He’d gone on to try to convince his father that if Nolan was getting a heist together, it’d be wise for Terry and his father to wait it out, wait till the heist was over and take the proceeds off Nolan’s hands before killing him. But revenge was still foremost in die old man’s mind, and he rejected the notion.
And then the kid had come home, and they knocked him out before he’d seen either of their faces, which was a lucky break. But then Sam wanted to kill the kid then and there, which was stupid, and Terry told his father so.
“You want to kill this kid and sit here waiting with a corpse God knows how long before Nolan shows up? How do we know Nolan is even in town? We got to deal with these two both at the same time, Pop, or else you kill one, and the other finds out and knows something’s up and comes looking for us instead of the other way around. Come on. We’ll leave now and they’ll just think somebody came in off the street and tried to rob them.”
So they left, and waited and watched for Nolan to come back to the shop. Across the street was an old school, which was evidently set to be torn down, but no work was going on, maybe because of the cold, snowy weather; at any rate, it was empty, no one around to stop them from going in and finding a first-floor window to look out of and watch the antique shop across the way. Both father and son pulled up desks designed for grade school children and sat, their skinny frames fitting easily enough.
It wasn’t till late in the evening, around ten, that Nolan came back, and by that time Terry’s father had fallen asleep, and Terry didn’t wake him. Terry wanted to stall his father long enough to find out whether or not a heist was in the offing, and he let his father spend the night in the cold, empty grade school in a third-grader’s desk. In the morning, when old Sam was waking up (and almost immediately began cursing his son for falling asleep on the job), Nolan and the short curly-haired kid drove out from around back of the antique shop, from the garage, in an old and somewhat battered Chevy II. And the Comforts went scrambling out of their third-grade desks, out of the condemned school and into their car, parked in an alley behind and, keeping a discreet distance, followed the Chevy II out of town. Soon the Chevy II disappeared off onto a back country road, and following them became impossible.
They drove back to Iowa City, to their deserted school and the desks by the window. The old man was trembling with near rage, and Terry, who’d been hit by his father on more than one occasion, was afraid a family fight was about to begin. But as weak as the old man was, Terry doubted that would amount to much.
“Pop, don’t you see?” Terry said. “There is a heist coming up. They’re preparing for it. Driving the back roads, figuring out getaway routes. Don’t you see it?”
But the old man didn’t see.
And so they again broke into the antique shop. To wait. For Nolan and the kid to come back together. Sam Comfort was going to settle his score as bloodily as it had begun. And God only knew what the old man would do, what gruesome goddamn lengths he’d go to to avenge the killing of his favorite son. It was like that black guy Terry had known in prison, who’d come in on his wife humping somebody else — people do things that are a little weird when they get taken advantage of.
They had found this attic. The apartmentlike upper floor had a low ceiling, and they could jump down into the kitchen easily from the attic perch. It was the old man’s idea, and for a change Terry liked it: Nolan was just too competent to deal with flat out; better to let him come home and think everything’s cool, tuck himself in bed for a nice night’s sleep, and then boom. Nolan was not the type of guy you could allow any slack. You had to have him cold, and even then better watch yourself.
They waited up there. Flat on their bellies. The lidlike door that opened above the kitchen cracked open a shade, so they could hear Nolan and the lad coming in — hear what they were doing, keep track of them, wait for just the right moment to spring the trap. Furthermore, the attic had a second hatchway over the garage, so if a hasty retreat was necessary, no problem. It was ideal.
It was also stuffy and cramped and hell to spend four or five minutes in, let alone hours. Terry was to the point of giving up on his idea of waiting for Nolan to pull off a heist before killing him; to forget about the money and just get on with it, just let his old man get his revenge rocks off. After all, Terry’d only been out a few days. He was horny. He wanted to be the one who did the screwing for a change, and he didn’t want any damn boy, either. He wanted to get drunk, and he thought he might smoke a little shit, too, a little tokin’ of respect for his late doper brother. Christ, after all those months inside, was this any way to spend his time? Flat on his belly in an attic that had less room to move in than his cell?
Noise downstairs.
Old Sam gripped Terry’s forearm.
Terry patted his father’s hand soothingly.
Between them was the shotgun.
“I’m sorry, Nolan.” Young voice. The lad. Nolan’s buddy.
“It’s okay. You almost killed us, but it’s okay.”
“That’s never happened to me before. Falling asleep at the wheel, I mean, Jesus.”
“Maybe it’s a good sign.”
“How do you figure?”
“Shows you’re relaxed, if nothing else. I doubt Rigley and the girl get that much sleep between now and Monday. No, I take that back — the girl’ll sleep fine. She’ll sleep better than any of us.”
“Listen, Nolan, I’m tired, and I know you are too. I mean, you slept all the way back yourself...”
“Except when you almost ran into the semi. That woke me up.”
“Yeah, except then. Anyway, I wonder if you’d mind going over a few things with me. I feel like there’s a few things you’re going to want me to know that Rigley doesn’t have to. After all, all he has to do is stand there.”
“Couldn’t it wait till morning?”
“I’ll sleep better if we go over it now.”
“I didn’t notice you having any trouble sleeping when you were behind the wheel.”
“I’m wide awake now.”
“Okay. I tell you what. I’ll take it from the top, and you stop me any time you got a question.”
After Nolan had gone over the heist in detail with the kid, the Comforts allowed time for everybody downstairs to go to sleep, then sneaked out through the garage.
13
Most of the downtown Port City buildings were brick and had a decaying look to them. The bank, on the corner, was an exception. It was white stone, two stories of nicely chiseled Grecian architecture dominated by three pillars carved out of its face. Above the pillars the word bank was cut in the stone and the date 1870; the bank’s electric sign, nearby, didn’t date back that far. The sign was attached to the corner of the building and hovered out over the sidewalk; it said first national bank of port city above a field of black, on which white dots grouped to form the time and then regrouped to form the temperature. Right now the sign said the time was 1:27. The time was 7:26. And the sign said the temperature was 98 degrees. The temperature was 20 degrees. The sign was broken.