Charles nodded. He pressed Sam’s hand, and rose.
“The ambulance will be here in seconds,” he said.
The cop said to him, “Sir, you’d better take the guns along. This place is going to be hopping in minutes and there aren’t enough of us to keep control of the scene.”
“Good idea, Officer,” said Charles. He bent, picked up Sam’s Thompson, noting from the weight that it was empty. He walked to Ed—the blister of the entry wound was right above the eye—and picked up the Remington 11, also empty, and Ed’s Super .38. He walked back to his Pontiac and dumped them in the trunk, locking it. Then he had a second thought. He picked up the Thompson, hit the thumb latch, and slid the empty drum off the gun. In his trunk was a bag of assorted training items and he reached into it now, withdrew another fully loaded drum, fitted it to the rails on the receiver, and slid it home. He didn’t notice a T for “Training” painted crudely on its dark frontal surface. It locked solid. He pulled back the bolt, feeling the slide through resistance as the spring recoiled, until it too locked. Then he thumbed the safety prong to up—this is “On”—and put the weapon on the offside front seat. He thought he had time and returned to Sam.
“I’m going now.”
“Get him, Charles. I know you can.”
“You keep fighting and we’ll laugh about this on the patio one night.”
But he knew it wouldn’t be so, just as he knew what hope Sam had given him was lost now, bleeding out in the grass of a town nobody ever heard of, as the only man who could have saved him lay dying. He knew he had been killed too.
He went back to the car, turned the ignition, and accelerated, finding no traffic at all, as the crime scene had dammed the road. He drove less than a mile until he saw a phone booth outside a bar, cognizant, as he drove, of sirens as finally the ambulances pulled by.
He got the number out of his wallet, dropped in his nickel, the operator told him how much more it was, he dropped in another three dimes, and waited as she put the call through.
“Sorrento Social,” someone answered.
“Put D’Abruzzio on,” he said.
“Hey, who do you think you are, bud? Mr. D’Abruzzio is in—”
“I don’t care where he is. He’ll talk to me now. My name is Swagger. He knows who I am. Go get him.”
It seemed to take forever, but finally Uncle Phil was there.
“How the hell did you get this number, Swagger? What is—”
“Shut up, meatball,” said Charles. “Five minutes ago, Nelson shot and probably killed two Division agents in a town called Barrington, on Northwest Highway. He’s probably hit. Where would the nearest safe house be from there? He has to lay up. Where would he go?”
“Okay, I’ll find out. But later, you and I are going to have a talk about this phone number and what games you’re playing.”
D’Abruzzio put the phone down, and more hours, possibly even a month or two, dragged by. Finally, he was back.
“Okay, they say he’ll turn east on Palatine Road, somewhere off of Northwest up around you, just south of Barrington. It goes by the big airfield, then jigs a little at a religious place called Techny, and then it turns into Willow Road, but basically it’s a straight shot into Winnetka, which is next to Wilmette. Jimmy Murray has a house on Walnut Street, just off the downtown section: 447 Walnut. That’s his best shot, his fastest shot. But he’ll be pokey. He can’t go over the speed limit or he’ll get cops on him. If he’s cool enough to mosey along, he’ll be okay. Can you catch him?”
“Bet on it,” said Charles.
It was time to hunt.
62
THE OUACHITAS
ARKANSAS
The present
“WAIT A MINUTE, SNIPER. Something you should know. Okay, sniper. Take it straight, deal with it.”
Bob fixed him with a hard sniper’s eye.
“What are you talking about?”
“This thing became just as big an obsession for me as for you,” said Rawley. “I called around, I talked to guys who told me stories told to them by their dads or granddads, who were cellmates of this fellow or that fellow, and I know what was said about it all. On our side of the street, that is—not the shit you call history.”
Bob waited.
“This story was big in the underworld in ’thirty-four, ’thirty-five, maybe even ’thirty-six. Somehow, it got forgotten as all the action moved to the East from the Midwest, where Dewey was going after the big New York people. Then the war came, and more stuff was lost, and so nobody remembered anything. But I found some memories.”
“Go ahead,” said Bob.
“You sure? You have an image of yourself and your kin, what kind of men you were, what you stood for. What’s it going to do to you to see that challenged, threatened. As I say, can you deal with it?”
“This is bullshit,” said Nick. “This creep is playing con games because he can’t do anything straight out. It’s not in the Grumley DNA.”
“The Grumley DNA is criminal, yes indeed,” said Rawley. “But inside of it, it’s about hillbilly honor and guts. It’s about standing straight and taking it, not ratting, not running, doing what’s right by a Grumley standard, even if death is the price. And maybe that describes Baby Face too, the big villain of the piece, but he gave it all up in payback for Johnny and Homer, and, in the fight of his life, walked straight into the guns.”
“That’s what Swagger is too,” said Nick. “With that minor detail, it does right by the standards of civilization, not by some backwoods clan of peckerwoods, chicken snatchers, cousin-fucking and sister-raping inbreds.”
“This fellow needs anger management,” said Rawley with a smirk. “His rapture over stereotype is quite disturbing. Antidepressants? Cymbalta? Zoloft? Anthrax? Okay, I am not shitting you, Swagger, it got around that somebody quit. One tin soldier ran away.”
“We ran into this one too. It’s crap.”
“We’ll see.”
“Don’t make me laugh,” said Bob.
“No, they say one of the Division studs called in, said, ‘Enough.’ He’d seen his buds shot to bits on the playground. He couldn’t take it no more. Too much blood, and he didn’t want to end up full of lead under the swings. He went away, just when they needed him most, back to Passel O’Toads, Arkansas. No names, but all fingers would point toward Charles, the man who shot Dillinger from behind and Pretty Boy from a hundred yards away.”
“Charles Swagger didn’t have no run in him,” said Bob.
“You don’t have no run in you. Maybe he did have run in him. Maybe not. I ain’t saying. I’ll let John Paul Chase tell the story. That is, if you’ve got guts enough.”
“He’s pure guts, goober,” said Nick.
Bob turned to page 152 of “THEY CALLED HIM BABY FACE!”
63
WILLOW ROAD
CHICAGO
November 27, 1934 (cont’d)
SHE HAD ROLLED HIS PANT LEGS UP, counted the holes—fifteen—and applied Mercurochrome to each one, painting orange over the red.
“How bad?”
“That stuff stings! But, generally, it’s better now.”
They had passed Curtiss Airport, taken a wide jog around some kind of religious place, and the road was now called Willow. It climbed a slope, crossed Waukegan Road, and they found farm-flatness on either side. Since it was chilly November, it was now dark, even at 6, and they rolled steadily on, through the sparse traffic of the sticks, with J.P. keeping a good lookout in the rearview as he held straight on.
“Anything?”
“Nah. Saw lights a few minutes ago, but they’ve gone now. He must have turned off. You okay?”
“He’s doing fine,” said Helen. “The bleeding’s stopped, no bones broken, and the bruising hasn’t started. Baby’s going to be fine.”
“Sure you d
on’t want a belt of hooch, Les?”
“Never touch the stuff.”
“Okay, we’re crossing Sunset Ridge Road, which means we’re coming into a nowheresville called Northfield, and just beyond it is Winnetka, and then a couple miles to Mr. Murray’s place in Wilmette. It won’t be long now.”
“Great,” said Les, snuggling his head against the warm and ample bosom of his wife, who held him close to her, her arms locked around his shoulders, her face next to his.
“I’m thinking clear now,” Les said. “I was sort of dingy in the head after I got shot up, but everything is clear now. We’ll go to Mr. Murray’s, someone’ll know a doc or a vet, they can dig these things out of my legs, and I’ll be good as new. Then we’ll visit our pal D’Abruzzio and be on our way.”
“You know what, Les,” said J.P. “I always thought it was a screwball plan, but you pulled it off. You made it happen. It turned on sheer guts, and you did it.”
“Yeah, me and an inch of steel.” Les laughed, and banged his fist against the sheet of metal under this shirt that shielded his vitals from the bullets of the law. “Bonk, bonk, bonk!” he said, “three times Mr. Federal nailed me in the boiler room with his machino and I didn’t feel nothing. Joke’s on him. He forgot to wear his. Bet he wears it everyplace in heaven!”
Les and J.P. laughed, though Helen felt a little squeamish laughing at the death of the federal officer, as she didn’t share Les’s rage at such men. If they had to die, they had to die, that was the bargain, but it was somehow wrong getting all sis-boom-bah about it.
“Les,” she said, “let the poor man rest in peace.”
“Come on, Helen,” said Les, “I made him famous. And since he’s a Justice Department guy, he should be glad he died for justice—my justice on Phil D’Abruzzio—instead of a lousy bank job or—”
Where did it come from? It was suddenly just there, beside them, angling in at their speed and clipping the fender hard. Les raised his head, as Helen screamed and J.P. fought the wheel for control, and saw a large dark car boring against theirs.
In the next second, the phantom had forced them off the road into a field, dark and immense, where J.P. hit the brakes to keep from spinning out of control, the car skidding as the locked wheels failed to bite into the loam, the car rocking, sliding, grinding, Les banging his head on the seat in front of him, Helen screaming again, the whole universe suddenly gone screwball, as nothing made any sense at all.
They came to rest a few dozen feet off of Willow Road, the intercepting vehicle angled ahead of them. At that point, its driver flicked on his own lights, so that his double beams cut into the Hudson’s double beams, and the area suddenly came alive in the glow of the illumination.
“Are you all right?” J.P. said.
“Take the machino!” responded Les, sitting upright, lifting the Thompson from the floor with a single arm and trying to get it over the seat to J.P. But he hadn’t the strength, even if it was the lightest of the two weapons available, and it fell back to the floor. His hand squirted to his .45 in the shoulder holster, as J.P. also went to pluck his pistol from concealment.
The door of the other car opened and a man stepped around it and into the light.
It was the G-Man. He had a Thompson.
64
THE OUACHITAS
ARKANSAS
The present
“ALL RIGHT,” said Bob, “he’s there. I didn’t see any run.”
“Maybe it’s in the next chapter,” said Rawley.
Bob regarded him harshly, but such was Rawley’s intense sense of Grumley self-adoration, it made not a dent in the man’s smirk.
“I’m just trying to make you aware of what’s in the air,” he said. “I don’t want you feeling bushwhacked and getting all disappointed. Maybe Swagger, disappointed, doesn’t keep his word.”
“I’ll keep my word,” said Bob.
“But maybe I won’t keep mine,” said Nick.
“That fellow,” yelled Braxton from his seat on the edge of the hole, “bears watching. You keep your eye on him, brother.”
“I will, brother,” yelled Rawley back at him. Then, turning to Bob, he said, “So Charles has finally caught up with Baby Face. What happens next, do you suppose, sniper?”
“I’d say death in a hat comes to call on Mr. Lester J. Gillis,” said Bob.
65
WILLOW ROAD
NORTHFIELD, ILLINOIS
November 27, 1934
FULL MOON, but not yet risen off the horizon. Orange, maybe umber, throwing its thin hue across the known world. A cold and blustery evening. An empty field in a farm town in a Midwest as flat as the Atlantic when calm. Otherwise, not much information: no traffic, no lights, no sign of civilization. Wind rushing through the high, dry grass, the stalks rubbing and whispering against one another. A vault of stars across the sky, pinwheels and whirligigs and clouds of light a billion miles away. The intersecting beams of the headlamps of the two twisted cars throwing an odd lattice of brightness across the land, illuminating the still-settling dust.
They watched him come. Tall man, low fedora, open topcoat, white shirt, black tie. Gunman. Face grim, sunken, maybe cadaverous, but those eyes! Dark and mournful and without flutter or tremor: blinkless. He moved with panther grace, big hands loose and ready on the submachine gun. He stared hard at them, hard enough to melt the glass through which they saw him.
“We both draw and fire,” said J.P. “Helen, you get down and—”
“No, my arm is pinned behind Helen and you aren’t fast enough. Hold steady, hear him out.”
The agent opened the passenger door.
“Hands on wheel, Chase,” he said. “If I see them move, I’ll part your haircut with hardball.”
J.P. swallowed. It did not occur to him to defy.
“You,” he said to Les. “Out here, little man. You and I have business.”
“He can’t walk, sir,” said Helen. “His legs are shot up.”
“Then I will kill him where he sits,” said the agent.
“My legs are okay,” said Les. “And I’m not afraid. If it’s a gunfight you want, mister, you have knocked on the right door. I fear no man and back down from no man.”
The agent stepped away, insolently turned his back, daring them to shoot. They would not—they could not—for they all believed that among his talents would be seeing behind himself.
“Still got the steel vest, Les?” asked J.P. in a whisper, having not moved his head, his hair, or his hands.
Bonk, came the answer, as Les slid over the Monitor, hooked the Thompson, and removed himself from the car. The first weight of his body and all that steel against his legs produced fifteen jets of pain that made him wince and cave, but he steadied himself on the car door, took a step, and then another, and found the pain at first bearable and then forgettable. He moved out twenty feet and faced his opponent.
“You cut that steel loose or I will put one between your eyes and turn your friends to Swiss cheese,” said the agent.
Hell! How did he know?
Les set the gun down in the grass, reached into his jacket, and unbuckled the two supporting straps. As the second one went, the two pieces of steel fell to the ground and then toppled flat to earth.
“Les!” screamed Helen.
“Don’t you worry, honey,” said Les, eyes riveted on the G-man, “this boy wants to play with the machino. No man in this world can take me on the machino.”
He picked the Thompson up, easily hefting it to his midline, where it rested in the familiarity of his two hands.
“You say we have business, sir?”
“I am Charles Swagger, Special Agent, Department of Justice,” said the man. “I hearby place you under arrest for multiple outstanding felony warrants, including first-degree murder this afternoon, against federal agents in Barrington, Ill
inois, those warrants forthcoming. I order you to surrender your weapon and raise your hands or prepare to face the consequences.”
“I am Lester J. Gillis, wrongly called ‘Baby Face’ by the newpapers, and you will have to take me the hard way,” said Les.
Two men, thirty feet apart. Each cranked a bit, quartering himself with respect to the other, with the Thompson gun on the diagonal across his body. They held still, each exploring the other’s face and body, reading what data the smear of lights from moon and headlights permitted, reading the position of the hands, the set of the chin in the jaw, the narrowness of the eyes, the tension, or absence of same, in the muscles of the face. Another second passed as the face-off approached—first, anticlimax; then farce, or even parody; and then—
Moon, wind, chill.
Les was fast as a burning cat. In pure blur he leveraged the big gun up and his talented eyes read the line that extended from back sight to front sight to target, calculating angles and muscle energy, graceful as any skeet champion, matador, or épée artist, a man with a true gift for the gun, all reflexes and experience that no instrument yet devised could measure, and he felt his finger find and caress the trigger straight back so there’d be no torque and the gun would hold true to the intentions of its shooter but—
The rustle of dry grass, the hum of double-winged navy FF-1 vectoring low toward Curtiss, a reveler’s far-off honk from a Model A.
Les had talent, more than most. Charles had genius, more than all. His speed had no place in time and his imagination saw the weapon as merely another pistol, and so he didn’t bother with the guidance of the left hand on the front grip, much less sights or hold or breath, but merely by vice-like strength of those long fingers, that thick wrist, that articulated forearm, put the gun where whatever autistic worm that lived deep in the ancient part of his brain instructed, and his wasn’t the first shot, it was the first six shots, and when Les’s finger closed on the trigger, it could but jack three useless rounds off, one of which clipped off half an inch of Charles’s ear, a wound Charles did not even notice.