He fired and caught the older man in the thigh. It knocked both of them down, the older man knocking into the younger, and upsetting the box of money. The older man said something unintelligible, and his gun snicked and Planner felt the third bullet enter his stomach, and he thought, Christ no! Not my stomach, I’ve got two there already. Jesus.

A bell was ringing. Distant. The phone! Nolan! Nolan, thank God!

Relieved, he died.

Two

1

The day he turned fifty, Nolan didn’t feel old anymore.

For the several years approaching this day — the day marking the start of his fiftieth year, the day he’d come to regard as the starting gun for senility — for these two long years he had become increasingly paranoid about old age. About becoming an old man: a codger; a coot. The time would’ve come for trading in his.38 Smith and Wesson for a cane and a spot on the bench in front of a court house in some small town somewhere.

Or in a rest home. In his nightmares he saw himself, a vegetable, a shell of a man, emaciated, sprawled on a bed in a ward full of other wrinkled husks of once men, tubes running into and out of his arms and nose and crotch, bottles of amber fluid hanging beside his bed, dangling like shrunken heads. The root of his dream came, no doubt, from the two occasions in the past two years when he’d been bedridden, the first time for three months, the second for six. Both times he’d been down with bullet wounds, the second time being the more serious, as he had been just barely healed up from the prior wound when these slugs entered his left side, the same approximate area of his body as before. It was during that second, more precarious ordeal that the rest home dream had begun, first as one of countless other feverish, delirious dreams, then as a recurring nightmare.

But that doctor had pulled him through, somehow, despite his great loss of blood. The doctor himself had said it was impossible to save him, but Nolan’s whispered, almost deathbed offer of, “Five grand extra if I live,” proved the trick. Money was indeed the world’s most potent miracle drug.

And now today, his birthday, fifty candles on his cake, today he felt fine, just fine. Emaciated? A shell of a man? He sat up in bed, patted his pot belly and laughed like Buddha getting his feet tickled. He felt young. He felt good.

He also felt tired, even though he’d just woken up.

But not very. He felt more good than he did tired, and why shouldn’t he feel tired? He had a right to be tired, damn it. He ought to be hung over as hell, after all that drinking last night, and he wasn’t. And he ought to be feeling physically drained, after the extended bedroom athletics with Sherry, but he didn’t. The way he acted last night you’d have thought he was a soldier on his last night before shipping overseas. Well, the morrow was here and the war had been declared over and he had his discharge papers and he felt fine.

He patted the ass of the sleeping girl next to him. She was a pretty thing, a sweet thing, a pleasant and very young plaything, who had made his summer pretty, sweet, and pleasant. And young. He knew now, in a sudden flash of self-awareness, his reason for choosing a girl, how old? Twenty? Nineteen? Better be eighteen at least. That would be the crowning touch, wouldn’t it? Of all the things Nolan had done in a long, enjoyable lifetime of crime, to get busted for statutory rape! He’d get laughed out of the business.

Right now, though, he was doing the laughing. At himself. For picking out a girl who was, yes, young enough to be his daughter. For all he knew she was his daughter; he’d never been one for keeping track of those things. He stroked her ass again and she groaned in her sleep and turned over, stretching out, her long, lithe, naked body pearled with sweat. Her legs were parted. The fountain of youth, Nolan thought, and laughed again.

He sat back in bed and listened to the girl snore. She snored like a man and he’d at first found it amusing and later it started to bug him; his present mood had him finding her snoring amusing again. She was a slender girl, with frosted hair that arced gently round a face that was all big blue eyes and pouty mouth and a semi-false look of innocence.

He thought back, with some affection, to the first time he’d seen Sherry. She was spilling coffee into a customer’s lap. The customer called her a stupid bitch and Nolan asked the man to please keep his voice down and watch where he was throwing his abusive language, and the customer had said he didn’t care, she was still a stupid bitch, and Nolan told him to get the hell out, which he did, and then Nolan took the shaken girl into his private office and sat her down and called her a stupid bitch and fired her.