Double Down E-Book

Max Allan Collins

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Veteran thief Nolan tangles with a skyjacker and vigilante in two full-length novels from Grandmaster Max Allan Collins (Road to Perdition), collected in one volume for the first time ever.It Takes a Thief to Take a Thief.In the aftermath of a bloody heist, Nolan and Jon find themselves flying home to count their ill-gotten gains — but a skyjacker taking the same flight has other plans. Meanwhile, in Des Moines, someone is offing members of the Mob-connected DiPreta family and the Mob thinks maybe Nolan can make it stop. Maybe he can — for a six-figure fee.Originally published as two separate novels (and unavailable in bookstores for 40 years!), DOUBLE DOWN finds Nolan and Jon pursuing the American dream in their inimitable criminal fashion. Flying high off his recent return after more than three decades in SKIM DEEP, Nolan is one of MWA Grand Master Max Allan Collins' most unforgettable characters, and DOUBLE DOWN is Nolan at his hard-boiled, larcenous best.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Acclaim For the Work of Max Allan Collins!

Hard Case Crime Books by Max Allan Collins:

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Introduction

Book One: Fly Paper

Prologue: Pre-Flight Check

One

Two

Interim: Takeoff

Three

Four

Epilogue: Crash Landing

Book Two: Hush Money

One: Thursday Afternoon

Two: Thursday Night

Three: Friday Morning

Four: Friday Afternoon and Night

Five: Saturday Morning

Acclaim For the Work ofMAX ALLAN COLLINS!

“Crime fiction aficionados are in for a treat…a neo-pulp noir classic.”

—Chicago Tribune

“No one can twist you through a maze with as much intensity and suspense as Max Allan Collins.”

—Clive Cussler

“Collins never misses a beat…All the stand-up pleasures of dime-store pulp with a beguiling level of complexity.”

—Booklist

“Collins has an outwardly artless style that conceals a great deal of art.”

—New York Times Book Review

“Max Allan Collins is the closest thing we have to a 21st-century Mickey Spillane and…will please any fan of old-school, hardboiled crime fiction.”

—This Week

“A suspenseful, wild night’s ride [from] one of the finest writers of crime fiction that the U.S. has produced.”

—Book Reporter

“This book is about as perfect a page turner as you’ll find.”

—Library Journal

“Bristling with suspense and sexuality, this book is a welcome addition to the Hard Case Crime library.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A total delight…fast, surprising, and well-told.”

—Deadly Pleasures

“Strong and compelling reading.”

—Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

“Max Allan Collins [is] like no other writer.”

—Andrew Vachss

“Collins breaks out a really good one, knocking over the hard-boiled competition (Parker and Leonard for sure, maybe even Puzo) with a one-two punch: a feisty storyline told bittersweet and wry…nice and taut…the book is unputdownable. Never done better.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Rippling with brutal violence and surprising sexuality…I savored every turn.”

—Bookgasm

“Masterful.”

—Jeffery Deaver

“Collins has a gift for creating low-life believable characters …a sharply focused action story that keeps the reader guessing till the slam-bang ending. A consummate thriller from one of the new masters of the genre.”

—Atlanta Journal Constitution

“For fans of the hardboiled crime novel…this is powerful and highly enjoyable reading, fast moving and very, very tough.”

—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Nobody does it better than Max Allan Collins.”

—John Lutz

She looked at him strangely. She was a very pretty woman; striking eyes. She said, in a surprisingly kind voice, “What’s a nice kid like you doing in a situation like this?”

When he’d researched other skyjackings, he’d found that his goal was different from most. Funny, too, because his would seem the most likely goal. But it wasn’t. Many skyjackers did it for glory; he wanted none of that. True, the adventure of it had been appealing to him, but the publicity meant nothing. He had no desire to become a folk hero, à la Rafael Minichiello or D. B. Cooper; and he certainly didn’t want to see his name in the papers! Some skyjacked out of death wish, suicidal tendency; if he had any of that, he didn’t know it. Much skyjacking was political protest and/or the seeking of political asylum, the skyjackings to Cuba being the most obvious example of that. But there was no political motivation to his skyjacking, although a disillusionment with the American Dream had had something to do with it. He was no protester; he cared nothing for politics. His was an admittedly selfish goal he shared with few skyjackers; D. B. Cooper and a handful of others, that was all.

So, when the stewardess asked him for his reason, he was almost anxious to clarify himself.

“I need the money,” he said….

HARD CASE CRIME BOOKSBY MAX ALLAN COLLINS:

SKIM DEEP

TWO FOR THE MONEY

DOUBLE DOWN

TOUGH TENDER*

MAD MONEY*

QUARRY

QUARRY’S LIST

QUARRY’S DEAL

QUARRY’S CUT

QUARRY’S VOTE

THE LAST QUARRY

THE FIRST QUARRY

QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE

QUARRY’S EX

THE WRONG QUARRY

QUARRY’S CHOICE

QUARRY IN THE BLACK

QUARRY’S CLIMAX

QUARRY’S WAR (graphic novel)

KILLING QUARRY

DEADLY BELOVED

SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT

DEAD STREET (with Mickey Spillane)

THE CONSUMMATA (with Mickey Spillane)

MIKE HAMMER: THE NIGHT I DIED

(graphic novel with Mickey Spillane)

*coming soon

DoubleDOWN

byMax Allan Collins

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A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

(HCC-149)

First Hard Case Crime edition: May 2021

Published by

Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street

London SE1 0UP

in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

Copyright © 1981 by Max Allan Collins; originally

published as Fly Paper and Hush Money

Cover painting copyright © 2021 by Mark Eastbrook

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Print edition ISBN 978-1-78909-141-0

E-book ISBN 978-1-78909-142-7

Design direction by Max Phillips

www.maxphillips.net

Typeset by Swordsmith Productions

The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

Introduction

The Nolan novels, like most of my series, began with what was intended to be a one-shot novel, Bait Money, written in the late sixties and early seventies when I was at the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. I had grown up wanting to write “tough guy” fiction, very much in the thrall of Spillane, Hammett, Chandler, Cain and Thompson, but had recently discovered the Richard Stark-bylined “Parker” novels by Donald E. Westlake. Don became something of a mentor to me, and he said nice things about Bait Money, even though it was obviously in part an homage to his own series about a hard-bitten professional thief.

That book originally had Nolan dying at the conclusion—my thinking being that once is homage, twice is rip-off—but when the publisher, Curtis Books, asked for sequels, I said yes. (Don was kind enough to give his blessing, saying that the Jon character, Nolan’s youthful sidekick, humanized both Nolan and the series itself in a way that was quite apart from his Stark novels.)

Blood Money was an outgrowth of dangling plot threads from Bait Money. Since Nolan had originally kicked the bucket in that book, at the hands of a former Family boss of his (the Family being my name for the Mob or the Outfit), plenty of loose ends awaited tying off.

So in a way, Fly Paper (which makes up the first half of the volume you are now holding) was the first true series entry. It was tricky because Nolan had retired from professional crime and was trying to go straight, in his jagged way. That meant to some degree all of the novels have, like Blood Money, grown from the previous ones. The series, in a way, is one long sprawling novel that resolves in Spree, and perhaps that’s why I didn’t write another until recently when Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai twisted my arm into writing a coda, Skim Deep.

The idea of the crook trying to go straight, and having his past come back at him in a bad karmic fashion, is the heart of these novels. Nolan is not a guy who has gotten religion, not hardly—he has always been a capitalist, a businessman chasing the American dream, and nothing grandiose, either.

Fly Paper grew out of the basic idea of, “What if a tough guy of Nolan’s stripe had been on board when D. B. Cooper famously skyjacked a plane?” This also provided an opportunity to make the D. B. Cooper character sympathetic, and pursue what has been a recurring plot device in my work: sending two sympathetic, opposing forces up against each other, to fuck with the reader.

It also gave me the opportunity to create a new recurring source of opposition for Nolan, now that his score with the Chicago Family was more or less settled. The Comfort family (lowercase “f”) became that new collective adversary for Nolan, and they are among my proudest creations, part Scraggs from Li’l Abner, with a dose of various characters Strother Martin played in ’60s and ’70s movies, and a big dollop of a real rural family of miscreants who used to love to come hear my band Crusin’ play, back (as they say) in the day.

Fly Paper was written around 1973, and was unfortunate enough to go into publishing limbo when Curtis Books was bought up by Popular Library, who (despite assurances) never got around to publishing the four Nolan novels in their inventory. I didn’t get the rights back until the early ’80s, when all of the first six books (Bait Money through Scratch Fever) were purchased by Pinnacle Books. In the intervening almost-a-decade, security measures at airports had heightened and that required a minor rewrite. Now those updated security measures seem mild indeed.

Hush Money, the fourth Nolan novel, is among the four in the series that were written in the early ’70s but not published till the early ’80s. When Curtis Books, a lower-end paperback publisher despite its supposed relationship to the fabled Saturday Evening Post, got itself absorbed by Popular Library, those four Nolan novels (and the first two Mallorys) went into that dreaded publishing limbo called inventory.

My agent received periodic assurances that the books would be published, but that never happened—editors prefer to publish books they’ve discovered and bought themselves, not something that’s a remainder from the overstock of some failed publishing house their firm swallowed up. Finally, however, the rights came back to us, and Pinnacle Books even ordered up two new novels. I don’t believe I’ve ever had a six-book contract since.

I performed some minor rewriting on the first two, already-published books (Bait Money and Blood Money) and did some updating where necessary, in particular the skyjacking novel, Fly Paper. Bait Money came out in a spiffy, pulpy new Pinnacle edition and sold very well. Things were looking up.

The irony of Hush Money is that it touches upon the reason that Pinnacle wanted six books out of me and—had the future gone in the fashion it portended—probably would have wanted three to six a year thereafter. Pinnacle had recently lost its signature crime series, the Executioner, a break-up between publisher and author (Don Pendleton) that was as awash in bad blood, as, well…an Executioner novel.

I had read a few Executioner novels, because early on they were a sort of updating of Mike Hammer, the creation of my literary “ideel” (as Li’l Abner would put it), Mickey Spillane. But they weren’t my style—just too overtly pulp and over-the-top for my refined tastes. I was more a Richard Stark guy now, and of course the Nolan series was in that tradition. Some call the Nolans a pastiche of Stark’s Parker novels, and there are overt influences—in particular, the strict points of view and switching back and forth between those points of view.

But I was at least as influenced by the Sand novels by an obscure author of ’60s softcore porn, Ennis Willie. Willie didn’t write softcore porn, but his publisher sold him that way. Really, the Sand novels were a skillful, unlikely melding of Spillane and W. R. Burnett, and for my money were far superior to Pendleton and his eventual ragtag army of imitators (a few exceptions there, particularly the Destroyer). Ennis Willie was an enigma in crime fiction fan circles for decades, until turning up a few years ago—two volumes of vintage Sand material are now available from Ramble House with introductions by me.

I had written my first Nolan—Mourn the Living, a book that didn’t get published till many years later—in 1967, before the Executioner came along in 1969. The first Nolan novel to be published, Bait Money, got its first draft in 1968. Hush Money was just my way of showing what would happen to the Executioner in my world—Nolan’s world, which is to say, nothing like Pendleton’s. Not that there was anything mean-spirited about it—it was just my darkly satirical take on what was then a newly minted, very popular series. Hush Money, remember, was written around 1974 or ’75.

I have no idea whether Pendleton was offended by Hush Money, when it was published in 1981. But he was offended overall by Nolan, which he said was “a silly syllable away from Bolan,” his character. Ironically, Nolan had initially been called Cord (in Mourn), which was changed to Logan in Bait Money; but because a long-forgotten paperback series had a hero called Logan around the time I was first sending Bait Money out to publishers, I changed the name to Nolan.

So there was nothing intentional about Nolan/Bolan. The packaging of the novels was similar, but all the series Pinnacle was publishing in that genre were similar. Nolan’s save-his-ass “war” with the Chicago mob was nothing like Bolan’s holy one. Nolan’s world was violent but in a less cartoony fashion than that of the Executioner.

Nonetheless, Pendleton threatened a lawsuit (there was already a lawsuit on other issues between him and his erstwhile publisher), and despite impressive sales figures, the Nolan series was canceled. The last two books on the contract (Hard Cash and Scratch Fever) even had his name stripped from the covers.

Later, I exchanged letters with Pendleton and made it clear I had not imitated him—that in fact, the Nolan character predated Bolan. He was apologetic and very nice about it, but it was too late. Nolan was really dead this time.

Of course, I later got to revive him for a single novel, Spree, in 1987, and then to close the series off with Skim Deep in 2020.

But that’s another story.

MAX ALLAN COLLINS

BOOK ONE

Fly Paper

This is for Terry Beatty, who understands Jon.

“Sky piracy…involves the interestsof every nation, the safety of everytraveller, and the integrity of thatstructure of order on which aworld community depends.”

R. M. NIXON

“Take me to Mexico.”

D. B. COOPER

Prologue:Pre-Flight Check

The suitcase itself was a bomb. It would be harmless enough going through baggage check, and no matter how roughly it was tossed into the cargo hold, it wouldn’t explode: all the jostle in the world couldn’t do that. Not till I arm it, he thought. By remote control, when the plane is in the air. Even then, nothing could set it off. Except his finger, on the right button.

Not that he wanted to blow up a plane, killing all the people on board, himself included. He wanted no part of that. But it was a possibility, a calculated risk he had to take; high stakes, high risk, simple as that. A more desperate man wouldn’t have twitched an eye at such a prospect, and his concern for his own life and the lives of others was proof positive that he was anything but a desperate man.

He was, rather, a man who’d made a decision. A difficult one at that, reached through calm, rational consideration. And as for the plane blowing up and people getting killed, well, that would be someone else’s decision: the decision of the airline official or FBI agent or heroic crew member who might force upon him the pushing of that final button.

He’d decided, too, that only under the most extreme circumstances would he even consider pushing that button before all the passengers (except a handful of hostages) were off the plane. He was not a monster, after all: the killing of perhaps several hundred people was not something his conscience could easily bear, even if that killing was forced upon him. Of course if it came to that, his conscience would be blown to pieces along with everything and everybody else, wouldn’t it?

But that was the most far-fetched of possibilities. That was not according to his plan. This is how it will go, he thought: after commandeering the plane, he would direct the pilot to a specific airport, at which the bulk of the passengers would be allowed to disembark. Remaining on the plane would be crew members (pilot, copilot and navigator), as well as a stewardess (a volunteer) and some passenger hostages (likewise volunteers). After the ransom money was delivered, the passenger hostages would be released, and the plane would again take off.

He felt no moral responsibility toward the lives of any of these people. The crew members were, after all, professionals highly paid to bear the hazards of flying, including that of skyjacking. And likewise, he couldn’t be expected to feel concerned about the passengers who volunteered to stay on as hostages. They would be volunteers, who’d made their own decision to stay on the plane, wouldn’t they? He was not responsible.

He was twenty-six years old and looked eighteen, with an eternally boyish face, like Johnny Carson. His hair was fair and short, neatly trimmed, neatly combed; he was freckled and blue-eyed. Despite the sloppiness of his surroundings, he was dressed in conservative, tidy work clothes: a deep brown sweatshirt with the words “Greystoke Teacher’s College” spelled out in white, light brown jeans, brown Hush Puppies and dark socks. His was the type of appearance many fathers long for in their sons; he was just what the recruiting officer was looking for: he was clean-cut.

He was hunched over the workbench in a basement that looked like a warehouse of a small electronics firm after a rather untidy burglary. While the workbench itself was well ordered, the room surrounding was chaos: supplies, abandoned projects, empty cartons, stacks of Radio Shack and other electronics catalogs, all were scattered about like so much refuse. Still, mess or no mess, he knew where to find whatever he needed, whenever he needed. To the uninitiated, the basement was a mess; to him it was a filing system.

The basement also held the artifacts of a childhood not entirely given up: a table with an electric train, still functioning, though one would have had to do a ballet around the boxes and unfinished projects to get to the control; a go-cart, mostly disassembled, awaiting the mood to strike its owner to put Humpty Dumpty back together; a guitar amplifier he’d half finished back in early high school, when he’d thought for a while he might take up that instrument; a motorcycle from that same era, a lightweight Honda, also still functioning, or almost—as soon as he got the engine put back together it would be; and off in one corner, stacks of science fiction comic books and pulp digests, as well as an overflowing box of tattered Big Little Books, space stuff mostly (Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Brick Bradford), old junk left from his older brother’s childhood but also a fond part of his. The yellowed pages of those little books, as well as the sf comics and pulps he’d bought himself, stirred his sense of adventure as much in their way as the go-cart and Honda had in theirs.

Upstairs, his wife kept things orderly. When they’d moved to this modest but cozy house from their small apartment (which had been more his workshop than their apartment, every room but the bath looking not unlike this basement), she had asked him if he could limit his projects and such to the downstairs. Though he could have overridden her if he’d wanted to, he’d deferred to her wishes. After all, she was his wife and deserved a nice home, didn’t she? He stayed downstairs.

Now he was rechecking all his leads, making doubly sure they were firmly soldered to the various solid-state chips that made up his remote control system. He was good at this sort of thing. He was an all-around handyman, good at anything mechanical—no electronics genius, maybe, but he knew what he was doing. There were guys with degrees in chemistry and biophysics and the like (his degree was in business) who had the knowledge, sure, but not the knack, not the knack for putting things together, making them work. He could make something out of nothing. Give him a pile of junk and a little time, and he would provide the sweat and imagination and come up with something special. The suitcase/bomb, for instance. He’d made that from, well, he’d made it from crap. Literally. Fertilizer, that is, nitrate-based fertilizer purchased at a local farm supply outlet. The nitrates were the key, and utilizing a variation on standard industrial “cook-book” recipes, he’d had no trouble processing the nitrate-based fertilizer into 10 x 4 x 3-inch blocks of plastic explosive, which looked like nothing more than six loaves of unbaked rye bread.

Next to the suitcase on the workbench were three items of great importance.

The first was a light, compact, but serviceable parachute, one he’d used when skydiving was a hobby of his several years ago, an emergency chute, worn strapped to the stomach.

Next was a portable citizen’s band radio, sender/receiver, about the size of a small hardcover book; this would provide communications when he hit the ground, so that his wife could come pick him up (she’d be receiving and sending on a C.B. in the car). The C.B. had a black, slightly padded case with a clip that would slip over his belt.

And, finally, there was the pocket calculator, an inconspicuous block of black plastic with numbered push-button face, not much bigger or thicker than a deck of playing cards. In this case, however, the deck was decidedly stacked: he had wired in several special functions in addition to the calculator’s usual ones. Except for a chip of circuitry that ran the calculator (whose bulk was primarily due to the panel of push buttons, and the window that displayed the answer to whatever mathematical question you might ask via those buttons) the inside was hollow, and there’d been plenty of space for the extra wiring. He’d wired in a signal, using a frequency higher than the regular broadcast band, one that would penetrate sufficiently into the cargo hold of the plane. This high frequency would be diffracted throughout the entire compartment, seeking out the suitcase, whereas a lower frequency would be blocked out by the metal of the plane. Four times four would arm the suitcase/bomb. Four times four times four would detonate.

“Honey!”

His wife. Carol. He covered the suitcase with some newspapers and went upstairs to her, before she could come down.

She was in the kitchen, sitting at the yellow formica-top table, stirring cream and sugar into a cup of coffee. She’d been crying again. Crying made most girls less attractive; ran their mascara and everything. His wife was different. Crying didn’t spoil her looks at all: she was a natural beauty, wore practically no makeup, just a touch of pale pink lip gloss. She had long, cascading blonde hair. Natural. Her eyes were cornflower blue. While her nose was a trifle large, it was nicely formed, and she had a nice white smile, too, though she wasn’t showing it now. Only on the occasional times when he stopped and studied her like this did he realize how really beautiful she was, and how good it was to have her around.

Like her hair, the kitchen was yellow, except for the white appliances that Carol kept so highly polished that when morning sun came in the window and reflected off them, it was almost blinding. Right now, however, the kitchen was dark, gloomy dark. It was the middle of the evening, and the window next to the table, curtain drawn back, let in nothing but moonless night. She’d left windows open all around the house, and though it was late October, the breeze was just cool, nothing more. No sounds came from outside: the night sounds in Canker, Missouri, population 12,000, ran to little more than the sporadic squealing of a teenager’s tires. What little light there was in the kitchen came from the living room where the TV was going, unattended; a comedy show was on, volume low, but every now and then a rumble of canned laughter would break the stillness. Carol’s face was pale. Expressionless.

“What’s wrong, Carol?”

“I don’t want you to do it.”

“Carol.”

“Ken. Honey. I don’t want you to go through with it.”

“And I don’t want to discuss that anymore. I already made up my mind. This is one project I’m going to finish.”

“Sit down, will you? And talk to me?”

He sat down, but he didn’t say anything.

“What are you working on downstairs?”

“You know. What I told you.”

“Why’s it taking so long to put together? I mean, if it’s a fake bomb, why’s it taking so long?”

“I explained that. It has to look realistic. It’ll help me if they have to waste a lot of hours defusing what they think is a bomb.” That didn’t really make much sense, but fortunately, she hadn’t questioned the logic of it.

“Ken?”

“Yes?”

“I don’t understand you.”

“Sure you do.”

“I don’t. I don’t understand any of this. It seems so unnecessary…”

“Carol. Look at my face. It’s got lines in it. I’m a kid and I got lines in my face.” It was something that was bothering him lately. Not that he was vain, but he did like to think of himself as young, and damn it, he was young. But his features, while boyish as ever and always would be, had grown tight these few years past; crow’s feet at the eyes, deep lines in his face from frowning too much and from smiling too much, too. He’d been a salesman these last three years, and excessive frowning (to himself, in private) and smiling (at prospective buyers, in public) were inescapable hazards of the trade. It came, as they said, with the territory.

“Still, honey,” Carol was saying, “you’re not old. Really. Would it be so hard to start over?”

“It sure would. You want me to die of a heart attack by thirty? I mean, look at my face, the lines. Jeez.”

Tears were welling up in her eyes. Even in the dark he could see that. Out in the living room, the TV was laughing.

“Come on, Carol. Knock it off. It’s going to work out okay.”

“Ken?”

“What?”

“You wouldn’t hurt anybody, would you, honey?”

“You know me better than that, don’t you? Jeez, Carol. How can you even say that.”

She touched his hand, stroked it. “You want some coffee?”

“Okay. Then I got to get back downstairs and finish up.”

One

1

Somebody was banging at the side door. Jon ignored it for a while, focusing his attention on the late movie he was watching—the original 1933 King Kong. But the banging was insistent and finally, reluctantly, Jon pulled away from the TV and headed downstairs to see what inconsiderate S.O.B. had the crazy idea something was important enough to go around bothering people in the middle of King Kong. Better be pretty damn earthshaking, Jon thought, pisses me off, and yanked open the door and saw a heavyset man leaning against the side of the building, his shirt and hands covered with blood. The guy had blood on his face, too, and looked at Jon and rasped, “Who…who the hell are you?”

Which took the words right out of Jon’s mouth.

Up until then, it had been a normal day. He’d risen around noon, showered, got dressed, thrown some juice down, and gone out front to the box to see if he’d gotten any comic books in the mail. Jon was a comics freak, a dedicated collector of comic art in all its forms, and did a lot of mail-order buying and trading with other buffs around the country.

He was also an aspiring comics artist himself (as yet unpublished), and while he was disappointed to find no letters of acceptance for any of the artwork he’d sent off, so too was he relieved to find no rejections.

Jon was twenty-one years old, a short but powerfully built kid (he was such a comics nut that he’d actually sent in for that Charles Atlas course advertised on the back of the books) with a full head of curly brown hair and intense blue eyes. He also had a turned-up nose that he despised and that girls, thankfully, found cute. His dress ran to worn jeans and T-shirts picturing various comic strip heroes, everything from Wonder Warthog of the underground comics to Captain Marvel (Shazam!) of the forties “Golden Age” of comics. Today he had a Flash Gordon short-sleeve sweatshirt; the artwork (a full-figure shot of Flash with cape) was by Alex Raymond, the late creator of Flash. Jon would accept no substitutes.

You see, comics were Jon’s life.

Take his room, for example. When his uncle had first given it to him, this room was a dreary storeroom in the back of the antique shop, a cement-floored, gray-wood-walled cubicle about as cheerful as a Death Row cell. Now it was a bright reflection of Jon’s love for comic art. The walls were literally papered with colorful posters depicting such heroes as Dick Tracy, Batman, Buck Rogers, and the aforementioned Flash Gordon, all drawn by Jon himself in pen and ink and watercolored, and were uncanny recreations of the characters, drawn in their original style. (That was both a skill and a problem of Jon’s: while his eye for copying technique was first-rate, he had no real style of his own. “Give me time,” Jon would say to the invisible critics, “give me time.”) Shag throw rugs covered the floors in splashes of cartoon color, and the walls were lined three deep with the boxes containing his voluminous collection of plastic-bagged and filed comic books, a file cabinet in one corner the keeper of the more precious of his pop artifacts. A drawing easel with swivel chair was against the wall, a brimming wastebasket next to it, and sheets of drawing paper and Zip-a-Tone backing lay at the easel’s feet like oversize dandruff. And the two pieces of antique walnut furniture his uncle had given him were not exempt from comics influence, either: the chest of drawers had bright underground comics decals stuck all over its rich wood surface (Zippy, the Freak Brothers, Mr. Natural), and on top Jon’s pencils, pens, brushes, and bottles of ink were scattered among the cans of deodorant and shave cream and other necessities. Even the finely carved headboard of his bed was spotted with taped-on scraps of Jon’s artwork, cartoonish sketches of this and that, mostly character studies of his girl, Karen, and Nolan, and his Uncle Planner.

His Uncle Planner. Still hard to think of Planner as being dead. Just a few months since it happened, and though Jon was almost used to the absence of the old man, he still didn’t like living alone in the big, dusty old antique shop. Soon he’d be getting around to contacting some people to come in and appraise and bid on the merchandise in the store. Planner’s collection of antique political buttons alone would bring a pretty penny. Of course the stuff in the front of the store, the long, narrow “showroom” of supposed antiques, was junk, crap Planner had picked up at yard sales and flea markets just to keep the shop sufficiently stocked; the good stuff was in the back rooms, because when Planner had run across actual antiques, he’d crated them up carefully and packed them away. Jon’s uncle had had real respect for real antiques, and felt it was silly to sell them, as their value was sure to increase day by day. Jon, however, had no hesitation about selling those back-room treasures, though he’d do his best to find a buyer who’d haul away the junk as well as the jewels.

Mostly, of course, the shop had been a front for Jon’s uncle. Planner had been just what his name implied: he planned things—specifically, jobs for professional thieves. He’d traveled around on “buying trips” and, in the role of cantankerous old antique dealer, had gathered the information necessary to put together successful “packages” for professional heist men like Nolan. Planner’s packages were detailed and precise, at times even including blueprints of the target, and he’d charged a fee plus percentage of the take. Two years ago, with the guidance of his uncle, Jon had participated in the execution of one of those packages, a bank robbery headed by Nolan (whom Planner rated as perhaps the best in a dying craft), and some three quarters of a million dollars from that robbery had rested in Planner’s safe since then—until this summer, when two men with guns came into the antique shop and shot Planner dead and took the money.

Jon and Nolan had gone after the two men and the money, and caught the two men, all right, but the money was lost. And so was Jon’s dream of owning a comic book shop, a mecca for collectors like himself—as were his hopes for having enough money to support himself for as long as it took to break into the comic art field. All of that—up in smoke.

But not really. As Planner’s sole heir, he was now owner of the shop, which he could conceivably convert into his comic book mecca, even if its location (Iowa City, Iowa) was a bit off the beaten track. And he had those two back rooms full of valuable antiques to turn into cash. And, too, Nolan had told him that the next time something came together, Jon was the first man he’d call. So things weren’t so awfully bleak, really.