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man himself who hadn’t liked the tension and danger of the life but who didn’t know any other so continued dabbling in it into his semiretirement. Planner would use his guise of eccentric old antique dealer to travel around and scout up prospective targets, working out detailed packages to sell to Nolan and a few others like him—that is, a suggested method or methods for pulling the caper off. He also served as a line of communication through whom others in the heist trade could be contacted and with whose help you could assemble a first-rate string.
    Two years ago, needing money, the Family hot on his ass and nobody in the trade wanting to share the heat with him, Nolan had turned to Planner for anything Planner could come up with for him. And Planner had given him the Port City job. Seemed that Planner’s nephew, Jon, a kid of nineteen or twenty, was in with a couple of other lads, one of whom was a pretty young bitch who worked as a teller at the Port City bank, which these kids were planning to rob. Nolan decided that having an inside person at the bank was an advantage that might offset the lack of experience and the immaturity of the kids, and out of sheer desperation, he went ahead with the robbery.
    And so had begun his relationship with Jon. Jon was a somewhat naive, basically shy kid who had dreams of drawing comic books for a living some day; he was a smart kid, a strong little bastard who lifted weights and all that and had been a state wrestling champ in his high school days. Jon’s only (if overriding) eccentricity was this thing of being a comic book nut: drawing the things, collecting them, talking about them almost constantly. Nolan didn’t mind, figuring everybody had a right to a quirk or two, but in the beginning he certainly hadn’t pictured the boy as someone he’d be entering a long-term partnership with.
    But after the Port City bank job, when some Family people caught Nolan with his pants down, it had been Jon who’d hauled Nolan’s ass out of the fire—and a bullet-riddled ass it had been, too. He’d taken Nolan to Planner’s and stayed by him like a damn nurse for six or eight fucking months. Nolan was not the sentimental type, but Jon was no longer just a silly damn comic book freak to him; Jon was a silly damn comic book freak who had saved Nolan’s life, and that was different.
    A lot had happened since then. Planner had been killed, shot to death in the back room of the antique shop when some old “friends” of Nolan’s had come calling. Nolan and Jon had evened the score as best as possible, but lost a pile of money in the process. In the meantime, Nolan’s long-standing feud with the Chicago Family finally fizzled out when a new regime came into power; the new Family people even hired Nolan, and he ran a motel and restaurant complex for them for a while. But he soon got a bad taste in his mouth, working for people who were in his opinion just a bunch of pimps and pushers and killers come up in the world. So he’d quit, amicably, and had decided to take the offer made him by another of his old working cronies who was retired and living in Iowa City, a very close friend of Planner’s named Wagner, who was having some health troubles and wanted Nolan to take over his restaurant business for him. Thanks to a heist he and Jon had pulled in Detroit a few months back, Nolan had had the necessary capital to buy in, and now here he was: settled down perhaps too close to the site of a fairly recent bank job, which was a risk, yes, but a risk he’d decided was worth taking.
    Now, however, as he stared across the table at George Rigley, president of the First National Bank of Port City, he wasn’t so sure.
    And George Rigley didn’t seem so sure of himself, either, at the moment. Nolan’s blunt threat of death had undermined Rigley’s confidence, shattered that slick, obnoxious superiority so many bankers project. For thirty seconds now, the man had just sat there, quietly