“All right,” Sturms said, sticking the gun down in his waistband. “I’ll call him and let you talk to him.”
He crouched and dialed the number from memory. It took a few seconds for the direct-dialing long-distance wheels to turn, and then he said, “Could I speak to Harry, please... Mr. Sturms in Iowa City is calling... I’ll hold... Hello, Harry, it’s good to hear your voice... No, everything was fine with the last shipment, no problem, everything’s terrific... No, it’s something else... I have a guy here says he’s a friend of yours, wants some help from me... I’ll put him on.”
Walter took the phone and said, “This is Walter.”
“Walter?” The connection was good; Walter’s Uncle Harry was coming through fine. “Walter, something didn’t go wrong today, did it?”
“I’m afraid so. Dad’s been hurt.”
“Oh, Christ. How bad is it?”
“Just his thigh, took one in the thigh. But he’s unconscious, and you know his high blood pressure trouble. You can’t die from a thigh wound, can you?”
“Depends on what gets hit. How bad’s he bleeding?”
“Bad at first, but we stopped it. I don’t think some major artery got hit or anything, if that’s what you mean.”
“Listen, you tell Sturms get a doctor for you, and get your father patched up and hit the road. Did things go okay otherwise?”
Walter hadn’t even thought about that. He hadn’t even thought about the old guy at the antique shop his father had shot.
“It could’ve gone smoother,” Walter said.
“What about the money?”
“We got it.”
“Good. Well, then, have Sturms get a doctor for you straight away and...”
“Sturms won’t do it till he gets the word from you that I’m worth helping.”
“Put the cocksucker on.”
Walter said, “He says put the cocksucker on.”
Sturms flinched and took the phone. Walter could hear his uncle yelling, but couldn’t make out the exact words. Sturms said, “You bet, Harry... Right away... Goodbye, sir.”
He hung up.
“Look,” Sturms said, “sorry I hassled you. Let’s forget it and start over.”
“Never mind trying to get in good with me,” Walter said. “Get your ass on that phone and get a doctor for my father.”
Sturms nodded.
The brunette bounced back in and gave Walter a Pabst in a bottle. She gave her husband one, too, but he was busy on the phone and just set the bottle down. She smiled at Walter and said, “Do you really think I’m talented?”
3
“Easy now, Planner,” Jon soothed, “easy now, this isn’t going to hurt a bit.” He lowered Planner’s blanket-wrapped body into the empty wooden crate. He’d felt lucky to find the crate, which was six feet long and a bit wider than necessary, but it sufficed. It had held an antique chest of drawers Planner had stored away. Jon had liberated the crate for this present purpose, the probably valuable antique shoved into a storeroom corner.
“There now,” Jon said softly, whispering, “there now, unc, that’ll be fine, won’t it?” The blanket-wrapped body was comfortably settled in a soft bed of excelsior lining the crate’s bottom. Jon replaced the lid on the crate and said, “Goodbye, Planner.”
Maybe he was an asshole, talking to Planner like that. But he just couldn’t think of his uncle’s body as some cold chunk of meat, even though he knew that was what it was. The body was Planner, for God’s sake, and looked as much like Planner as it had when there hadn’t been bullet holes in it, and the only way Jon could deal with the situation was to keep talking to Planner. It seemed natural to keep talking to Planner.
And when he’d lifted the body, it had seemed light and heavy all at once. Could this featherlight bundle of flesh have walked and breathed? Could this granite-heavy load of bulk be the body of a frail old man? He held the body like a baby in his arms, and he felt as though he were parodying that famous statue at the Vatican, the one that got defaced, and he gave out a nervous little laugh that wasn’t really a laugh at all, and said, “Aw, shit, Planner, you can’t be dead.”
But he was, of course, and there was work to be done. Work for the living. Nolan had said so.
After throwing up, Jon had grabbed for the phone and dialed Nolan direct. It took a while to get through, what with the switchboard operator at that motel or whatever it was trying to track Nolan down. It’d seemed an hour before Nolan came on, and Jon’s bladder was about to burst.
“Jon?” Nolan had said. “Calm down, Jon, what’s wrong?”
And Jon had told Nolan about Planner, about Planner being dead.
“Jesus, kid. Stay calm,” Nolan had said, his voice as soft, as sure of itself as ever. “Don’t go hysterical on me.”
Don’t go hysterical on me. Nolan had told him that once before, after the bank job, when everything had exploded into blood and death, and Jon had been able to hang on, because Nolan was there. He’d been able to make it because Nolan was a rock and Nolan was there, and now Nolan’s voice was coming over that hunk of plastic, disembodied but here just the same, reassuring him, calming him, enabling him to survive, for the moment anyway.
“Go on,” Nolan was saying.
“He’s dead, and the money...”
Jon hadn’t realized yet what it meant, but he could remember seeing the safe door swung open and the shelves empty.
The money. Good God, the money.
“It’s gone,” he told Nolan. “All of it.”
Nolan was silent for a moment. A long moment.
“Nolan?” Jon asked, panic rising in his chest, catching in his throat.
“Yeah, kid,” the steady voice said. A rock again. “Go on.”
“The money’s gone. I just came in and... and found Planner and it must’ve all just happened.”
“How do you know?”
“Hell, I wasn’t gone more than an hour, and the... blood... it’s still wet, uh, fresh.” He remembered slipping in the stream of it on the back stoop. “You know, Nolan, you wouldn’t think Planner had so much blood in him. You wouldn’t think it could seep all the way back to the porch like that.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean somehow it ran from the back room, where the safe was cleaned out, back onto the porch and... shit, that couldn’t be Planner’s blood, could it? What do you figure?”
“I figure Planner got a shot off at whoever shot him.”
“Of course. Bad, you suppose?”
“Bad enough he left some blood behind.”
“Nolan, should I call the police or what? I mean, we were robbed and Planner was murdered and...”
“Christ no! Use your damn head.”
“That was stupid. I’m sorry I even said it, Nolan.”
“Never mind that. Did Planner have a gun in his hand?”
“I... I haven’t really looked that close yet. If you want to know the truth, all I’ve done so far is spot Planner’s body, puke out my guts, and call you on the phone.”
“You go look the back room over. I’ll hold on.”
Jon set the receiver on the counter and went back for a look. He found one of his uncle’s two.32 automatics clutched in an already stiffening hand, and he found across from Planner the place in the wall where one of the bullets had gone in. And the beginning of the trail of blood was at the safe, where the guy would’ve been crouched down, emptying the shelves. He went back to the phone and reported what he’d found to Nolan.
“Okay,” Nolan said. “Now listen to me. Are you pulled together? Are you settled down?”
“Yes. I’m settled down.”
And Nolan told him what to do. Told him to contact that doctor, Ainsworth, the one that patched Nolan up and treated him while he was holed up at Planner’s. Contact the doctor and pay him to make out a false death certificate, verifying Planner’s demise as by natural causes. Pay him plenty, to fill out the forms and such and help keep the cops from coming and having a close posthumous peek into Planner’s setup. Then clean the place up, get rid of the gun Planner fired at whoever shot him. Put Planner in a box and arrange to have him cremated. Do all of that, and then ask around at the places in the neighborhood, that Dairy Queen, the filling station next door, ask if they saw anybody leaving Planner’s around that time. But don’t act suspicious in asking. Make something up, like whoever it was was going to sell you something and didn’t leave an address, something like that.