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  Fortunately, he had Darlene Looper on hand to remind him what a proper object of lust was supposed to look and sound like. A talented if unagented actress, Darlene was a corn-fed beauty who, like for instance Lana Turner long before her, could show glints of a darker side. It was that darker side Doug was determined to tap into.

  She was off The Stand now, no salvaging that situation. But how about Burglars Burgling (tryout)? Given the right makeup and wardrobe, Doug could just see her as a continuation of the long line of blonde sexpot gun molls extending back to before movies discovered sound. Give her a short slit skirt, fishnet pantyhose, and a nice small silver designer pistol slipped under the black frilly garter on her thigh, and there wasn’t a felony on the books a man wouldn’t be happy to commit with her. Doug saw her as the candy on the arm of Andy; surely he wasn’t gay. So back to New York Darlene would come, traveling in Doug’s Yukon with himself and Marcy. Marcy in the backseat, of course.

  None of which dealt with the real problem that had forced him to drive one hundred miles north from the city last Friday. Now that this year’s story line for The Stand had been fatally wounded by young Kirby Finch, what could replace it? What was their throughline story for the year, culminating in spring’s sweeps week?

  Many useless solutions were proposed, starting with the all-night brainbender session at Get Real on Thursday. For instance, Josh: “Kirby decides to become a priest. The family’s ambivalent, and just when they’re coming around, just when they’re learning acceptance, he decides he’d rather stay with the family, at least until the farmstand succeeds.” Doug: “No.”

  Or Edna: “Kirby’s big brother, Lowell, the intellectual, carrying too heavy a load of books out of the library, trips and falls and is paralyzed. There’s one slim chance an operation will give him back the use of his arms and legs, and at the end of the season, where we were going to do the wedding, he walks!” Doug: “No.”

  Or Marcy, Friday morning, on the trip up: “We go with the reality. Kirby comes out of the closet.” Doug: “He isn’t in the closet, that’s the problem.” Marcy: “He comes out to his family. They don’t know what to do, what to think, and they finally decide blood is thicker than prejudice, and they’ll stand by him. Everybody learns a wonderful lesson in tolerance.” Doug; “No.” Marcy: “Doug, it could be very real.” Doug: “But it couldn’t be reality, Marcy, reality shows do not solve society’s problems. They don’t even consider society’s problems. Reality is escapist entertainment at its most pure and mindless.”

  All weekend the suggestions kept coming in. Harry Finch, father of the fairy: “What I say is, we bring that Darlene back. Turns out, she’s my daughter. Wrong side of the blanket, you know. Family’s all upset, thinks she’s trying to horn in on the success of The Stand, they finally come around, see she’s just a poor lost girl, needs a family, at the end we all hug and kiss and have a big celebration.” Doug: “Let me think about that, Harry,” which is how you say no to a civilian.

  Finally, Monday morning, when Doug went along the walk from his motel room to Darlene’s room to see if she was packed and ready for the trip, he found her appropriately dressed but seated on the bed among her unpacked goods, frowning into space.

  “Darlene? What’s up?”

  She looked startled out of her reverie. “I was just thinking,” she said.

  “We gotta get going, Darlene.”

  “Oh, I know that. But I was thinking about the problem here, and I was wondering if something that happened to a friend of mine might be any use.”

  Another “solution” to the problem, eh? Well, might as well listen. “Sure,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  “Her folks eloped,” Darlene said. “You know, years ago, just before they had her. I think it was gonna be pretty close, which came first.”

  “That happens sometimes,” Doug agreed.

  “Only if you’re not paying attention,” she said, and shrugged. “Years and years later,” she told him, “they found out, that preacher wasn’t any preacher at all. He was a fake.”

  Interested despite himself, Doug said, “The one who married them?”

  “Except they wasn’t married,” Darlene said. “You know, they had six kids by then, most of them half grown up, they didn’t know what to do.”

  “A tricky situation,” Doug agreed.

  “At first,” she said, “they was just gonna go to some city hall somewhere, get married on the sly, not tell anybody about anything. But then they thought it over, they decided, the first time they had to run away and elope, didn’t have any proper family wedding, so now they could. Get the whole family in on it, great big church wedding, big party, the girls were the bridesmaids, the youngest boy was the ringbearer, it was the best time anybody ever had anywhere.”

  “Darlene!” Doug cried. “You’re a genius!” And he flung himself on her on the bed in a massive embrace that was almost entirely pure.

  Which is where Marcy found them a minute later, when she opened the room door. “Oh!” she said, embarrassed, backpedaling. “I thought we had to, ah, start going, uh, away.”

  Doug sat up and gave her the most dazzling smile of her life. “Marcy,” he said, “Darlene has just saved The Stand!”

  “She has?”

  “Get the family together, before we leave we can give them the good news, let them start working out some of the details.”

  Confused but agreeable, Marcy said, “Okay, Doug. Should I close this door?”

  “No, no, Marcy, we’ll be right along.”

  Marcy took her departure, and Doug turned his dazzling smile on Darlene. “And Kirby,” he said, “can be the bridesmaid.”

  15

  WHEN STAN MURCH TRAVELED interborough while not in his professional role of getaway specialist, he preferred public transport. It was always possible to pick up private wheels when and where needed. Therefore, when he left the Murch manse early Monday afternoon, where he walked was to the final stop of the L subway line, being Canarsie/Rockaway Parkway, a line which, at its other extreme, a world and more than an hour away, culminated at Eighth Avenue and Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. (He was a commuter! Think of that! He’d never known that before.)

  While walking down Rockaway Parkway, which it was impossible not to think of as Rockaway Parkaway, Stan cell-called John at home, expecting it to take three or four rings to get an answer, since John had only the one phone in his house, which he kept in the kitchen even though he was never in the kitchen except when eating, when, of course, his mouth would be full.

  Four rings. “Yar?”

  “Stan here. You gonna be around in an hour?”

  “Even two hours.”

  “I’m on my way. I’m commuting, John.”

  “Uh-huh,” John said, and when he opened his apartment door to let Stan in an hour and ten minutes later he said, “You’re pretty good at that commuting.”

  “Practice makes perfect.”

  As they walked toward the living room, John said, “You want a beer?”

  “A little early in the day,” Stan said. “I’m trying to cut down on sodium.”

  In the living room, John settled into his chair and Stan onto the sofa, where he said, “I been thinking. That’s why I’m here.”

  John nodded. “I figured it was something like that.”

  “What I been thinking about,” Stan said, “is this reality caper thing.”

  “I guess we’re all thinking about that,” John allowed.

  “So here’s what I come up with,” Stan said. “This is more complicated than it looks, because we’re tryin to come up with two heists at the same time.”

  John thought about that, then nodded and said, “Yeah, that’s right. The one they see and the one they don’t see.”

  “While they,” Stan said, demonstrating with arm movements, “think we’re doing something to put in front of their camera, we’re actually doing something we don’t want them to know about, because it’s stuff we’re not supposed to know abou
t.”

  “The cash in Combined Tool,” John said. “If there is cash in Combined Tool.”

  “There’s something in there,” Stan said. “Something with a value on it. That high-tech door tells you that much.”

  “I think,” John said, “what we gotta do is their heist first, collect our pay, and then pick up the tools.”

  “Well, that’s what I was thinking about,” Stan said. “Once we do their heist, we got no more access to that building.”

  “Well,” John said, “we’ve always got access.”

  “Yeah, but not so easy,” Stan insisted. “If there’s an excuse for us to be around that building anyway, it gives us more elbow room, like.”

  John shook his head. “We can’t do Combined Tool first,” he said. “They’ve got to know it’s us that did it. They’ll call off the other thing and they’ll call the cops.”

  “So what we do,” Stan said, “we do them both at the same time.”

  John frowned at that. “What, a couple of us one place, a couple another place?”

  “No, that’s not the idea.” Stan spread his hands. “I know you think it’s a mistake for drivers to come up with ideas.”

  “Not exactly a mistake,” John said, being diplomatic. “Just unnecessary.”

  “Well, I did my thinking anyway,” Stan said, “and I’m gonna tell you what I come up with.”

  “I’m listening,” John said, but couldn’t entirely hide a hint of skepticism in face and voice.

  “We haven’t given Doug our target yet,” Stan pointed out, “because we didn’t pick it yet.”

  “Right.”

  “And Andy, sometime back, suggested to Doug we make the target one of the outfits in that corporate spaghetti they got over there. People thought maybe that was a good idea.”

  “Maybe,” John said. “I don’t seem to remember Doug being really excited about it. So what do you want to do?”

  “The storage place,” Stan said. “One floor up from the tool place. People put things in storage if they got no use for them right now but they’re too valuable to throw away.”

  John said, “Wait a minute. What? You want to knock over Knickerbocker Storage? In the same building?”

  “At the same time,” Stan said. “We’re right there already, we can get alarms shut down, we can get the electricity off if it comes to that. We can probably go right down through the floor from one of the storage units.”

  “That you’re not gonna do,” John told him. “That isn’t just some little thin wood floor like a house in the suburbs. That’s a building you can drive trucks around in, every floor. Those floors are gonna be concrete, thick slabs of concrete.”

  “All right, some other way,” Stan said. “Maybe there’s a fire escape in the back.”

  “I don’t think so,” John said. “There’s that inside metal staircase, with the trapdoor to the roof. That’s the second exit, all you need for the fire code.”

  “Then some other way,” Stan said, shrugging that off. “The point is, we’re there.”

  “Yeah, we would be,” John said. “You’re right about that. The question is, would Doug go along with this?”

  “We ask,” Stan said. “If you think it’s a good idea, we ask.”

  “I think,” John said, “it could possibly be a good idea.”

  Heady praise indeed. Grinning in relief, Stan said, “I’ll take that beer now. And what the hell, I’m not driving. Hold the salt.”

  16

  WHAT WITH THE MASSIVE last-minute changes in the story line of The Stand, Doug didn’t get home on Monday evening till well after seven. There were so many subsidiary decisions to be made, or remade, so much new research to be done. For instance, they had to be certain the actual officiator at the Grace-and-Harry wedding twenty-some years ago wouldn’t come out of the woodwork to sue everybody in sight for calling him a con man. So much to do, so little time.

  Fortunately, to make up for all this sudden scrambling, Doug was bringing Darlene Looper home for an evening of confabs. A little later, they’d go out for dinner in the neighborhood, during which he would describe to her the concept of Heist! (provisional), but for now, there was time to relax and get to know one another a little better. “It’s a humble hovel,” he announced grandly, unlocking the door, “but it’s my own,” and he pushed it open to everything wrong.

  In the first place, he would never leave the lights on in the empty apartment all day long, and in the second place, this was not an empty apartment. There were several people in the room, the most prominent being someone who could retire the phrase “most prominent” if he wanted to. A giant in black trousers and a vast black turtleneck sweater who suggested somehow a black hole that had come to Doug’s living room from deepest space, he was turning in his huge mitts the life-size brass banana with Doug’s name etched into it that had been given him by his employers in celebration of the completed first season of The Stand. That the banana was not a crop that could be grown on the Finch’s upstate New York farm had been completely irrelevant; the operative consideration, Doug believed, as with most things, had been phallic.

  Now, in the corners of the room not occupied by the giant, Doug saw faces he recognized, that at least suggested some explanation for this invasion: Stan, Andy, and John, all pawing through Doug’s artifacts. Plus, in another corner, a young guy with the eager look of a born pickpocket.

  “The householder,” said the giant, in deep organ tones, and Andy looked around, dropping several of Doug’s books onto the coffee table as he said, happily, “There you are! We thought you’d never get home.” Then, noticing the dumbfounded Darlene peeking over Doug’s shoulder, his happy smile switched to a look of concern, and he said, “Doug? Is this a bad time?”

  In the reality business, Doug had learned to recover fast when hit with surprises; adapt, play the scene you’ve got, fix it later in the editing room. “As a matter of fact, Andy, this is a very good time. I was going to tell Darlene all about you guys at dinner, so now we can all get on the same page at the same time.”

  Stan, never far from paranoia, said, “Tell her all about us? Which all is that, Doug?”

  “Come in, Darlene,” Doug said, and when she sidled past him into the room he shut the apartment door and said, “Darlene, these guys are going to be in another reality show we’re just putting together, that I want you for. That’s Andy, that’s Stan, and that’s John, and I don’t know these other two.”

  Andy, a natural master of ceremonies, said, “The kid is Judson, and the guy with the banana is Tiny.”

  Doug said, “Tiny?”

  “It’s a nickname,” the big man growled, and put the banana down.

  Darlene, who also adapted fast, grinned a little loosely at Tiny and said, “It doesn’t do you justice. I’m sure it doesn’t.”

  Andy said, “Doug? You want her for the show? Walk me through this.”

  “Let’s all sit down,” Doug said. “As long as we’re all here.”

  There were chairs and sofas to accommodate them all, but not much over. Once they were all seated, Darlene said, “Doug? What kind of reality show are they going to be in? Not a farmstand.”

  “How do I phrase this?” Doug wondered, “The fact is, these guys are, uh…”

  “Crooks,” John said.

  “Criminals,” Tiny grumbled.

  “Thieves,” Stan said.

  “Professional thieves,” Andy expanded, and grinned. “Licensed and bonded.”

  Darlene said to Doug, “You’re going to do a reality show about professional thieves? Doing what?”

  “Thieving,” Doug said,

  “Professionally thieving,” John explained.

  “I don’t understand,” Darlene admitted. “These people even say they’re thieves, and you give them the keys to your apartment?”

  “I didn’t give them the keys to my apartment,” Doug told her. “Apparently, they don’t need the keys to my apartment.”

  Stan said. “How i
s this—Darlene, is it?”

  “Yes,” she replied simply.

  “Darlene,” he repeated, and said to Doug, “what’s she gonna do on the show?”

  “You can’t have an all-male national television series,” Doug explained. “Not even professional wrestling. Darlene was going to have a part on The Stand this year, but it didn’t work out, so it occurred to me she could be a very good addition to our show.”

  “As?” Stan asked.

  “As,” Doug told him, “a gun moll.”

  Everybody else looked blank, while Darlene looked appalled. “A gun moll!”

  “Sure.” Doug spread his hands, “What’s a gang without a gun moll?”

  “I don’t have a gun,” Darlene said.

  “That comes with your costume.”

  “And I don’t want a gun.”

  “No bullets,” Doug assured her, “Just the gun, as a prop. On your thigh, I thought.”

  The kid, Judson, said, “Darlene, how old are you?”

  She looked at him with curiosity. “Twenty-three.”

  To Doug, the kid said, “A moll is going to have to be hooked up with one of the guys in the gang.” Smiling at Darlene, he said, “I’m almost twenty, and I’ve always liked older women.”

  This development came as a very unpleasant surprise to Doug, who realized at once that he hadn’t thought the ramifications through. Darlene was going to slip through his fingers even before he ever got his fingers onto her.

  And had already slipped, from the grin she was now bestowing on the kid. “Your name is Judson?”

  “Right,” he said, grinning back.

  “What do they call you?”

  “The kid,” everybody said,

  She laughed. “Well, kid,” she said, “it’s nice to meet you.”

  “You, too.”

  Nose now firmly out of joint, Doug said, “What I don’t get is, what’s everybody doing here? How come everybody’s in my apartment?”