly Jon’s face distorted further under the mask, as he yelled, “Nolan! The old man!”

And as he remembered Sam Comfort, whom he’d merely cuffed out of the way so he could take care of more important business, as he recalled the crazy old man with a shotgun, Nolan heard the country calm shatter a second time in gunfire.

Interim: Takeoff

10

CAROL SAID, “I WISH
I was going with you.”

Ken made a face at her in the bedroom mirror, as if to say,
Don’t be ridiculous
, and went on strapping the emergency parachute to his stomach, over his black cotton pullover. On the bed, closed, locked, was the suitcase with the fake bomb in it. The suitcase was a cheap, tan overnight bag they’d picked up at a discount department store. “Picked up” was literally right: Ken had shoplifted the suitcase, much to Carol’s discomfort, and the thought of that afternoon, several weeks ago, still gave her something of a chill.

Ken had said he didn’t want to leave anything behind that could be traced to him, and he felt purchasing any such items locally would be dangerous. Carol didn’t agree: the items he had in mind (the suitcase, some clothes, a wig) could be purchased at any large chain store and should be virtually untraceable. How could you tell, for example, which of the hundreds of thousands of stores an overnight bag had been purchased from?

But Ken had poured out a stream of double-talk, saying many items were code-marked for certain distribution areas, and skyjacking was a federal offense of the most serious nature, and those FBI men can trace a piece of string to the shirt on your back and blah blah blah. Carol didn’t believe any of it, but realized that Ken probably didn’t either. There was some secret reason he hadn’t divulged to her yet for his going one hundred miles to a discount department store to purchase the items at all: he was going to shoplift them—a bit of news he saved for Carol until they were parked in the discount store’s huge parking lot.

“You will cover for me,” he said. “Make sure none of the floor-walkers or sales people see me.”

“But Ken . . . this is crazy.”

She looked across the sea of cars—it was Saturday, and the only parking space they’d found was at the rear of the endless lot—and even from this distance the store looked gigantic, some grotesque national monument to commercialism. Though the massive building was a pinkish brick, its face was primarily steel-trimmed glass, topped with enormous neon letters that said
BARGAIN CITY
. She knew, without ever having been in there, that those rows and rows of doors would open onto an entryway big enough to put their house in, an entryway lined with bubble gum machines and armed guards.

Wasn’t Saturday the worst possible day to go shoplifting? All those people? All those people were precisely why Saturday was ideal, Ken said; there’d be too many people for store personnel to keep track of. Carol didn’t quite buy that line of reasoning, either, but she went along with Ken. When push came to shove, she always went along with Ken.

She realized it wasn’t stylish these days to let your husband—or any man—control your life. But she wasn’t a liberated woman, and had no desire to be one. That point of view came from being the last of six children, she supposed, all the rest of whom were boys. She’d been the little sis, and she and her mother had lived in the shadow of her father and his five sons. And it hadn’t been so bad. Being the only sister of five brothers had plenty of advantages, and she was the baby of the family besides and accordingly was awarded extra attention: on a holiday, she’d get more gifts, more kisses, than anyone.

Still, a big part of her childhood had been learning to keep her place. As the youngest child, you learned that anyway, and as the youngest and a girl, you got used to having your life controlled for you; your decisions made for you; your thinking done for you. You got used to having men dominate your world.

Ken had been just the kind of man she was used to. They’d met at a junior college in their hometown, in downstate Missouri, and he had been the firm but gentle sort of guy she’d been looking for, always. It hadn’t been hard to grab him; she was aware of her good looks, and Ken was a loner whose nonconformist ways had turned off most of the girls he’d dated—he’d rather spend Friday night working on some electronics project than at a movie, say, or a dance. He had a quiet strength she liked, and he was cute, and while he wasn’t thoughtful, he certainly wasn’t cruel. Besides, she was used to having self-centered men around her. Wasn’t that the way of all men? The ones worth having, anyway.

There was a side to Ken that bothered her, when she got to know him better; but she’d cherished the flaw in him, rather than rejected him because of it. By the time she noticed his weak spot, she was already hopelessly in love with him, so her reaction was positive: the flaw in Ken was something she could, in her quiet way, help him with; she could give him the encouragement to overcome his one weakness.

His weakness was that he had a tendency not to finish things. He had a fine mind, brilliant, really; he could do most anything. But his mind moved so quickly, his enthusiasm shifted so rapidly, that he often did not complete what he’d started. He’d flunked out of the junior college, primarily because he had no interest in the subjects he was taking, and one just doesn’t flunk out of J.C.—J.C. is where a person goes ’cause he might flunk out (or already
had
) someplace else.

After they were married, Ken had gone to Greystoke Teacher’s College, while Carol worked as a secretary and helped put him through, and he finally graduated after an extra semester. Greystoke was an expensive school that ate up much of what Ken’s parents had left him, not to mention most of Carol’s weekly paycheck; but Greystoke was a special sort of college, a school for students who hadn’t hacked it elsewhere, an educational court of last resort, guaranteed to graduate its enrollees. Mostly rich kids from back east made use of Greystoke, just so they could pick up a token degree. Some years it was accredited, others it was not. Fortunately for Ken, his was one of the accredited years, though with the school’s poor reputation, it hardly mattered. Not that the odds of landing a good job with a Greystoke degree were bad; why, they were excellent—provided you were the son of some tycoon.

So she’d watched, reluctantly, while Ken took the salesman job, selling Florida real estate with a pitch that included a free meal and the showing of a film. Ken would go into towns of medium size, mostly, with the dinner invitations already sent out, and proceed with his routine. He didn’t know where the company got its mailing lists, but the prospects who attended the dinners were excellent, couples nearing retirement who were ripe for a good land offer. It was a lucrative field, though Carol was bothered by the fact that the company sales pitch sounded uncomfortably like a con game. Ken assured her it was on the up and up. And she’d finally been convinced, because after all, hadn’t the sales executive invited them to Florida to give Ken a first-hand look at the land he was selling? And they’d gone, they’d seen it; it was gorgeous land; they’d bought a chunk of it themselves.

Of course, that had been part of the deal: Ken had to invest in a lot of his own and become a stockholder, purchasing a specified minimum number of shares. That had taken the last of the money his parents had left him—just over ten thousand dollars. But what better investment was there than land?

This time Ken hadn’t been a quitter, and Carol had been so proud of him. For three years he sold the lots, and he and Carol racked up quite a savings—as one of the company’s top salesmen, Ken was regularly offered stock options, and they fed over half of Ken’s earnings into Dream-Land. And they’d bought the house in Canker with a bank loan, choosing the quiet little town so they could be close enough to Carol’s family to make visiting easy, but far enough away to enjoy privacy. Ken’s plan was to keep selling for another three years, and then they’d have amassed enough stock for him to borrow against and open up a small TV and radio repair shop, which would be ideal for him and for Carol, too, who didn’t like sharing her husband with the road.

Ken’s investment of his time and money had assured Carol that her husband’s flaw—that tendency not to finish what he started, which came from a certain immaturity—was now a thing of the past, a wound healed over, with not even a sign of scar tissue.

But wounds can open up after the longest time, if enough pressure is applied to them. And pressure in this instance emerged in the form of Ken’s aptly named parent company, Florida Dream-Land Realtors.

Part of Ken’s pitch had included pointing out that, while the cash outlay for a piece of Dream-Land land was amazingly low, that low price was made possible by holding off actual development of the land, actual building of homes, until 70 percent of the lots had been sold. Of course, a buyer couldn’t be expected to wait forever for his home and his land, so a projected date (five years hence, from Dream-Land’s first sale) was set for development to begin. This was guaranteed; either said development began, or the buyer’s money would be returned, with the buyer retaining full ownership of his lot.

All of which sounded swell, both to salesmen like Ken and to prospective buyers, most of whom were far enough away from retirement that waiting a few years for their dream land was no problem. Five years wasn’t so long.

But long enough for a swindle.

Plenty long enough for that. Oh, the land was down there, all right; everybody who bought a lot owned a slice of Florida land. But not the land in the film Ken had shown to the people at the invitation-only dinners; not the land the sales exec had pointed out to Ken and Carol on their trip down there. The land in the film, the land the exec pointed out, belonged to somebody else.

Dream-Land was Florida land, too.

Swampland.

Uninhabitable damn swampland that could gag an alligator; dream land that was a nightmare. And Ken and all the other salesmen and the folks they’d sold the land to, all of them, were stuck in that swamp up to their rears.

The only happy aspect was that Ken himself, and most of the other salesmen, were in no way liable for the fraud perpetrated; they, like everybody in it (except the Dream-Land wheels) were the butt of the joke.

So there they sat, in Canker, Missouri, with over three years of their lives wasted, no savings, not a damn thing—except a mortgaged house and plans that had fizzled into nothing.

But you can always make new plans, and Ken came up with one. Carol hadn’t liked it from the outset, but what could she say? Ken was, after all, the man of the house.

But sometimes bowing to every wish of the “man of the house” could go too far. She shouldn’t be expected to do something she would hate herself for doing. Like helping him on this crazy skyjacking thing. Even aiding and abetting his silly, stupid shoplifting. There just wasn’t any sane
reason
for it; no logic to it. And besides, she didn’t for the life of her see how he was going to get the shoplifting done. He had picked the suitcase up first, actually just tucked it under his arm, then strolled around the store, and while she kept an eye peeled, he’d slipped the various items in: curly brown wig, some sunglasses, green corduroy shirt, and some jeans.

“How are you going to get past the registers?” she asked him.

“Just watch,” he said, and headed to the front of the store. There was a coffee shop up on the right, off to one side of the rows of check-out counters. They sat in a booth in the shop, and Ken carefully drew a folded-up sack from his pocket, a large sack with the discount store’s name on it. He put the suitcase inside. When that was done, she followed as he slid past the check-out counters, mixing in with the shoppers pouring out of them, and with the suitcase-in-sack snugly under his arm, went out the door.

Past several armed guards who were standing by that door for the express purpose of nabbing shop-lifters. No one questioned him. Nothing.

In the car, she found she was panting. Sweat was rolling down her cheeks, though the day was a cool, overcast one. “What would you have done,” she managed to ask, “if someone stopped you?”

“I was prepared for that,” he said, the tone of his voice implying he’d almost been hoping for that, as well. “I had a story ready.”

“What kind of story?”

‘That I’d seen a lady drop this package in the coffee shop and was going out into the lot after her, to give her her package.”