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Epilogue: Crash-landing

17

CAROL FOUND HIM
in the high grass off to the side of the highway, behind a billboard advertising a bank savings plan. She was relieved she’d had so little trouble finding him; he’d told her, over the C.B., that he’d overshot their target area just a little, but that he could still make it to Highway 67, and when he had, he’d told her of the billboard and she’d found it—and him—with ease.

He was a mess. He was as pale as a cadaver, the black pullover and jeans streaked with the mud from the farmer’s field he’d landed in, and probably from stumbling and falling in the miles of other fields he’d trudged through to get to the highway. His discomfort was obvious: he was curled up in a crumpled ball, like a wad of paper littered along the road; he was clinging to the brown attaché case like a drowning man clutching something buoyant.

Still, he was in one piece, and it could have been worse. She’d expected it to be worse. If he’d been bloody and twisted, she wouldn’t have been surprised; she knew his jump had been a bad one, that he’d hit hard and wrong, even if he hadn’t said so, because even over the C.B., the pain was evident in his voice, no matter how he tried not to show it.

“Baby,” she said, “how bad is it?”

“Not so bad,” he said. “Collar bone’s broken, I think.”

“Oh baby . . .”

“It can wait till we get home.”

“Can’t we? . . .”

“No. We can go to the hospital at Canker, soon as we get back. We’ll say I fell down the stairs or something. Here. Take the money back to the car. Do that first, then come help me. It’ll look less suspicious. Okay?”

“Okay.”

She returned to the car and opened the trunk. Cars were whizzing by, but no one was paying any attention to her. She put the attaché case in and started to close the trunk lid, then stopped. She was curious. She wanted to see what $200,000 looked like. She wanted to see what they’d gone through hell for. So she snapped open the case, for a quick peek. . . .

Bright four-color covers in plastic wrappers flashed up at her: pirates in outer space, ray guns, and rocket ships.

She shut it again, quickly, as if maybe she hadn’t really seen what she’d seen.

She didn’t know why, or how, but the elaborate plan, the “project,” had gone wrong. Dreadfully, disastrously, absurdly wrong. A practical joke turned back on the joker. And, like all good jokes, it was funny, or would be: in their old age, perhaps, they could reflect on this foolish episode and its ironic result with some amusement. Yes, she thought, Ken and I might laugh about this someday.

But not right away.

Not today.

She closed the trunk, wondering what to do. It was obvious Ken didn’t know anything had gone wrong; that he still thought he’d got off the plane with an attaché case full of money. And now was certainly not the time to tell him any different.

Now was a time to go back and put her arm around her husband’s waist and help him to the car and get him to a hospital. Later would be a time for mending wounds, for putting pieces back together.

She got Ken settled in the back seat, and he was asleep almost at once.

Now was a time for going home. Alive and free, and going home, Carol thought. That in itself was a lot, wasn’t it?

She got behind the wheel.

   About the Author

Max Allan Collins, who created the graphic novel on which the Oscar-winning film
Road to Perdition
was based, has been writing hard-boiled mysteries since his college days in the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. Besides the books about Nolan, the criminal who just wants his piece of the American dream, and killer-for-hire Quarry, he has written a popular series of historical mysteries featuring Nate Heller and many, many other novels. At last count, Collins’s books and short stories have been nominated for fifteen Shamus awards by the Private Eye Writers of America, winning for two Heller novels,
True Detective
and
Stolen Away
. He lives in Muscatine, Iowa with his wife, Barbara Collins, with whom he has collaborated on several novels and numerous short stories. The photo above shows Max in 1971, when he was first writing about Nolan and Quarry.