Les raked a long burst across the rear of the Hudson, kicking yet more dust in the air. He heard the more convulsive blasts of the Monitor, as J.P. squirted a short welcome in the same direction; his bullets being faster and more powerful, they didn’t so much kick the dirt up as detonate it, blowing huge gouts of loam skyward, driving the guy who’d risen over the hood back.
The G-Man with the Thompson fired a long burst that pecked its way down the length of the Ford’s exposed side, blowing out windows, making the thing bounce and shudder as the bullets riddled the metal. Les answered with a mag dump, again aiming his shots into the ground just to the rear of the Hudson, again filling the air with a screen of grit, driving the Tommy gunner back. He wondered where G-Man number two was. No action from the other end of the car yet. Les came over to hunt for him, having just a little angle onto the car’s grille, but the fellow was too canny to make a dumb mistake like that, so Les’s burst was just an exercise in suppressive fire.
He dropped the mag, skittered back to the rear seat, and reached in to grab two more just as a burst of hardball blew through the door, shredding it, letting gray sky in through the new crown of twisted steel.
That was too close for comfort.
He rushed through the mag change, exposed himself briefly, and jacked out a short burst.
—
“WE JUST GOTTA HOLD ’EM!” yelled Sam from his position behind the rear of the Hudson, his Thompson trained on the Ford a hundred fifty feet away, as he scanned for targets. “There’ll be cops and State boys and even Charles here in minutes, maybe seconds. Just hold ’em.”
“He’s too far for the shotgun,” Ed yelled back from his crouch behind the wheel at the car’s other end, just below the crest of the hood. “Goddamn, I need a rifle!”
“I have ’em pinned,” yelled Sam. He ducked up, squeezed a small dose of lead off, then dropped down.
Ed had his Super .38 out. He rose over the hood, and though it was a long shot, he knew his chances improved with stability, so he placed the gun in both hands against the flat of the hood, held high, eyes pinned on the front sight, and fired three times at the hunched figure behind the hood whose automatic rifle was sending hellacious strikes toward them. He slipped down immediately after the third shot, hoping that one of these too-long attempts had connected but suspecting they hadn’t. He squirmed farther down and emerged around the grille of the Hudson and this time fired left-handed at the figure with the Thompson, again holding high, again doing everything right except hitting.
“Goddamn,” he screamed as the slide locked back, and he dipped back just as the earth next to him broke into spurts of dirt and grit, sending a sting of debris toward him. He reached into his suit pocket, yanked a Super .38 mag free, and slammed it into the shaft of the pistol grip, came back over again.
He saw Baby Face.
He saw him coming right at them.
“He’s coming, Sam. Hit him, hit him, hit him! He’s coming!”
—
LES FIRED, THE gun quit on its own, and he looked to see a stovepipe jam at the breach, the shell trapped between the bolt and the breach opening at a weird angle. He pulled hard on the bolt, to no effect, felt a scalding column of steam rise from it.
This has to be over, he thought.
Every second we are stuck here, we are closer to going down.
I have to end this thing now.
He stood, slipped over to J.P., crouched at the other end of the Ford, and slid the Thompson to him.
“Fix this goddamned thing! Here, give me the big one.”
They exchanged weapons, J.P. taking the Thompson, looking at it, realizing the magazine follower had jammed the shell up too quickly. His quick fix was to hit the mag button and drop the defective mag, even as Les gave him a new twenty-round magazine. He locked it in, found the bolt free, drew it back.
Les grabbed two more Monitor mags out of the back, dumped the half-full one, and pushed a new one into the well.
“I’m going to finish these bastards,” he shouted. “Cover me, goddammit.”
He rose, the Monitor locked under his right arm, his right hand crushing the pistol grip, his left guiding the muzzle from the fore end, and began to walk toward the Hudson, squeezing out short bursts. He walked in a fury of hatred and fear, everything he was, or had dreamed of, expressed in the insane trudge into the guns of the Division, daring them to bring him down, not caring if they did, his mind crazy-bent on one goal, which was to kill. He walked, he walked, he felt three thumps as three hardballs hit him hard in the belly and chest but did not penetrate the steel that shielded his body from them. He walked, he walked, he fired, he walked, the shells flipped from the breach, the heavy bullets tore huge detonations of dirt and shredded grass skyward. He felt his legs light up in pure sting. He walked, he walked, he walked.
—
“HE’S COMING, SAM! Hit him, hit him, hit him! He’s coming!”
Sam slipped around the body of the car and saw the killer stomping furiously toward him, hat low, face red, bent over his automatic rifle in some kind of desperate concentration, and Sam got to him first. He put the wedge sight square in the middle of the chest and squeezed off a burst and knew that he’d hit with three dead-solid, perfect killing shots to the center of mass, but still the man came on, unperturbed by the death that had just eviscerated him.
Sam got back on target, this time leaning harder into the car for more support, clenching the gun to shoulder, and all his muscles tight against it, looking through the Lyman aperture at the front sight’s triangle, and squeezed off another burst, but at two rounds the gun went quiet.
What the hell?
He brought it down and realized he had no idea what to do. He banged hard at it with one hand, then pulled back on the bolt and it slid, perfectly and smoothly, locking back, and he looked into the breach that his move had opened and saw only emptiness where a cartridge should have been and realized, with horror, that the gun was empty and that he had no pistol and that—
It felt like he was kicked hard in the stomach twice, and a wave of dizziness crashed across him. The gun slipped from his grip, he tried to compensate for the spinning but he lurched forward, nose down, smelling the dirt and grass of Barrington.
Somehow, he found the strength to look up and saw the gunman twenty feet away, but having turned, now addressing Ed.
“Ed, Ed!” he called, not so much voice but heart, for he wanted nothing more than to protect the young man, but then it all went away and he blacked out.
—
LES SAW THE LAWMAN go down, as by the application of a sudden bolt of energy his body moved by the velocity of what had struck him, not by anything he himself had done. He alchemized in a microsecond from alive and vital to sheer weight falling in obedience to gravity and hit ground, twitching. Les knew the man had taken two solid through the gut. He knew such hits had permanent results. He knew you didn’t come back from two Government .30s.
Another rage of bees tore at his legs, sending tendrils of angry pain through him. He turned and saw the other agent a few yards away, in mid-rush, as, having just abandoned his shotgun for empty, the man yanked on his pistol to bring it to bear.
But Les’s instincts had oriented the Monitor, and his instincts had motivated his trigger finger, and without willing or thinking, he felt the hydraulic spasms as the rifle fired four times in less than half a second, and one of the rounds smacked into the agent’s forehead, its force blowing his hat off as it cratered his face, which began to foam with blood. The man went down, hard and flat, stirred, rolled over, and then just lay still.
Suddenly it was quiet.
Suddenly it was over.
Les’s legs were on fire. The anesthetic of pure combat rage had abruptly quit and he felt the pain where he’d taken lead. He felt a dozen wounds, he felt the rush of blood, he felt steel clamps of hurt pin
ching hard, he felt the bones themselves crying to yield, to sag to earth, but he turned and yelled to J.P., then scanned for the approach of new enemies. Far off he could see people hidden behind stopped cars or peering around telephone poles, but no one wanted to enter the battlefield.
He limped to the Hudson, walked around it, and climbed in, dumping the heavy Colt Automatic Rifle in the passenger seat. The car was still running, as the driver had leapt from it at such a speed running for cover that he hadn’t switched off the ignition. Les dropped it into gear, legs still burning, and cranked the wheel, delivering the car in seconds to the Ford, which had been almost thoroughly eviscerated by the fight. It looked like it had been jackhammered by a crew of laborers. He pulled up next to it, stumbled out his own door, opened the rear door, and rolled in.
J.P. was on him in seconds.
“Load the guns and get us out of here.”
“How bad?”
“He had a shotgun. He put some buck in my legs, they hurt like hell, but I don’t think I’m bleeding out, and I couldn’t walk if he’d broken any bones.”
It took J.P. thirty seconds to toss the Thompson in, then he was behind the wheel and the car was in motion.
“Do you see Helen?” Les moaned from the backseat.
“No, I— Oh, wait. Jesus Christ, yes, here she is.”
Helen ran toward them as J.P. halted. She jumped in, screaming, “Oh god, baby, are you all right?” and J.P. punched it, the tires spinning on the grass, bucked to the pavement, and took off down Northwest Highway.
“Christ, it hurts,” Les was saying.
“It’s all right, baby,” said Helen.
60
THE OUACHITAS
ARKANSAS
The present
THERE WAS NO DOUBT about authenticity. The handwritten manuscript was spread over several stocks of old, old paper, dry as bone, delicate to the touch, a total of one hundred and fifty-one pages, all in the same hand, a big, looping, semi-literate cursive. None of it was written in ballpoint. You could track as the pencils, some blue, some red, some plain lead, wore to nub against the pressure of an eighty-year-old man’s rush of memories. It bore the title, handwritten in clumsy capitals, “THEY CALLED HIM BABY FACE!”
J.P. was no writer. His prose was barely serviceable, riddled with cliches and other forms of staleness, tripe, and banality. He frequently misspelled, had much trouble with tenses, and that American bugaboo: the mysterious apostrophe. But he wrote with energy, directness, and without any literary attributes, such as irony, sarcasm, archness, coyness. He just was racing death to get it all down. He almost made it.
But when they read the account, something almost magical occurred. In spite of its crudity, each man saw it as J.P. saw it—as if when the narrative intensified, J.P. became more of a writer, and pure memory elevated his prose—and by their need to know.
Nick put down the last page of his account of the battle. They sat at a dilapidated picnic table not far from the ruins of the cottage. It was sunny and quiet in the high woods, under a blue sky, where the mayhem just described was a million miles and eighty-three years away. Rawley had fetched the first chunk, stashed a few hundred meters away, while Braxton, still flex-cuffed but patient and obliging, played the hostage.
“Good reading, huh, boys?” he called, noting the completion.
They ignored him.
“No doubt those two guys were brave,” said Nick, “but they were so overmatched.”
“I’d hate to think of the rage Charles must have felt,” Bob said. “He could have handled Nelson and Chase, but he wasn’t there. Christ, the anger he must have felt.”
“This belongs to the Bureau,” said Nick. “It’s a perfect example of what not to do in a gunfight. It’s Dade County all over again. Or, rather, Dade County was Barrington all over again.”
He was alluding to an infamous Bureau gunfight where an anti-bank-robbery team had jumped a duo of heavily armed hard cases who wanted to go all the way. Who had to go all the way. Who, like their predecessor and icon, Lester “Baby Face Nelson” Gillis, had been dreaming of such an Armageddon in a very small space his whole life, and when it happened, he was ready for it, all gunned up, crazy-brave as any SS lunatic on the Eastern Front, and you could only beat him with courage, a mind as tough as his, experience, and bigger, faster bullets. That’s how Michael Platt killed two agents and wounded four more in three minutes of gunwork in August of 1987.
“Ballistics,” said Bob. “If you have ballistics on your side, you have God on your side.”
“Baby Face had the big gun, no doubt about it,” said Nick.
“That .30-06 on full auto must have been a terrifying thing. I’m just thinking that even as it hit the earth, even as it missed, it blew out such a chunk of planet, it had to drive the agents back, taken their aggression from them. In ’Nam, first tour, some of the RVNs were armed with old War Two stuff, and the BAR and the Browning Thirty did a job on any structure, any man, any vehicle, any anything they hit. There’s poor Sam, with a Thompson he’d never fired before, sending three-quarters of his shots into the sky or the dirt. There’s Hollis, a good man in a fight but stuck with a shotgun with a range of fifteen good yards before the shot pattern breaks apart. He goes to pistol, but he’s shooting a moving, advancing killer, while another one is suppressing him with full automatic.”
They were silent.
Then Bob said, “Charles Swagger would have shot Nelson in the knee, blown it out, and when he was down and still, shot him in the head, all from a hundred feet out. Then he would have set the car tank afire with Thompson tracer, and when Chase ran out in flames, screaming, he would have tracked him and blown his head off. And we wouldn’t be sitting here reading this.”
More silence.
Rawley emerged from the woods line, as before, his hands up.
“Last chunk,” he said, bringing the package over.
“This one’s got some surprises.”
Swagger took it, flipped through it, took a deep breath.
“You sure you want to read it now, sniper man? You may learn something you don’t want to,” said Braxton.
“Shut up,” said Nick.
“Fair warning,” said Rawley. “I’ve read it. He hasn’t.”
Rawley was right. Whatever Charles did or didn’t do, whatever he became, why his spiral was downward toward dissolution and death, it was here in this little nest of pages.
61
BARRINGTON, ILLINOIS
November 27, 1934 (cont’d)
JUST INSIDE BARRINGTON’S LIMITS, the traffic backed up. Charles opened his door, and stood to see it was stopped by the presence of two police cruisers by the side of the road a hundred yards ahead. He got out his badge, got back in, and rolled down the window. Honking, he got enough room to maneuver to the shoulder, and progressed to the scene, where an officer halted him until Charles showed his badge.
The cop said, “Okay, sir, go on. They’re your people, all right.”
Charles felt his stomach drop out when the cop spoke. Never in a fight had he had such a feeling, but this one was straight off the cliff, all the way down, faster and faster, until he hit and was smashed to pieces.
He took a deep breath, moved ahead a few more yards to the police cruiser, and got out.
He could see Sam on the ground, blood everywhere on his lower trunk, the Thompson ahead of him in the grass, chinks of brass littering the site, a cop kneeling over, not doing much since there wasn’t much to do. Even from where he was, Charles could see the wound. He’d seen it before, in the war, and a fight or two along the way. The gut, straight through, blowing chunks and tubing out, opening a dozen unstoppable bloodstreams, pulverizing the mysterious organs that kept you alive. It was fatal.
He looked and a hundred fifty feet away saw the Ford, not so shiny now. Windows all shot out, one tire flatten
ed, so the thing perched at a broken angle, dust and bullet holes all across it. From the site, he could pretty much read the story of the fight, and the tracks of the missing Hudson, heavy in the grass, told him the rest of the story.
He went to Sam.
The man had the death pallor, a rim of blood around his lips, his eyes sliding toward glassiness as he contemplated sky and nothing else. Flecks of blood dotted his skin. His Brooks Brothers striped shirt was seeped in magenta and flecked by kernels of black dried blood. His breathing was hardly there. But as Charles knelt, Sam managed to turn his eyes. Charles put his hand on the man’s shoulder, for there wasn’t enough energy left in him for him to lift a hand.
“Charles, he wouldn’t go down. I hit him over and over. I put that front sight on him, I fired short bursts. I know I hit him, but he kept on coming.”
“I’m sure you hit him bad, Sam. I’m sure he’s dead and they’ve dumped him in a hole somewhere. We’ll find him soon.”
“Oh god, Charles, I tried so hard. Tell my boys how hard I tried.”
“You can tell ’em yourself, Sam. They’ll sew you up and you’ll be back in no time.”
“How’s Ed, Charles? I haven’t heard anything, I haven’t seen him. I . . .” He trailed off.
Charles looked at the cop on the other side of Sam and the cop gave him the bad news with a quick shake of the head and Charles knew Ed was gone.
“They’re working on him now, Sam,” said Charles. “Like you, he’s going to pull through.”
“I know you’re lying, Charles. It’s okay. I was brave, wasn’t I? I did the job, the Duty. No one can say—”
“What they’ll say is that Division agent Sam Cowley stood up and shot it out with the most dangerous man in America. They’ll say that, because it’s the truth. You’re the best, Sam.”
“Charles, go now. Get him. He went south on the highway only a few minutes ago. He’ll stay under the speed limit. It’s the number nineteen car, blue Hudson, plate G45511.”