The third Leech had grabbed up one of the guns from the pile Nolan disarming them had made, and scrambled off into the warehouse and Nolan pursued him, telling Jon to cover Lyle, who through all this, impervious to it, remained crouched over his father’s body, apparently wondering what life would be like without someone to tell him how to live his.
Nolan ran after the final Leech, who hurtled down one and then cut over to another backroom aisle, and was nearing the double doors that led out into the department store, when he wheeled to throw some gunfire Nolan’s way.
It was wild gunfire, though, chewing up some shelved merchandise at left, and Nolan shot him once, in the chest, and the bullet burst bloodily through the Leech and the Leech burst bloodily through the double doors, flopping on his back in ladies’ wear, dead as his brothers.
When Nolan returned, Jon was guarding Lyle, and the three men were dutifully unloading the trailer.
“Forget it,” Nolan told the three. He allowed himself a sigh. “It’s fucked, now. We’ll leave the trucks loaded — they belong to the Leeches, anyway — and the Leeches aren’t going anywhere.”
Winch put down the box he was unloading. He shrugged. “Maybe if we leave everything, they’ll think a fight broke out. You know, your classic falling out among thieves, and that’ll be the end of it.”
“Yeah,” Fisher said. “Maybe they’ll just write it off as a heist that went sour.”
“Maybe,” Nolan said, nodding.
“Imagine,” Dooley said, dryly, “anybody mistaking this for a heist that went sour.”
“Pa,” Lyle was saying.
The three men exchanged glances, and walked over to Nolan as a group. Winch, who seemed a little pale, remained spokesman.
He said, “Why don’t the three of us split, then. This is no place to be hanging around.” He looked around him. The two dead Leeches. The dead Coleman Comfort. The bashed-up-looking Lyle Comfort, mourning on his knees, a smear of his father’s brains on his left shoe. Blood on the floor and the smell of shit and cordite in the air. Winch shook his head again. “This is what I hate about this business.”
Nolan said, “I promised you money.”
Dooley, who was anxious to go, waved that off. “We trust you.”
Fisher thought about that briefly, then agreed.
“I don’t think you’ll have to wait,” Nolan said, and he went over to Comfort’s body. He took Lyle by one arm and hauled him over by the far wall; told Jon to keep him covered. Jon was doing fine, Nolan thought; he’d come through this like a real pro.
Nolan bent over Comfort’s body and pulled down its coveralls.
Winch said, “Jesus Christ, Nolan — what...”
One of the coverall pockets was soaked and the strong sickly sweet smell of perfume rose; a bottle the old man had boosted had broken when he fell, apparently. Nolan ripped open the plaid shirt to reveal longjohns; and, finally, a fat money belt around Comfort’s waist. He unfastened the bulky belt, stood, and extended it toward the three men, like it was some plump, ungainly but rare snake he’d bagged for them.
“You guys carve this up,” he said. “If there isn’t at least a hundred grand here, I’ll eat the fucker. Anyway, I want no part of it.”
Winch took the belt, held it in both hands and looked at it incredulously and said to Nolan, “How did you know he’d have it on him?”
“I didn’t,” Nolan said. “But I noticed he’d put on some weight since Sunday — he must not’ve worn the money belt to that first meeting. Entrusted it to Lyle, in case I pulled something, I guess. Anyway — I never knew a Comfort who believed in banks.”
“This one takes the cake,” Winch said, shaking his head.
“It’s getting light out,” Dooley said, touching Winch’s sleeve. “We better go.”
“My sentiments exactly,” Fisher said.
The men bade brief good-byes to Nolan and Jon, stepped over and around the corpses, collected their guns and left out the back door, going quickly to Fisher’s Buick in the parking lot and disappearing into the sunrise, leaving behind a changed, rearranged Brady Eighty that would, in a short time, surprise those who would come in and take over for them, the day shift who normally inhabited the place, who would not be in for a normal day.
Lyle had said nothing through all this, except an occasional “Pa.” He hadn’t wept. He just stood near the wall, looking stunned, Jon holding the UZI on him, Lyle’s wide eyes staring at his pa’s corpse.
Nolan put the .38’s nose against Lyle’s.
“So you threw her down a well,” he said.
Lyle looked past the gun at Nolan, like a wide-eyed child. Orphan child. He shook his head no.
“What, then?” Nolan demanded.
“She was running. She fell down one.”
Nolan looked at Jon. Jon looked at Nolan.
“Show me where,” Nolan said.
22
Feeling like he was in a dream, an unending awful dream, Jon drove Nolan’s silver Trans Am, following the cherry-red Camaro down Highway 92, woods at left, the Mississippi at right.
He wondered if Cindy Lou was on her bus yet. He had given her the keys to his van, back at Brady Eighty, and told her to leave it at the bus station; he’d pick it up later. Was she sitting in the station even now, waiting for a bus to take her away to L.A., away from the father she feared, and didn’t know was dead?
Jon shook his head; he’d tried to help her. Just like she tried to help him. But she had, not so indirectly, provided the circumstances for her father’s murder — in which Jon was an accomplice.
He wondered about her. He wondered if she would find any kind of life in La-La Land. Waitress? Hooker? Something better, he hoped. He wondered how long it would be before she learned of her father’s death, and how she’d react. How would she feel about Jon, and Nolan? Would she bite her lip and understand? Or would she be the next Comfort to come out of the past and want to kill them?
The sun, not at all high in the sky, glinted off the cold gray choppy surface of the river. Up ahead Nolan was driving. Comfort’s son Lyle was in the back seat, trussed up like something out of a bondage magazine, but sitting up nonetheless, so he could see out the window and give Nolan directions. The excess clothesline, and there was quite a bundle of it, was on the floor in the Camaro’s back seat. So was a flashlight.
“We’re not going to leave her down there,” Nolan had said, with a passion unlike him.
Left unsaid was the faint hope that she might be alive. But both knew that hope was so faint as to be transparent as the wishful thinking it was. The girl was dead. Sherry was dead. Nolan would have to face that.
Recovering a body wasn’t Jon’s idea of a great way to start a day; his bones ached, he was so tired, and he supposed hunger was behind the grinding pain in his stomach, but after his session with the UZI, eating was out of the question — the idea of ever eating again seemed in fact abstract.
He’d killed those men, those two Leeches. Nolan’s bullets had been in there, too, but Jon had seen the UZI bullets zing across the chests, going in black, coming out red. His mouth was dry.
They were murdering lowlife sons of bitches but he had killed them. Self-defense, but he had done it. He had killed them. He could face that.
He could live with it.
What he wasn’t sure about was whether he could live with murdering Lyle Comfort.