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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.

And so the Tropical.

The Tropical was a modest operation in comparison with those other places the Family had offered him and, in fact, was used as a trial-run spot for people being considered for top managerial positions in the countless hotels, resorts, niteries and other such establishments owned by the powerful Chicago syndicate. The Tropical was a motel, consisting of four buildings with sixteen units each; two heated swimming pools, one indoor, one out; and a central building housing a restaurant and bar, both of which sported a pseudo-Caribbean decor meant to justify the motel’s name. It was located ten miles outside of Sycamore, Illinois, and was devoted to serving honeymooning couples, some of whom were actually married. Lots of legit businessmen out of Chicago, as well as Family people, used it as a trysting ground, and so, accordingly, the Tropical made damn good money for its size.

Nolan himself had been serving a trial run at the Tropical before his money was stolen; now he was there on a more permanent basis, to observe the progress of others undergoing trial runs, doing little more than watching, really—just some mental note-taking and reporting back to Felix on the behavior and capability of the temporary managers. He would break in each new man (whose stay would range from three to six months) and see to it that a sense of continuity was maintained in between these pro tempore managers.

Which meant he mostly sat around.

And considering the salary he was drawing, that didn’t make for such a bad setup. At least, not when Sherry was around.

Sherry was young, almost obscenely young, a pretty blonde child who spent most of her time in and out of bikinis. She had applied for a waitress job at the beginning of Nolan’s stay at the Tropical, but she couldn’t keep the food and coffee out of customer laps, and rather than fire her, Nolan found a place for her. The place was between the sheets of his bed, and when she wasn’t there, she was adding to the Tropical’s already erotic atmosphere by sunning in her hint of a bikini around the outdoor pool. She was not a brilliant girl, nor was she an empty-headed one, and if she did talk a trifle much, he’d gotten used to it quickly; anyway, her voice was melodious and soothing, so if you didn’t listen to the words, it was no trouble at all.

Now she was gone.

The summer was over and there was no sun for her to lie under. She’d begun to get itchy at the tail end of September, and yesterday, when she got the call from her father saying her mother was sick, she’d decided to go back to Ohio and help out her folks. She and Nolan had had their most emotional night last night: she crying and Nolan making an honest effort to be cheerful and kind about the whole thing. She swore she’d come back the next summer; Nolan didn’t mention that he hoped to be long gone from the Tropical by then. He just nodded and eased back up on top of her again.

He tried to bank the one ball in and missed. He said, “Shit,” and chalked up his cue.

“Want some company?”

“No,” Nolan said. He shot again; this time the ball went in.

“Hey. I said, want some company?”

“No,” Nolan said.

The kid doing the asking was maybe eighteen, skinny, with long, greasy hair and a complexion like a runny pizza. A fat kid, older by a couple years probably, came sliding up to the table like a hog to slaughter. The skinny kid had on jeans and a gray work shirt with a white patch on the breast pocket that identified the shirt’s origin as Ron’s Skelly Station and the kid’s name as Rick; the fat kid had on a yellow short-sleeve shirt with grease stains and massive underarm sweat-circles, and the buttons over his belly couldn’t button.

“Hey, Chub,” Rick said to his friend. They were like two balloons, one with the air let out, the other inflated to bursting. “You know what feeling I got about this guy, Chub? I got this awful feeling he’s some kind or prick or something.” There was emphasis on the word “prick.”

Chub, however, said nothing. He just stood there, shifting his weight, from foot to foot and looking Nolan over.

Rick went on. “I mean, I ask him does he want some company and he says, ‘shit no.’ He’s some kind of antisocial bastard, I think. What do you think, Chub?”

Chub, apparently, didn’t know what to think. He’d come over to have a laugh with ol’ Rick, but now that he was here and had a look at Nolan, he wasn’t sure he liked what he saw. After a moment he tapped his skinny friend on the shoulder and gave him a flick of the head that said, come on, don’t mess with this dude.

But then reinforcements arrived: two older guys, looking like something out of a fifties hot rod movie, came up from the other end of the hall to see what was the hassle. One of them actually had on a T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a cigarette pack stuffed in at the shoulder; he was an emaciated sort with pipe-cleaner arms down under the rolled sleeves, who made the skinny Rick look healthy. His cohort, however, was more genuinely menacing: a sandy-haired, greasy-haired, wide-shouldered bear with close-set, glittering eyes; he wore jeans and a T-shirt under a black cotton vest, and had biceps the size of California grapefruit.

“Okay,” Nolan said. “Who wants to play some eightball?”

He played once with Rick and lost. His mind was still elsewhere. But the crowd around began making snide remarks about his shooting, and it brought his mind into focus. When he played the fat kid, for a five, he broke and didn’t sink any; then next time his turn came around, he sank all the little-numbered balls and the eight, leaving Chub’s stripes scattered all over the table. A murmur went through the small crowd, and pipe-cleaner arms stepped up, and Nolan took five from him the same way. He did it to all of them, except that most times he was running the balls right from the break.

He was good at pool; he was, in fact, good at most games. He’d been playing in a low-stakes poker game regularly with some Sycamore businessmen and had found it an enjoyable enough time killer. Good as he was at games, he was not a gambler. He was interested in pool and card playing for the chance to exercise his mind and to hone his skill; he didn’t like to play with pros, because they had their life in the game, and you don’t want to screw around with people in something they make a living at. The best amateur doesn’t want to play the worst pro, because the game is a lark to the amateur, whereas the pro is deadly serious, and sometime you’ll find yourself with a broken head and stuffed in a garbage can if you fuck with the pros and win.

Also, Nolan never hustled. Pool or cards or anything. He could go into a pool hall like this one and almost always clean the place out, if he felt like it; same with lots of small-town, high-stakes card games. But you made enemies that way. Same as when you diddled the pros, the amateur who thinks he’s a pro can get pretty mad himself.