Hot Springs

by Stephen Hunter

  He heard a thump or something coming from outside. He ducked out, searched, saw nothing. He looked into the casino manager’s office and it appeared empty.

  He thought nothing of it and downstairs he could hear the loud voice of D. A. Parker, “Now, ladies and gentlemen, you just stand clear, we are from the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office and don’t mean no harm to any citizens. You just relax and you’ll be able to go home in a bit.”

  • • •

  There was a quiet moment when the world seemed to hang suspended. Then it exploded.

  Earl sat calmly as the doorway burst open and the first man through swung his .45 like a scythe and neatly clipped the security man at the door. Great anticipation, great reaction. Earl watched the hand with the gun invert, then flash outward toward the stunned piece of beefcake, heard the odd, meaty sound as the gun made contact with the face, and watched as the enforcer dropped into a puddle. Other raiders spilled into the room, fanned out, and took over the room.

  It was good. He was proud. No one was out of control, no one was gesturing crazily or screaming. They simply asserted command. They were professional, and Stretch, who was doing the shouting, had an authoritative voice untarnished by fear or doubt.

  “Hands up! Hands up! Show us hands!”

  Hands went up; people froze. Even the croupiers and the pit bosses froze with the sudden, overwhelming display of force.

  That is, except for the bartender.

  Earl knew his man. The bartender reacted with his guts instead of his brain, and, alone among them, he spun and grabbed reflexively for a weapon under the bar.

  Earl probably could have broken his arm with the sap. Instead, he thumped him lightly and perfectly, intercepting the plunging limb and striking it at the nearly fleshless bone along the arm’s top.

  “Ah!” the bartender groaned, driven to his feet by the agony of the blow that had turned the whole left-hand side of his body numb. He sat back, clasping the bruise to him and in pure animal terror recoiled and tried to go tiny and harmless.

  “You be a good boy!” Earl warned.

  Earl turned back and saw that the situation was now in complete control. Nobody else moved.

  “You okay, Mr. Earl?” asked Slim.

  “B’lieve I’m fine,” Earl said, taking his badge out of his pocket and pinning it to his lapel.

  “You were one inch from catching a tommy gun burst in the guts,” one of the raiders said to the bartender, who still groaned at the pain.

  Earl leaned around the bar, plucked out the pool cue and threw it across the floor. Then he pulled out the sawed-off pump, pointed it down, and jacked the pump hard, ejecting six twelve-gauge shells. He dumped the empty thing on the bar, its pump locked back to expose the unfilled chamber.

  D.A. was there next.

  “Now, ladies and gentlemen, you just stand clear. We are from the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office and don’t mean you any harm. You just relax and you’ll be able to go on home in a minute.”

  “Can we keep our winnings?”

  “Anything on your person you may keep. Sorry, but anything on the tables will be confiscated by the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.”

  There was some grumbling, but as the guns came down and the hands came down, everybody seemed to be making the best of it.

  In another second Carlo Henderson appeared with a squawking guy in a white tux, hands cuffed behind him.

  “Who the hell are you? What the hell is going on? I am Jack McGaffery, manager of the Horseshoe, and Owney Maddox is going to be plenty jacked at this.”

  “Reckon he will be, sir. Are you aware there are illegal gaming devices on the property?”

  “Naw, do tell? Never noticed a thing, there, Sheriff. By God, Owney Maddox will have your ass for this. You ask these folks. He won’t—”

  “Well, sir,” said D.A., “you tell Owney Maddox if he wants to make an appointment with Mr. Becker, to go right ahead. Meanwhile, soon’s we get these folks out of here, we’re going to destroy the illegal—”

  “Destroy! Jesus Christ, man, you must be crazy! Owney will hunt you to your last day on earth!”

  “Don’t think you get it yet, McGaffery. He ain’t hunting us, we’re hunting him. We’re the new boys in town and by God, he will wish we’d never come. All right, fellows, let’s get it done!”

  They began to herd the citizens out the front doors, while a few other raiders moved the casino staff to one side. Earl stood watching and noted that Frenchy finally arrived from upstairs with his Thompson gun. He hadn’t shot anyone yet; that was good.

  “All right,” Earl commanded. “Peanut, you bring the cars up close and we’ll get the axes out and go to town. Y’all, you just sit down over there, and watch what we do so you can give Owney Maddox a good report. Mr. Becker will be here soon. We’ll see if you’re gonna be arrested or not. I want—”

  Earl had a thought before him which was something like “I want you to pay close attention to what a thorough job we do, because we’re going to do a lot more thorough jobs before we’re done,” which was meant for the casino staff as a note of intimidation for Owney Maddox and the Grumley boys. That way he’d know he had some problems and he’d get serious about them.

  But that thought never got out.

  Instead, from the corner of his eye, he saw something move that shouldn’t move at all. It was a shape, a form, a shadow, and no clear outline was visible, for it seemed to emerge from the back entrance in a flash of a second. Earl only recognized that it was a human form and that a hard, cold thing that rose at an angle above it was the double barrels of a shotgun.

  Earl could not command himself to draw and fire. No man could move that fast from the rational part of his brain. He simply swept aside the coat, drawing the gun, his thumb flying to and pushing off the safety, his other hand clasping the grip and cradling the first hand, his elbows flying and then locking, almost as if he’d willed it rather than done it, and in the next billionth of a second the pistol reported loudly, kicked against his tight double-handed grip and ejected a spent brass shell.

  In the close room the noise was tremendous. It bounced off walls and its vibrations sprang dust from rafters and countertops. It unleashed energy from everywhere, as citizens dove for cover, raiders dropped and pivoted, aiming their weapons off the cue from Earl, and even D.A. got his gun out fast and into play. Only Frenchy stood rooted in place, for Earl’s bullet had passed within a foot or so of him before it plowed into the center chest of what appeared to be a vacant, doughy-faced young man in an ill-fitting Sunday-go-to-meeting suit.

  His eyes locked on Earl’s as the shotgun fell from his hand, and implored him for mercy. The request was too late, for it wouldn’t have mattered if Earl fired again or not. The young man went down like a sack of spring apples falling off a wagon, hitting the floor with the crack of bones and teeth breaking; his blood began to pump from his heart across the floor in a spreading satin puddle.

  Everybody was yelling and diving and moving at once, but Earl knew it was over. He’d seen the front sight on the chest at the moment he’d fired.

  “Goddamn, Mr. Earl,” somebody said.

  “That damn boy!” said McGaffery. “He didn’t have the sense of a mule. You didn’t have to kill him, though.”

  “Maybe he ain’t dead,” said a raider.

  “He’s dead,” said D.A., holstering his automatic. “When Earl shoots, he don’t miss. Good shot, Earl. You boys see that? That’s how it’s done.”

  Earl himself felt nothing. He’d killed so many times before, and not only yellow men. He’d killed white men in Nicaragua in 1933, with the same kind of gun that Frenchy carried.

  But he felt it in his heart right away, the difference: that was war. This was—well, what was it?

  “You killed a Grumley,” said the bartender, still holding his bruised wrist. “Now you got the Grumleys on you. Them boys don’t forget a thing. Not never. The Grumleys will mark you and dog you the rest of your days, mister
.”

  “I been dogged before, mister” was all Earl said; then he turned to the raiders and said, “Okay, let’s get going. You got some busting up to do. Come on.”

  But he didn’t like the killing either. It wasn’t a good sign, Grumleys or no Grumleys.

  15

  Owney knew the most important thing about his situation was to pretend he had no situation.

  Thus, though Hot Springs’ insular, gossipy little business, gambling and criminal communities were literally aflame with speculation about the raid, and the Little Rock Courier-Herald and the Democrat had run pieces, it was important for him to suggest that nothing was really amiss. He got up, dressed dapperly—an ascot!—and went for a stroll down Central, saying hello in his best Ronald Colman voice to all those he knew, and he knew many people. He was especially British today, even wearing a Norfolk jacket and flannels, with a dapper tweed hat.

  “Cheerio,” he said wherever he went. “Be good sports. Keep the old upper lip stiff. Tut tut and ho ho, as we say in Jolly Olde.”

  He attended a luncheon for the hospital board and dropped in at the Democratic Ladies’ Club, where he made a donation of $1,000 toward the clubhouse redecorating project slated for that fall. He met Raymond Clinton, the Buick agency owner, and had a long discussion about the new Buicks. They were beauts! He said he was thinking about retiring his prewar limo. It was time to be modern and American. It was the ’40s. The Nazis and the Japs were whipped! We had the atom bomb!

  But even as he was going about his public business, he was relaying orders through runners to various of his employees, directing a search, putting pressure on the police, sending out scouting parties, setting up surveillance at Becker’s office in City Hall and convening a meeting.

  The meeting was scheduled for 5:30 P.M., in the kitchen at the brand-new Signore Giuseppe’s Tomato Pie Paradise, where Pap Grumley and several ranking Grumleys, F. Garry Hurst, Jack McGaffery and others showed up as ordered. Everybody gathered just outside the meat locker, where about a thousand sausages hung in bunches and strings. The smell of mozzarella and tomato paste floated through the air.

  “No siree, Mr. Maddox,” said Pap. “My boys, they been up, they been down. These coyotes have vanished. Don’t know where they done gone to ground, but it ain’t in no goddamn hotel nor no tourist camp. Maybe they’s camping deep in the hills. Shit, my boys couldn’t find a thing. We may have to go to the hounds to git on these crackers. Know where I can git me a troop of prize blue ticks if it comes to that. Them dogs could smell out a pea in a pea patch the size of Kansas. One particular pea, that is.”

  He spat a gob of a fluid so horrifyingly yellowed that even Owney didn’t want to think about it. It landed in the sink with a plop.

  “You got boys coming in?” Owney, the high baron of New York’s East Side, asked in his native diction.

  “Yes sir. Got boys from Yell County. The Yell County Grumleys make the Garland County Grumleys look tame. They’re so mean they drink piss for breakfast.”

  Owney turned to Jack McGaffery.

  “And you? You made the fuckin’ calls I told you?”

  “Yes sir. We can get gun boys from Kansas City and St. Paul inside a week if we need ’em. It ain’t a question of guns. We can put guns on the street. Hell, there’s only a dozen or so of them.”

  “Yeah, but we gotta find the fuckers first.”

  He turned to Hurst.

  “What do you make of it?”

  “Whoever thought this out, thought it out well,” said the lawyer. “These boys were well armed and well trained. But more to the point, whoever is planning this thing has thought long and hard about what he is attacking.”

  “Garry, what the fuck are you tawkin’ about?” said Owney.

  “Consider. He—whomsoever he may be—has certainly made a careful study of Hot Springs from a sociological point of view. He understands, either empirically or instinctively, that all municipal institutions have been, to some degree or other, penetrated and are controlled by yourself. So he sets up what appears to be a roving unit. It stays nowhere. It has no local ties, no roots, no families. It can’t be reported on. It can’t be spied on. It can’t be betrayed from within. It permits no photographs, its members do not linger or speak to the press, it simply strikes and vanishes. It’s brilliant. It’s even almost legal.”

  “Agh!” Owney groaned. “I smell old cop. I smell a cop so old he knows all the tricks. You ain’t pulling no flannel over this old putz’s eyes.”

  He looked back at Jack.

  “The cowboy was the fast one. The rest were punks. But you said a old man was in command. That’s what you said.”

  “He was. But I only heard the name Earl. ‘Earl, that was a great shot,’ the old man said to the fast cowboy after he clipped Garnet. But no other names were used. The old one was in charge but the cowboy was like the sarge or something.”

  “Okay,” Owney said. “They will hit us again, the bastards. You can count on it. They are looking for the Central Book, because they know when they get that, they got us. Meanwhile, we will be hunting them. We got people eyeballing Becker. We follow Becker, he’ll be in contact with them, and somehow, he’ll lead us to them.”

  “Yes sir,” said Flem Grumley, “ ’ceptin’ that Becker never showed at his office this morning, and when we sent some boys by his house, it was empty. He moved his family out. He’s gone underground too.”

  “He’ll turn up. He’s got speeches to make, he’s got interviews to give. He wants to be governor and he wants to ride this thing into that big fuckin’ job. He’s just another hustler. He don’t scare me. That goddamn cowboy, he scares me. But I’ve been hunted before.”

  “Pray tell, by whom, Owney?” asked Garry.

  “Ever hear of Mad Dog Coll?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yeah, well, Mad Dog, he comes gunning for me. He steals my best man, fuckin’ Jimmy Lupton, and holds him for ransom. I got to pay fuckin’ fifty long to get Jimmy back. He was a pisser and a half, that fuckin’ kid. Balls? Balls like fuckin’ steel fists. Crazy but gigantic balls. So you know what the lesson is?”

  “No sir.”

  “Bo Weinberg catches him in a phone booth with the chopper. The chopper chops that mick fuck to shit. Don’t matter how big his fuckin’ balls are. The chopper don’t care. So here’s the lesson: everybody dies. Every-fuckin’-body dies.”

  • • •

  After the meeting, Owney went to his car. He checked his watch to discover that it was five o’clock, 6:00 New York time. He told his driver where to go.

  The driver left Signore Giuseppe’s, drove down to Central, turned up it, then up Malvern Avenue and drove through the nigger part of town, past the Pythian Hotel and Baths, past cribs and joints and houses, then turned toward U.S. 65, the big Little Rock road over by Malvern, but didn’t drive much farther. Instead, he stopped at a gas station along the edge of Lake Catherine.

  Owney got out, looked about to make certain he was not followed. Then he went into the gas station, a skunky old Texaco that looked little changed since the early 1920s, when it was built. The attendant, an old geezer whose name should have been Zeke or Lum or Jethro nodded, and departed, after hanging out a sign in the window that said CLOSED. Owney checked his watch again, went to the cooler, took out a nickel bottle of Coca-Cola, pried off the cap and drank it down in a gulp. He took out a cigarette, inserted it into his holder, lit it with a Tiffany’s lighter that had cost over $200, and took a puff.

  The cigarette was half down when the phone rang.

  Owney went to it.

  “Yeah?”

  “I have a person-to-person long-distance call for a Mr. Brown from a Mr. Smith in New York City.”

  “This is Brown.”

  “Thank you, sir. I’ll make the connection.”

  “Thanks, honey.”

  There were some clickings and the rasp of interference, but a voice came on eventually.

  “Owney?”

  �
�Yeah. That you, Sid?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what the fuck, Sid? What the fuck is going on?”

  “Owney, I tell ya. Nothing.”

  “I got a boy busting my balls down here. Some hick ex-soldier prosecutor who thinks he’s Tom Fuckin’ Dewey.”

  “Not good.”

  “No, it ain’t. But I can take care of it. What I’m worried about is that fucker Bughouse Siegel. Frank and Albert and Mr. Lansky all like the little fuck. Is he behind my trouble down here? Is he trying to muscle me out of the business? It might do him some good.”

  “Owney, like you said, I asked some questions. What I hear is he is just pissing money away into a big hole in the ground out in some desert. That hot-number babe he’s got with him, you know, she ain’t too happy. She’s been talking to people about what an asshole he is. She has friends. She has a lot of friends and he leaves her alone in Hollywood to go out to the desert and piss some more money into a hole. Only I hear that broad ain’t ever alone. She still has the hotsies for Joey Adonis, among others.”

  “So the Bughouse has that to worry about before he worries about my little action down here?”

  “That’s what I hear. But Owney, I have to tell you the big guys do like him. They sent him out there. He has their ear. I’d look out for him. He thinks big.”

  “Yeah, he thinks big, with my thoughts. I gave him his whole idea. He thinks he can fuckin’ build a Hot Springs in the desert. There’s nothing there but sand. Here, we got nature, we got mountains, we got lakes, we got—”

  “Yeah, but in that state, gambling’s legal, so you don’t get raided. Remember that. That’s a big plus.”

  “We’re not supposed to get raided here.”

  “So you said. Owney, the guys, they always say, That Owney, he runs a smooth town. That’s why they like to go there. The baths, some dames, some gambling, no problem, no hassles with the law. That’s what they like. As long as you provide that for them, you will have no problems.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Owney. Best thing you can do is forget about Bugsy, and keep that town running smooth. That’s your insurance policy.”