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 Comfort, 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.
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.”