Spree (2 page)

“Nobody suffers,” Cole said. “They can get ’em replaced, if you’re worried about poor people.”

“I just want to know how it works. I know you said it wasn’t my concern, but really it is. If I’m going to be involved in something . . . criminal . . . I want to know the extent of it.”

Cole shrugged. Then his face darkened. “I hate that nigger shit!”

He was glaring past her. She glanced in that direction, at the big-screen TV, where Tina Turner was prancing, singing, in pantomime. Cole reached for a
TV Guide
next to him on the couch and hurled it at Lyle; the corner of it hit Lyle in the head. The son winced but did not even glance back, and certainly didn’t change the channel. He was apparently used to this form of criticism on his father’s part.

“Anyway,” Cole said, his distaste lingering in his sour expression, “we know when the stamps go out—third of the month—and that on the fifth they’re in mailboxes. Lyle and Cindy Lou just go out and about like good little mailmen, rain nor hail nor sleet, only in reverse. Taking letters out of mailboxes, not putting in.”

“It’s that easy?” she said. Repressing,
and that petty?

“Yup,” he said. “It ain’t so small-time, either,” he added, as if reading her thoughts. “There can be as much as two hundred bucks’ worth in one envelope. Also, some people sell ’em to us direct. We pay a quarter on the dollar.”

“People sell their own food stamps?”

“People got things they want to buy and not eat. Sure. And we got some bars that we do business with.”

“Bars? You can’t buy liquor and cigarettes with food stamps . . .”

“Of course not—not ’bove board.”

“Oh,” she said. It was easy enough for Angie to figure how that could work: a bartender letting a customer use a dollar food stamp for thirty cents or so worth of booze or smokes.

“It’s a safe way to make a little extra bread, honey,” Cole said, in his fatherly way. “You won’t get caught. You almost
can’t
get caught. What are you doing, except moving some paper around? It ain’t even embezzling, really.”

“It is criminal,” she said.

“Much in life is,” Cole granted.

She said she wanted to think about it, and, after a particularly slow week in her father’s store, she called Cole Comfort and said yes. She never dated Lyle again. Once a month she drove to the farmhouse and got a supply of food stamps, bringing them cash in return. The Comforts always wanted cash.

And her dad, her sweet dad, tough ex-marine that he was, was so blessedly naive. He really thought business was up.

It crushed her to have to pull the rug out.

But it was time. She’d had a call from the Department of Social Services; an investigation into food stamp abuse was under way. An appointment to “interview” her had been set up. She didn’t know what this meant exactly, but she did know it was time to get out.

She’d socked a few thousand away, and bought a few toys outright (the Mazda, for one) and got her father on his feet, even if it was only temporarily. She didn’t know where she was going, but she did know she’d been in Jefferson City long enough. With her nest egg and her college degree and her looks, she could go anywhere, if she could just weather the Department of Social Services storm.

For right now, however, she was at the Comforts’, for one last time.

She was greeted at the door by Cindy Lou, a cute curvy strawberry-blond freckle-faced sixteen-year-old in a calico halter top and short jeans and bare feet with red-painted toenails. Somewhere between Daisy Mae and Lolita.

“Daddy’s upstairs figuring the books,” Cindy Lou said, ushering her into where John Wayne and Elvis, as always, ruled. “He’ll be down in a jif.”

And he was, in his usual Hee Haw apparel and his almost seductive smile. He said to Cindy Lou, “Take the pickup and get ’er gassed.”

She clasped her hands together in front of breasts that Angie would have died for. “Can I, Daddy?”

He reached in his pocket and withdrew a twenty and, grinning shit-eatingly, said, “What’s it look like?”

She snatched it out of his hands, and he patted her round little butt in a less than paternal way as she departed. Angie wondered for a moment whether Cindy Lou was old enough to have a license, before dismissing it as a foolish question.

He bade her sit on the couch again, which she did, where he poured her Old Grand-Dad and she carefully, tactfully, explained her position. Lyle was watching MTV, in headphones. Rick James was on the screen, silently screaming, but this time Cole didn’t hurl a
TV Guide
. Maybe he was getting more tolerant.

Or maybe he was just preoccupied.

She withdrew from her purse an envelope of cash, which he riffled through, smiling absently; he usually gave her a thick packet of food stamps at this point. He was preoccupied tonight.

“This investigation,” Cole said, tucking the money away in a deep coverall pocket, “what have you heard, exactly?”

“Nothing,” she said, shrugging expansively.

“They ain’t even talked to you yet.”

“Just on the phone. It’s only an appointment.”

“Are you worried?”

“Sure I am. But I don’t see how they can prove anything.”

“Damn,” Cole said. His smile was as rueful as it was pretty. “This has been one sweet little scam—but I’m afraid its days are numbered.”

“This investigation is that serious, you think?”

“Hard to say. I can tell you this—they started registering the mail with the food stamps in it. Anything over ninety bucks gets registered. Recipient has to sign.”

“So your kids can’t go raiding mailboxes anymore.”

“Not like they could. It’s just too damn bad.”

She shrugged. Smiled. “It was fun while it lasted.”

“Sure was,” he said, and hit her on the side of the head with the Old Grand-Dad bottle. She heard the glass break against her jaw, felt her skin tear, a flash of pain, then darkness.

She came out of it, once, for a moment, hearing: “A girl, Pa? I don’t want to kill no girl. I was
with
her before.”

That was when, for the first time, dying violently occurred to her.

2

IN NOLAN’S LIFE
, right now, comfort was very important.

He’d lived hard, for fifty-some years, and it seemed to him about time to take it easy. This was the payoff, wasn’t it? What he’d worked for, for so very long: the good life.

Not that he wasn’t still working. He liked to work. His restaurant-cum-nightclub, Nolan’s, nestled in a nicely prosperous shopping mall, was doing a tidy business and he put in, oh, probably a fifty-hour week. He did all the buying himself, and kept his own books, did all the hiring and firing as well as playing host most evenings. No, he didn’t greet his patrons at the door—he had a hostess for that —but he did circulate easily around the dining room, asking people if they were enjoying their meals; and in the bar he’d move from stool to stool, table to table, chatting with the regulars.

Right now he was at home, though, in the open-beamed living room of his big ranch-style house, home on a Friday night (a rarity), a gaunt-faced, rangy man stretched out in a recliner, stroking his mustache idly, watching the reason for staying home on a Friday: a boxing match on HBO, a black guy and a Puerto Rican bashing each other’s brains out on a twenty-seven-inch Japanese TV screen. Nolan’s idea of world unity.

The room around him was cream-color walls and modern furnishings and soft browns. What he wore matched the room, though he hadn’t intended or even noticed it: a cream-color pullover sweater and brown corduroy trousers and brown socks and no shoes, vein-roped hands folded over a slight paunch.

The paunch bothered him, but not much. He’d been a lean man so long that in his mind he still was. Eating the food at his own restaurant had done it to him, and he’d taken up golf to halfheartedly work the budding Buddha belly off. Toward that end, he rarely rode in the cart, walking, trying to make it feel like a real sport.

He was enough of a natural athlete to break one hundred the first month he played, which frustrated the rest of his regular foursome, who, like him, were in the Chamber of Commerce, with stores in or near the Brady Eighty mall. Harris owned a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts outlet, a twenty-four-hour operation, and frequently handed Nolan a free dozen, which didn’t help his weight, either. Levine owned the Toys ‘R’ Us franchise in Brady Eighty. DeReuss, the wealthiest and quietest, was a Dutchman who owned a jewelry store in the mall. After eighteen holes, the foursome would go to the country club bar and drink and talk sports and women. Nolan liked the three men. He felt, at long last, as if he’d joined the real world. The legit world.

He sometimes wondered, in rare reflective moments, for instance between rounds tonight, what his friend DeReuss who owned the jewelry store would say if he knew Nolan had, in his time, heisted many similar such stores, albeit never in a mall. He didn’t know where his three golfing chums had got their financing; but Nolan had done it the good old-fashioned American way: he’d gone out and taken it.

For nearly twenty years, prior to this current respectability, Nolan had been a professional thief.

Jewelry stores—along with banks, armored cars and mail trucks—were his pickings, though not easy. He prided himself on the care he took; he was no cheap stick-up artist, but a pro—big jobs, one or two a year, painstakingly planned to the finest detail, smoothly carried out by players carefully cast by Nolan himself. Nobody got hurt, especially civilians; nobody went to jail, especially Nolan. He ran the show. He always had.

Well, not always. He’d started with the Family, the
Chicago
Family that is, but not in a criminal capacity. And certainly not in the heist game; in his experience, Family guys themselves rarely got into honest stealing, though they frequently bankrolled it. Unions and vice were where the Family was comfortable doing their stealing, and Nolan wanted none of either.

He hadn’t meant to go to work for the Family at all; he didn’t know that the Rush Street club where he was hired as a bouncer was Outfit-owned until he saw the manager paying off one of Tony Accardo’s cousins.

That same manager was stupid enough to short the Family on its piece of the proverbial action, and left in a nervous hurry one night. Nolan never knew whether the little man had made it to safety or the bottom of Lake Michigan, and he didn’t much care which. All he knew was it opened up a slot for him—soon he was managing the club himself, and still doing his own bouncing, making a name with the made guys, who eventually tried to get Nolan to join the Sicilian Elks himself, only he passed. They resented that, and tried to pressure Nolan into bumping off a guy he knew pretty well, and Nolan balked, and somebody else killed the guy, which somehow led to Nolan shooting (through the head) the brother of a Family underboss. Messy.

That had sent him scurrying into the underground world of armed robbery, which—with the exception of the aforementioned occasional bankrolling, a money source Nolan never sought —rarely touched Family circles. In that left- handed world he’d made his mark, and a lot of money. And, eventually, time cooled his Family problems—he had outlived the bastards, basically, and was now on more or less friendly terms with the current regime. He’d even operated a couple of clubs for them.

But he wanted to have something of his own. He didn’t like having Family ties; it wasn’t his idea of going straight, and straight was where he had always hoped to go, deep in the crooked years.

So here, finally, in the Quad Cities, a cluster of cities and towns on the Iowa/Illinois border, which is to say the Mississippi River, he had settled down and bought his restaurant and gone there: straight.