Cole Comfort, being dead, no longer lived in his rustic house in the country outside Jefferson City, Missouri. He lived nowhere, obviously, though what was left of him had been buried near Davenport, Iowa, in a gully where the ground was soft enough to dig deep but not so close to the little stream as to get exposed, if the water overran.
He lived on in the memory of his mother, though the location of Cole’s earthly remains—in fact, even whether he truly had died—was unknown to her. Not that she had any doubt that her boy, missing six months, was dead at the hands of a ruthless son of a bitch named Nolan.
Mabel Winifred Comfort, known to one and all as Maw, lived in her son’s humble, plunder-filled farmhouse, a turn-of-the-century structure wearing aluminum siding the way a thief does a stocking mask. She appeared harmless enough, an old lady, overweight, struggling around the place with her walker, the upstairs of the two-story house a country she could no longer visit.
Thanks to the choppers Coleman bought her, Maw still had the lovely smile whose sadistic aspect escaped notice of some, often to their peril. She had been lovely herself once, a showgirl in Kansas City in her teens, a high-class hooker in St. Lou in her twenties, and then the devoted mother of three boys— Samuel, Coleman, and Daniel.
Their father, Jedidiah, had been gone so long, his face was a blur to her. The only picture she had of him was from a wanted poster and that was faded with age worse than she was. Had it really been fifty-year or more that Jed wooed her back with him to the hardscrabble Georgia sticks that spawned him?
Some gangsters Jed crossed in the Lou had been after him, but in time the law and rival hoods took care of that, and finally the Comforts wound up back in the Show Me State. He’d always been a good provider, Jed, and he died brave, exchanging gunfire with a grocer.
Maw was likely in her seventies somewheres, but in those days in backwoods Missouri, such inconsequential things as getting born weren’t well kept track of. Her girlish figure had long since become a memory under a succession of colorful muumuus, floral mostly; what had once jiggled now undulated like water about to come to a boil. Short sexy curls were a now frizzy gray skullcap.
For years she had lived with Coleman and his son and daughter—dumb-as-a-stump Lyle and jailbait babydoll Cindy Lou. Six months ago the boy’s butchered body turned up in a ditch a few miles from this house, and the girl was off in Hollywood making dirty movies, if family gossip was to be believed. To Maw that was a step up from just giving it away.
What blew things to hell and gone was Coleman’s scheme to blackmail former accomplice Nolan into helping loot a big shopping mall in Davenport, Iowa. In a nursing home at the time, Maw was only on the fringes of the thing; but Cole had spoke to her about it, grinning that grin so much like hers, proud of what he was cooking up. Such a handsome boy with that snow-white hair, full head of it, too. He’d been visiting her at Sunny Acres, an assisted care facility in Jefferson City.
She’d not been a resident, though, just recovering there from hip surgery, having taken a fall in the parking lot outside the Golden Spike Bar & Grill. Cole had bought her a new hip, a plastic one. That was just the kind of son he was, even if she sometimes cursed him for that hip, when it rained bad and got sore as a boil.
Why didn’t you just let me die, you dumb son of a bitch? she would say even now. But then she’d smile to herself, thinking how much she loved him.
How much she missed him.
She knew that bastard Nolan, who years ago had done a few jobs with Sam and Cole, had killed her firstborn and now likely her middle boy, too. Cole’s mall score didn’t come off and everybody connected with it either run for the hills or was dead. In the aftermath, somebody had killed Lyle, likely right here in this house when he got back home, judging by the blood spatter left behind like a grisly “fuck you.” Probably that was Nolan, too. Nothing worse than a goddamned reformed crook.
Mabel Winifred Comfort wanted nothing else out of this life but resolution of what was done to Coleman. Well, resolution and continued comfort. She ate well, having groceries delivered, and she ordered off Home Shopping Network all kinds of goodies, beauty products and exercise machines and jewelry, most of which remained in their boxes, stacked in the downstairs spare bedroom.
Her barn was filled with boxes, too, of such items as microwave ovens and VCRs and TVs, from tiny to big, and cigarettes and booze and various other things and stuff that made life worth living, or at least ways tolerable. These were items she bought, but not from Home Shopping. Maw had taken over her late son Coleman’s fencing operation, buying and selling, dealing only in cold hard cash. Jars and shoeboxes of the stuff were squirreled around the place, which was hers now, not that any deed said so.
Daniel had moved her in, maybe a month after Coleman disappeared off the face of God’s good earth. She hadn’t seen him since, though it was only a two-hour drive. He did talk to her on the phone once a month. Big of him.
Always a disappointment to her, Daniel—at 45, the youngest— was kind of a black sheep, or maybe in the Comfort family more a white one. He’d got himself some kind of two-year degree in accounting from a junior college and then a job as a bank teller. He weaseled his way up, over the years, to loan officer in a bank in O’Fallon, a suburb of St. Lou.
And he never once used that position to help Cole or any of the Comforts rob the goddamn fuckin’ place! What kind of boy had she raised anyway? Did the wolves switch her baby for a lamb? He didn’t even use the name Comfort! He was Daniel Clifford, legally.
It was like he was ashamed of his own kin! Of course the Comforts had made the papers in Missouri, over the years time to time, and that might be the why. Benefit of the doubt.
She kept the place tidy, or rather the colored girl who came in once a month did—that gal was about due, because right now the kitchen sink and counter were piled high with dirty dishes and this and that. Till the cleaning gal come in, Maw couldn’t cook anything but TV dinners, like the Hungry Man turkey and fixings she put away at noon.
But Maw liked keeping a nice house. She had to put up with leaving it crummy outside. The two-story was set back off a gravel road that cut through farmland the family hadn’t owned for ages, with a sagging silo and an overgrown yard home to various dead vehicles that were rusting into art pieces.…
It all seemed an unlikely setting for a fencing operation that brought in thousands every week. She had a boy from town (who’d worked with Cole) who came by to supervise the unloading of merchandise into the barn or up on the second floor.
The first floor of the farmhouse was pretty much her whole world. She had struggled with the interior decorating. Other than her own bedroom, she’d never had any input in that regard—and she was okay with that. It had been Coleman’s house to live in as he chose with his boy and girl. If he wanted velvet paintings of John Wayne and Elvis all over the cheaply woodgrain-paneled living room walls, that was his right; she had her kitten posters and her frog collection in her own quarters to suit her.
With Coleman likely passed, she might have taken those Elvises down, skinny and fat alike, and the old and young Duke, too. Only she just couldn’t bring herself. They weren’t to her more refined tastes, true, but they were Coleman. They represented him. They made it feel like he was still here, like the smell of his cigar smoke that was still in the drapes.
Nothing wrong with the furniture in that living room, though. No, Coleman had seen to it that they had only the best, and at Maw’s request kept the couches and recliners and such protected in clear vinyl. She might have preferred just early American, and not this mix of modern and traditional and every other damn style you could think of. But that reflected less what Coleman’s personal preference was and more what had been in the furniture warehouse he looted that time.
One favor she meant to have Daniel do her was deal with all that stereo equipment. It didn’t play her collection of Red Foley, Little Jimmy and Ernest Tubb 45 EPs and 33 1/3 LP albums. She had hundreds of 78’s, too, and nothing to spin them on! That fucking thing in the living room took only those little silver discs. Her last surviving son would do her one favor, anyway—get her a goddamned record player!
Daniel could have the rest of the stereo stuff. She’d considered selling it, but her fencing operation dealt in strictly new, in-the-box merchandise—that was what the clientele Coleman bequeathed to her required.
She had another favor from Daniel in mind, too. Which truth be told was even more important than finding a way to play her Porter Wagoner records. And he was coming, Daniel was, this afternoon. He’d called all soft-spoken but the anxiety showed through. Wanted to talk to her. She could guess what about, and it made her smile, those choppers gleaming at her in her reflection as she sat across from the Budweiser mirror by the big-screen TV, leaning back in her recliner, the only one not covered in plastic, since she didn’t like the way her big fat butt made it squeak.
Goddamn, to be young again.
What was left to an old woman but comfort and resolution? And of course by resolution what she meant was restitution. And what she meant by restitution was revenge. Good old fashioned eye-for-an-eye type revenge, although that wasn’t enough. Not near enough. Two eyes for one, maybe. Three. She’d come up with something.
Besides making money from stolen goods, and ordering things from Home Shopping that she (and, really, nobody) didn’t need, Maw had two hobbies.
One was collecting Precious Moments figurines. The only addition she had made to the living room decor, otherwise a kind of shrine to her late son Coleman, were several mounted multi-tiered shelves of the little pastel children and their pets, many of the kiddies cast as angels and Biblical prophets. She had all the “Original 21” figurines—her favorite was “God Loveth a Cheerful Giver,” a sweet little girl giving away puppies from a wooden cart. For her birthday three years ago, Coleman took her to the Precious Moments theme park, with its chapel, in Carthage, a three-hour drive.
That was the kind of son Coleman had been.
Her other hobby, picked up many years ago the way some gals pick up knitting, was basket weaving. It relaxed her. Soothed her. Mellowed her out. Kept her from hitting the sauce too hard, because you needed a clear head and steady hands.
And her hands were steady, all right. She had bad knees and arthritis in the hip area, but her hands were fine, just fine. She had a table set up in what had been Cindy Lou’s bedroom where she could work with sturdy scissors and her sharp knife, side cutters too, for chipping off ends. Round-nosed pliers to kink the stakes before bending—she liked the angles nice and sharp. She’d paid good money for her bodkin, the wooden-handled pointed tool that made spaces between woven work, and could push a rod into position where a gap had been fashioned.
While mourning Coleman, she’d got carried away some, buying yard after yard of natural reed, weaving up a storm, doing her own staining and dyeing. Cole’s bed was covered with baskets, stacks of them, all sizes and various shapes. She’d done some of those at Sunny Acres. Country Crafts, a gift shop in Jefferson City, handled some of her baskets on consignment, but she had more than they could take on at the moment.
Maw used her walker to convey herself into the bathroom, where she freshened up. Put on lipstick and some powder. She wanted to look good for her son. It was important to her that Daniel knew she was still in the game. Not some old biddy, but a player. Her face was smooth, except around her mouth, where vertical lines left the telltale marks of the longtime smoker. She’d stopped ten years ago—or was it eleven?—when a doctor said he couldn’t find a pulse in her legs.
Nonetheless, she hated the face that looked back at her in that goddamned mirror. She had been beautiful once. Men had paid good money to slide their dicks in that red mouth, and her lower lips, too; but she never let them plow her back garden. She was just not that kind of girl.
Maw and her walker trudged into the kitchen, where she cleared the table, somehow squeezing more things onto the counter, and readied for her son. She set a bowl of Spanish peanuts out. An ashtray too, because he still smoked. Cans of Bud were cooling in the fridge. More fuss than that he did not deserve.
Gravel stirred outside, as a car pulled from the road into the drive. She and the walker waddled back into the living room, and she used the remote on her recliner arm to turn down the big-screen TV on Home Shopping, where Marie Osmond was selling a Marie Osmond doll, and got the front door open. Her youngest son’s car was a Buick Skylark, light tan with a darker brown vinyl top. He parked behind a baby blue Cadillac Coupe DeVille that Coleman had bought her—that was the kind of son Coleman was. Driving was a bitch after the hip replacement, though, so mostly it just sat.
Daniel got out of the Buick and into the sunny June afternoon, cool for this time of year. He wore sunglasses, a small man with a skimpy mustache and thinning dark hair and an oval face whose shape and sharp features reminded her of a long dead aunt she’d never liked.
He lifted a hello hand as if it were heavy and his smile seemed to take effort, too. His polo shirt was V-neck and white, his slacks gray, his tasseled shoes white leather; he was sockless. This was part of his attempt to look young for that new wife of his. His third.
The first had been nice, a plain girl with flat features and a flat chest but a loving little thing until she divorced him over the second girl, who was also plain but not flat-chested. After that one ran around on him, Daniel was single for a while and took to bar-crawling, as Cole described it, and had a year or so ago married the recent one, who was in her twenties and cute and also not flat-chested but a little fucking gold digger. Also Cole’s words.
Coleman had always considered Daniel a disgrace and a goddamned embarrassment to the family. And she couldn’t say he’d been wrong.
Daniel navigated the dead vehicles and made his way up the cement stoop to the open front door and stood there like a trick or treater, just looking at her.
“Maw,” he said.
“Daniel,” she said.
She scooched back some with her walker, motioned him in, and soon they were sitting at the kitchen table with beer and peanuts and exchanging a few pleasantries.
Strange not having Cole here, Maw. It is. You need to get to know Heather, Maw. You’d like her if you knew her better. Bring her by. I finally got over that cold. Good to hear. Can you believe Bill is in high school now? Right age for it.
Bill, her only grandchild by Daniel, was by the first plain wife, who raised the child. Maw didn’t know the boy well. She did know he’d been a smart aleck who could’ve used a firmer hand. Sprout could have used some time with the Good Book, which is what Maw and her late husband had slapped and whipped their brood with when a lesson needed learning.
“Mind if I smoke, Maw?”
“Please. Other people’s is all I get these days.”
He dug the pack from his breast pocket, which had an alligator on it. “I’m glad you gave it up. They say it can kill you.”
“That’s the rumor.”
He lighted up a Kent, got it going, then sat there staring past her, getting his nerve up.
He blinked at her. “What?”
“How much does she want?”
“How much does who want?”
Maw sipped at her can of Bud. “Heather. Enough for her own car? Maybe just a new one. That Buick’s five years old if it’s a day.”
He shook his head. “Nothing to do with Heather. Not… directly.”
She nibbled a couple of peanuts. “What, then?”
“I got myself in trouble.”
“With another woman? Pregnant you mean, or just cheating?”
His blue eyes, the only thing about him like Cole, popped at her. “No! I’m a one-woman man, Maw, you know that.”
One woman at a time, she thought.
She said, “Just spit it out, then.”
“I borrowed some money.”
“Where from? Your bank?”
“Yes.”
She unleashed the grin. “You mean you got your hand in the till, boy?”
He swallowed; it made the excuse for a mustache twitch. Sighed. Nodded.
“I know a shylock,” she said, with a shrug, tossing back some peanuts.
“No time for that. Anyway, I’d only get in deeper.”
“Didn’t know you had it in you. Took you long enough. Make me proud, if you weren’t such a sniveling little girl about it.”
He was staring into the ashtray. “We bought a new house.”
“Don’t remember bein’ invited to the housewarming. Over-spend, did you?”
He nodded. “I paid off the contractor. We can make the monthly payments, no problem. But there were cost overruns, and…anyway. I need ten thousand, fast.”
“You said something about time.”
He nodded, sucked smoke, let it out. “Bank examiner’s coming in two weeks. The scheduling got changed around. I thought I had another three months, and figured I could raise it somehow.…”
Probably the same way as today—by hitting up his softhearted old mother.
“If I’m found out,” he said, with a desperate shrug, “I’ll go to jail. Even if the bank covers it up, to save embarrassment… word will get around. They’ll check up on me. Never find a new home at any bank anywhere.”
“I’m not getting any younger, son.”
He blinked at her again. “What? I know that. What do you…?”
“I’ve been watching the 700 Club a good deal.”
His frown said confusion, not irritation. “Uh, you have? What…Maw, I’m in trouble.”
“You should tune in, then. Send in your prayer request. Pat Robertson himself will talk to the Lord on your behalf. He’s got a pipeline, straight up.”
“Are you okay, Maw? Are you…is your thinking okay?”
“My thinking’s fine. I’m not senile, son, not yet. But I’m coming to terms with my mortality. Thinking about the next stage of life.”
Daniel squinted at her. She could almost see him thinking, The next stage of life for you, Maw, is the cemetery.
“I’ve done some bad things in my day, Daniel. Wicked things. Maybe I should make up for it. Maybe donate to the 700 Club to help them spread the Good Word.”
“Donate? Well, if you want to. If you…you know, don’t overdo.”
Another sip of Bud. “I’m thinking I might leave everything to the 700 Club. Thousands and thousands of dollars, son. The whole damn pile. Not a measly little ten grand.”
His mouth hung open and his eyes seemed almost as wide.
She said, lightly, “There’s another option, though.”
Daniel perked up. “Oh?”
“The Precious Moments people.”
“What about them?”
“I might have enough to donate to them, too. Spread it around some.”
“They’re a business, Maw.”
She nodded—yes, yes, yes. “A business doing good. Established by preachers. You know, they have that chapel in Carthage. Your brother took me there. Maybe I have enough for those good people to build a Mabel Winifred Comfort wing onto that chapel.”
He sat forward. “Maw…I was counting on…you’re my mother. And I’m your only living child.”
“I am. And you are.” A child is right, she thought.
His smile was a pitiful thing. “Can you loan me that money, Maw? Leave the rest to Pat Robertson or Precious Moments or God Himself. But help me keep from having my life and everything I’ve made of myself slip through my damn fingers? Set up a payment plan. Please?”
She reached across and touched his hand; squeezed it gently. The gesture, not a common one to her, surprised him—almost like it carried an electric shock.
“You can have twenty thousand now,” she said, “and all of the rest when I pass.”
For a moment he looked as if she’d struck him hard in the belly. Then he relaxed, face softening into relief. “Maw, I knew you’d come through for me. I knew you would.”
And she had before. This was not the first time he’d come asking for money. She’d always given it to him, because it had been small change—a few hundred for Christmas presents for his wife and kids, a thousand for a family trip. Why not? What was a mother for?
But this time was different. This time he was showing a glimmer of something. This time he’d gotten smart. He had, in his small way, joined the family business.
“Son,” she said, “if you insist on being an Honest John all your life, I can’t stop you. But when I’m gone, all of this can be yours.”
He smiled. “Even the Elvis paintings?”
“Take one with you today, if you like.”
“I was just…”
“I know,” she said, chewing peanuts. “You think they’re tacky. And you’re not wrong. Your brother Coleman was a redneck. But so am I, and so are you, under your suits at the bank and your sporty weekend clothes. I never thought I’d live see a Comfort playing…” She shuddered. “…golf.”
He shrugged. “It’s a business thing, Maw.” He sat forward, his smile different now. “Listen, I can’t tell you how much I—”
“Can it. The twenty G’s is for a favor.”
His eyes narrowed. “What kind of favor, Maw?”
“Nolan.”
“Who’s Nolan?”
She told him. It took a while. She had him get her another Bud from the fridge before she started in.
“This Nolan, for a lot of years, put crews together for institutional jobs,” she said. “Banks, mail trucks, armored cars, jewelry stores, the like. He used your brothers Sam and Cole a few times, but finally things kind of went south. Not bloody, just…they didn’t work together no more. But a friend of Nolan’s got on Sam’s wrong side, and Sam shot him up some. After that, Nolan must’ve felt justified, ripping Sam off. Him and some punk kid lobbed in smoke grenades and made it look like a fire.”
Daniel seemed to be barely following this. “Lobbed in smoke grenades where?”
“At Sam’s place in the boonies up in Michigan. See, we Comforts have taken down too many banks to believe in them. Your brothers and your Maw, too…we always keep our money at home. Sam had the bulk of it in a strongbox, and when he thought his house was on fire, he hauled that box of cash the hell out of there.”
“And this Nolan was waiting?”
“He was, and that kid accomplice. Your nephew Billy got killed in the fracas, and your brother Sam got shot. Nolan and the kid left him there to bleed out. But he fooled ’em, Sam did, tough ol’ bird, and he planned his retribution while he waited for his boy Terry to get out of stir.”
“And then…he and Terry went after Nolan?”
“They did. And got themselves killed for their trouble. Shotgunned to shit and took the blame for a bank job of Nolan’s.”
Daniel was nodding, eyes narrowed. “I guess I knew that rap. Cole told me when I asked him about it once. It was in the papers, remember?”
“I do. And the world thinks your poor dead brother pulled that bank heist.” She crushed an empty Bud can in her hand and tossed it on the table with a clatter. “It wasn’t goddamn fucking fair.”
“Sam getting the blame?”
“No! Sam not getting the money! Are you paying attention, Daniel?”
“I am, Maw. But what is the point?”
She leaned in. “I have information about Nolan. It’s six months old, but it should still be good. About where he lives, and his business…”
“Well, we know his business,” Daniel said, shrugging. “He’s a pro thief.”
“No, son. He’s retired. Well, not retired—gone straight. He owns a restaurant or a nightclub or some goddamn shit, that he plowed his ill-gotten gains into. Anyway, the money ain’t my concern.”
That sent her son’s eyebrows up. “It isn’t?”
“No! We’re making money hand over fist, here. When I pass, you will inherit all of my money and this business, if you can grow the balls to run it.”
He was thinking now. “The fencing operation.”
“That’s right. Then you can keep that little chippie happy with cars and clothes. Sell that house that got you in trouble. Move in here. Take down the Elvis pictures, and John Wayne, too. Tear the place down and build your dream house, if you like. I don’t give two shits.”
“Maw…you’re wonderful.”
“I know it. Now, it’s all yours, if…”
“If?”
“…if you do me that favor. The Nolan favor.”
“What about Nolan?”
“You need to corner him, boy, and make him tell you what happened to your brother. Make him confess. Do whatever it takes.”
“Maw, he sounds…dangerous…”
“He’s that, all right.”
“And that will do it? Find out from him what happened to Cole? That’s the favor?”
“Oh, hell no. Son, you have to kill the bastard.”
“I’m no killer!”
She flipped a dismissive hand at him. “Then you’re no son of mine. And the only decision you leave me to make is between Pat Robertson and Precious Moments.”
“Maw, you can’t ask this of me.”
“I am asking you, boy. I want that man’s head.”
“I…have to kill him. You want him dead.”
“Yes. I want his head.”
“Figure of speech.”
“Figure it any way you like.” She rose. “Wait here.”
Maw didn’t even use her walker. She was energized. She trundled into Coleman’s bedroom and selected just the right one.
On her return, she placed the basket in front of Daniel, who reacted like a startled child, which was what he was, wasn’t he? She lifted the lid gingerly, like a Hindu snake charmer checking the contents.
“Use this,” she said.
He swallowed thickly. He was close to crying, she knew; but to his credit, he didn’t. Maybe he was a Comfort after all.
“And bring it here,” she said.
“Yes, Maw.”