Spree (16 page)

“A mistake,” Nolan said. “Ante up, gentlemen.”

An hour later, Nolan brought the dull subject up again; Andy couldn’t believe this guy.

“You have a lot to lose,” he said to DeReuss. “All your diamonds and such.”

DeReuss, who was shuffling, shrugged facially. “Our inventory is considerable, yes.”

“I can imagine.” He began dealing Black Maria. “How much?”

“Approaching three hundred in jewels and merchandise,” he said, adding, “Thousand,” to clarify three hundred what.

Jesus
, Andy thought,
and I thought I was in a lucrative line
.

“The other jewelry store carries somewhat less,” DeReuss added, faintly regal.

Nolan smirked darkly. “And you’re protected, if you call it that, by an alarm on one easy-to-snip phone line.”

DeReuss looked at his hole cards. He smiled on one side of his face; whether it had to do with his cards or the subject at hand, Andy couldn’t tell. “I have my own security measures.”

“Oh?”

“Tear gas. Anyone opens my vault, he’ll cry all the way—and not to the bank.”

“Good idea,” Nolan said. “But I’d still appreciate your support at the next meeting.”

“What,” Andy said, “are you running for office?”

“I just think we need an armed guard on duty, twenty-four hours a day. Preferably two guards.”

God, this guy was a stick in the mud.

“Let’s play cards,” Andy said. “Fuck business.”

DeReuss said to Andy, “How’s your assistant manager working out? What’s her name?”

“Heather. Fine. I’ll open for a buck.”

DeReuss looked at his hole cards again, smiled privately. Did the Dutchman suspect about him and Heather? Andy hoped to hell not; he’d tried so hard to be careful. He wished he were with her. He was losing heavily tonight. Twenty bucks in the hole, only three hours into the game.

The game broke up around one-thirty. Nolan had cleaned up. On the last hand, which he dealt, a hand of Black Maria, he’d had the ace of spades in the hole and won the poker hand as well; it was a big pot, biggest of the night. He seemed embarrassed about it, as he was showing them out.

“For the big winner,” DeReuss said, smiling just a little, “you seem less than overjoyed.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Levine said to Nolan, grinning,
”
’cause nobody I know loves the green stuff more than you.”

“Next time I’ll let you pay for your goddamn doughnuts,” Harris said, good-naturedly.

“Hey, you won,” Andy said, patting Nolan on

the shoulder. “Loosen up. Enjoy being so goddamn lucky.”

Nolan opened the door for them; he shrugged, smiled. “You’re my friends,” he said. “I hate taking your money.” And Andy and the rest went home.

11

ROGER WINCH
felt uneasy about working with Cole Comfort again. The only time he’d worked with the guy was one money-desperate month, ten or eleven years ago, when Comfort pulled him and his partner Phil in on some supermarket heists.

Heists, hell—burglaries was more like it: Comfort and some lowlife trucker pals of his would pull up in back and load up all the beef from the meat freezer, while Roger and Phil were up front, Phil—having picked the locks to get them inside—now playing point man, watching for cops and such, while Roger blew the safe. Which was usually a snap, because virtually every one was a J. J. Taylor where he could do a simple spindle shot—knock off the dial with one swift hard blow of the sledge, and then tip her over on her back and use an eyedropper of grease, and hell, in five minutes he was in her.

Small-time jobs, those grocery “heists,” although they took thousands of bucks out of them, because Comfort knew when to time it—Thursday nights, when the stores allowed the money to pile up to cover cashing paychecks on Friday.

Still, Roger hadn’t liked the Comforts—Sam and Cole—because they were small-timers and mean and smelled bad. He didn’t trust them. They never cheated him. They never tried to pull a cross. But he didn’t trust them, anyway.

He always had the feeling the Comforts would have just as soon killed him as look at him. But for some reason—perhaps because they thought he might be of use to them again one day—they had never pulled anything on him.

Nonetheless, he would have passed on this gig but for two reasons: Nolan’s presence; and he needed the money.

Nolan made any job worth doing. Roger was about the only pete-man in the business who’d never done time, and that had a lot to do with working so often with Nolan, who beyond a doubt was the most careful and tediously precise organizer in the business. No little old lady in the entire U.S. of A. was as cautious, as conservative as Nolan.

And Roger liked that. He liked going into jobs knowing the lay of the land—the specific safe, the floor plan, the alarm system, the security guards (if any), the proximity of patrolling cops, the whole megillah. He didn’t like carrying guns. He didn’t like anything that smacked of armed robbery. Night work. That was Roger’s style.

Roger’s style was playing it safe. He was, in every sense of the term, a safe man. He lived in a safe neighborhood in a safe city and he had chosen a safe, low-key, respectable life-style, which included a ranch-style split-level home in West Des Moines, a homemaker wife and three well-behaved children, Vicki, twelve, Ron, eight, and Joe, four. He didn’t run around on his wife—she was a little plump, but he liked her plump, and she was pretty as the day he met her, a waitress in a bar in Seattle, where he and Phil worked a job.

Even Roger’s appearance was unthreatening: he was forty-six years old, five seven, 137 pounds, usually encased in pastel Banlon shirts and polyester slacks, his brown hair cut very short, his face filled with reassuring character lines, his brown eyes lidded sleepily, his nose straight and never broken, his smile gentle. He had a safe, respectable business—locksmithing—which he maintained with his longtime partner Phil Dooley, a middle-aged, rather stout confirmed bachelor who somewhat resembled a smaller, balding Walter Matthau.

Phil was an excellent locksmith, and lived as quiet and low-key a life as Roger. Phil, who lived in a tastefully art-deco-appointed sprawling apartment on the top floor of an apartment building he owned, was a homosexual, which was something they had never discussed, rarely even alluded to, in twenty-some years of business and friendship. Phil lived with no one, although he seemed to maintain relationships with various young men attending Drake University, though such boys moved on with graduation and nothing permanent ever came of it.

Roger had grown up in Massachusetts, in the Boston area, living in a safe little neighborhood in safe little Malden—where his parents, who ran a stationery shop downtown, had raised him. He’d lost his parents long, long ago—while he was still in high school; they had been on their way for a safe, quiet weekend in the Hamptons when they were killed in a head-on collision with a semi that was passing another semi. He’d gone to live with an aunt, briefly, before going to Drake on a track scholarship.

During his freshman year, he’d met Phil, who’d invited him up to his apartment; they had met in a pizza place and found a mutual interest in what was then called “hi-fi” equipment. Phil invited him up to show him the latest in hi-fi, and to listen to Kingston Trio records—in stereo, no less. Unfortunately, Roger soon found that the hi-fi stuff was the equivalent of etchings, and he had to set Phil straight about some things.

Phil had apologized profusely, saying he’d misread Roger and was so very sorry, so very embarrassed; and they’d become friends. Roger didn’t much care about Phil’s sexual bent. Roger’d had his own secrets. One of which was that he’d been a shoplifter for as long as he could remember.

He had shared this secret with Phil, one evening when they were both in their cups; and Phil, who already had a hole-in-the-wall locksmithing shop, admitted he had certain criminal leanings himself. He’d done time, in fact. That was where his homosexual leaning had flowered, Roger gathered. Anyway, Phil had used his locksmithing abilities on a number of burglaries, back in St. Louis where he’d grown up; he’d been involved with a ring that broke into stores and businesses. Phil used to work with a pete-man—safecracker—named Harvey Watters; they’d lived together for a time. But Watters was “inside,” as Phil put it.

Watters had taught Phil a lot about the safecracking business, but Phil didn’t have the nerve for it—specifically, for making the necessary grease—that is, the nitro—and working with knockers (detonators) and explosives in general.

But Roger had no such fears—the Fourth of July was his favorite holiday—and through Phil, Watters’ expertise was passed on to Roger, who in the meantime had lost his scholarship and was expelled from Drake when he was caught cheating on his chemistry finals.

And so they had begun, through Phil’s St. Louis contacts and a few others right there in Des Moines, doing jobs. Three or four or five times a year. Roger was a natural pete-man and, despite the relative infrequency of their jobs, gained a real reputation in the trade. He and Phil made a lot of money. Soon they had expanded the locksmithing shop and had a healthy legit business going.

They always planned to phase out their “other” profession, but they had never quite got around to it.

Because what Roger and Phil had in common, besides hi-fi and business and crime, was a love of gambling. Gambling was the only part of Roger Winch’s life, besides crime of course, that couldn’t be classified as safe. He and Phil—on three or four times a year “convention” trips —went to Vegas or Tahoe or Atlantic City, and played high-roller. They tended to go their separate ways—Roger concentrating on blackjack, and Phil on roulette. Now and then one of them came home a winner. Frequently neither did.

At the moment, Roger’s savings account (he couldn’t speak for Phil) was flatter than a blackjack dealer’s ass. It needed replenishing, to say the least; Doris—Roger’s wife—was oblivious to their finances, but he had promised her that condo in Florida, and unless he came out of semi-retirement, criminally speaking, and made a score, he’d have to disappoint her, and that was one thing Roger didn’t want to do.

Neither he nor Phil had done a job in a year and a half. They were getting older (Phil was sixty) and, Roger’s gambling losses aside, had built comfortable lives for themselves. Their locksmithing business was tops in town, and could be sold for a nice piece of change, when they went into retirement, a few years from now, something they were already discussing.

But Phil, Roger could tell, missed the excitement of doing a job; Phil might not have had the stones to handle explosives, but he obviously loved night work: unlocking doors and going in places and taking things. And there was, Roger had to admit, a thrill to it. There were, Roger could not deny, few things sweeter than seeing the door of a safe, which you’ve punched or blown, swing open.

But the business had changed. There just wasn’t as much work as there used to be. Oh, it wasn’t technology—changes in safe design were no big deal—nitro can beat any style of vault; and being in the locksmithing business gave them access to all the inside info for the finer points.

But too many safes these days were out in full view, floodlit at night, often near windows at the front of stores, where the cops could see you working. And the credit card was putting pete-men like Roger out of business, anyway: there just weren’t as many cash transactions as there used to be. Also, businesses routinely used bank night depositories, rather than stick the day’s proceeds in an on-site safe. So even if you could get to the safe, there wouldn’t likely be much in it.

So Roger, broke, frustrated, was pleasantly surprised to receive the phone call from Cole Comfort, of all people.

“It’s a big job,” he said. “We need you and your pansy pal, too.”

“Don’t say that,” Roger said.