Fly Paper

by Collins, Max Allan

  And instinctively Jon clawed for the .38, yanked the gun from its holster, and wrapped both hands around the stock and aimed and squeezed the trigger. Just as Nolan taught him.

  The shot was an explosion that tore the night open.

  And Sam Comfort.

  Old Sam caught it in the chest, high in the chest, about where one of the bullets had struck his son, and fell over on his back, much as his son had.

  Jon got to his feet, but didn’t go over to where Sam was. Nolan was already leaning down to examine the man.

  Jon said, “Is he? . . .”

  “Not yet,” Nolan said.

  “What should we do?”

  “We should get the hell out of here.”

  “And . . . leave him ... to bleed to death?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus, Nolan.”

  “Listen, what is it you think we’re doing here? Playing tag-you’re-fucking-It? We’ve robbed these people, Jon, and killed them. Now what do you think we should do?”

  “Get the hell out of here,” Jon said.

  So now, having spent a shocked, pretty much sleepless night, Jon tried to begin facing up to the fact that he’d—damn it!—that he’d killed a man. Every time he admitted that to himself, every time the phrase killed a man ran through his mind, his stomach began to quiver, like that pitchfork in the ground.

  Sure, the prospect had always been there, ever since he first teamed up with Nolan, on that bank job. And yes, there’d been blood before; people around them had died, violently—his uncle Planner for one. Bloody brush fires like that could spring up around a man like Nolan at just about any time. But reacting to such brush fires was one thing, and starting them something else again. Nolan had introduced Jon to a world of potential violence, but together they, had never initiated violence. Never before, anyway. This time—pitchfork or no pitchfork, shotgun or no shotgun—this time, Jon and Nolan had invaded someone else’s home territory, had initiated violence, and people had died. This they had known, these thoughts Jon and Nolan had shared in that look they exchanged after Billy’s death; a loss of innocence for Jon, for their relationship, that they could recognize even through the smoke and nylon masks.

  That the Comforts were perhaps bad people, evil people, was weak justification at best, rationalization of the most half-assed sort, and made Jon wonder just how he and Nolan were any different from Sam and Billy Comfort.

  It all came down to this: Jon had killed a man.

  And it made him sick to think it.

  “Sorry I took so long,” Nolan said, sitting down across from Jon at the window table. He took a bite of his sandwich, a hamburger identical to Jon’s. “Damn thing’s cold. Was I gone that long?”

  “It was cold when they brought it.”

  “Goddamn airports. I told you we should’ve just grabbed a hot dog at one of those stand-up lunch counters.”

  “I hate those things, Nolan. Standing at those lousy little tables, getting your elbow in somebody’s relish . . .”

  “Yeah, but the food’s hot, isn’t it? And not so goddamn expensive.”

  Jon had to smile at Nolan’s consistently penny-pinching attitude. Here they’d picked up, what? Over $200,000 from the Comforts’ strongbox last night, and the man is worried about nickels and dimes. Jon could figure why Nolan had taken so long in the can, too: he’d waited till the non-pay toilet was vacant.

  Nolan noticed Jon’s smile, weak as it was, and said, “You feeling better, kid?”

  “I’m feeling all right.”

  They really hadn’t talked about it yet, but it was there.

  “You can’t let this get you down.”

  “Nolan, I’m all right. Really.”

  “I believe you.”

  They were silent for a while, each nibbling at his cold, lousy hamburger as if it were a penance.

  Jon glanced around to make sure a waitress wasn’t handy to overhear, then said, “Are you sure the money’s going to be okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “What about the . . .” Jon gestured, meaning the two guns, which along with the money were in one of Nolan’s suitcases.

  “Don’t worry,” Nolan said. “The baggage goes through unopened, I told you.”

  “Don’t they have an X-ray thing they can run the baggage through?”

  “That’s just for carry-on luggage. Shut up. Eat.”

  Neither one of them finished their hamburgers. Nolan left no tip. When Nolan wasn’t looking, Jon left fifty cents. After all, the waitress wasn’t necessarily to blame for the hamburgers being cold.

  Fifteen minutes later, boarding passes in hand, they were standing in line while a pair of female security guards, armed, took all carry-on luggage, right down to the ladies’ hand bags, and passed it through the massive X-ray scanner. Ahead of them in line a few paces was a college-age kid with curly brown hair, similar to Jon’s, wearing jeans and a green corduroy shirt tucked in over a premature paunch, carrying a Radio Shack sack.

  “Hey, Nolan,” Jon whispered.

  “What.”

  “That kid up there.”

  The kid was presently handing the Radio Shack sack to the security guards and being checked through with no trouble.

  “What about him?”

  “Isn’t that a wig he’s wearing? Take a look. That isn’t his hair, is it?”

  “Maybe not,” Nolan admitted. “So what?”

  “Well, it just seems strange to me, a young guy like that, wearing a wig.”

  Nolan shrugged.

  So Jon shrugged it off, too; maybe the kid was prematurely bald or something. Like the paunch. Weird, though—young guy with no fat on him elsewhere, no hint of a double-chin, and here he has a gut on him.

  Jon stepped up and smiled at the two security guards, both of whom were pretty and blonde, and allowed his brown briefcase to be slid into the X-ray. Then he and Nolan stepped through the doorlike framework that was the metal detector. On the other side Jon picked up his briefcase of comics, wondering offhand if X-rays had a negative effect on pulp paper.

  They climbed the covered umbilical ramp to the plane, boarded, and were met by the flight attendant Nolan had met at the hotel. She was a knockout brunette who, for some reason, looked vaguely familiar to Jon. She gave him a brief, similar where-have-I-seen-you-before look, and then she and Nolan traded longer looks of a different sort, Nolan saying, “Morning, Hazel.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Ryan,” she said, and she and Nolan made eyes for a second. It was damn near embarrassing.

  They passed through the forward, first-class compartment and past the central galley, where the fourth and final flight attendant (a dishwater blonde not quite as attractive as the others) was already fussing with filling plastic cups with ice. They continued on into the tourist cabin, where they took the very last seats in the rear of the plane, near the tail. Only a few people were on board as yet, but Jon and Nolan had been toward the front of the metal-detector line, and the plane was going to be close to capacity.

  Jon was having problems with the briefcase: it was so jammed full of comics and stuff, he hadn’t been able to get it shut again, since the security guard checked it. He was struggling with it in his seat, and it got away from him and flopped out into the aisle, in the path of another passenger.

  It was the kid in the wig, still lugging his Radio Shack sack.

  The contents of Jon’s case were scattered in the aisle, and Jon and the guy in the wig bent over and began picking the books up.

  “I’ve got some of these,” the guy said, holding up a Buck Rogers Big Little Book. He had a soft voice, or at least was speaking in a soft voice. He seemed almost shy.

  “Really? You a collector, too?”

  “No. I read them as a kid.”

  “You don’t look that old.”

  “They were my older brother’s.”

  “Oh. Well, thanks for the help.”

  “Hope I didn’t damage them or anything.”

  “Never mind
. My stupid fault.”

  The guy in the wig smiled a little—a very little—and went on toward the rest rooms in back of Jon and Nolan’s seat. He stepped inside the first one.

  “Must be nervous,” Jon said. “Plane isn’t even off the ground and he’s going to the can already.”

  Nolan hadn’t been paying much attention. “Maybe it’s his first flight,” he said.

  12

  NOLAN LOOKED OUT the double-paned window as the Detroit airport flowed by, the plane beginning to make its move down the taxiway. Above him, the little air vent was blowing its stale, recycled air down into his face and, as he looked up to turn it away from him, he noticed the FASTEN SEATBELTS and NO SMOKING signs flash on in red letters, and he buckled up. About that time, Hazel’s voice came over the tinny intercom and reminded anyone who hadn’t yet complied with those two requests that now was the time.

  He didn’t really like planes that much, didn’t care for flying. He didn’t feel in control on a plane and preferred traveling by car, where he himself could be behind the wheel. Years ago, he had traveled by train fairly often, but train service in this country had gone to hell, and buses were a pain in the ass and slower than walking. So he was adjusting, finally, to the jet age, despite his firm belief that if God had wanted men to fly, he’d have given them parachutes.

  They had the three-abreast seat to themselves, though the unused third was presently being taken up by the briefcase of comic book crap that Jon had lugged aboard. Right now, the cabin pressure was making its abrupt increase, and Jon was making faces, swallowing as he popped his ears. Nolan did the same, with less facial contortion.

  Hazel’s voice came on the intercom again, while two of the other flight attendants stood, one at the front of the tourist compartment and the other halfway down the aisle, going through the oxygen-mask-and-emergency-exit ballet to the accompaniment of Hazel’s narration. When that was over, one of the flight attendants came walking down, checking to see if all smokes were out and seat belts fastened, and when she came to Jon and Nolan, she asked Jon to please put his briefcase under the seat in front of him. Jon explained that it wouldn’t fit under there, and she took it away from him, paying no heed to his protests, and put it in a closet compartment opposite the rest rooms that were right behind them.

  For a while, Jon sat there, looking like a kid whose favorite toy got taken away. Then he said, “Nolan.”

  “What.”

  “Get a load of that.”

  The kid who’d collided with Jon’s briefcase of comic books a few minutes before, the same kid Jon had noticed was wearing a wig, had come out of the john from behind them and was now heading back up the aisle.

  “Get a load of what, Jon?”

  “That kid in the green shirt.”

  “What about him?”

  “That isn’t his stomach.”

  “What?”

  “He’s got something under his shirt.”

  “No kidding.”

  “No, really, Nolan, something bugs me about that guy. Why’s he playing dress-up? Wearing that wig. Carrying something under his shirt.”

  “Maybe it’s old comic books.”

  “You can laugh if you want to, but that’s a weird kid, take it from me . . . and don’t say ‘takes one to know one.’”

  “Would I say that?”

  “You’d think it.”

  “You got me there.”

  The plane had stopped now, having reached the end of the taxiway, and out the window Nolan watched a DC-8 land, bouncing twice on its motionless tires, making blue smoke as rubber met concrete, and then settling down. The soft throb of the 727 jets began to build as the plane started to move, picking up speed fast, shoving Nolan and Jon back in their seats. The nose of the plane lifted, and they headed for the gray sky, Detroit slipping away rapidly under them.

  The seat belt and no-smoking sign soon winked off, and Nolan loosened his seat belt but left it buckled. The captain’s voice came out of the intercom and went into the standard flying-at-assigned-altitude-and-estimated-time-of-arrival spiel. According to the captain, the overcast day would be turning into rain here and there up ahead, but he anticipated smooth flying nevertheless. Sure.

  On the whole Nolan was pleased with the way things had worked out at the Comforts. Maybe pleased wasn’t the word—more like satisfied. The take had been over two hundred thousand (he hadn’t counted it, except for a fast shuffle through the strongbox of cash), and they’d got out with their asses intact, in spite of the foul-up. What more could he ask?

  It was, of course, unfortunate that Jon had had to shoot a man; but something like that was bound to happen sooner or later, and the kid had been exposed to the rough side of the business before, so it wasn’t like he’d been a complete virgin. Last night, what had happened had left Jon silent and shocked, but today he was as talkative as ever, and seemed only slightly depressed. And sleepy. Nolan would bet his share of the take that the kid hadn’t slept more than a couple hours, at most.

  If he had his way, it wouldn’t have happened. He’d sure as shit tried to plan around any overt violence. But what the hell, you can’t shelter a kid forever; if you do, he’s going to suffocate. He figured Jon would get over it. There’d be a scar, but Jon would get over it.

  Yes, the kid would have a rocky conscience for a while, Nolan knew, but that was the way it should be. It wasn’t healthy to feel good about killing a man, even a man the likes of Sam Comfort. When killing gets easy, a man is less than human, in Nolan’s opinion, and a man who likes killing isn’t a man at all. Besides, it’s bad for business. Society and its law-enforcement agencies take a much dimmer view of killers than they do of thieves, possibly because most of society fits into that latter category, to one degree or another.

  Anyway, it was over and done, and they were sitting pretty: pretty rich, and pretty lucky to be alive, and pretty sure nothing could fuck up at this late date. Nolan did feel a little bad about holding onto the two guns. Normally, he’d have got rid of them immediately, since they’d been fired on a job—especially when they’d been fired and killed somebody on a job—which these guns had. And he would get rid of them when he got back, after he had seen to it Jon and the two hundred thousand were returned safely to that antique shop in Iowa City. He would’ve asked Bernie for a fresh gun when he returned the Ford early that morning, but Bernie wasn’t there yet, so he’d decided to risk holding onto the .38s for a short while. But it was not good policy to do so, and it grated on him even now, thinking of those two guns down in the suitcase in the hold, nestled next to all that cash. Even Jon, over their mid-morning brunch (two bucks for a goddamn stinking cold hamburger!) had expressed concern about the guns, which had pleased him because it showed that Jon was getting more perceptive about things that counted, and irritated him because the kid had spotted a flaw in Nolan’s supposed perfection.

  Hazel was coming down the aisle, looking very nice in the tailored flight attendant outfit, with its soft, light colors. She stood beside their seat, leaned down, and asked, “Can I get you gentlemen something to drink?”

  “I thought you were working first class,” Nolan said.

  “I was, but since you were riding tourist, I traded off with one of the other girls.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “If you’re senior flight attendant, you can.”

  “Oh, you got rank, huh?”

  “It’s called age. But it was kind of silly for me to do.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, this junket’s such a short hop, I’m not going to have much of a chance to do anything besides serve a few drinks and pick up the empty cups.”

  “Yeah, but anything, just so you can be close to me, right?”

  Hazel said to Jon, “I see why you need all three seats. One for you, one for him, and one for his ego.”

  Jon said, “He’s just talking big so nobody notices he’s airsick. If he had his way, we’d be traveling by covered wagon.”

&
nbsp; Hazel laughed, and Nolan did too, a little. Nolan ordered a Scotch and Jon a Coke, and let Hazel go.

  “She’s a nice lady,” Jon said.

  “Yeah. She lives in Chicago. One of those high-rises on the lake. Has lots of days off, she says. Maybe I’ll be able to get in and see her now and then.”

  “Chicago isn’t much of a drive from the Tropical, is it?”

  “An hour, if the traffic is bad. Only, I hope I won’t be at the Tropical much longer.”

  “With half of last night’s take in your sock, you shouldn’t have to be.”

  Nolan nodded, then said, “Say, kid.”

  “What?”

  “I, uh, never really, you know, thanked you for last night.”

  “Thanked me?”

  “Yes, goddammit. You did save my fucking ass, you know.”

  “Well, you saved mine. So what?”

  “Yeah. So what.”

  They both sat back and tried to look gruff. Nolan was better at it than Jon.

  “Hey, Nolan.”

  “What”

  “That kid. The one with the wig.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “He’s headed up toward the front going up through the first-class compartment.”

  Nolan had no comment.

  “I don’t know, Nolan, something weird about him, I tell you. Something’s going on with that kid.”

  “Aw, shut up. Go to sleep for half an hour, or go get one of your funny-books and read it or something.”

  They sat in silence. Five minutes went by, and then the dull little bell sounded that signaled the intercom coming on.

  The captain again.

  “We’ll be having a little change in course this morning, ladies and gentlemen. We’ll be rerouting our plane directly to the Quad City Airport at Moline. Those of you who were headed there anyway shouldn’t mind this little detour as much as the others.”

  The captain’s lame attempt at humor had the reverse of its intended effect: it was easy to see past his superficially light, joking tone and tell something was wrong, very wrong, and the murmur of passenger concern swept through the plane like a flash flood.