Hot Springs

by Stephen Hunter

  “Now, I worked for Colt’s for a number of years, so I got a deal on these guns. Then I had ’em shipped to Griffin & Howe, a custom gunsmithy in New York. Earl, take one out, please, and show it around.”

  Earl pulled one box out, pried the lid off it. Inside, a Colt government model gleamed blackly at him, but he saw immediately that the cardboard of the box was slightly mutilated in one spot, where it meant to hold the pistol snugly, as if something larger than spec had been pushing at the box. He pulled the pistol out.

  “See what you got?” D.A. asked. “You tell ’em, Earl.”

  “The sights are much bigger,” Earl noted right away. Indeed, the target pistol’s adjustable sights had been replaced with a bigger fixed version, a big flat piece with a cut milled squarely into the center; at the front end, instead of that little nubby thing, there was a big, square, wide blade.

  “Oversized rear, Patridge front sights. What else, Earl?”

  Earl gripped the pistol and his hand slid up tight to nest it deep and his thumb naturally went to the thumb-safety, which had been enlarged into a neat little shelf with the soldered addition of a plate. His whole thumbprint rested squarely on it. No way he was going to miss that thing.

  “Now dry-fire it,” the old man said.

  Obediently, Earl pointed in a safe direction, thumbed back the hammer, pressed the safety up for on. When he plunged it down with his thumb, the thumb met just two ounces or so of resistance, then snapped downward with a positive break. Earl pulled the trigger, which broke at a clean four pounds, without creep or wobble.

  “That is a fighting handgun,” said the old man. “The best there is. Completely safe to carry cocked and locked. Its ramp polished and smoothed so that it will feed like a kitten licking milk. A trigger job to make it crisp to shoot. A fast, seven-round reload in two seconds or less. A big-ass .45, the most man-stoppingest cartridge there is, unless you want to carry a .357 Magnum, which would take you two years to master, if that fast. And finally, the shortest, surest trigger stroke in the world. Gents, that’s the gun you’ll carry, it’s the gun you’ll shoot, it’s the gun you’ll live with. It’s the gun you’ll clean twice a day. It’s the gun that’ll win your fights for you if you treat it well. I should tell you it was all thought out by a genius. Not me, not by a long shot. But that’s what the Baby Face did to his .45s. He was a killer and some say even crazy, but he had more pure smarts about guns of any man since old John Browning himself.”

  • • •

  Draw, aim and fire.

  Draw, aim and fire.

  Two hands, the safety coming off from the thumb’s plunge as the second hand came to embrace the first in its grip, the rise of the front sight to the target.

  “You don’t got to line it up,” said the old man. “What you’re looking for is a quick index. You have to know that the gun is in line; you don’t got to take the time to place the front sight directly between the blades of the rear sights. You got to flash-index on the front sight. You see that front sight come on target and you shoot.”

  Draw, aim and fire.

  Draw, aim and fire.

  Earl was surprised how well it worked, once you got the hang of it. It helped that his hands were so fast and strong to begin with, and that he’d fired so many shots in anger and so shots in practice meant nothing. But clearly, he had some degree of exceptional talent: the pistol came out sure, it came up and BANG it went off, almost always leaving a hole in the center of the target.

  “Forget the head, forget the heart,” counseled the old man. “Aim where he’s fattest, and shoot till he goes down. Center hit. Clip him dead center. If he don’t go down, if he’s still coming, shoot him through the pelvis and break his hipbone. That’ll anchor him. Some of these bigger boys take a basketful of shooting before they go down. That’s why you have to shoot fast and straight and a lot. Usually, the man who shoots the most walks away.”

  D.A. watched with eyes so shrewd and narrow they missed nothing. This boy, that boy, this boy again, that one again: little flaws in technique, a tendency to flinch, a lack of concentration, a finger placed inconsistently on the trigger, a need to jerk, or, worst of all, an inability to do the boring work of repetition that alone would beat these ideas into the minds. But D.A. was patient, and kind, and never nasty.

  “Short, you are very good, very fast, I must say,” he said to the young Pennsylvanian, who, to be sure, was the best of the youngsters, a very quick study.

  Short was fast too. Not as fast as Earl or the old man—in time, the old man believed nobody would be faster than Earl—but fast. He got it right the first time and kept it right.

  Henderson, from Oklahoma, was a bit more awkward. Tall and blond, with arms too long and hands too big, he was all elbows and excess motion. He didn’t have the gift for it that Short and some of the others did. But Lord, he worked. He got up early to practice dry-firing and he stayed up late practicing dry-firing.

  “You are a worker, son,” said D.A.

  “Yes sir,” said Henderson. “That’s what my people taught me.” He drew against phantom felons until his fingers were bloody.

  • • •

  “Now this,” said Earl, a few days later, “this is the real McCoy.”

  He held in his hands the .45 caliber Thompson M1928 submachine gun, with its finned barrel, its Cutts compensator, its vertical foregrip, its finely machined Lyman adjustable sight.

  Five other such guns lay on the table, sleek and oily.

  “Mr. D.A. got a deal with the Maine State Police, which is why these guns all say Maine State Police. This will be our primary entry weapon, not merely for its firepower, but more than anything for its psychological effect. You find yourself on the other side of a gun like this, the thought goes, you don’t wanna fight no more. Didn’t work with the Japs but it should work with these here Hot Springs hillbillies.”

  The men looked at the weapon, which he held aloft.

  “It’s a recoil-powered, open-bolt full automatic weapon. That open-bolt business is important, because it means it can only be fired with the bolt back. You forget to cock it, you are S.O.L. If it don’t have a magazine in it, it can’t fire, unless you have done stuck a cartridge with your fingers up in the chamber, then cocked it, and I ain’t never heard of no man doing that but it’s my theory that if there’s a way to screw up, some recruit will find it, no matter how well hidden. Don’t never put a shell into the chamber because everybody will think it’s empty and that’s how training accidents happen. You’ll have plenty of chance to bleed up in Hot Springs, no need to do it here.

  “Now, this evening, I’ll teach you how to break it down, how to clean it, how to reassemble it. You will clean it and reassemble it each time you fire it, and the reason for that is the same as the one I gave you earlier: you want to treat it well so it will treat you well. Now, how many men know how to shoot this gun?”

  A few hands went up, mainly from the older men who’d joined the unit from State Police agencies.

  But so did Frenchy’s.

  “Frenchy Short, do tell. Well, young man, you come on up here. Where’d you learn to shoot the tommy?”

  Frenchy came up.

  “My mother knew the police chief of our town. She arranged for me to shoot all the guns for my fifteenth birthday.”

  “A birthday present. Damn, ain’t that something. Come on, Frenchy, show the boys.”

  So Frenchy went to the firing line, inserted a stick magazine and leaned into the gun.

  The Colt Police Silhouette target loomed twenty-five yards downrange, the shape of a man with his wrist planted on his hip.

  “Get ready, boys!” Earl said and Frenchy found a good position, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Then he remembered the actuator up top, drew it back with an oily slide of lubricated metal, reacquired the shooting position, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

  “Shit!” he said.

  “Safety,” said Earl.

  Frenchy fiddled, ev
entually turned some lever.

  Again he brought the gun to his shoulder.

  One shot rang out. The magazine fell to the ground.

  “Shit!”

  “Now, see, Frenchy here thought he already knew. He didn’t wait to learn. He already knew and he wanted to show off. You don’t show off at this work, ’cause it’ll get you killed. Got that? This is about teamwork, not hey-look-at-me. Also”—he winked at Frenchy—“when you load the mag, you gotta slap the bottom to make sure the mag lock has clicked in. Sometimes it don’t lock up all the way but the spring tension holds the mag in place, and you think it’s time to bebop. But it don’t bebop, it only bops, once. Frenchy didn’t know that, the mag kicked loose. So what does he now say to Baby Face Nelson who is walking toward him with a sawed-off? Slap that mag hard, hear it lock in.”

  Earl locked the magazine in, gave it a stiff smack with his palm, then drew back the actuator, then spun and shouldered it.

  “Plug your ears, boys, but open your eyes. I’m using tracers so’s you can watch the flight of the bullets.”

  He leaned into the gun with a perfect FBI firing position and fired half a magazine and even though his left wrist was stiff with ancient pain, he gripped the foregrip tightly, pulling it in. That was the whole key to the thing. The gun shuddered, the bolt cycled, the empties flew in a spray, the gun muzzle stayed flat though blossoming with blast and flash and spirals of gas, the racket was awesome as the bullets sped off so fastfastfast it seemed like one continuous roar. It was so bright that no flash could be seen but the chemical traces in the tail end of the bullets still igniting, trailing for a split second the incandescence of the round’s trajectory. It was there and not-there at once, the illusion of illumination in the form of a line of simple whiteness, almost electrical, straighter than any rule could draw; the line traced from the muzzle to the target without a waver to it. Twenty-five yards downrange Earl’s gun gnawed a raggedy hole in the center of the silhouette.

  “Great, huh? Well, guess what, that’s all wrong. Never fire more than three-round bursts. In the movies they wail away like that, but that’s because right behind the camera they got a bohunk with a case of .45 blanks ready to scoot out and reload when the camera’s off and the star’s taking his Camel break. You will carry all your ammo, and you don’t want to use it up for nothing, and unless you are a genius, every goddamn shot after the third is going into the trees. I happen to be a genius. Maybe Frenchy is too. But no other birds here appear to be. This is how we do it.”

  He turned again, brought the gun into play and tapped out three short three-round bursts. Each burst scored the head of the target, each leaked its flicker of flame. By the end, there was no head, only shredded tatters of cardboard.

  They worked with Thompsons in the afternoon and the .45s in the morning for several days. They worked hard, and some got the swing of it faster than others, but by the end, each of them was edging toward some kind of proficiency. The tracers, an old FBI training trick, made it easier for a buddy to read the trajectory of the rounds and advise you when the muzzle roamed, throwing bullets to no particular destination. But Earl warned them only to use the tracers in training, never in battle, because first of all they were a dead giveaway to your position and secondly the trace was incendiary and if fired into dry wood buildings or sage or other undergrowth or dead leaves or whatever, would light up a fire. No problem on an island like Iwo, but not good in a city like Hot Springs, where most of the casinos were old wooden structures.

  On the fifth day, Earl introduced them to the BAR.

  “Now this here gun is a real Jap-killer. It fires big .30 government cartridges at about twenty-three hundred feet per second and they will tear up anything they hit. If you got a boy behind soft cover, this will punch through and get him. Against cars or light trucks, this here thing is The Answer. Twenty-round clips, effective range out to one thousand yards, gas-operated, man-portable, but no lightweight. About sixteen pounds. They usually come with bipods for support, but the first thing that happens is the bipod is junked. These guns already got their bipods junked. Each squad in the Marines or the infantry had one of these guns; they were the base of fire, set up to cover all squad maneuvers and offer long-range suppressive fire.

  “We will use these guns sparingly. They will fire through three walls and kill someone across the street going to the bathroom. But you should know them, anyhow, in case we come up against some real desperadoes, who are hunkered in good and solid and want to shoot it out to the last man. That’s when the BAR comes into play. It ain’t a John Wayne gun. You don’t spray with it like you see in the movies. It’s got too much power for that.”

  But the boys found it much easier to shoot than the Thompsons, for the reason that it was heavier, and its weight absorbed the recoil better and because the longer .30 governments were much easier to load in the magazines than the stubby .45s for the Thompson. They’d shoot it at the hundred-yard range, and quickly became proficient at clustering five-round bursts center mass on the silhouettes.

  Half days were spent on weapons they’d be least likely to use, the Winchester 97 shotguns and the M-1 carbines. And then they took Sunday off, and most went into Texarkana for a movie or some other form of relaxation while Earl and D.A. plotted the schedule. Everybody knew what was coming next.

  The fun part.

  10

  Owney never held his meetings at the same place twice. It was a habit from the old days. You didn’t want to fall into a pattern, because a pattern would get you killed. If you have a Mad Dog Coll hunting you, you learn the elementary lessons of evasion, and you never forget them.

  Thus most of the higher-ranking Grumleys, the bigger casino managers, the head bookmakers, the wire manager, his lawyer, F. Garry Hurst, the men who ran the men who ran the numbers runners, and so forth and so on, were used to being banged all over town when Owney convened them.

  They never knew when the call would come and what travel it would demand. So today’s mandate was usual in the sense that it was no more unusual than any other mandate. He called the meeting for the bathhouse called the Fordyce, on Central, which had been temporarily closed for the occasion.

  They sat naked, swaddled in sheets, under an ornate glass roof, multitinted and floral. It was somehow like sitting in flowers. It was daytime, as befit business. Sunlight streamed through the window above, incandescent and weirdly lit by the hyacinth-tinted glass. Each had bathed in the 141-degree water until each had felt like a raisin. Then each had been subjected to a needle-pointed shower that ripped open their pores. Now they sat in a steam room, looking like Roman senators in togas, except that the vapors swept this way and that. Outside, Grumleys patrolled to make certain no interlopers or accidental eavesdroppers were in the vicinity. A couple of Grumley gals even moved into the women’s bath area, so as to make sure no ladies lurked there.

  The meeting was businesslike, though the Owney on display here was not the cosmopolitan Owney the host, anxious to put on a display of savoir faire for an important out-of-towner, complete to a version of a British accent derived more from an actor than from actual memory. In the privacy of his own sanctum, where his power was absolute and his prestige unchallenged, Owney devolved to the tones of the East Side of Manhattan, where he had been nurtured from the age of thirteen through the age of forty-three.

  “Nothin’,” he said again, chewing on an unlit cigar, another Havana. “You got fuckin’ nothin’?”

  “Not a dang thing,” said Flem Grumley, the senior Grumley since Pap Grumley’s clap had kicked in a month ago, declaring that seasoned operative hors de combat. Flem, hardened in the bootlegging wars of the ’20s, spoke a brew of Arkansas diction so dense it took years of concentration to master its intricacies. “We’s run the town up, we’s run it down. These damned old boys done slipped the noose. Damnedest goddamndangdest thang.”

  Owney chewed this over a bit, shredding his cigar even further.

  “Only,” said Flem, “only
a bit later cousin Slidell, that being Will’s boy Slidell, not Jud’s nor Bob’s, nor—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Owney, to halt the list of Slidell Grumley fathers.

  “Uh, yes sir, that Slidell, he done checked back at the Best out Ouachita. Seems a feller rented two cabins fer a week. Older feller, sad-like. A younger feller jined him, tough-like, so it goes.”

  “There were two of them, then?” Owney remarked.

  “Wal, sir, maybe. Manager says them boys stopped showing up midweek. Never came back. Will’s Slidell got the key, checked out each cabin. Wasn’t nary much-like. Extry underwear, toothbrushes and powder, a Little Rock newspaper. No guns or nothing. Them boys travel light, even if they’s the ones, even if they’s wasn’t.”

  “I don’t fuckin’ like this shit one bit,” Owney said aloud. “If they was nobodies, they fucking wouldn’t have thought it to be a big deal. They mighta left town, but not before checking out. These guys, they knew I’d be looking for them. That fuckin’ cowboy who hit Siegel, he knew me. He looked at me and said”—and here he lapsed into a passably convincing imitation of the rumbly vessel that was Earl’s sulfur-scorched voice—“ ‘How ’bout it, Mr. Maddox, you or any of your boys want a taste?’ He fucking knew me. How’s he know me? I don’t know him. How the fuck he know me?”

  Owney gazed off into the vapors as if fascinated by this new problem. That guy had the best hands he’d ever seen.

  “That fucking guy, he could hit. I managed a boxer for a few years. Big lug couldn’t hit shit. But I know the fight game, and that boy was a hitter!”

  “Could they be New York guys? Or Chicago guys?”

  “They could be Chicago guys,” Owney said. “Bugsy was a New York guy and he sure as shit din’t know them. I’d a heard if they was New York. Man, he hit that yid hard!”