Spree (25 page)

“She’s a sleeping beauty,” Jon said, meaning the janitor.

Nolan stood. “Stay here and keep Mr. Comfort company.”

And he left them together, and Jon took Nolan’s place at the desk, but didn’t speak to Comfort. After a while Comfort asked him if a cat caught his tongue.

“No,” Jon said. “I’m just taking your advice about children.”

DAVE FISHER
, Roger Winch, and Phil Dooley sat in a gray Buick which belonged to Fisher but was officially owned by a nonexistent person named Bernard Phillips. The Buick, which was parked in the Brady Eighty back parking lot, motor running, had Alabama license plates. Fisher had written to the Alabama Department of Motor Vehicles for the plates, fulfilling the requirement of a description of the car, vehicle identification number and registration fee. The Buick was a stolen car which Fisher, who lived in Minneapolis, had bought from a friend in St. Paul, who ran a chop shop. The Buick had a new VIN (vehicle identification number) and new tires; it did not have much of a heater, as the three men were finding out.

None of them was wearing a heavy winter coat—Fisher wore a dark blue polyester jacket, Winch, a brown corduroy sport coat over dingy work clothes, Dooley, a sand-color suede jacket. They needed jackets light enough to keep on, inside, during a long night of work, but protective enough to keep them from freezing when toiling in the chilly loading-dock areas.

“If I’d known this heater was down,” Fisher said apologetically to Winch, in the rider’s seat beside him, “I’d have fixed it.” Dooley was in back.

“Fuckin’ cold out there,” Winch said, rubbing his hands together. “At least it isn’t snowing now.”

Their breath was smoking, clouding up the windows.

Dooley said, “We only got a couple inches. I think it’s lovely.”

Fisher said, “What’s taking so long? It’s twenty after ten, already.”

“There he is,” Winch said, pointing toward Nolan, who could be seen behind the glass doors of the mall’s east-end rear exit. He was crooking his finger at them, like a parent summoning his children.

Fisher admired Nolan; he’d done several jobs with him, oh, probably half a dozen years before, and he’d come to admire the man’s logic and discipline. He had no such admiration for Comfort, with whom he’d worked on a Mickey Mouse house burglary about ten years ago—a rich guy in St. Louis with an elaborate alarm system, or so Comfort said; Fisher had no difficulty getting around it. The job wound up paying a couple grand. Whoop-de-do.

When he heard how Nolan had been forced out of retirement by Comfort, Fisher hadn’t been surprised exactly, although kidnaping Nolan’s lady seemed extreme even for Comfort. Fisher was on Nolan’s side in this, although he was eager to do this job and even more eager for the money. This was a challenging score (because of the size of it—the alarm system would be nothing) and would bring in a sizable piece of change, one that should indefinitely underwrite him as he continued developing the computer software he knew would one day make him a millionaire.

They piled out of the car. Fisher opened the trunk and took out a large square suitcaselike affair. Winch took out a duffel bag which made metallic clinks and clunks as the tools within bumped against each other; not to worry: the safecracker’s partner, Dooley, carried the knockers and grease, in his jacket pockets. Nothing was going to blow up tonight except some doors on safes, Fisher thought, smiling to himself—and, possibly, this job in Comfort’s face, if the old fool crosses Nolan.

Nolan let them in, locked the door behind them. He said to Fisher and Dooley, the men upon whom the job depended, “The Leeches will be here with the trucks at eleven. We got enough time?”

“Sure,” Fisher said, referring to the alarm system.

“Sure,” Dooley said, referring to the minimum eighteen locks he’d have to pick in the next few hours.

Nolan directed Winch and Dooley down to the mall entrance to Nolan’s, where Jon would be waiting to let them in—they’d be entering the restaurant side, which was closed; they would join Comfort in the back room, where all would wait till Nolan gave the go. The go was contingent upon Fisher’s success in jumping the alarm system.

Toward that end, Nolan walked Fisher into the maintenance shop, just to their left through the double doors. The unconscious woman who was the night janitor was tied up in her swivel chair; she looked dead, but she was snoring, which was among the things dead people didn’t do. The garagelike room was cluttered with cans of paint and canisters and bottles of cleaning solutions and such; the bag of guns was stowed in the corner, as he’d instructed Jon. Good.

Nolan walked Fisher up a half flight of stairs into another cluttered but low-ceilinged area, littered with unidentifiable junk and more cleaning supplies. On the wall at left was the board where the phone line came in; it looked cluttered, too, to Nolan, who knew little about such things—to him, it was just a couple of metal control boxes affixed to a board with dozens of little green wires shooting off here and there, making side trips into junction boxes. But Fisher seemed to know immediately what the various wires were for and where they were headed; he touched some of them, lightly, lovingly, smiling like a suitor.

Then Fisher opened what looked like a traveling salesman’s sample case and started unloading it.

“You need any help?” Nolan asked.

“No. It’s just a matter of clipping onto the phone line and measuring the pulse rate with this oscilloscope”—he pointed to a small battery-operated TV—“and, once I’ve got a wave reading, adjusting my little black box”—he nodded to a little black box with some dials and switches—“to that specific pulse rate and clipping it onto the alarm line, completing the circuit, fooling their so-called system.”

“And if you fuck up?”

“The cops’ll be here in five minutes,” Fisher said, and took his pocket knife and started scraping the phone wire bare.

17

THE SMALL CABIN
, one room with bath, would have seemed cozy to her, normally. A fire was going in its wood-burning stove, across the room near the far wall; this was, at the moment, the only light source in the room, and the warm orange glow cast on the rustic, knotty-pine interior of the cabin was as homey as a Norman Rockwell painting. Sitting before the stove, in a textured gray narrow-lapel jacket, over a wine-colored shirt, with matching pleated pants, was the boy/man, Lyle. He was a stylish dresser, Lyle was. The problem was his I.Q. seemed about the same as his shirt size. He sat there now, roasting a marshmallow on the end of a long twig he’d found outside, sat there cross-legged like an Indian in designer clothes, like a new-wave Boy Scout.

Sherry didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She did neither: she didn’t want to upset Lyle. She’d had some bad moments with him, over the past days, and had only today begun rebuilding. There were signs Lyle was warming to her again. He had, for example, offered to roast a marshmallow for her, just minutes ago. She declined, but thanked him for his thoughtfulness. That was one of the small pleasures of being held prisoner by a dimwit like Lyle: he never picked up on sarcasm. You could get away with anything—verbally. You just couldn’t get away.

She shifted on the bed; her ass felt raw—bedsores, possibly. Today was Thursday—tonight was Thursday; it was dark out the cabin windows (when it was light, there was nothing to see but snow and trees). She was dressed just as she had been Sunday when she’d been shanghaied: bulky lavender turtleneck sweater and matching cords; her suede boots were under the bed—she wasn’t sure what became of her gold jewelry. She was sitting up, pillow behind her, her left hand cuffed to one thick rung of the bed’s maple headboard. The arm was sore and stiff, particularly her shoulder, which ached; her whole upper back ached, as a matter of fact. Sleeping that way, as she had for four nights now, was awful; the first night, she’d kept waking herself up, turning in her sleep only to yank her own chain—but she was used to it now. She had been here forever, after all.

The square room had two single beds, separated by a bed stand on which was a phone; and at the root of the other bed was a small rabbit-eared TV on a stand. Over at the right was the only door, and just left of the door, catercorner from where she lay, was a little off-white kitchenette area, the only part of the room that wasn’t dark-yellowish-varnished knotty pine. Just opposite her was the bathroom. To her left was a window, nailed shut.

On the bed stand, near that teasing phone, was a Sony Walkman with assorted tapes: the Cars, David Bowie, Billy Idol, Tears for Fears and (perhaps most appropriately) Simple Minds. That Lyle listened to such tapes first amazed, then amused, and finally depressed her. She had tried to engage him in a conversation about Bowie, and Lyle had said, “I like
some
oldies.” Further observations about the music he listened to included liking the beat and a “smooth” sound and “It has a cool video.” Lyle was born to rate records on
American Bandstand
.

In fact, Lyle was “bummed out” (a leftover hippie phrase that seemed oddly anachronistic, coming from the lips of this eighties Li’l Abner) that the cabin’s “tube” didn’t get MTV. No cable out here in the country, no satellite dish either apparently; just rabbit ears. Nonetheless, Lyle seemed able to settle into soap operas and game shows, during the day, and sitcoms and cop shows in the evening, his stupidly handsome face impassive as he watched the moving images on the screen, often while listening to his own alternative track on his Sony Walkman—
The Cosby Show
with Billy Idol voice-over,
Hill Street Blues
starring the Cars.

He had not been mean to her. He did not seem to have a mean bone in his body (nor a brain in his head, but at least he wasn’t sadistic). Her first thought, upon waking handcuffed to a bed, with the two men standing at the foot of it staring at her, was rape.

But Lyle hadn’t touched her. The other one had felt her up some, pretending to just be moving her around—nothing overt. This one was Lyle’s “pa,” an almost handsome, white-haired, blue-eyed apparition; he was in his sixties, this one, a frightening son of a bitch with a gentle, charming smile through which shone the intelligence—and sadism—his son lacked. She had only seen him once, that first night, but the threat of him hung over her captivity like a rustic cloud. Lyle, who spoke with his pa on the phone every few hours, was in the old man’s sway, obedient as a well-trained dog and nearly as smart.

That first night had been the worst, or close to it. Her anger ran a race with her fear and came in a close second. She had all but snarled at the old man at the foot of the bed: “What the hell is this about?”

And Lyle’s pa had leaned a hand over and patted her leg; she kicked at his hand, but he anticipated it and pulled it away and smiled sweetly at her. “This is about your boyfriend, honey. And you go kickin’ people, and you’ll wind up with your feet cuffed, too. Mind your manners, hear?”

She heard; she heard bloodcurdling insanity and rage churning under his phony milk-of-human-kindness tone. She knew immediately that Nolan was in at least as much trouble as she was.

“If your man loves you, honey,” said Lyle’s pa, “you’ll be just fine. You’re gonna have to camp out with us for a few days, is all. We’ll treat you right. Just don’t you make a fuss.”

“Nolan will . . .” she started, then thought better of it.

“Kill us?” Lyle’s pa smiled. “I hardly think so.” He walked around the side of the bed and put a surprisingly smooth palm against her cheek, smiled at her, as demented as a TV preacher. “We got something that’s precious to him. He’s gonna do just like we say.” Some edge came into the voice: “And so are you, honey. So are you.”

“How . . . how long will I be here?”

“A few days, darlin’.”

“A few days.”

“Thursday. Make yourself to home. Don’t cause trouble. Be a good girl.”

The old man had soon left, and she was in the company of the good-looking boy. He had been polite.

“Pa says you can go to the bathroom,” he said, “long as you don’t overdo it. We got supplies here. There’s a microwave.” That meant frozen dinners, as it turned out; three a day (breakfast was scrambled eggs and sausage but in the little frozen-dinner format). At first she could barely look at the stuff, let alone stomach it; she soon learned to do both.