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double-story homes with modest, well-tended lawns and lots of trees—a beautiful, shade-bathed street in summer, equally beautiful in winter, with the bare branches of the trees catching handfuls of snow and holding them, occasional white strokes of an artist’s brush in a scene predominantly gray. But right now only the gray seemed apparent to Jon: skeletal, dead branches on skeletal, dead trees, the houses themselves dark and cheerless. Energy conservation was leading to less brightly lit Christmas seasons than those of the recent past: the bright colored lights were at the moment unlit, the nativity scenes on lawns and Santas climbing in chimneys were minus spotlights, and only for a few hours each evening would the seasonal glow be switched on at all. The world still looked like a Christmas card to Jon, but a gloomy one, sent by an atheist.
    Nolan pulled the Buick into one of the spaces alongside the antique shop, and they got out. The shop was a two-story clapboard building that looked more a part of the residential area it bordered than the business district it began, with a Shell station next door and various chain restaurants (like the Dairy Queen across from the Shell) nearby. Jon had kept the shop closed since his uncle’s death, and had no intention of continuing in the antique business. There was a guy—a friend of Planner’s—set to come next month and make a bid on all the antiques and junk in the place, and after that Jon was considering turning it into a candle shop, to be run by Karen Hastings, his on-again-off-again girl friend (off-again at the moment, though he felt he could patch things up, if he decided he wanted to) and running a mail-order business himself in old comic books and related items. Actually, things were beginning to settle into place in Jon’s life: he had invested his money in the Pier with Nolan, and it was a good investment that should keep both of them solvent for untold years to come; and he had inherited the antique shop and its contents, which would provide more cash and a place to live and do business out of; and he had Karen, if he got around to patching up their relationship; and his artwork was getting better all the time and getting close to where he really thought he might actually be able to make a living drawing comic books. And a fresh, new year was coming up in a matter of days.
    And now this.
    Another robbery.
    He and Nolan went in. Nolan went upstairs, Jon to the room in back on the first floor, where he slept and kept his studio. It had been a storeroom when his uncle Planner turned it over to him, a dusty, dirty oversize closet that Jon had converted into a shrine to comic art, plastering the gray wood walls with colorful homemade posters of Dick Tracy, Batman, Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and half a dozen other comic heroes, drawn by Jon unerringly in the style of their original artists. A few splashes of bright color in the form of throw rugs transformed the cement floor into something livable; a few pieces of furniture—the genuinely antique bed and chest of drawers given him by Planner—turned storeroom into bedroom. A drawing easel and a file cabinet containing his rarest comic artifacts, and boxes of comic books lining the walls made the room a cartoonist’s studio. He had consciously decorated and organized the room so that it would be a cheerful, constant visual reminder of who he was.
    There was also a poster of perennial movie bad guy and sometime spaghetti western hero Lee Van Cleef, wearing his black mustache and dark gunfighter’s outfit, fondling the six-gun on his hip, looking a hell of a lot like Nolan. The six-gun, and the .357 Magnum Dick Tracy was brandishing, and Flash Gordon’s ray gun—these and other implements of the fantasy violence he’d so enjoyed for so many years—irritated and disturbed him tonight, and he thought, What a bunch of bullshit , and left the room.
    He went upstairs. The lights were off, but he knew his way around. Nolan