It had all gone away. No bank robbery, no Tommy gun, no goddamned South Bend, just this sonovabitch riding him, holding on hard for life, as if Les were some kind of bucking animal, and at last Les felt his grip loosen, so again he smashed backwards and this time, groaning in pain, the hero slipped off.
Les spun to confront him, discovering a teenager under a mop of disheveled hair, stepped back as the boy raised his hands in fear, as if to ward off what fate had in store for him, so Les drove gun butt into face, feeling a wet, satisfying thud on impact, driving the kid back into plate glass, which surrendered, and the boy went down in a waterfall of sparkles and lay, covered by diamonds and shards and splinters, in a jewelry-store window frame.
“Asshole,” cried Les at the boy, then killed him, raking the fallen boy with a splatter of .45s that brutalized yet more vapor and debris into the air. He turned back, and still aflame with rage at the world for denying him the dignity and grace he required of it, unleashed another long burst in the general direction of everywhere, and with his superb marksmanship, hit that target squarely.
His moment of kingly conquest, however, vanished when, too damned close, a car window atomized as someone had rushed a twelve-gauge blast at him, missing and blowing out the window instead, and he turned to answer, seeing no shooter, so he just finished the drum into the city. It took a few seconds to unsnap it, pull it out, then toss it, grab the second one, which had been wedged through all this in his pants at the small of his back and had not come loose, and rolled away and slid the heavy thing into place—you had to thread the metal lip into slots milled into the receiver on each side for tight locking. Then he rammed back the bolt atop the beauty and, presto, he was back in the fight.
—
“OOPS, FOLKS, AIN’T DONE WITH YOU YET!” yelled Johnny, gesturing with his .45 at the bank officers in the office. “Get your asses out here and earn your cut.”
The three men exchanged worried glances, but Johnny’s big Colt was the more convincing argument, and so they obeyed, even as outside someone was refighting the Somme.
“Make a little circle around us, fellows,” said Johnny. “And relax, your friends ain’t gonna shoot you. Who’d foreclose on ’em then?”
The three took positions around Johnny and Charlie, and together the five began an awkward shuffle-dance to the door and out, where the police—many had arrived to take up positions behind abandoned cars—instantly opened fire.
—
HOMER HUNTED FOR TARGETS, taking a shot at a cop with a shotgun who’d just blown a hole in a car window next to Les, aiming low, not to kill but to send the fellow running. It seemed like there were cops everywhere—who knew they had so many in this shithole?—and he went after them, but always put the bullet near, but not into, the cop, forcing him to spin and duck away. But if he was missing them, they were missing him, and the lead filling the air like ice pellets was generally useless.
He looked over at Jack on the other side of the entrance, saw him to be frozen, and yelled, “Goddammit, open up! Drive ’em back, don’t just stand there!”
Jack nodded, swallowed behind his cigar, and came out with a revolver of some sort, which he proceeded to fire to no purpose other than noise and maybe a fractured window here and there.
At that moment the bank doors blew open and a mob emerged, revealing itself to be Johnny and Charlie and three hostages. If the cops paused, it was for less than a second, because immediately they opened up, and some jackrabbit in blue had worked over to the left with a pump gun and he blasted at the group twice, though low, and the hostages went down as Charlie whirled in pain, then regained his composure and sent a fleet of hardball slugs off to punish the shooter.
“Let’s get out of here!” screamed Johnny. “I got the swag.”
“Yeah, yeah, let’s go,” yelled Homer in reply, grabbing Charlie to point him, though his leg trailed blood from the charge of twelve, toward the car.
Homer, jokester and vaudeville fool, was magnificent. After launching Charlie, he stood upright, clicked in another magazine of .351s, and went into the statue mode, calm, strong, without tremor or doubt, providing aimed fire near, but not into, the cops, while the three others staggered to the car, like the drummer, the fifer, and the flag bearer of Yankee Doodle Dandy legend. They got in, and Homer screamed at Les, just coming up from a reload, to join them.
Les nodded, rose, and ran, covering himself with one-handed shooting, yielding much noise but little consequence, while Homer, again heroic beyond reproach, stood, firing calmly, driving the cops back with well-aimed marksman’s rounds that instructed the recipient to keep his head down if he cared to survive.
When at last Les had made it, Homer raced his own self to the car, careful to weave around the front and thereby not expose himself to Charlie’s fusillade as it poured from the rear window, another careful example of shooting at everything and hitting nothing, except putting a bullet mustache on the face of a movie poster on the air-conditioned picture-show palace across the street. Charlie, in his rush, may have thought Gable was a cop.
Homer threw in his now empty .351, slid into driver’s seat, and then it felt like he caught a Dempsey haymaker in the side of the head, saw a flash in which he and his brothers threw apples at Billy Dawes and his brothers in a war they had fought in 1912, and then went to sleep.
—
NO DIGNITY! None! He ran like a comedy hobo, with his pants on fire and a mob after him with a rope, as clouds of spray and grit flailed him. All the cops in the world were shooting at him!
Les turned slightly, raising the Thompson with one arm, and squeezed, sending a crowd of missiles a half inch wide into space. It was as much for his own morale as it was to drive the cops back, though indeed it did seem to quiet the less aggressive police shooters.
“Come on, goddammit!” yelled Homer, who stood like a monument, dishing out his rifle rounds, stopping to reload in a dazzling blur, while simultaneously the small knot of robbers reached the idling Hudson and—no dignity here, either—piled in.
—
SOMEHOW, Les made it to a safe zone behind the fender only to feel Homer’s strong farm-boy hand on his arm, pulling him toward the rear door, still open for him.
“Cock-a-doodle, don’t get tagged,” yelled Homer, really shoving him face-first into the melee that was already two men deep, with Charlie trying to squirt up to get gun to window to fire, and poor Jack, scared witless, trying to untangle himself from Charlie. When he landed, Les felt a blow to his nose, which was issued by Jack’s plunging knee, bellowed, “OW!” and slid to the floor like a child, as Jack sort of segued over him with, of all things, a bag in his hands. Then the roar of Charlie’s Thompson, as he finally got it into play and began hosing down Michigan Street.
—
LES GOT HIMSELF UP but couldn’t get close enough to the window to get his hose-gun muzzle out and he didn’t want to fire inside, as the recoil could bounce it around the car cab.
The driver’s-side door opened, Homer tossed in his rifle, slid in, and put foot to pedal, one hand to wheel and the other hand to brake—then suddenly snapped, elongating to full length, as he was hit in the head. Les could almost feel the vibration as the bullet blew into Homer’s thick, slicked-down hair and threw blood spots across the upholstered ceiling of the car.
—
PURVIS CAME RUSHING OUT of his office, climbed on a desk, and began to bellow.
“All right, the bastards have shot the hell out of South Bend, nobody knows how many dead. We have good preliminary IDs on Dillinger and Pretty Boy, and you can bet the other whiz kids are there too. Mr. Cowley is on the phone with Washington, we’re trying to get a Tri-Motor ginned up at Metropolitan. Mr. Cowley will stay here and coordinate with Washington, the Director, and the various agencies involved, and there are a lot of them. Clegg, you and your people stay here with him and give Mr. Cowley your total supp
ort. If I hear— Well, let’s just put it this way: any order from Mr. Cowley is to be viewed as an order from me. If we have to move fast and I’m not available, he may call directly on field agents, and you jump too if that happens. Any questions?”
“Do we have time to pack?”
“Nope. You can wash out your drawers in the sink, and we’ll go in together on razor blades and shave cream and toothpaste. Sam will rent us some rooms in the town. He’ll have that by the time we land, but we won’t be sleeping, except on the plane, until tomorrow night. I want to get there while the scene is hot. We’ll see if you science geniuses can come up with an actual clue or something.”
“Mel, what about logistics?”
“I will have Mrs. Donovan along, not right away but tomorrow by train, to handle typing up reports and keeping us up with anything from the Director that doesn’t come to Sam or me directly. Anything more?”
That seemed to be it. The guys were young, bunked together in apartments, five to the joint, or just married and had prepped their wives for this sort of action. But Mel covered that too.
“The rest of you call wives, or whatever, and tell ’em, tell them you’re on the road until further notice. Hollis, you get the Thompsons issued, and plenty of .45 and .38.”
“BARs?” asked Hollis. The big .30 caliber guns were so penetrative, they were seldom issued.
“No, not this time. If we think we’ll need ’em, we’ll send for ’em. Sheriff, you’re on the South Bend team, we want you looking hard at the shooting aspects. Big gun battle, tell us what happened and how. Jesus Christ, it’s still smoking. Okay, people, why are you still here? Let’s go!”
—
“CHRIST!” yelled Johnny, and in a flash had yanked Homer’s corpse under while going over, and again though it was without dignity, it was not without proficiency. Johnny was fast in action, and everything he did was right and smart and not driven by the panic that Les could sense riding in the desperate muscles of both Charlie and Jack on either side. He cracked a grin. Johnny! The best! Always!
Johnny clutch-pumped into gear, veered into the street, found a path through the obstacle course of shot-up cars on the road ahead, took the car through several sharp and squealy turns, riding two tires as it cranked around the corner, while Charlie emptied his drum into the sky, the bag in Jack’s hands turning out to be full of carpet tacks, which he seeded the road with behind them. There was nothing for Les to do except hope that Johnny could outdrive the law.
Soon enough, Johnny found a stretch of empty, straight highway out of town and hammered it. Like a beast, the great Hudson in-line eight delivered its full-throttle roar, spewing exhaust as it ate the pavement.
The world turned to blur, and Johnny held at eighty, gracefully passing slower cars ahead of him, driving oncomers into ditches with his bravado, and the car sailed along toward the empty Indiana horizon, soon into fields of corn and wheat and roads so straight that it seemed they had entered fantasy.
“We’re in the money,” came a voice from somewhere, and, damn, if Homer, blood sopping the left side of his face, didn’t pull himself up with a grin.
13
GREENCASTLE, INDIANA
July 1, 1934
“TWENTY-EIGHT GRAND!” Les shouted at Homer. “We went through the battle of Verdun for a lousy twenty-eight grand! I got shot for twenty-eight lousy grand!”
Homer didn’t really respond to him. He was glassy-eyed, tending to drift into and out of reality, and had a killer headache.
“He ain’t right,” said Johnny. “The bullet didn’t go through, but you take a bash like that and your brains are scrambled. It’ll be a couple weeks before he’s back to himself.”
Mickey Conforti had wiped the blood off his face and improvised a kind of bandage from a dishrag. She’d soaked another one in cold water and curled it over his brow. He lay on a beat-up sofa in the back room of the Green Cat Tavern, where the gang had gone for refuge after meeting another confederate in another Hudson, dumping the original, and picking their way back here over back roads. All that remained was the split-up and the trip home, wherever that might be.
“So let’s get it over, goddammit,” said Les. “I got to raise some cash for the winter months. I got kids to feed, I got a wife who needs a new coat.”
“When she molts, you can trade that in for some new scales and rattles,” said Homer from the sofa.
“See, he ain’t hurt. He’s just hiding down there so he doesn’t have to say, ‘Hey, I screwed up, there wasn’t any stamp money to speak of, why don’t you boys take my share to make up for my mistake.’”
“Calm down, Les,” said Johnny. “He earned his share. Twenty-eight isn’t a bad day’s take.”
“Less than six apiece, Johnny. Chicken feed! When Jimmy Murray set a job up for us, he never put us in a place where we took out less than fifty. And we didn’t have to shoot our way out. Those cops were just about to call in the artillery.”
“Okay, guys,” said Charlie Floyd, “I got my take, I’m hitting the road. Time to get scarce. I won’t say it’s been a pleasure because it ain’t, but now’s the time to find a hole, preferably a broad’s hole—”
“Charlie!” said Johnny, “there’s a lady here.”
“It’s all right, Johnny,” said Mickey. “I heard worse.”
“Anyhow, anybody got any good-byes or hugs for me? No, I didn’t think so. Then I’m gone.”
With that, his Thompson disassembled already and packed in a suitcase, his fifty-six hundred dollars crumpled into the same suitcase, he gave a nod and headed out.
Les’s verdict: “Dumb cluck’ll hit a trooper roadblock and get himself killed or captured, and if he’s captured, he’ll rat us out in a second.”
“Charlie’s okay,” said Johnny. “Les, you have to calm down.”
“Easy for you to say, Johnny. You didn’t get clipped in the gut, then jumped by some hick trying to be a picture hero. I feel like Dempsey teed off into my chest. You just walked in and walked out.”
“Someone had to keep his head,” said Johnny.
“I didn’t lose my head. I needed to keep the cops down and away and that’s what I did. If I didn’t empty two drums into your home state, we’d be looking at life-plus-forever at Crownsville. And, this time, no wood gun will get us out. You only get to use that trick once.”
“Les, there’s no quieting you when you get a rage on like this. Chase, can’t you take him to Helen and she can talk some sense to him?”
“We’ll go after dark,” said Chase, who’d driven the new Hudson down to pick them up at the old Hudson.
Chase was a tall, angular man, by no means unattractive, by no means an exemplar of the gangster charisma and lifestyle, who always dressed neat and who, for some reason or other, had been infatuated with Les ever since they met performing mysterious errands in Reno a few years earlier. Who knew the chemistry of the connection, and who could even understand it? He was one of a series of minor-league hitters in orbit around Les. John Paul Chase would always be there for Les, and if you wanted to work with Les, John Paul was the price you paid, though it wasn’t a high price since the guy was pretty solid in his own right.
And Chase was one of the few who could talk sense into Les, control him, get him settled down and halfway rational again. That was half his value right there.
“But, Les,” he now consoled, “Johnny’s right. No sense staying all het up about it. You got out clean, nobody’s dead, nobody’s bleeding out, nobody’s hooked, you copped some good dough, times being what they are, and Helen’ll give you a nice back rub when you get back to the cottage.”
“Did you call her? I’m worried all the radio reports will have her worried.”
“I did. She’s swell. Making spaghetti for dinner.”
“Okay,” said Les.
“You got room in that big tub for Home
r?” asked Johnny.
“Cock-a-doodle, no,” said Les. “It ain’t up to me to get him and his nun girlfriend back to St. Paul. I got John Paul, Jack, my two kids and Helen.”
“Thanks for the compliment, Les,” said Mickey from the sofa, where Homer was resting his head on her lap.
“That wasn’t very nice, Les, you should know better than that,” said Johnny.
“She knows it was a joke. Mr. Laugh-a-Second, that’s me.”
“All right, Homer,” said Johnny, “get ready to move in a couple hours. Looks like I’m the guy who’ll drive you back to St. Paul.”
“You’re a prince, Johnny,” said Mickey. “Always count on Johnny for being a good guy. He never lets anyone down. Unlike some other guys who ain’t so noble.”
“I don’t have room for that mook,” said Les. “And I ain’t no chauffeur.”
Things settled down, as each fellow decompressed from the shoot-out in different ways, Homer by aching and moaning; Johnny by smoking cigars and sipping Pikesville rye in shirtsleeves on the porch, watching the sun set over Indiana’s green fields; Jack by being innocuous and, secretly aware he didn’t belong, swearing to never do this kind of work again; and Les by slowly cooking off his rage and hatred at the world for again denying him the dignity he felt he had earned.
By nightfall, he had settled into a kind of dull spell and didn’t feel like much fun at all. He was like a reptile, all heated up and feisty in the hot weather, dolorous and numb in the cold. John Paul had to take the initiative.
“Okay, I’m going to get him back to Helen now, and then to Chicago.”
“Don’t forget his cut. He’ll go nuts again if he thinks he’s been cheated out of his cut.”