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“But there would be no sales slip in the sack.”

“So what? It was her package, not mine.”

“Do you think they would have believed you, Ken? Do you honestly think they would’ve believed you?”

“Been interesting to find out, wouldn’t it?”

They drove fifty miles and then Ken stopped for lunch, but Carol didn’t order anything. Her stomach was still jumping. All the while, sitting in the car, she’d been expecting a highway patrol car to come screaming up behind them. The heavyset Broderick Crawford cop would say, “Okay kids, let’s have a look at that suitcase there in the back seat.” He had never shown up, of course, but he was there in her mind, the cop and his car and siren and gun.

Finally, she consented to a grilled cheese sandwich, which she nibbled at. She said, “I never stole anything before, Ken.”

And Ken looked at her, and there was something in his eyes, a damn twinkling in his eyes. He grinned and said, “Me neither.”

There it was: the reason. The secret purpose of the trip. The skyjacking he’d been planning, this new, obscenely dangerous project, this terrifyingly large-scale
crime
he was going to commit, was the first time he’d ever even contemplated breaking the rules.

Ken. Conservative Ken. Arrow-straight Ken. It was quite a leap from shoplifter to skyjacker, but an even bigger one from Eagle Scout to skyjacker. She understood that now.

She understood that in a crazy way the shoplifting had been a trial run, as well as an absurd ritual of self-initiation; that had Ken been caught and been unable to bluff his way out of the situation, he would have taken it as, well a
sign
, an indication from somewhere that he was in way over his head. That this should be another project left unfinished.

But he hadn’t been caught, and here they were, weeks later, the skyjack plan finally going into effect.

Ken seemed very calm, the late afternoon sunlight filtering through the filmy pink curtains of the bedroom window and bathing him in a golden, contented glow; he seemed almost peaceful, as he neatly assembled himself, climbing into the green shirt, which fit over the chute as though he had a paunch. It was as if he was assembling the components of one of his electronics gadgets.
Could he really be so cool?
Carol wondered.
Did that silly afternoon of shoplifting free him so from worry?

She wouldn’t be free from worry, not until she had him back again, in their house, in this bed. Her only consolation was that the bomb in the stolen suitcase was a dummy. Carol wondered for a moment why Ken would have spent so much time building a mock bomb into the suitcase. This, like his shoplifting escapade, was almost eccentric aspect to the “project” that Carol would never completely understand. She just took comfort in knowing that her Ken could never really hurt anybody, let alone blow up a planeload of people.

She touched his shoulder, caught his eyes in the mirror, and held them. “Maybe something will happen. Something you haven’t thought of. Maybe . . . maybe we won’t ever see each other again.”

This time he
really
made a face. This time he said it out loud: “Don’t be ridiculous.”

And he looked away.

Fifteen minutes later, they were in the car, and she was driving him the eight miles to a town where no one knew them, where he could catch the bus to Detroit. She felt uncomfortable in the driver’s seat

Three

11

LIKE ALL AIRPORT
restaurants, this one was lousy. The $2 hamburger was cold, the potato chips stale, the Coke flat and mostly ice. Jon looked out the window. The sky was overcast. Right in front of him, some men in coveralls were stuffing the belly of a 727 with luggage; behind them stretched an endless concrete sea of runway, planes taxiing around as if wandering aimlessly. It was a gray day. Jon’s was a gray mood.

The Detroit airport was a cold, monolithic assemblage that didn’t exactly cheer Jon up, its overall design a vaguely modernistic absence of personality, heavy on dreary, neutral-color stone, and its infinite intersecting halls converging on a toweringly high-ceilinged lobby in what might have been intended as a tribute to confusion. The only thing he liked about the place was that, compared to Chicago’s O’Hare, there were fewer people and, consequently, not as much frantic rushing around. But the less hectic pace didn’t do Jon any good, really; it only gave him time to reflect on things that were better left alone. It gave him time for a gray mood.

And he was tired. He’d been up all night practically, watching movies—not on the tube, but in a ballroom at the hotel, with hundreds of other voluntary insomniacs. The showing of old films (“from eight till dawn”) was a traditional part of a comic book convention, and when he got back to the hotel after the Comfort bloodbath, he figured he might as well enjoy himself, he wouldn’t be getting much sleep that night, anyway. Not after what happened.

He’d made a point of not sitting with anyone he knew and, despite the common interests he shared with those around him, avoided conversation, and struck up no new acquaintances among his fellow fans. His hope was that he’d lose himself in the flickering fantasy up on the screen, and so he sat watching, all but numb, leaning back in the uncomfortable steel folding chair and letting the Marx Brothers and Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon and any number of monster movies roll over him in a celluloid tide. Jon and the rest of the crowd followed the films through most of the night; the feature set for a 4:30 A.M. screening was worth staying for: the original 1933
King Kong
, and Jon thought to himself,
This is where I came in.

After that, the crowd had thinned, even the diehards throwing in the towel in the face of an especially dreadful Japanese monster epic, and Jon finally headed up to the room, where he grabbed a couple hours of restless sleep.

Only now was the shock beginning to subside.

Only now was he able to begin exploring the significance of what had happened last night. Last night, afterwards, he had tried to squeeze what had happened out of his mind, filling his head instead with the harmless, distracting images of old movies. Now, the next morning, Saturday, he sat by the window at the airport, watching the ground crew scurry around a Boeing 727, sipping his flat Coke and replaying the events of the night before on the movie screen of his mind. Jon remembered waking up after being struck by Billy Comfort with a pole of some kind, and remembered looking up at Billy and realizing that the pole was the handle of a pitchfork, a pitchfork Billy was a second away from jamming into Jon. He knew he should roll out of the way, but Billy’s foot was pressed down on his chest, holding him there, firm, for the pitchfork’s downstroke. . . .

And then a shot, and another, and Jon had seen two thin streams of blood squirt from Billy’s chest, and Billy was knocked off his feet, allowing Jon to roll clear, which he did, the pitchfork sinking into the earth next to him. For a moment, both Jon and the pitchfork trembled. Meanwhile, Billy had flopped on his back and died.

Jon got to his knees, turned, and saw Nolan. They looked at each other, a look that had a lot in it.

Then Jon saw Sam Comfort, whom Nolan had evidently knocked down but not out, rearing his head above the high weeds that had hidden him from Jon’s vision, and Sam Comfort had a great big goddamn gun in his arms, a
shotgun
, and was lifting its twin barrels to fire them into Nolan, and Jon yelled, “Nolan! The old man!”

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.