It was Monday afternoon, a few minutes after two. He had just come from the post office in downtown Davenport, where he express-mailed a package containing the original art for Space Pirates, issue #5, to his publisher in California. Normally that would have put him in a relaxed state of mind — knowing he had another issue behind him, thinking that a month sounded like plenty of time, a luxurious amount of time, to write and draw another twenty-two pages of outer-space comic-book whimsy. It wasn’t, of course, but he liked to spend a day or two pretending it was, getting a leisurely start on the scripting of the next issue, picking up speed so that by week’s end he’d be ready to start drawing.
This week wouldn’t quite work that way.
For one thing, he was in no frame of mind to think up funny stuff — and for another, his time wouldn’t be his own for a while, not till Friday, and chances were Friday wouldn’t find his frame of mind any more conducive to thinking up funny stuff than it was today.
This week was spoken for; his time was taken up.
He had a mall to help heist.
This mall he was strolling through right now, Casual Corner, Radio Shack, Mrs. Field’s Cookies, Kroch & Brentano’s, Barb’s Hallmark, weaving through the swarm of seasonal shoppers, in and out and around the mock rustic carts perched periodically in the middle of the wide mall aisle, cute carts filled with Christmas knick- knacks, quilted Christmas stockings and little wooden reindeer and lots and lots of candles, seasonal shops on wheels overseen by teenage girls dressed as elves. In the central area of the mall, where the ceiling rose an extra half story to a mirrored height, tiny twinkling white Christmas tree lights, arranged in circular chandeliers, hovered like plastic ghosts; a white picket fence decorated with gay red bows surrounded Santa’s cotton-covered slope, in the midst of which steps rose to the Christmas occasion. The fat man in red and white sat on a red and white throne with an eight-year-old girl in his lap; you can be arrested for that in some states, Jon thought. Teenage girl elves atop the slope were charging four bucks per Polaroid with Santa. Maybe stealing was in season.
Ho ho ho.
Christmas was Jon’s favorite holiday, favorite time of year, for that matter; usually the commercialism didn’t get him down, it was just part of the Christmas package — only this year he felt cynical and angry, because Nolan’s Sherry was in the hands of that crazy murderous son of bitch Comfort. Maybe she was dead already.
He had thought he’d left this behind him. He had thought those days, with Nolan, were over. He liked Nolan. He respected him, and supposed he felt something like affection for the guy, though you’d have to take Jon’s toenails out with pliers to get him to admit it.
But those days with Nolan seemed a nightmare to him now. A vivid nightmare, easily recalled, but nothing he wanted to dream again. He had seen people die, violently; he had done violence himself. He had felt no exhilaration during the handful of heists Nolan had taken him on — only nausea and cold, clammy fear.
Already, he had the butterflies; like he always had before a performance. The trouble was, the resemblance between rock ’n’ roll and heisting ended there: once on stage, music all around him, the butterflies flew; on a heist, impending violence around him, the butterflies grew.
How did he ever get mixed up with a guy like Nolan? He had his criminal uncle to thank for that; thanks, Unc. RIP. Merry Christmas.
He turned left at Santa’s Kingdom and walked down a wide short corridor where, near the front entrance and separated by another Our Merry Best stop sign and a fenced-in patch of cotton snow with electronic big-eyed smiling-face rosy-cheeked puppets riding a sleigh, was the First National Bank branch, on the right, and at left, Nolan’s. The restaurant wasn’t open yet, but Nolan was waiting there for Jon. When Jon raised his fist to knock, in fact, Nolan’s face appeared in the glass door and he opened it up.
Jon stepped inside, glanced around the place. This room (one of two, not counting the kitchen) seemed to be largely a bar, and there was a nice parquet dance floor, room for a band to play, if some tables were moved out. The walls were busy with nostalgic bric-a-brac and lots of yuppie-ish hanging and potted plants; it wasn’t much like Jon pictured a place called Nolan’s would look. Sherry’s touch, he supposed.
“Nice place,” Jon said.
“It’s a living,” Nolan said. He was wearing a pale blue dress shirt and black slacks; no tie or jacket. He pointed to a nearby table, and they sat.
“You want a beer or something?” Nolan asked.
“No.”
“Did you take a look around?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think?”
Jon gestured with two cupped hands, as if grabbing the balls of a giant. “I think this is nuts. Heisting a goddamn shopping center? It’s looney! Why not Fort Knox, other than Goldfinger already tried it. And, shit, man, Comfort’s crazy. As a fucking bedbug.”
Nolan moved his head to one side, slightly; that was his shrug. “You’re right and you’re wrong. Right about Comfort. Wrong about the mall heist.”
Jon looked at Nolan carefully; the lighting was dim, and Nolan seemed even harder to see than usual. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I don’t kid, kid.”
Jon smirked. “Really? I seem to recall a few thousand sarcastic remarks directed in my general vicinity.”
“Sacking this place can be done,” Nolan said. “It’s nagged at me ever since I took space here, how easy it would be.”
“Nolan, this place is fucking huge. And now this alternate-universe Jed Clampett wants to pull a couple of trucks up to the back door and go shopping? A couple days from now? And you think that’s a good idea?”
Nolan folded his hands on the table and looked at them. “It doesn’t matter what I think; it’s Comfort’s party. But the job is workable. It’s also nothing I want any part of. It endangers the life I got going here.”
Jon sat forward. “You mean, you figure an investigation after the robbery might be serious enough that somebody could uncover your checkered past?”
“Investigation is hardly the word. And neither is robbery. There are fifty shops in Brady Eighty. Two of them are jewelry stores. Plus three major department stores — Petersen’s, J. C. Penney and I. Magnin. There’s also a bank.”
Jon shrugged. “Sure there’s a bank, but there’s no way to get in the vault. They’re sure to have a big mother with a time lock. Right?”
“Right. But they got two night deposit safes, and an instant-cash machine. That’s three safes — modest-size ones. You know what they got in in ’em?
“No idea.”
“I’d say, twenty grand in the instant-cash machine. And as for the night deposits, you were out in that mall. You saw the kind of business they’re doing.”
“It’s crowded, all right.”
“It’s December. The month that makes the rest of the year possible, for businesses. There could easily be fifty grand in night deposit money — not less than twenty-five.”
Jon shrugged again. “So there’s serious money, in this. But there’s also a ten-man string. Assuming Comfort won’t pay the two of us, that still leaves eight, which is a lot of ways to split the take.”
Nolan got up. He paced slowly beside the table. That bothered Jon; Nolan wasn’t the pacing type.
“I don’t want to go into it in detail right now,” Nolan said, still pacing, “but I figure this for a half-mil haul, conservatively, after goods are fenced.”