So Roger, broke, frustrated, was pleasantly surprised to receive the phone call from Cole Comfort, of all people.
“It’s a big job,” he said. “We need you and your pansy pal, too.”
“Don’t say that,” Roger said.
“Say what?”
“Don’t say anything unkind about Phil. He’s a real gentleman, and I expect you to treat him that way.”
“Why, of course. No disrespect meant. We need his special talent — there’s going to be lots of doors that need unlocking.”
Hearing Comfort’s soothing, southern-accented tone made Roger queasy; the man was a liar, and a small-timer to boot. Roger couldn’t think of Comfort without thinking of heisting grocery stores, loading frozen meat into trucks. A nickel-and-dimer, Comfort was, and a dangerous one.
“I don’t know, Cole,” Roger said, wanting very much to take the job, but not feeling it prudent.
“It’ll be fifty gees each, minimum,” he said.
“Hmmm.”
“It’s an inside job. Very safe. More than that I dare not say.”
“Who else is in?”
“Nolan.”
That decided it.
“Count me in,” Roger said.
“How about the... your pal?”
“He’s in.”
“You can speak for him?”
“I can speak for him.”
Now it was a week later, in Davenport, Iowa, in the restaurant/nightclub called Nolan’s. It was just past three o’clock in the morning. They had come in two cars; he and Phil had been picked up downtown, at the Hotel Davenport, where they shared a room (he had no qualms about sharing a room with Phil — Phil never fooled around on the job). Cole Comfort himself had been driving, a blue Ford pickup; Roger sat next to driver Cole, and Phil sat next to Roger. In the other car were the three Leech brothers (as it turned out) and Dave Fisher, the slightly nerdy electronics guy.
They sat at a big table in the dimly lit bar area of Nolan’s. Nolan himself, in a pale blue shirt and dark new-looking jeans, stood off to one side, leaning against a pillar, among hanging plants, lurking in the foliage like a jungle cat. Cole Comfort sat at the head of the table, a white-haired, blue-eyed near coot in a plaid shirt and overalls. Overalls, God help us. Roger glanced at Nolan, wondering why the man would lower himself to work with Comfort. Nolan, as usual, was expressionless.
Next to Roger was Phil, looking professorly in a tweedy brown sport jacket over a sweater-vest and tie; sitting like a student next to him was Fisher, a serious, earnest man in his late thirties, wearing thick glasses with heavy black frames and a white shirt and black tie with pens and gizmos in a plastic pouch within his shirt pocket, a pocket-size notebook on the table in front of him. Across from them were the Leech brothers — Ricky, Jerry, Ferdy — three lumberjack-brawny guys in their late thirties with five-o’clock shadow and dirty sweaters and stocking caps, which they were wearing indoors, just as they were wearing the same blank-eyed expression. They were triplets. No one on earth, outside of their family, could tell them apart.
Seeing them here had not made Roger’s night. They were the same truckers who’d worked with Comfort on the supermarket heists. They were not really stupid men; they showed signs of being smart. But they were brutes — crude, lewd and rude, as Phil had once put it. Roger knew Phil would be equally less than thrilled to see the owners and operators of Leech Bros. Trucking of Sedalia, Missouri.
“I don’t like working with faggots,” a Leech said to Comfort.
“I don’t neither,” another Leech said, also to Comfort.
The third Leech merely nodded.
“Shut up,” Comfort said. “Phil’s good at what he does. We need him.”
“Thank you,” Phil said. The sarcasm in his voice was faint, but there. The Leeches missed it; no one else did.
One other person was there — a young guy of about twenty-five, with short blond curly hair and a sweatshirt with some sort of space-cadet comic-book character on it. He wasn’t sitting at the long table — he was at a small table for two nearby, sitting in a chair that was turned around, leaning over it, head on his crossed arms, like a kid in study hall. He did not want to be here.
“Do we all know each other?” Comfort said.
“I don’t know him,” a Leech said, pointing back to the blond kid.
Nolan said, “He’s with me.”
“Does he have a name?” a Leech said.
“Jon,” the kid said. “I caught your names earlier. Huey, Dewey and Louie, isn’t it?”
The Leeches didn’t get it.
One said, “I’m Ricky.”
Another said, “I’m Jerry.”
Another said, “I’m Ferdy.”
Nolan said, “We’re supposed to be ten. I only count nine.”
Comfort looked over at Nolan and said, “My boy Lyle can’t be with us tonight.” Then he said, “Come join us, Nolan,” waving him over.
Nolan walked past Comfort to the table for two and joined the kid named Jon.
“How about some beer?” a Leech said, pointing over toward the bar.
Nolan said, “We’re not socializing. We need to make this as short as possible. I don’t like hanging around here.”
Comfort smiled at Nolan and said, “I just thought this was as good a place as any to meet.”
“It’s a stupid place to meet,” Nolan said.
Comfort glared at him, then the glare melted into a seemingly sincere smile. “You’re mistaken, Nolan. It’s a real smart place to meet. We’ll meet here tomorrow night, too. It’s better than meeting at one of our motel rooms where we might be seen together. This is real out of the way and private.” Comfort smiled like Daddy at the men sitting at his table. “Nolan’s nervous about meeting here because this very mall we’re sitting in is our target.”
That confused Roger, who said so: “You mean, the mall bank here’s our target? I don’t do banks... you can’t blow a vault like that without noise to raise the dead—”
“Shush,” Comfort said gently. “I mean, we’re gonna take this whole dang mall. We’re going shopping; a regular moonlight madness sale, only it’s all on the house. Thanks to Nolan, here.”
Phil was sitting forward; even the generally bored-seeming Fisher was shifting in his seat. The Leech brothers weren’t impressed; they obviously were already in the know. Nolan and Jon, too.
Fisher said, “What exactly do you mean? This mall has, I would guesstimate, fifty-some stores.”
Comfort turned to Nolan, who then said: “Fifty stores exactly — not counting the bank, this restaurant or the three major department stores.”
A rather stunned Phil asked Comfort, “How in God’s name do you heist a mall?”
Comfort said, “Nolan?”
Nolan, still seated at the nearby table, said, “Right now, as we sit here, there are no security guards on duty. Only a single janitor. The alarm system is silent — no audibles at all — on a phone line to a security company and the cops.”
“Lead me to it,” Fisher said, smiling smugly.
Nolan cautioned him: “I’m told the change in pulse rate, if you jump it, automatically sets off the alarm.”
Fisher shrugged. “Not with one of my little black boxes wired in, sending them the right pulse rate. Go on.”
Nolan did: “The security guard goes off at ten. He doesn’t even come back on duty till one o’clock the next afternoon. The maintenance man opens the doors at seven A.M. Merchants start arriving around eight-thirty, and stores open at ten.”
“We would have from ten till six-thirty or so,” Roger said, “inside this mall, to do what we pleased.”