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“Let go of the door.”

Comfort did, tentatively.

Jon said, “My uncle—Planner—is dead.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Sorry. I hadn’t heard. How did it happen, boy?”

“Heart attack.” Which was what the death certificate had said, anyway, and an expensive damn piece of paper that was, too.

“And you’re his nephew, then? Taking over the business, are you?”

“No. I got no interest in antiques, and I’m going to sell all the stock at once, soon as a good buyer turns up, and will you please get out of here and let me get some sleep?”

The gray eyes narrowed, then eased up. “Well, I’m sorry to see you so hostile to an old friend of your uncle’s, and I’m sorry to hear the news about his untimely end. Please accept my condolences.”

“Sure. Sorry if I was short.”

“Understandable. Say, what you keep in that garage of yours?”

“If it was a garage, I’d keep my car in it. But it isn’t, it’s a storeroom. Good night.”

And he pushed the door shut and locked it, and stepped to one side in case any bullets should come flying through. Several heartbeats later, he crept to the side window and looked out to see the old man join a long-haired kid, leaning up against their Buick Electra. They shared a few moments of heated conversation, most of the heat coming from the old man, as the kid was a spacey type. Then both men shrugged. The old man got behind the wheel, the kid next to him, and they drove away.

When he rejoined Breen, the man was asleep and snoring. Jon was at first relieved that he wouldn’t have to listen to any more of the talkative man’s ramblings, but then he thought better of it, shook the guy awake, and told him about the brush with the Comforts.

“You’re okay, kid,” Breen said, grinning. “You handled old Sam beautiful, sounds like.”

“Why don’t you show your gratitude,” Jon said, “by telling me what all this is about.”

Breen did. He told Jon he’d been working a month of parking meter heists (“Small potatoes, kid, but over the long haul, she adds up!”); told him old man Comfort had over a hundred and fifty gees, cash, from several such runs of meter heisting in the area, and had tried to kill Breen less than an hour earlier, to avoid paying Breen’s $12,000 share.

“Listen,” Jon said. “I’m going to call Nolan. I think maybe he’ll have some ideas concerning the Comforts.”

Breen thought that was fine.

Jon went out to the phone that sat on the long counter behind which Planner had constantly sat puffing expensive cigars. Jon sat on the counter, dialing the phone, thinking of his uncle’s violent death, wondering if he was being a fool to follow in those bloody footsteps. But he forgot that when he heard Nolan’s, “Yeah?”

“Nolan? You got to come here, right away.”

“What’s the problem, kid?” Nolan’s voice was calm, but Jon seemed to detect a note of enthusiasm in it.

“You know a guy named Breen?”

“I do.”

Jon filled Nolan in on what had happened to Breen, and how he’d come bleeding up to Jon’s doorstep.

“What about a doctor?”

“I bandaged him up, Nolan. He’ll last okay. Maybe tomorrow we can get Doc Ainsworth in for a look at him. So far, I been more concerned about the Comforts than anything.”

“Rightly so. And you were right not bringing in a doctor, because the Comforts might be watching. You locked the doors, of course? And moved Breen’s car?”

“Of course. And the Comforts have already come around once.” He’d held that back to shock Nolan with—saved it for effect.

But he should have known better with Nolan, who just said an emotionless, “Well?”

And Jon told him about the run-in with Sam Comfort.

“You’re doing better all the time, kid. In fact, what do you need me for there? You got things under control.”

“Well, for one thing, these damn Comforts got me sweating. They’re unpredictable, judging from what Breen says, and from what I saw of them.”

“Did you fool old Sam, you think?”

“I got an idea what was going on in that head. He could come barging in with a gun right now and I wouldn’t be surprised. You know the Comforts pretty well, Nolan?”

“I worked a job with that crusty old son of a bitch, years ago. He didn’t cross me, because I didn’t give him the opening. But if my back had been to him, he’d have put the knife in, no doubt about it. Breen was stupid to work with him in the first place. Everybody knows Sam is as crazy as he is unreliable.”

“Well, Nolan, what do you think?”

“I’ll come, yeah.”

“It’s not that I need help, exactly . . .”

“I know, kid. You just like having me around.”

“That’s part of it.”

“And that hundred and fifty thousand of Comfort’s is another.”

“Right.”

“We’re about due, Jon. Maybe we can help my old buddy Breen and do ourselves a favor, too.”

Jon grinned into the phone. “Right.”

Two

 
 5

THE RIOTS COULD
have been last week, the way this neighborhood looked. Buildings stood black and gutted from flames; no one had even bothered boarding up the broken-out, blown-out windows, which stared from the buildings like the empty sockets of gouged-out eyes. Other blocks had fared better, their buildings untouched by flame, some stores none the worse for wear, open for business. But even these more fortunate blocks showed the scars of violence, their wounds no less ugly for the pus being dried up and crusted over. The sites of many small businesses were vacant now, abandoned by their white proprietors in the wake of black unrest, leaving behind storefront windows broken out and never replaced, nothing remaining but jagged edges of glass, like teeth in the mouth of a screaming man. Outrage had fired this violence, from which had come further outrage: one emigrant had boarded up his storefront window and written, in an angry red scrawl:
“AFTER 20 YRS. SERVICE, CHASED FROM OUR HOME,”
a star of David beneath the words like a signature. Passing by the boarded-up store was a thin black woman in a pale, worn, green dress, trudging along like a parody of a weary darkie, pulling a child’s wagon filled with groceries, and her face told the whole story: she’d had to walk blocks and blocks to a grocery store, and hoped like hell nothing spoiled. She seemed to shake her head a little as she moved along past her neighborhood corner grocery, which was an empty, burned-out shell.

Nolan sat in the back of the taxi cab, listening to the meter tick his money away, and half listening to the cabbie, who’d been pointing out the sights like a cynical tour guide. The cabbie had grown up in this part of Detroit himself and was saddened and somewhat pissed off about what had happened here since he’d left it for a better neighborhood.

Back at the airport, Nolan had chosen this black cabbie over a white one, because he wasn’t sure if the white cabbie would’ve wanted to drive him into this neighborhood. Matter of fact, Nolan was a little ill at ease himself; he’d feel
a hell of a lot better armed, but he hadn’t been able to carry heat on the plane because of skyjacking precautions. He’d brought a gun along, of course, a pair of them in fact: two S
& W .38s with four-inch barrels. But they were packed away in his suitcase (no sweat from airport security on that—only hand-carried bags routinely got checked), and a .38 nestling between his fresh socks and change of underwear wouldn’t do him much good down here. The suitcase, and Jon, ought to be at the hotel by now; this taxi ride had been one that Nolan felt better taken alone, so he’d sent the kid on ahead with the luggage on the airport-to-hotel shuttle bus.

Which was considerably cheaper than this damn taxi, but then, you didn’t find a shuttle running from airport to ghetto and had to expect to pay the price. The price in this case was double stiff: the tinny racket of that disembodied mechanical head hooked to the dash, wolfing down Nolan’s money, was depressing enough, let alone having to put up with the cabbie’s gloomy line of patter.

The cabbie was a thickset, very black man with white hair and white mustache, and was maybe a year or two older than Nolan. “Yessir,” the cabbie was saying (
why couldn’t I get a sullen one,
Nolan thought,
or at least one of those mumble-mouths you can’t make heads or tails of
), “this neighborhood was hit super-bad, rioting and lootings and snipings and you name it. Bad hit as any place in the country.”

Nolan grunted, to show he was paying attention. He glanced at the meter and winced: attention wasn’t all he was paying—fourteen bucks and climbing. Christ!

The cabbie rambled on. “Martin Luther King weren’t the only thing got killed, that time. This whole neighborhood went down with him. Look at it. You ever seen a place so tore-up?”

“No,” Nolan said, though it wasn’t true. Berlin had been like this, after the war.

“You know, where I’m taking you, it’s about the only business in the area didn’t get hurt. All them cars, and not even a antenna busted off. And a white fella runs it, can you beat that?”

“No.”

“Huh?”

“No, I can’t beat that.”

Nolan’s lack of interest finally dawned on the guy, and shut him up. Which was no big deal, as they were within a block of Bernie’s Used Auto Sales anyway.

Bernie’s was indeed a white man’s business that had gone untouched in the rioting, and with half a block of cars sitting out in the open like that, it was a wonder. The big garage next to the lot had gone untouched as well, not even a broken pane of glass. It was not hard to figure: Bernie’s business was not one the neighborhood would like to lose. A grocery store was expendable, but not Bernie’s.

Nolan got out of the taxi, looked at the meter, which read “$15.50.” He handed the cabbie a twenty and waited for change, but the guy just grinned, said “Thanks,” and roared off. Nolan now understood how the cabbie had made it to a better neighborhood.

Immediately, a salesman approached Nolan, saying, “What can we do for you, my man?” His words were mild enough, but his tone and expression said,
What the fuck you doin’ here, whitey?
He was a lanky, chocolate-colored guy who couldn’t keep still. Nolan hated goddamn funky butts like this; he liked people who didn’t move anything but their mouths when they talked, and not much of that. This guy was a fluid son of a bitch poured into a white-stitched black suit and a wide-brimmed gangster hat. The band was wide and black, the hat itself white, and Nolan had seen George Raft in a similar one, years ago. It looked better on Raft.

“Tell Bernie I’m here.”

The guy stopped dancing, narrowed his eyes on Nolan. “Uh, like who should I say . . .”

“Tell him Nolan.”

“He’s not . . . ”

“He’s expecting me. Didn’t he tell you? No, I don’t suppose he would. Tell him.”

The guy’s eyes filled with something, and it wasn’t love. “Okay,” he said. “Wait here till I see if it’s cool with the man.”

“Okay.”

The salesman strode off, but his butt seemed slightly less funky now. His reaction to Nolan had been a natural one, as most of Bernie’s white customers never showed their faces around here, making arrangements to see Bern at his suburban home or at one of his junkyards. Nolan walked around the lot while he waited, taking a look at Bernie’s stock.

The lot was packed with cars, of recent vintage mostly, every make and model from Volks to Mercedes, Pinto to Caddy. An impressive selection, but to the casual observer, nothing unusual. Nolan was not a casual observer, and he was smiling, thinking of the one thing that separated Bernie’s from your run-of-the-mill used-car lot: virtually every car on the well-stocked lot was a stolen one.

But the skill and workmanship of Bernie and staff saw to it that every car sold off the lot was not only untraceable, but offered to the public at bargain pricing and with full warranty. This was why Bernie’s had been an oasis in a desert of rioting: nobody kills the golden goose, and Bernie was him, Bernie was the goose who’d provided this neighborhood with countless golden eggs. Rip off a car in the morning, and by early afternoon Bern’s cash was in your pocket, and Bern was cool, he paid off fair, no hassle, no shuck. And on top of being where you could unload the car you stole for ready cash, Bernie’s was a mother of a cheap place to buy wheels. If there was one white dude in the neighborhood who deserved being called brother, it was Bern, baby, Bern.

Nolan wasn’t precisely sure how Bernie worked this gig, but he did know that Bernie had been a jump-title expert for years. Last Nolan knew, Bernie owned a chain of junkyards all over the Detroit area and, by matching up stolen cars with junked cars of the same make, he simply spot-welded the junker’s serial numbers onto the stolen job—under the hood, inside the door and, when possible, on the frame— and presto, a “new” car ready for titling. Legislation had, in recent years, crippled jump-title rackets badly, especially on the large scale that Bernie worked; but fortunately, a southern state notorious for its lax titling laws was glad to have Bernie’s trade, and the particular county Bernie did his business through even went so far as to service him by mail-order. Sounded far-fetched, but Nolan remembered the time in Alabama, not so very long ago, when he’d stolen a car and, with no proof of ownership whatever, driven up to the courthouse, got the auto tided, and driven it away.

“Yer fat!”

Nolan turned, and Bernie was standing there, a short, massively muscled man with not an ounce of flab on him; he had a round face with round eyes and round nose and, when he spoke, a round mouth. If he hadn’t had a full head of curly brown hair, he’d have looked like a talking cueball. He was wearing the world’s dirtiest coveralls, with “Bernie’s” emblazoned over one breast pocket “How’d you get so goddamn fat?”

“I’m an old man, Bernie. I live a soft life these days.”

“Soft life, my ass. Come on, Nolan, let’s go in the back and have some beer.”

Why Bernie didn’t have a potbelly from constant beer guzzling was one of the mysteries of life Nolan would never understand. Maybe the man just worked hard enough to offset all those suds: Bernie, never content to live high on the carloads of cash his business brought him, spent most of his time in there doing the drudge work—painting the cars, doing body work, replacing parts, everything. It was obvious that Bernie didn’t need to do illegal work to make a good living; but the illegal route had led to his own shop, his own operation, and freedom was always worth a little risk. One thing was for sure, Nolan thought: Bernie ran the most efficient automotive firm in Detroit And probably the most honest.

The back room was a cubbyhole with a small desk and a large cooler of beer. The desk was cluttered with car manuals, the Red and Blue Books of this and many a year, bills and receipts, and so on. Nolan knew the reason for the mess: Bernie kept good books, but felt that overly neat records made the IRS unduly suspicious. Besides, he got a kick out of making them come in and dig. If they wanted to come and look for ways to screw you, cross your legs and make ’em work their asses off getting in.

Bernie popped a top and handed a foaming beer to Nolan, did the same for himself. “So yer fat, and you ain’t dead.”

“Yes I’m fat, no I’m not dead.”

“You already told me why you’re fat. Now tell me why you ain’t dead.”

“Didn’t you hear about the change of regime in Chicago?”

“No. I got no Family ties, never did have. I’m an independent and like to stay clear of that shit. You know me, Nolan. So what, the people that wanted you dead, those Family people, are out? And what, the new people love you?”

“Something like that.”

“What are you up to now?”

Nolan told Bernie about the Tropical.

“Sounds boring.”

“It is. But it’s a good deal, for the immediate present, and I don’t want to blow it”

“How could you blow it?”

“Well, you see, Bernie, I’m here on business. Detroit’s never been my idea of a place to vacation.”

“So?”

“The Family people I’m fronting for don’t want me straying from the straight and narrow. They got a name and background set up for me, so I can front the Tropical with no static from the law or anybody. Somebody runs a check on me, I sound like the president of the goddamn Chamber of Commerce. Hell, I’m even a college graduate, would you believe that?”

“I believe you can pass for one,” Bernie said, getting a fresh beer. “I joined this country club, and it’s full of those Phi Beta crappers. They’re some of the dumbest, most boring assholes I ever hung around with. If Thelma didn’t insist we belong, I’d get the hell out.”

Bernie’s social-climbing wife, and the indignities he suffered because of her, was a topic Nolan could do without, so he steered around it, saying, “Anyway, Bern, my point is, there are certain of my former activities the Family doesn’t want me engaging in.”