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ruling, and newspaper comics being shrunk down to the size of postage stamps, he’d do better going into blacksmithing.
    But what the hell—he loved the comics. He would stay with it.
    He put the assembled tree on top of the television set. It looked naked. Pretty girls , Jon thought, still full of Christmas spirit, look good naked; plastic trees do not. He had neglected to buy any decorations or tinsel, but guessed he would get around to that tomorrow. Maybe some gifts under the tree would improve things.
    “Yeah, gifts,” he said out loud, tinning on the television. (Some cop show was on—he couldn’t tell which, as they all looked pretty much the same to him, especially the ones with helicopters flying around constantly.) He flopped onto the couch by the wall and watched without watching.
    The artificial tree, barren of gifts, made him think how absurd it was of him to decorate the living quarters of a man like Nolan with the sentimental ornamentation of the season. It was equally absurd to think of buying gifts to put under the tree. What did you buy a tough guy for Christmas, anyway? Maybe wrap up a box of .38 slugs in a bright red bow and put it in his stocking mask?
    Yes, it was a real problem, buying a bank robber a gift.
    And then Jon remembered.
    Hey , he thought. Those days are over.
    It hit him, perhaps for the first time, and he had the strangest damn feeling: a mingling of glad and sad, loss and gain.
    Nolan was retired.
    Nolan wasn’t a thief anymore. Nolan had put his long-barrel .38 Colt and shoulder holster away in moth balls, hadn’t he? To help an old buddy run a restaurant. Retired.
    Which meant Jon, too, was retired. From that particular precarious life-style, anyway. Heists and guns and bullets and blood were back in the paperbacks where they belonged, back in the movies and comic books, back on the tube, like that mindless cop show he wasn’t paying attention to, and Jon was relieved. The game was over, and he was relieved.
    And vaguely sorry.
    But mostly relieved, shit , when he thought back on it, on two years of breaking the law and having people shooting at you and, Christ, sometimes shooting back. He shuddered, wondering how he’d ever let himself get mixed up with somebody like Nolan in the first place.
    He liked Nolan. He admired him. But he did not worship the man, even if at one time he’d come close to doing so; in the very beginning, he’d seen Nolan as a living personification of the strong, silent heroes of popular mythology—the supermen of the comics, the gunfighters and private eyes of the movies. Nolan was like somebody who’d walked right out of Jon’s fantasy world, and it had been exciting.
    Now, however, Jon knew there was a fuck of a lot of difference between fantasy and fact; now he knew the reality of seeing people he cared about—Planner, for instance, and Shelly, a girl Jon’d made love to—die, brutally, cruelly, with hands cupping their own blood, as if they were trying to catch and hold onto the life that was gushing out of them and dripping through their fingers. Jon had known the terror of having the police after you, and he had known what it was like having people far worse than police after you, trying to kill you. And you trying to kill them back.
    It wasn’t that he’d grown moral all of a sudden. He still felt being a thief wasn’t any worse than being a politician or a business executive, although he felt thieves were generally more honest. And insurance companies were dens of damn thieves, dealing with customers, trying to screw them like thieves, and who were at least partially dependent on the self-admitted thieves like Nolan to keep in business. No, all of the old rationalizations held up for him. In a corrupt society , his uncle Planner had once told him, a thief at least has a chance to be an individual, to be honorably corrupt . The idea of being a thief didn’t bother Jon.
    The idea of killing did. Jon valued human life. He had respect