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was already sacked out. Snoring. Jon stretched out on the couch. He just didn’t want those fucking fantasy faces staring at him, even in the dark; he couldn’t sleep in that room tonight. He didn’t know why exactly, he just couldn’t.
    But he didn’t have trouble getting to sleep. It should have been a sleepless night, the way his state of mind was, but he was just too goddamn tired to be an insomniac, after his afternoon of running through the woods with a sketch pad up his butt, and an evening that included riding/hiding on the floor in the back seat of Nolan’s car and sneaking in back of that cottage and wrestling a shotgun away from that damn amazon, and shit . . . too tired to do anything now but sleep . . .
    And dream.
    He dreamed he was on a heist. Not the Port City bank heist, past or future. Nolan wasn’t in the dream, either. And it wasn’t a bank at all. It was a museum. He was trying to steal a diamond. It was like some movie he’d seen once. He was in a museum, trying to steal a diamond, and he had people helping him, people he’d gone to junior high and high school with, people he hadn’t seen in years. One was a kid with greasy black hair and a bad complexion, who’d shared a joint with Jon in the john at a high school dance and Jon had gotten nauseous and afraid of being caught. And now here this kid was, years later, helping him steal a diamond from a museum. And there was a girl, that sluttish girl Jon had taken behind the bleachers at a football game in junior high and gotten his hands in her pants, and a week later, when some skin started peeling off his fingers, he’d wondered if he could have caught some awful disease off her or something, she was here too, with the greasy-haired kid, and they were stealing this diamond. And then cops. Cops came rushing in. The museum was dark at first, just a big pool of black with a circle of light on the display case where the diamond was. But now cops were rushing in, and it was a huge white room, full of light. There weren’t any walls in sight, just blinding white light and cops in blue with guns, rushing at them. He knew some of the cops: one of them was the art professor he’d argued with at the U of I before dropping out—the professor who had told him comics were junk and to whom Jon had said, Who are you to say, with your crappy fucking abstract pretentious art. And another cop was a guy his mother had lived with for a while, an ex-army sergeant who’d hated Jon and got drunk one night and tried to beat Jon up and Jon had cleaned his clock—he was there, a cop, shooting. And old Sam Comfort, the man Jon had killed. He was a cop too. Shooting. And the sluttish girl and the greasy-haired kid, they turned into other people all of a sudden, they turned into Shelly and Grossman, the two friends of Jon’s who’d been in on the Port City heist, who had died in the bloodbath aftermath of that heist, and who were dying again, as the cops, the prof and the ex-army sergeant and Sam Comfort were shooting .357 Magnums at them while Jon tried to run but his legs were rubber and there were no exits anywhere, just smooth white walls, and Shelly and Grossman were dying again, spurting blood in slow motion like the movies, Grossman screaming Jon’s name, Shelly flopping onto the display case with her blonde hair streaked with blood . . .
    “Kid.”
    “Uh, what, uh ... ?”
    “Hey. It’s okay.”
    “Nolan?”
    “You were dreaming.”
    “Dreaming?”
    “Yeah, dreaming, and making a hell of racket at it. Like to wake the dead.”
    He sat up. It was daylight. His mouth tasted foul.
    “What the hell time is it, anyway?”
    “About ten o’clock.”
    “That’s impossible, I just fell asleep here a . . .”
    “Yeah, you just fell asleep. Nine hours ago.”
    “Shit,” he said, rubbing his eyes, “I don’t feel like I slept at all. I’m tired as hell.”
    “You wore yourself out dreaming and making noise.”
    “Goddamn nightmare.”
    “I