by Chad Dundas
“That he relented only when these people, these very serious people, threatened to do some very serious things to his equally hardheaded and infuriating little wife?”
She swallowed, searching for a retort.
“That even then,” O’Shea said, “the champion refused on principle to take part in a fixed match, but offered to take on this man Windham under tremendously disadvantageous circumstances? That the champion’s creditors agreed to go along only because the circumstances made any other outcome impossible and the champion agreed to foot the bill for services rendered?”
“You’re saying it was Pepper’s idea to have Fritz break his leg?”
O’Shea nodded. “And your husband paid him out after collecting on a substantial wager he’d made against himself beforehand. How do you think the people in charge felt about that? The creditors, I mean. The serious people.”
“Well, it’s nonsense to begin with,” she said. “But if it did happen, I suppose they would be happy they got what they wanted.”
“Happy?” O’Shea said. “My dear, it scared the shit out of us. A man who would pay to have that done, to himself? We couldn’t believe it. A man like that is capable of anything. A man like that is totally impossible to control.”
“It’s ridiculous,” she said. “Why would he need to take out a loan from a bunch of gangsters when we had more money than we could spend?”
“That sounds like a topic you’ll have to take up with the former lightweight wrestling champion of the world,” he said. “All I can tell you is, there were whispers that his wife liked to gamble.”
The door opened and the man called Francis stuck his head in. “I’ve got them for you,” he said.
O’Shea nodded and made a solemn little stack out of the papers Moira had brought with her. She thought he might say something else to her, but suddenly he didn’t seem to want to look at her anymore. He looked only at the papers. “I’ll be right there,” he said as he stood up.
More than once as he sat cross-legged in the failing light of the day, his back pressed against the sticky trunk of a wide pine, Eddy asked himself what he was doing. The place he’d found to hide was seventy-five yards uphill from the hunting camp, at the fringe of a thick grove of ponderosa between the lodge and the horse barn. He sat half obscured by a tangle of fallen logs, invisible to anyone coming or going on the road. It was a good spot, and ever since he’d found it while hiking the hills around the camp weeks earlier, he hadn’t been able to get it out of his mind.
Snow was coming down, and it might have been beautiful if it weren’t so cold. From this position everything looked just as he’d mapped it out. He’d brought along two blankets: one of them folded under his ass, the other laid out on the ground as if for a picnic. Still, the chill crept through the folds of wool, into his legs and up his spine.
He had almost decided to call the whole thing off when he’d finally heard back from John Torrio. The Italian’s note arrived a couple of weeks earlier, scrawled in a child’s hand on a piece of cheap card stock. The tone of the short, crude message didn’t exactly convey an outpouring of enthusiasm, but Torrio said if what Eddy was proposing was on the level, he would send some men to Montana to check it out. Eddy had driven into town to meet with them the night before and found them to be nearly as awful as the Canadians. Just a bunch of amateurs hiding their fear inside cheap suits and loud talking. They didn’t want any part of the shooting, naturally, but said if Eddy had liquor to sell, they were buying. The sight of them almost convinced him to change his mind once and for all. Then they’d opened a big, double-locking attaché case and showed him the money.
That morning he’d slipped out of his room before dawn and strangled Wes Templeton in his bed. There was no going back now.
Eddy’s original plan had been much cleaner, with more maneuvering and less cowboys-and-Indians stuff. He would simply wait for the Canadians to deliver the booze, suffer through a few final hours with them before they headed back across the border and then carry out the rest of the plan at his leisure. O’Shea had fouled it all up with his bright idea to send Templeton to Montana. Templeton, who packed as many trunks and bags as a woman, one of his satchels full of nothing but books. Templeton, who liked to sit by the window in the parlor reading and making inane comments about passages he found amusing. Sometimes reading them aloud and then looking at Eddy over the tops of his glasses like Eddy was supposed to have something smart to say back. The man’s very presence there had been an insult, to his intelligence and to his pride.
Now Templeton was dead and he was on to plan B.
It gave him a quivering feeling to change things at the last minute, but now that Templeton was gone, most of Eddy’s original planning was spoiled. He couldn’t very well let the Canadians drive all the way to the hunting camp and unload the booze as normal—especially if they ran late, like they were doing now, and had to spend the night again. They would expect to see Templeton there, and every question they asked about his absence would compound the likelihood that Eddy would slip up and tip them off somehow. Luckily he had this location as a fallback. Proper preparation, he liked to call it. If there had to be violence, it was going to be violence on his terms, in a situation that he controlled.
Before his meeting with the Italians he’d made a couple of calls to verify the legitimacy of the Frank & Livermore real estate company. A week earlier, he’d bought himself a ticket on an overnight train to the coast. In Portland, Oregon, he planned to buy a car to drive south to Los Angeles and had spent a couple of evenings memorizing a road map he bought at a local filling station.
He could feel the promise of California glowing in his chest like a hot lump of coal. He had no idea what he would do when he got there—and the prospect of having no plan made him feel frayed around the edges—but he kept reminding himself that he didn’t have to stay if it turned out Los Angeles wasn’t right for him. There were plenty of out-of-the-way places a man like him could find work. O’Shea fancied himself a king of sorts, but the truth was he didn’t have much reach outside of the midwest and a few friends in New York. Since the day he had returned from Howard Livermore’s rooming house, he had not disturbed the papers from their hiding place in the bottom drawer of his desk. He thought of them often but was still too worried about the possibility of germs to take them out and hold them in his hands. When this was over, he would have to risk it, heading back to the lodge to retrieve them along with the last of his things.
One of Eddy’s main worries had been the hired girl. He thought she might make a stink when he let her go the same day the rest of them left for the wrestling match. Closing up shop, he’d told her, and when he gave her a cash bonus to thank her for her service, the only question she asked was whether she could take some of the housewares to sell in town. Eddy told her that was fine.
He’d brought along a sandwich wrapped in wax paper, but it had taken him longer than he’d planned to bury Templeton, so he was saving it for after. Templeton was a big man and it had been a job just getting him down the stairs and out the back door. The ground was frozen so solid that he had to spend an hour going after it with an old, dull axe before he could make any headway with his shovel. The grave he dug was slim and shallow but far enough into the trees that it probably wouldn’t be discovered. Even if someone happened across it, he’d have to know what he was looking for to notice it. It was hard work and Eddy had thought of quitting, but he wanted to leave no trace of Templeton. Anything to muddy the waters for the men O’Shea would send looking for him. He liked to think Dion would come himself. His old friend hadn’t given him much attention these past few years, but by the end of the day Eddy expected to have his full, undivided.
This was what he was thinking about, tucked away in his nest, when he heard the low rumble of engines coming up the road. Crawling forward on his stomach, he pressed the butt of the rifle to his shoulder and closed his eyes, takin
g a slow, deep breath to steady his hands. When he opened them and sat staring over his sights at the empty road, two things occurred to him. First, no matter how this day turned out, it would be a relief to finally be done with it all—done with Montana, the isolation of the hunting camp and all the ridiculous men he was supposed to watch over there. He was looking forward to putting it behind him.
Second, he was starving.
Knowing there was no one out there to catch them, the Canadians came over the hill with headlights blazing. There would be six of them: two riding in the covered flatbed truck full of crates, and four behind in a touring sedan. The magazine in his rifle held six shells, and he had an extra lying on the ground at his side, but their numbers meant he couldn’t afford to miss. If he had to stop to reload while any of the Canadians were still alive and possessing working limbs, there was a high probability he could lose them in the woods.
The convoy slowed to a stop just after the truck and sedan lumbered across the small wooden bridge that stood over a low, iced-over stream. This was a surprise. The truck was still about fifty yards from where Eddy planned for it to be. He’d thought the Canadians would pull all the way up to the horse barn to unload their cargo as normal. Instead they just sat there, headlamps blaring, both machines idling. What were they doing? Did they sense something was different about the camp, the lodge standing dark and still? Had they been spooked when they saw no one had come out to meet them?
Eddy could feel something ticking in his mind like a stopwatch. From this angle, he could see the driver of the truck but not the man riding in the passenger seat. He didn’t have a shot. Drive on, he whispered to himself. Drive on like you always do. Finally, after a minute of no movement at all, the driver of the truck leaned out the window and yelled something to the men in the car, his words garbled on the breeze. The four of them got out and scrambled forward, holding long guns at their waists, their heads scanning side to side as if looking for enemies.
Eddy relaxed his finger on the trigger. As quickly as he could, he reviewed his options. He could abort his plan and slip away through the woods, but he could not go back to the hunting camp for his train ticket or his proof of deposit on the property in California. At least, not while the Canadians were there, and with him and Templeton both suddenly gone without explanation, there was no telling how long they would stay. He didn’t like the idea of hiking through the cold all the way to town, especially with no money and no prospects. Plus, the Italians were there now, waiting at their rooming house for him to drive in and give them the all clear.
No, he could still make this work. He just needed to take good shots. His finger touched the cold metal of the trigger again. The Canadians were moving up the road carefully, but they were clearly men with no formal training. They were grouped too tightly together and walked standing at full height, like a family of prairie dogs on alert. When they got to the front of the truck they paused in the ghostly glow of the headlamps, and Eddy dropped them where they stood.
Shot. Lever, lever, shot. Lever, lever, shot. Lever, lever, shot.
In the war he’d met British riflemen who could crank out thirty shots from their Enfields in under a minute. Eddy was not quite that fast, but killing the first four men took less than twelve seconds, and before the last body hit the ground he was sighting in on the men inside the truck. He could see only the driver, who was in a panic, terrified by the sudden booming reports of the rifle and the sight of his escorts falling dead. Eddy knew the man couldn’t see him, not in the dark with the hill and trees behind him. The way the reports had deflected off the flat rear side of the lodge, he probably didn’t even know which direction the shots had come from. The truck lurched as the driver cranked it into reverse, but he only managed to crash into the sedan, pushing it back against one side of the narrow bridge, boxing him in.
Just as Eddy loosed his fifth shot, the truck jumped forward and stalled. Sparks flew from the roof as his bullet ricocheted high of its target. He cursed under his breath, and as the driver opened the door to clamber out he shot again. The driver was moving, so this shot was also not quite as true as the first four. The bullet caught him in the throat and rocked his head back against the metal of the truck cab before he fell, one hand clawing at the black blood flooding from the wound. The other hand struggling to pull a pistol from his belt. Eddy left him that way and ejected the rifle’s magazine, fitting the extra in its place as he tried to sight in on the last man, the passenger, who would still be in the cab of the truck. The man must’ve crawled across the seat and pulled the driver’s door shut and was now out of sight. Eddy cursed. He’d expected that in his terror he would also try to run, but now the man was hunkered down on the floorboards of the truck, maybe with a gun in his hands, maybe not.
After another minute of watching, Eddy started down the hill in a crouch. He didn’t like leaving his nest but saw no other way to finish the job. Keeping his eyes on the truck and holding the rifle at chest level, he quickly but carefully covered the distance to the wash at the side of the road. The truck driver was still trying to die with his revolver in his hand, his elbow propped against the ground and the barrel pointing straight into the sky. When Eddy got close enough, he threw the rifle over his back, pulled out his own pistol and shot the man in the head.
He was stiff from sitting so long in the cold, but the climb down the hill had at least got the blood moving in his legs. Crouching behind the front wheel of the sedan, he called for the man in the cab of the truck to throw down his weapon. His ears rang from the boom of the shots, making his voice sound strange and hollow. He was irritated with himself for not bringing cotton to plug them. He got no reply from the man in the truck, and as he sat there in the buzzing silence he started to feel a tickle at the back of his neck. What had he forgotten? What had he missed? What did the Canadians know tonight as they approached the camp? Nothing, he told himself, it was all going perfectly. It was all going exactly as he’d drawn it up.
Odds were the man still in the truck only had a handgun. Anyway, if he had a rifle or a shotgun, it would be clumsy and awkward at such close range. That might give Eddy the advantage. His biggest worry at the moment was time. Eddy didn’t want to hang around out in the open any longer than he had to after all that shooting, all that racket. Chances were that no one was around for miles, but chance was something Eddy liked to avoid. Just in case some farmer or hunting party had heard the noise and decided to come investigate, he planned to be long gone before they arrived.
Quickly he made a checklist in his mind of the things he still needed to do: He’d have to move fast to hike back up to his nest to collect his blankets, then back to the road to pick up the dead men’s guns. Earlier he’d planned to load the bodies into the sedan and run it off the road, but now decided against it.
He needed to move.
To hell with it, he thought. He took the Enfield off his back and leaned it against the side of the sedan. Creeping forward, moving deliberately over the frozen turf, he rapped the butt of his pistol against the truck’s passenger-side door. Still he got no response. His pistol ready in his right hand, he used his left to reach up and yank the door handle. To his surprise, it opened easily. As it did, he swung around to face the cab, bringing his gun up and clearing it over the top of the seats.
The truck was empty.
Eddy dropped back to his crouch and turned to look up and down the road. Was it possible the man in the truck had slipped out and run into the woods while he was on the move? No, he was sure no one had gotten out of the truck; he’d kept his eyes on it the whole way. Still, the Canadians always sent six men. Why had they changed their methods for this trip?
He sat there in the stillness until his anxiety had subsided. Nothing but the breeze moved through the trees around him, and there was no sound but his own breathing and the ringing in his ears. Five men, he thought, feeling a small wave of pride at the number. It was the most he’d
killed since Amiens. For a man who knew his way around a rifle, there was simply no substitute for a hidden position in the high ground.
He had only fired one shell from his pistol, but he reminded himself to reload it when he got back to the lodge. It was still a couple hours before the Italians were expecting him, and even if they were nothing more than small-timers, he’d rather greet them with a fully loaded weapon, just to be safe.
He was about to make the hike back up to his nest when a queer sensation came over him. Something wasn’t right. He’d overseen the Canadians bringing shipments in for nearly a year and they had never used fewer than six men, never stopped the truck near the bridge and sent armed men up the hill to check things out. They had never deviated from the plan. Eddy didn’t believe in coincidence, and even if he did, it would be a lot to swallow that this load of all loads was the one where the Canadians changed their methods.
Unless.
Suddenly thinking of snipers, he scanned the hills above him for movement or the glint of metal against rock. Impossible, he decided. As if to prove it to himself, he stood up, pistol hanging at his side, and stepped away from the truck and into the open. Nothing happened, just a wind stiff enough to make him suck his chin into his chest to avoid losing his hat. Still, the feeling that something was wrong nagged at him. He looked at the sedan, sitting in the road like a giant insect from dinosaur times. Going back to the driver’s side of the truck, he switched off the motor and pocketed the keys. Resting his hand on the hood, he listened to the engine tick and stared for a minute at the empty cab. There had never been a second man up there.
Five men, not six. It made no sense. Turning on his heel, he walked to the back of the truck, running his fingers along the rough canvas tarp that held the load. He squatted, his knees creaking, and undid the knot that held the tarp to the truck’s rear bumper. As he did, an eerie feeling rose up the back of his skull until it felt like a hot water bottle sitting underneath his hat.