Fly Paper

by Collins, Max Allan

Ten seconds.

  He pulled the nylon mask down over his face. It didn’t impair his vision particularly, though he could feel it contorting his features, feel it tight on his face. It was a strange feeling, like pressing your face against a window.

  Five minutes, and he left the Ford, got down in the ditch, and walked till he was across from the house, then crawled across the gravel road, moved up and over the opposite ditch, and into the high weeds of the Comforts’ front yard. The weeds were more than sufficient cover; he traveled on his hands and knees and couldn’t be seen. He was within a few yards of the house when he heard a muffled pop, and after a moment smoke began to fill the air. Nolan had said the smoke would penetrate, and penetrate it did, in spades. The smoke was curling out through openings the house didn’t know it had, from around windows and between paint-peeling boards and from every damn where—gray, creeping smoke—and if Jon didn’t know better, he’d have sworn the house was on fire.

  Which was, of course, the idea.

  To convince the Comforts their house was burning.

  To panic the old man into grabbing his treasure box of loot and abandoning his ship.

  By this time, Jon was right up by the cement steps that rose to the front door, and he pulled the pin on his little olive-drab can, which made it pop and sprayed out smoke, blowtorch fashion, to the accompaniment of a loud hissing sound. As he retreated to the tall weeds, Jon wondered how so much smoke could fit into one little can. Earlier, he’d asked Nolan about the canisters; why, he’d wanted to know, was the top of the can gray and the rest green? Because, Nolan explained, the green was for camouflage purposes, while the top of the can was marked the color of smoke it made. Jon almost wished they’d used one green smoke bomb and one red one; it wouldn’t have looked like a fire, but it sure would’ve freaked out that pothead Billy Comfort. The poor burned-out bastard would’ve thought he was hallucinating.

  Nolan should be coming around the house any time now. The smoke was thickening, but Jon wasn’t having too much trouble maintaining a reasonable level of vision, even with the nylon mask. A figure was coming around from the left of the house. Must be Nolan, Jon thought, but then he saw the outline of the figure’s head: it was a head with a bushy mane of hair, Afro-bushy.

  It was Billy Comfort, speak of the goddamn devil.

  The shaggy-haired figure was moving toward Jon, and Jon ducked behind the cement steps. Billy was carrying a pole of some sort, and though he apparently hadn’t spotted Jon, he was heading straight for the smoke grenade, which was still spewing its gray guts out, hissing away like a big sick snake. As Billy approached, Jon suppressed a cough, covering his already nylon-covered mouth, wondering where the hell Nolan was, or, for that matter, old man Comfort.

  Billy knelt beside the smoke grenade, fanning the fumes away with his free hand. He nudged the blisteringly hot canister with one foot, like a Neanderthal trying to figure out what fire was. Finally, he said, “Far fuckin’ out,” and began to laugh and cough simultaneously.

  Jon’s hand touched the butt of the .38 lightly. Nolan had said leave the subduing to me, but Nolan wasn’t around. Somebody had to subdue Billy Com-fort, and right now, before Billy went screaming out the truth of the deception to his old man.

  So Jon did what he thought best.

  He tackled Billy, burying his head in Billy’s balls.

  Billy yelped accordingly, and his foot connected with the smoking can and he slipped on it, like a contestant taking a fall in a log-rolling contest, and he went down hard, the air escaping from him in a big whoosh. Jon clasped a hand over Billy’s mouth and grinned in what proved to be a premature victory, because Billy managed to swing something around that caught Jon on the side of the head and blacked him out.

  When Jon awoke, seconds later, he saw right away what it was that had put him to sleep: the handle of that pole Billy was carrying, only it was more than just a pole: it was the wooden shaft of a five-pronged pitchfork. And Jon looked up through the smoke-and-nylon haze and saw in Billy’s eyes a haze of another sort: a druggy haze. Billy was high, and Billy was on to the game. Maybe he’d even witnessed Jon and/or Nolan planting the smoke bombs; perhaps he’d been back in that barn, smoking or snorting or doing God-knows-what sort of dope, when he’d spied suspicious things going on up by the house, and had grabbed a pitchfork as a make-do weapon and come rushing to the rescue of home and hearth.

  So that’s how it stood: Billy with one foot on Jon’s chest, smoke floating around them like a choking fog, Billy raising the pitchfork to impale Jon and put him to sleep again.

  Permanently.

  9

  NOLAN CROSSED the gravel road in a crouch, hopped down into the ditch. It must have rained here recently, as the ditch was damp and got his shoes muddy. When he was safely within the sheltering trees that divided the Comfort land from the neighboring spread, Nolan cleaned his shoes off on the trunk of one of the clustered evergreens.

  He was uncomfortable in the nylon mask; the thing was hot, even on a cool night like this. He pulled it off and stuffed it in his pants pocket. He’d put it back on when he got up by the house. Right now, he preferred having his vision completely unimpaired; enjoyed having the clear, crisp country air fill his lungs without a damn nylon filter.

  Panty hose, he thought, and grinned momentarily.

  In his left hand was the olive-drab canister, the U.S. Army smoke grenade identical to the one he’d left with Jon. With his right hand he withdrew the long-barreled .38 from the police holster; it was going to be necessary to rap a head or two, and perhaps do more than that, should something go out of kilter, despite what he’d told Jon about going easy with the firearms. He’d taught him well, but Jon’s experience under fire was more than limited; if push came to shove, Jon would be armed, would be able to respond, but Nolan didn’t want that kid waving a .38 around frivolously.

  He stayed within the thick evergreens, got up parallel to the big gray barn and, crouching again, crossed half a block’s worth of pasture and then flattened himself against the barn’s back side. He could hear cattle or something stirring around in there, but not a Comfort, surely; the Comforts owned this land, according to Breen, but leased both pasture and barn to a farmer whose own property adjoined the Comforts’ in back. Which made the Comforts a part of the landed gentry, Nolan supposed, which was a hell of a thought.

  The house was maybe a hundred yards from the barn, maybe a shade more than that. Open ground and, with the moon full and the house fairly well lit up, not easily crossed unseen. He got on his hands and knees and began to crawl, like a commando training under the machine-gun fire of some square-jaw sergeant.

  He crawled two feet, and his hand—the one with the gun in it—sank into something soft which, on closer examination, proved to be cow dung. Nolan wasn’t happy about have gunk all over his hand, or his gun either, and wiped both clean on the grass. Holstering the .38, he swore to himself and crawled on. But the pasture was a cow-pattie minefield and, several feet later, the same hand ran into the same substance, a bit drier this time but no less irritating. So he said a mental “Fuck it,” got back up in a crouch, and moved on. What the hell, he thought, it wasn’t like the Comforts were out watching for him, and you can’t expect a city boy to go crawling through cow shit, not for anybody or anything.

  A barbed-wire fence separated the Comforts’ yard from the pasture, and Nolan squeezed under the fence without so much as snagging his sweater—a much more successful enterprise than his aborted attempt at crawling across the cow-pattie beachhead. The weeds were waist high in the yard and, keeping in his low crouch, he proceeded until the weeds ended and the gravel drive, which circled the place, took over. The family Buick was parked alongside the house on the left, which meant it would be a toss-up which door Sam would head for—front or back—when the “fire” broke out. Before he left the high weeds to cross the drive, Nolan got out the nylon mask, pulled it on, and drew the .38 again. Down to business, cow shit or no cow shit.

&nb
sp; The house had many windows, and lights were on in most of the rooms, but all the window shades were drawn. This was frustrating, because Nolan had to make sure both father and son were present in the house, and where. The shade of one window on the right side of the house allowed an inch or two clearance at the bottom to peer through, and since Breen had given him a full layout of the house, it didn’t surprise Nolan to find that the room beyond the window was the living room. He was, however, slightly surprised to find that Breen’s description of the Comfort place had not been an exaggeration: the house really was as lavishly—and tastelessly—furnished as Breen had said. The living room had wall-to-wall red shag carpeting and a sofa and reclining chair covered in a yellowish leather; there were any number of heavy, expensive wood pieces of various and totally nonmatching styles, as well as a couple of clear plastic scoop-seated chairs. Everything in the room was of high quality, but was slapped together like a furniture store’s warehouse sale. Drab, old, pale wallpaper, faded and peeling, was a backdrop to all this expensive but oddly coupled furniture, and the high point of the room was the Hamms beer sign over the sofa, lit from within, displaying a shifting panorama of shimmering “sky blue waters.” Lying on the sofa, sipping a Hamms, basking in the glow of a color television console the size of a foreign car, was Sam Comfort—a skinny old man with a potbelly, wearing gray longjohns, the buttons open halfway down his chest He was watching “Hee-Haw.”

  None of the other, shaded windows around the house afforded Nolan any view, though from Breen’s description he knew where everything was: adjacent to the living room was a kitchen (with space-age refrigerator, of course—stick a glass in a hole in the door and you get ice water) and Sam’s bedroom, which were side by side and together took up the same space as the rather large living room; in there somewhere was a toilet—Nolan didn’t remember exactly where—unless the Comforts still went the outhouse route, or maybe the cows weren’t the only ones crapping in the pasture. According to Breen, the old man’s room was unlike the others in the house, as it alone did not show signs of acquired affluence; the master bedroom was as empty and functional as the old man’s mind. Upstairs was a bedroom for Terry (the statutory rapist presently being rehabilitated) and another for Billy—also an office affair Sam used for planning sessions and the like. Nolan could see colored lights flashing behind the shade on Billy’s window; Breen said Billy’s room was a pot freak’s retreat, water bed and strobe lights and black-light posters and tons of stereo equipment, enough wattage in the latter to power a fair- size radio station. He could hear the faint throb of rock music coming from that upper floor room, and he would have to make the hopefully safe assumption that Billy was mind-tripping up there, as was the boy’s usual practice.

  Satisfied that he’d pinpointed both Comforts, Nolan went to work on the basement window in back of the house. The window came open easily, soundlessly, with the proper prying from his knife. He climbed down inside the Comforts’ lowest level, a washing machine right below the window serving as a step down for him, making his entry a quiet one.

  He used a pen-flash to examine the room. This end of the long basement was the laundry room; the other was being converted into a bar and recreation area. This was the first remodeling the Comforts had undertaken, and they were apparently doing the work themselves, as it was pretty slipshod: boards, cans of paint, various building bullshit lying around.

  Which was good, because this was the makings of a fire hazard; this made a logical reason for a basement fire, and should help to con Sam as he quickly tried to make some logic out of a fire breaking out in his house. The remodeling was almost finished, but not quite: the bar was in and linoleum was on the floor, but the ceiling wasn’t tiled, which was also good: those open ceiling beams would insure the effectiveness of the smoke bomb’s penetration.

  Nolan knelt with the canister, pulled the lever, heard its pop, left it on the floor, mid-basement, turning his head away even before he’d let go of the can, as already its stream of smoke was shooting out like water from a firehose. The can hissed as it dispersed its contents, and Nolan headed toward the laundry end of the basement, then hopped up onto the washing machine and out the window.

  He immediately returned to his view of Sam Comfort relaxing in the living room. A smile formed under the nylon mask as Nolan watched bewilderment grow on Sam’s face, first as Sam sniffed smoke, then as he saw smoke. After a slapstick double-take, the old clown jumped from the couch as if goosed and ran upstairs via the stairwell opening in the far corner of the room. The positioning of those stairs was a break for Nolan; with this view of the action, he’d be able to key on whether or not Sam opted for the front door, here in the living room, or the back door, out in the kitchen. Sam was only gone half a minute, then came tumbling out of the stairwell, a man who’d all but fallen down the stairs, coughing from the ever-thickening smoke, showing signs of panic, shaking in his damn underwear. As Sam came into clearer view in that smoke-clogged receptacle of a room, Nolan could see plainly under one of Sam’s arms an oversize green metal strongbox—Bingo!— while slung over Sam’s other arm was a double-barreled shotgun. He’s panicked all right, Nolan thought, but the old coot’s as suspicious and crafty as ever.

  A sound—pop!—turned Nolan’s head, in reflex, before he realized the sound was only Jon’s smoke grenade going off, meaning things were running to plan. When he turned back, the old man was no longer in sight.

  Shit! The room was pretty well dense with smoke now, and Nolan couldn’t tell if the front door was slightly ajar, which would have indicated whether Sam had gone out that way. Damn it, there was nothing to do but circle behind the house, and if Sam wasn’t back there, come on around and catch him out the front. Damn!

  Nolan ran.

  Sam wasn’t in back, nor was the back door ajar.

  Alongside the house, where the Buick was, no sign of Sam there, either.

  And what about Billy? An ugly chain of deduction was forming in Nolan’s mind. Sam had gone upstairs for three reasons, hadn’t he? To get the strongbox; to grab the shotgun; to warn his boy Billy. But Sam hadn’t been up there very long, barely long enough to do all those things. Why hadn’t Billy been following along on his daddy’s heels, down those steps? Why hadn’t Sam yelled “Fire!” when smoke first began trailing into the room, to warn Billy immediately? Shouldn’t that have been Sam’s natural reaction?

  If, then, Billy hadn’t been upstairs, where had he been? And more important, where the hell was he now?

  Once around the front of the house, Nolan knew the answer to that. Nolan’s questions about Billy were, for the most part, anyway, answered: Billy had not been in the house; Billy had been outside, Christ knows why or where. And Billy was onto the “burning house” trick. In fact, Billy was right next to the smoke grenade Jon had planted.

  And Billy was grinning. The smoke was just as thick out here as in the house, but Nolan could see that Billy was grinning. Billy was laughing, or was doing something like laughing, a combination of rasping smoke-cough and sick snickering. Billy was stoned out of his head, and Billy was standing with one foot on Jon’s chest, getting ready to heave one mother of a pitchfork down into Jon, punching steel teeth through the kid, pinning him to the earth like a scarecrow.

  Nolan was still running, a slow but steady jog, and he bumped into Sam, who’d come out the front door, and the two men came face to face and for just a moment. Nylon mask or no, Nolan felt he could sense recognition in Sam’s flat gray eyes.

  Nolan slapped the old man across the side of the face with the .38 and Sam said, “Unggh!” and toppled, colliding with Nolan. Nolan hit the ground and was on his feet again within the same second, and he brought up the .38 and fired twice.

  The shots broke the country calm like cracks of thunder. The bullets hit Billy Comfort in the chest and rocked him, shook him like a naughty child, exploded through him, blood squirting from the front of him, a spatter of bone and organs and more blood bursting out his back. He pitched
backward, gurgling, dying.

  Jon was awake now and rolling to one side as Billy Comfort’s last effort in life—the hurling of the pitchfork—came to no account: the fork quivered in the ground, right next to Jon, but not, thankfully, in him.

  Nolan looked at Jon and, with their stocking-distorted features, they exchanged a look that had in it any number of things—relief and shock and frustration among them, perhaps regret as well—and suddenly Jon’s face distorted further under the mask, as he yelled, “Nolan! The old man!”

  And as he remembered Sam Comfort, whom he’d merely cuffed out of the way so he could take care of more important business, as he recalled the crazy old man with a shotgun, Nolan heard the country calm shatter a second time in gunfire.

  Interim: Takeoff

  10

  CAROL SAID, “I WISH I was going with you.”

  Ken made a face at her in the bedroom mirror, as if to say, Don’t be ridiculous, and went on strapping the emergency parachute to his stomach, over his black cotton pullover. On the bed, closed, locked, was the suitcase with the fake bomb in it. The suitcase was a cheap, tan overnight bag they’d picked up at a discount department store. “Picked up” was literally right: Ken had shoplifted the suitcase, much to Carol’s discomfort, and the thought of that afternoon, several weeks ago, still gave her something of a chill.

  Ken had said he didn’t want to leave anything behind that could be traced to him, and he felt purchasing any such items locally would be dangerous. Carol didn’t agree: the items he had in mind (the suitcase, some clothes, a wig) could be purchased at any large chain store and should be virtually untraceable. How could you tell, for example, which of the hundreds of thousands of stores an overnight bag had been purchased from?

  But Ken had poured out a stream of double-talk, saying many items were code-marked for certain distribution areas, and skyjacking was a federal offense of the most serious nature, and those FBI men can trace a piece of string to the shirt on your back and blah blah blah. Carol didn’t believe any of it, but realized that Ken probably didn’t either. There was some secret reason he hadn’t divulged to her yet for his going one hundred miles to a discount department store to purchase the items at all: he was going to shoplift them—a bit of news he saved for Carol until they were parked in the discount store’s huge parking lot.