So that was it. You couldn’t live the straight life without something from the past, something bent, turning up now and then. And this time, it was a Comfort.
Nolan said, “I didn’t kill your brother.”
The smile faded. “Don’t shit me, Nolan. You ain’t in any position to shit me.”
Nolan knew trying to reason with a Comfort was like lecturing a tree stump, but he tried anyway. “Your brother and his son Terry tried to hijack a job of ours; they got killed trying, but it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t Jon, who pulled the trigger. It was somebody else on that job, who’s dead, now. So you’re trying to settle a score that doesn’t need settling.”
“Let’s suppose you’re telling me the truth,” Cole Comfort said, his eyes slits. “Even so, it don’t justify you trying to heist Sam at his house that time; you killed Billy in the process, so don’t go talking about scores that don’t need settling.”
Billy Comfort. The redneck pothead who’d been poised to stick a pitchfork in Jon outside Sam Comfort’s rustic digs, when Nolan put two .38 slugs in him, killing him.
“Sam ripped off a partner of mine,” Nolan said, knowing he was fighting a futile battle, but trying anyway. “I was getting his money back for him.”
Comfort slammed a fist on the tabletop; the beers jumped, and Cole’s smile, his cool attitude, fell away to show the rage beneath. “Bullshit! It was no business of yours. You don’t steal from your own kind! It ain’t done. You don’t fuckin’ do it!”
The barmaid brought Cole his whiskey. He paid her, then gulped it down like medicine.
“A lot of people who worked with your brother, over the years,” Nolan said, “just flat out disappeared. The same is true of people who worked with you.”
Cole shook his head, his expression now stern. “I’m a businessman, don’t you forget it. I treat my business associates fair and square.”
The Statler Brothers were booming out of the jukebox.
“What do you want for the girl?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
Astounded by all this, Jon entered the conversation: “Then why in hell did you take her?”
“Inducement,” Comfort said, looking at Nolan, not Jon.
“Inducement,” Nolan said.
“You see, we’ve had some bad blood, you and me — all three of us, matter of fact. But that’s bad blood under the bridge, far as I’m concerned.”
“Really.”
He folded his hands. “I have a business proposition for you, Nolan.”
“An offer I can’t refuse.”
“That’s right. Not if you want to see that little piece of tail again.”
“Don’t even think about hurting her.”
Comfort took off the Stetson-like hat and scratched his head, fingers lost in the thick pure white hair. Then he put the hat back on and said, “Oh, I don’t think it’s gonna have to come to that. I think you’d have wanted to go in with me on this job in any event — but, just in case, because of the bad blood, I took the girl for inducement sake.”
“Get to the point.”
“Like I said — revenge crossed my mind. I won’t lie to you and say otherwise. But then I thought, Cole — stealing well is the best revenge. Ain’t that the truth?”
“Point being?”
Cole Comfort’s smile was a crease in his leathery face; his eyes twinkled, like a psycho Santa Claus. “I spent some time, recently, at that fancy mall of yours.”
“It’s not mine.”
“Sure it is — you got your restaurant there. You know all about that place, and what you don’t know, you can find out. I watched you. You got friends. You’re a regular pillar of the community, ain’t you, Nolan? They love you — butchers, bakers, candlestick makers. Bankers, too.”
“So what?”
“I have a dream,” he said, and it wasn’t Martin Luther King’s. “I think maybe everybody who ever was in a shopping mall has had this dream — namely, what would it be like to have the place to yourself some night? To just go shopping from store to store, taking what you want, and best of all — not paying for anything.”
“That’s an interesting dream. But maybe it’s time you woke up, Cole.”
He smiled big. “Dreams come true, sometimes. You’re going to help me make mine come true. You’re going to help me go shopping at Brady Eighty. We’re going to loot the entire goddamn place.”
Jon said, “You can’t be serious.”
But Nolan knew he was.
Cole Comfort, waving a hand in the air, grandiosely, said, “We’re going to bring trucks in, semis, right into loading docks. We’re going to steal every appliance and electronic plaything in the place. We’ll hit the bank; the jewelry stores. We’re going to empty everything but the pet store, and if one of us wants a goddamn dog, well, we’ll take that, too.”
“It can’t be done,” Nolan said.
“Sure it can,” Cole said. He painted an air picture with a sweep of a gnarled hand. “Think of it — an all-night shopping spree — and we leave without paying the bill.”
Silence; silence but for the Oak Ridge Boys, blaring.
“Let the girl go and I’m in.”
“No. First we loot the mall. Then you get the girl.”
Nolan looked at Jon. Jon rolled his eyes.
Nolan said, “When did you plan on taking this shopping spree?”
“Thursday night.”
“What Thursday night?”
“Next Thursday night.”
Jon said, “You’re nuts. You’re fucking nuts.”
Comfort smiled at Jon, a nasty smile. “Children should be seen and not heard,” he told him.
“How do you plan on going about this?”
“Oh, I got some ideas, but most of it, you’re going to figure out, Nolan. You got the inside track, after all. You’re going to run the show, like always.”
“I’m the director,” Nolan said, “and you’re the producer.”
Comfort grinned like a good ole boy. “That’s right. Now, I’ve spent two weeks doing my own homework, and putting things in motion. We’ll have three semis and ten men, ourselves included. Everybody’ll be in town by Tuesday night. We’ll have a great big get-together and you can tell us just how we can get this turkey shot.”
“It’s not enough time.”
“It’ll just have to be. Besides, sooner the job goes down, the sooner you get your piece of tail back.”
“Don’t call her that.”
“I’ll call her what I like.”
“You do what you think is best, Cole.”
“You’re in, then?”
“I’m in.”
“And the kid?”
“Ask him yourself.”
Comfort looked at Jon and Jon said, “I’m in.”
Comfort put both hands on the table and pushed out of the booth, smiling. He tipped his snake-banded hat to them. “Thank you, gentlemen. You’ll be hearing from me.”
“Cole.”
“Yes?”
“If the girl is returned with so much as her hair mussed, I’ll shoot you in the head.”
“Will you, now?”
Nolan just looked at him.
Comfort’s smile disappeared, and then so did he, out into the cold night.
Part Two
9
The mall was decorated for Christmas. At every entrance, including the one in back where Jon came in, a wreath-ringed red placard greeted customers, like a yuletide stop sign; it sat on a treelike post growing from a Styrofoam-snow base, saying, in a white Dickensian cursive, Our Merry Best — Brady for the ’80s. Considering the lettering style, Jon thought, maybe that was the 1880s. Muzak dreamed of a White Christmas from unseen speakers above, as if God were Mantovani. Red and green banners hung from the ceiling, rows of them extending the width of the aisle, every six feet or so, swaying ever so slightly, looking more like grotesquely oversize military ribbons than anything having to do with Christmas. Or so thought Jon, anyway, who was in a very bah-humbug mood.