This time Jon didn’t shrug. “So if this goes down, it’s going to be major. Major media coverage; serious cop action.”
“Yes. My being the inside man on the heist could well come out. So could my ‘checkered past.’”
Jon was nodding. “The bank robbery will bring in the feds; state and local police will enter the other robberies; the department stores will have insurance investigators on the case...”
Nolan stopped pacing, looked around him. “I could lose everything.”
“Is this place what’s important to you?” Jon said, disgustedly. “What about Sherry?”
Nolan looked at the floor. “I said I could lose everything.”
Jon sighed. “I’m sorry. I know she’s what’s important in this.”
“She’s more important to Comfort than she is to us.”
“How so?”
“She’s what’s keeping him alive.” Nolan checked his watch. “Come on. I’m having coffee with a guy at two-thirty. I want you to meet him.”
They turned right at Santa’s Kingdom toward the Walgreen’s, half of which was drugstore, the other half cafe, whose outer wall was lined with booths looking out on the mall. Jon followed Nolan into the café, where they joined a ruddy-cheeked balding blond man of about twenty-five, who wore an expensive-looking gray suit and a red-and-green-striped tie; the gray coat was supposed to say executive, and the tie was supposed to say Christmas, or so Jon assumed. The guy wanted it both ways: authority figure and nice, regular guy.
“Nolan,” he said, putting down the coffee cup he was sipping from, half rising, extending a hand to shake. “Good to see you.”
“How are you, Stan? Stan, this is Jon Ross. He’s an old friend of mine.”
Stan half rose, grinning, extended a hand to Jon and they shook; too firm a grip, Jon thought, an overcompensating grip.
“Old friend?” Stan said. “He’s as young as I am.”
“We’re none of us getting any younger, Stan,” Nolan said, smiling faintly. “Jon’s the nephew of a friend of mine. Late friend. Neither of us have much family, so we like to spend Christmas together.”
“Right,” Jon said, smiling blandly at the guy, thinking, gee, Nolan, what a crock of shit.
Nolan gestured toward Stan and said, “Stan Jenson is our new mall manager.”
“Well, six months new,” Stan said, embarrassed, as if Nolan had been praising him effusively, as if “mall manager” were a designation on a par with “ambassador” or “astronaut.”
“He’s the guy who thought up that ‘Our Merry Best’ slogan,” Nolan said to Jon, deadpan.
“Really,” Jon said.
“No big deal,” Stan said, waving it off, as if Jon had said “Wow.”
“Snappy,” Nolan said, nodding.
“The advertising firm said they couldn’t have done it better,” Stan admitted, with a modest little shrug.
A waitress came and Nolan, who hadn’t had lunch yet, ordered the chicken fried steak. Jon, who hadn’t had lunch yet either, was still in no mood to eat; he ordered a Coke.
“Stan,” Nolan said, “I appreciate you getting together with me. I missed last month’s Mall Merchant Association meeting.”
“I know,” Stan said, smiling, “and we met at your restaurant!” He was grinning, as if he’d pointed out the biggest irony of them all. This guy was harmless, Jon thought, but a jerk. If a jerk can ever be harmless.
Nolan said, “What I wanted to talk to you about was mall security.”
Jon squirmed in his seat.
Stan put on an exaggerated “oh no” look, shook his head. “Not that again. Are you singing the same old song, Nolan?”
“I think security here is lax, Stan.”
Stan’s expression turned somber. “Nolan, I appreciate your concern. And as a merchant yourself you have every right to voice your opinion. But I wish you wouldn’t denigrate our fine staff.”
“I’m not denigrating anybody. On the other hand, I didn’t want to embarrass anybody, either. That’s why I wanted to talk to you, one on one. Not at a meeting.”
Stan nodded, appreciating that.
“Virtually every store out here, including the bank, is tied into the same security system,” Nolan said.
“A-1 Security,” Stan said, smiling tightly, nodding some more.
“They’re a good outfit. But did you ever stop to think that all of our alarms are carried on one phone line? All it would take is for a thief to snip that one phone line and he could have carte blanche.”
Stan smiled wide now, shaking his head, waving a hand as if to quiet a child. “That’s not the way alarm systems work, Nolan — if the wires are cut, the alarms are activated — at both the A-1 office and the police department.”
“It’s possible to jump the alarm, Stan.”
“Jump the alarm? You mean, cross the wires to bypass the alarm?”
“Yes.”
“Wrong again, Nolan. This just isn’t your area.”
“How am I wrong?”
“Well, this is going to get a little technical. But bear with me.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“A-1 tells me that if their alarm is jumped, the ‘pulse rate’ of the current flowing through it will set off the alarm.”
The waitress put Nolan’s chicken fried steak platter down in front of him; it included a generous portion of mashed potatoes with brown gravy, and Jon, whose Coke she also delivered, thought it was no wonder Nolan was getting a belly on him.
“Well, that’s reassuring,” Nolan said, cutting a bite of meat. “But I’d like to put another alarm system in, at the restaurant — not just a silent one, connected to A-1, but something nice and loud.”
Stan lectured with a pointing finger, friendly but firm. “Check your lease. We don’t allow any audible alarm systems.”
Jon couldn’t stay out any longer. He said, “Why not?”
Smiling, Stan looked at Jon patronizingly. “It’s been our experience, in our other malls, that when such alarms go off during business hours, by accident, as they sometimes do, it can be very unnerving, alarming, if you will, to the shoppers.” He stopped to chuckle at “alarming.”
“With our location, on the edge of the city, with so little else around, who would hear such an alarm after hours, except the burglar himself, who would beat a hasty retreat? A silent alarm, on the other hand, which A-1 assures us that it can react on within minutes, will keep the burglar there and unaware.”
“What’s wrong,” Jon asked, “with scaring him away before he has time to take anything or do much damage?”
Stan shrugged matter-of-factly. “What’s wrong with capturing him? The five minutes it would take A-1 to dispatch a car, not to mention the police who may well be there just as soon, isn’t that big a deal.”
“Okay,” Nolan said, his chicken fried steak eaten, just starting his potatoes, “you’ve convinced me. But one thing you will never convince me on...”
Stan laughed softly, shaking his head in friendly frustration. “You still think we should have a security man on duty twenty-four hours a day.”
Nolan nodded, swallowed a bite, said, “I think you should hire four more men, and two should stay on night shift. Patrolling inside and out.”
“That’s simply not necessary. The corporation has malls all over the Midwest, and security measures in those malls are exactly like those here. When was the last time you heard of a robbery at a mall?”
“Hell,” Nolan said, grinning, which was something Jon had rarely seen, “maybe I’m just paranoid.”
“Well,” Stan said, finishing his coffee, “at least you didn’t suggest our security guard be armed, for pity’s sake, like you did at that one merchants’ meeting.”