Jon and Karen had been semi-shacked-up for six months now. Semi-shacked because Jon hadn’t really moved in with Karen (and vice versa) for the simple reason that Jon and Larry didn’t get along, and besides, Karen thought it might be bad for Larry if Mommy’s boy friend lived with them. A quaint idea in these loose days, Jon thought, but he didn’t bitch: he liked his moments of privacy, and no way was he going to have his comic book collection and Larry under the same roof. It was a pleasant enough relationship as it was, and Karen was happy receiving the healthy alimony/child support check from her lawyer ex-husband (which would stop, of course, if she and Jon were to marry), and Jon had promised himself he wouldn’t consider marriage with Karen until Larry was either old enough to send to military school or got hit by a truck.
Still, Jon had toyed with the idea of asking Karen to move in with him — even if Larry did have to come along. Karen ran the Candle Corner, a downtown Iowa City gift shop with head-shop overtones: hash pipes, Zig-Zag papers, posters, water beds, and the rack of underground comics that had brought Jon into Karen’s shop in the first place. He’d considered asking her to help him convert Planner’s antique shop into a larger version of her shop downtown, with more emphasis on water beds and apartment furnishings, and he would restrict his “comic book mecca” idea to a mail-order business out of one of the back rooms. She’d have no trouble interesting someone in taking over her long-term lease on that three-story building downtown that housed her shop, her apartment, and another to let above; and she and (ugh) Larry could move in with Jon, since the whole upstairs of the antique shop was a nicely remodeled five-room living quarters that Planner had used. So far, however, Jon had stayed in his room downstairs, only using the upstairs for its kitchen facilities and the living room’s color TV, and that last only lately: it had taken Jon weeks to get used to the idea of Planner being dead and longer to lose the creepy feeling the upstairs gave him.
Anyway, he was considering that — asking Karen to move in, to become his business partner. But he hesitated, and when he’d put in a long-distance call to Nolan (who had met Karen), to ask his opinion of the idea, the following advice had come from Nolan: “Never mix bed partners and business partners, kid — you get fucked both ways.” And since Nolan tended to be right about such things, Jon was, for the present, holding off asking Karen.
He spent the afternoon drawing, working up rough pencil layouts for a science fiction story he was hoping to sell to Heavy Metal magazine. It was to be somewhat in the style of the old EC Weird Fantasy and Weird Science, two great but long-dead comics, casualties of the bloody war waged upon comic books by parental groups and psychiatrists back in the early fifties. Jon’s script was two Ray Bradbury stories put together and all switched around, and for the art he was combining elements of the underground’s Corben and EC’s Wally Wood in hopes of disguising his own lack of style with a weird mixture.
At four o’clock he watched a “Star Trek” rerun.
At five he went across the street to the Dairy Queen for supper — a tenderloin and hot fudge sundae. He usually ate with Karen, but she was at a Tupperware party, for Christ’s sake. (“You’re going to a Tupperware party, Karen? What kind of free spirit are you, anyway? Hash pipes, water beds, and Tupperware!” “Jonny, she’s a friend of mine. She’s one of my best friends and she invited me; I have to go. If you’re not busy... could you sit with Larry?” “Anything but that, Kare. Let me pay for the damn sitter myself. Anything.”)
At six-thirty he got out a stack of comic books he hadn’t gotten around to yet and started reading.
At ten he went upstairs and turned on the TV and got himself a bottle of Coke and some potato chips and got settled down for the showing of King Kong on the educational channel at ten-thirty.
At eleven-thirty somebody knocked on the back door.
The man with bloody hands and shirt.
2
The night after Sherry left, Nolan was consumed with boredom and hostility, and felt he had to get away from the motel for an evening or he’d go fucking crazy. The motel was called the Tropical, and Nolan had been managing the place for some syndicate people out of Chicago for months now, but it was a job he’d grown tired of lately, and he had to let off steam. Since he didn’t care to embarrass or anger his employers, he took the time to drive some fifty miles to a little town where nobody knew him and, dressed in the grubbiest old clothes he could dig up, spent the evening in a tawdry little pool hall with the village’s “rougher element,” people who would have been born on the wrong side of the tracks had the town been big enough to have tracks.
Nolan was good at shooting pool. He was hustler-good, but chose to shoot by himself, and did so undisturbed for two solid hours, drinking beer and doing his best to run the balls as rapidly as possible. Tonight he was off a little, as his mind was busy with Sherry and the job at the Tropical and ways of changing what was becoming a tiresome life.
He was fifty years old, even if he didn’t look it, a tall, raw-boned man with just a little gut from several months of overly easy, overly soft living. His hair was black, widow’s-peaked, with considerable gray working its way in along his sideburns; he wore a down-curving mustache that made his mouth take on an even more sour expression than it naturally wore; he had high cheekbones, and his face had a chiseled look, like something turned out by a sculptor in a black mood.
He had been a professional thief for almost twenty years, an organizer and leader of robberies, mostly institutional (banks, jewelry stores, armored cars, and the like) and his was the best track record in the business: there was not and never had been a single member of a Nolan heist behind bars — though some were in jail for other, non-Nolan jobs they’d been in on, and a few did die in double-cross attempts Nolan squelched.
Before that, when he was just a kid, really, Nolan had worked for the Family in Chicago, as a nightclub manager, utilizing those same organizational abilities of his. He turned a Rush Street dive into a legitimate (if syndicate-owned) money-maker, partially from the local color he provided by serving as his own bouncer. Trouble was, his reputation for being a hardcase fed back into the Family hierarchy and gave some of the top boys the wrong idea: they tried to get Nolan to leave their Rush Street saloon and come in with them, for grooming as a young exec, so to speak, wanting him to start at the bottom in an enforcer capacity. He had balked at the suggestion, and the dispute that caused with the local Family underboss eventually got bloody, and Nolan had to drop out of the Family’s sight for a while. “For a while” being almost twenty years, during which he’d turned to heisting. Only recently, when a long-overdue change of regime hit the Chicago Family, had Nolan come into syndicate good graces. Through a lawyer named Felix (the Family consigliere), Nolan had been invited in, in the capacity he’d originally sought — nightclub manager — and part-owner as well. The Family offered Nolan a choice of several multimillion-dollar operations (including a well-known resort and a posh nightclub-cum-restaurant) on the stipulation that he buy in as a partner. That was fine with Nolan, because he had some $400,000 in his friend Planner’s safe, his share from the Port City bank job, and this would make an excellent investment for putting the money to use.
Unfortunately, while he was still negotiating with Felix, Nolan’s money was stolen and eventually lost, and Nolan was unable to uphold his half of the Family bargain.