Soon, however, this mall would come back to life — night or not.
He turned left at Santa’s abdicated kingdom, skirted the red and green Our Merry Best sign, and used the key Nolan had given him to enter the mall entrance of Nolan’s, which had been locked to customers since nine.
He entered through the closed restaurant side and found Nolan and Comfort facing each other in the back room; Nolan sitting quietly, expressionlessly at the desk, Comfort sitting on a case of whiskey, arms folded, grinning at Nolan like a skull.
“She’s a sleeping beauty,” Jon said, meaning the janitor.
Nolan stood. “Stay here and keep Mr. Comfort company.”
And he left them together, and Jon took Nolan’s place at the desk, but didn’t speak to Comfort. After a while Comfort asked him if a cat caught his tongue.
“No,” Jon said. “I’m just taking your advice about children.”
Dave Fisher, Roger Winch, and Phil Dooley sat in a gray Buick which belonged to Fisher but was officially owned by a nonexistent person named Bernard Phillips. The Buick, which was parked in the Brady Eighty back parking lot, motor running, had Alabama license plates. Fisher had written to the Alabama Department of Motor Vehicles for the plates, fulfilling the requirement of a description of the car, vehicle identification number and registration fee. The Buick was a stolen car which Fisher, who lived in Minneapolis, had bought from a friend in St. Paul, who ran a chop shop. The Buick had a new VIN (vehicle identification number) and new tires; it did not have much of a heater, as the three men were finding out.
None of them was wearing a heavy winter coat — Fisher wore a dark blue polyester jacket, Winch, a brown corduroy sport coat over dingy work clothes, Dooley, a sand-color suede jacket. They needed jackets light enough to keep on, inside, during a long night of work, but protective enough to keep them from freezing when toiling in the chilly loading-dock areas.
“If I’d known this heater was down,” Fisher said apologetically to Winch, in the rider’s seat beside him, “I’d have fixed it.” Dooley was in back.
“Fuckin’ cold out there,” Winch said, rubbing his hands together. “At least it isn’t snowing now.”
Their breath was smoking, clouding up the windows.
Dooley said, “We only got a couple inches. I think it’s lovely.”
Fisher said, “What’s taking so long? It’s twenty after ten, already.”
“There he is,” Winch said, pointing toward Nolan, who could be seen behind the glass doors of the mall’s east-end rear exit. He was crooking his finger at them, like a parent summoning his children.
Fisher admired Nolan; he’d done several jobs with him, oh, probably half a dozen years before, and he’d come to admire the man’s logic and discipline. He had no such admiration for Comfort, with whom he’d worked on a Mickey Mouse house burglary about ten years ago — a rich guy in St. Louis with an elaborate alarm system, or so Comfort said; Fisher had no difficulty getting around it. The job wound up paying a couple grand. Whoop-de-do.
When he heard how Nolan had been forced out of retirement by Comfort, Fisher hadn’t been surprised exactly, although kidnaping Nolan’s lady seemed extreme even for Comfort. Fisher was on Nolan’s side in this, although he was eager to do this job and even more eager for the money. This was a challenging score (because of the size of it — the alarm system would be nothing) and would bring in a sizable piece of change, one that should indefinitely underwrite him as he continued developing the computer software he knew would one day make him a millionaire.
They piled out of the car. Fisher opened the trunk and took out a large square suitcaselike affair. Winch took out a duffel bag which made metallic clinks and clunks as the tools within bumped against each other; not to worry: the safecracker’s partner, Dooley, carried the knockers and grease, in his jacket pockets. Nothing was going to blow up tonight except some doors on safes, Fisher thought, smiling to himself — and, possibly, this job in Comfort’s face, if the old fool crosses Nolan.
Nolan let them in, locked the door behind them. He said to Fisher and Dooley, the men upon whom the job depended, “The Leeches will be here with the trucks at eleven. We got enough time?”
“Sure,” Fisher said, referring to the alarm system.
“Sure,” Dooley said, referring to the minimum eighteen locks he’d have to pick in the next few hours.
Nolan directed Winch and Dooley down to the mall entrance to Nolan’s, where Jon would be waiting to let them in — they’d be entering the restaurant side, which was closed; they would join Comfort in the back room, where all would wait till Nolan gave the go. The go was contingent upon Fisher’s success in jumping the alarm system.
Toward that end, Nolan walked Fisher into the maintenance shop, just to their left through the double doors. The unconscious woman who was the night janitor was tied up in her swivel chair; she looked dead, but she was snoring, which was among the things dead people didn’t do. The garagelike room was cluttered with cans of paint and canisters and bottles of cleaning solutions and such; the bag of guns was stowed in the corner, as he’d instructed Jon. Good.
Nolan walked Fisher up a half flight of stairs into another cluttered but low-ceilinged area, littered with unidentifiable junk and more cleaning supplies. On the wall at left was the board where the phone line came in; it looked cluttered, too, to Nolan, who knew little about such things — to him, it was just a couple of metal control boxes affixed to a board with dozens of little green wires shooting off here and there, making side trips into junction boxes. But Fisher seemed to know immediately what the various wires were for and where they were headed; he touched some of them, lightly, lovingly, smiling like a suitor.
Then Fisher opened what looked like a traveling salesman’s sample case and started unloading it.
“You need any help?” Nolan asked.
“No. It’s just a matter of clipping onto the phone line and measuring the pulse rate with this oscilloscope” — he pointed to a small battery-operated TV — “and, once I’ve got a wave reading, adjusting my little black box” — he nodded to a little black box with some dials and switches — “to that specific pulse rate and clipping it onto the alarm line, completing the circuit, fooling their so-called system.”
“And if you fuck up?”
“The cops’ll be here in five minutes,” Fisher said, and took his pocket knife and started scraping the phone wire bare.
17
The small cabin, one room with bath, would have seemed cozy to her, normally. A fire was going in its wood-burning stove, across the room near the far wall; this was, at the moment, the only light source in the room, and the warm orange glow cast on the rustic, knotty-pine interior of the cabin was as homey as a Norman Rockwell painting. Sitting before the stove, in a textured gray narrow-lapel jacket, over a wine-colored shirt, with matching pleated pants, was the boy/man, Lyle. He was a stylish dresser, Lyle was. The problem was his I.Q. seemed about the same as his shirt size. He sat there now, roasting a marshmallow on the end of a long twig he’d found outside, sat there cross-legged like an Indian in designer clothes, like a new-wave Boy Scout.
Sherry didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She did neither: she didn’t want to upset Lyle. She’d had some bad moments with him, over the past days, and had only today begun rebuilding. There were signs Lyle was warming to her again. He had, for example, offered to roast a marshmallow for her, just minutes ago. She declined, but thanked him for his thoughtfulness. That was one of the small pleasures of being held prisoner by a dimwit like Lyle: he never picked up on sarcasm. You could get away with anything — verbally. You just couldn’t get away.