“Trust me on this. And don’t say anything to Blanchard.”
“Okay,” he said. I could hear the reluctance in his voice, but I knew his word was good.
“We’ll talk tonight,” I said.
“I’ll be there, never fear. As of now I’m out of communication with the task force, and I’m not going to be at the meeting this afternoon. I’m just going out to the place about seven and wait in the woods. That way Curtis can’t spring any last-minute bullshit on me. I’ll be there whether he likes it or not.”
“It’s going to be cold tonight,” I cautioned.
“Don’t worry. I’ve spent many an hour on a deer stand in worse weather, so this won’t be nothing.”
“Thanks, Bob,” I said.
“We’ll see one another this evening,” he said.
As I hung up the phone, I fervently hoped we would. The cold feet were running up and down my spine once more, only this time they were more like hooves, and they felt like they belonged to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There was only one reason I could think of why Blanchard would try to keep Wallace out of the operation, and I didn’t like it a bit.
Forty-three
I had a late breakfast with Nell and Aunt Lurleen. Afterward I drove back to my apartment and whiled away the afternoon alternately watching TV and reading a book on the Byzantine Empire. About six that evening I went out and got a grilled cheese sandwich at the 45 Grill, then cruised a few miles down the coast to try to relieve the tension. When I returned to my place I dressed in my dark clothes and my ripple-soled shoes.
Regardless of what Jasper said, that night I didn’t intend to be out there without a weapon I knew and trusted. I unloaded and reloaded the magazine of my Browning Hi-Power 9mm. After I’d worked the slide a half dozen times, I thrust it into my shoulder holster. Under a bulky cardigan sweater and my windbreaker it was unnoticeable. At twenty minutes until nine I locked the front door and headed toward the Motherlode.
Lodke’s three clubs were going full bore that night. The Gold Dust parking lot was full and a line of cars was parked on the shoulder of the highway out front. No doubt the flyers he’d put out had helped his business.
To my surprise everyone was on time. We parked our cars in a grassy clearing a hundred yards behind the club. The two stolen vehicles were perfect for the job—a tan Plymouth and a pale green Pontiac Catalina, both midrange, nondescript, late-model four-doors. Jasper quickly issued the guns. “They’re all loaded,” he said. “But check ‘em out if it makes you feel better.”
I pulled the slide back far enough to determine that there was a cartridge in the chamber, and dropped the magazine out to confirm that it was full. Then I slipped the thing into the waistband of my pants.
“All right, guys,” Jasper said. “This is it. Cinch up your balls and plan to hold your mud. Two and a half hours from now we’ll be in the clear and sitting pretty.”
Weller and I got in the backseat of the Plymouth. Lardass took the wheel with Freddie Ray Arps at his side. The other six men climbed into the Pontiac and it took the lead. Soon we were crossing the bay.
“How’s it going, Hardhead?” I asked.
He shook his head tiredly, and I knew exactly how he felt.
“Hey, Lardass…You ever pulled a highjacking like this?” Arps asked.
“Yeah-man! Like stealing cars better, though.”
“How many you reckon you’ve stole in your life?”
“Shit-man-I-dunno,” he said, once again exhibiting his curious habit of running his words together. From behind he looked like a huge triangle with a tangle of weeds growing at its peak. He was a smooth and skillful driver, though, and forty minutes after we left the Motherlode we turned off on a graveled county lane. After a couple of miles we pulled up before a heavy iron gate that was set some fifty feet or so back from the road. Beside it stood an electrical pole that held a meter base and a meter for the motor that operated the gate. Jasper and Slops jumped from the Pontiac and hurried over to the pole. Moline pulled a pair of wire cutters from his pocket and quickly cut the wire seal on the meter. A couple of seconds later he pulled the meter from its base. Then Jasper aimed a small gadget at the gate’s lock and motioned for Moline to replace the meter. As soon as the meter was back in its socket, the gate swung open.
Once we were all through the gateway, Jasper pointed the gadget a second time and the gate swung shut. Then he squatted down at the gate’s motor and clipped one of the wires that led to the control. “That’s that,” he whispered. “Okay, now everybody get your masks on.”
We pulled our masks over our heads and paired off and started toward the trailers. The others strung out ahead while Weller and I brought up the rear, our ripple-soled shoes soundless on the hard-packed sand. It was a long lonesome walk, one I feared might be my last. The woods were deadly silent without a breath of wind blowing. The oaks that lined the trail were old, and heavy with their many years’ accumulation of Spanish moss. By now the full moon had climbed above the tops of the trees to hang like a baleful eye against the eastern sky.
I’ve heard people say that their whole lives flashed before them in moments of extreme danger. Mine didn’t that evening, but I did feel small and alone in a way I hadn’t since I was a child. It was very much in my mind that I might meet my end in the next few minutes, and there is nothing like the threat of imminent death to make you face the grim reality of your essential alienation in a vast and pitiless cosmos. I suppose it’s for the sake of our sanity, but we moderns view pain and despair and defeat as abnormal, something apart from the natural order of things. But there’s nothing at all abnormal about them. The pathetic, fruitless life and the tragically undeserved death are just as much a part of this world we live in as candy canes and warm, fuzzy puppies and pretty little girls.
I was lost in these thoughts when I heard Weller say in a curiously plaintive voice, “This don’t feel right, Hog. If I just didn’t have so many debts coming at me right now ...”
As we reached the mouth of the clearing the deep sense of foreboding I’d harbored for two weeks grew almost unbearable. Jasper reached down to clip the phone cord while the others fanned out toward the trailers. Weller and I stood quietly, waiting for the sound of the first knock.
And then I saw it. Suddenly, it all came together in my mind, and I knew what was dreadfully wrong about this night. I saw what was going to happen, too, and at that precise moment I acted on an impulse. But it was an impulse I’ve never regretted. I bumped the old man with my shoulder, and whispered, “Get the hell out of here, Hardhead.”
“Whaaa—?” he began.
“Go,” I said, pushing him away. “Now.”
He stared at me for a brief moment before his head gave one quick, affirmative nod. Then he stepped down into the shallow ditch that bounded the lane, and quickly his dim silhouette shrank and dwindled into the dark wall of woods like a crafty old bass sinking back to the bottom of its murky pool.
I stood silently with my heart pounding in my chest as I watched Jasper and Rozel approach O. P. Giles’s trailer. They were like men moving in slow motion, or in one of those dreams where you’re fleeing some nameless terror and it’s like you’re mired in molasses.
Finally, after what seemed like an eon of time, they reached the door of the Airstream. Then they looked at each other and I saw Jasper nod. After that things happened fast. Rozel had just raised his hand to knock when the night exploded into a Bosch fantasy. The door of the trailer flew violently open in his face, and I saw Curtis Blanchard standing in the doorway, illuminated by the dim glow of the single streetlight across the drive. He was in flak gear, and he held an M-16.
The front door on one of the other trailers was kicked in from the outside, and at the same time I heard a gasping squawk from my walkie-talkie. One pair of robbers had obviously jumped the gun, not waiting for Sparks to secure the lead trailer. They too were about to get a rude welcome.
Before Rozel could react, a long burst
of flame erupted from the muzzle of Blanchard’s M-16, and the big hood lurched backward, ripped to shreds by the tiny, high-velocity bullets. He fell to the ground and quivered horribly for a couple of seconds, and then he was as still as he was ever going to be.
Jasper Sparks had considerable presence of mind, and it took only a second for him to catch the drift of what was coming down. Instead of running, he dived forward and scuttled up under the trailer. This caught Blanchard by surprise, and he stood motionless for a moment in the doorway before he leaped to the ground and pointed the barrel of his rifle under the trailer. At that exact moment I heard a shotgun blast across the way. Then guns were going off all around me.
I turned my head in time to see Freddie Ray Arps stagger out onto the drive, his face half blown away by buckshot. Just then a stray round hit the streetlight, and the trailer park was reduced to a nightmare world of dull orange flashes and living corpses that danced and capered in the cold silver light of the rising moon.
The tall, slim form of Tom-Tom Reed ran wildly into the clearing and got caught in a hideous crossfire. At least a dozen rounds must have hit him in the space of a couple of seconds, and he collapsed into a big pile of leaves, his long legs kicking and twitching in his death throes.
In the middle of it all I heard someone huffing and puffing and sensed a large, dark mass headed my way. The mass took on human form and I recognized Lardass Collins. Watching him try to run was funny and pitiful at the same time. He came jiggling down the drive like a bouncing bowl of Jell-O, his mask gone and his goofy eyes rolling wildly, the Remington pump held unused at port arms across his chest. He’d never been in a deal like this before, and he didn’t like it. Gunfire flashed everywhere and the bodies were falling.
Just to my right I saw Blanchard squatting beside Big Harry’s lifeless body. His M-16 roared as he fired burst after burst up under the trailer’s foundation. Out of the corner of my eye I caught movement on my left. I turned to see Slops Moline, his hands now shorn of their weapon, crawling desperately away from one of the trailers while a young Mississippi state trooper in flak gear limped slowly along behind him. Slops had lost his mask too, and the trooper had been hit; he held one hand tightly to his lower abdomen, and in the other he clutched a large revolver.
Suddenly, Bob Wallace materialized beside me, an Astros baseball cap low over his eyes, his Colt Python at arm’s length and pointed straight at Collins. “Stop!” he yelled.
But stopping wasn’t on Lardass’s agenda that night; he just trundled relentlessly on like a slow-moving locomotive with no brakes, his mouth opened wide in a silent wail. Then he began to raise the shotgun to his shoulder, but before he could fire, Wallace’s Colt bellowed twice, and Lardass fell back on his fat butt, his legs stretched out in front of him in a wide V. Then he did the strangest thing: he belched a long, earthshaking belch that seemed to go on forever. Finally, when it had ended at last, he smacked his lips a couple of times and never moved another inch. Instead, he just sat there, graveyard dead, yet perfectly balanced on his great wide ass.
Then the young trooper caught up with Moline. In two lurching steps he got ahead and pointed his revolver down at the Charleston hood’s upturned face at point-blank range. Moline had stopped his scrabbling, crablike crawl, and his mouth hung open in utter amazement, his eyes wide with fear. “Oh, OOO—” he gurgled, trying to say God only knows what when the young cop’s finger tightened on the trigger, and Slops Moline was bound for Glory.
A second shotgun blast took Freddie Arps down for good, and for a few seconds the air was full of an eerie hush. Then three quick shots rang out from one of the trailers down the way. They were counterpointed by a burst of M-16 fire far off behind the office trailer where Blanchard had gone after Sparks. A few moments later I saw the slim form of Jacky-Jack Rolland stroll out from behind the second trailer to the left as casually as a man walking his dog. He stopped, looked up at the sky for a second, and then toppled slowly to the ground like a tree cut off at its base. Somewhere nearby an owl hooted in annoyance at all the racket. After a moment its great wings beat the air as it took flight, and the world fell silent once again.
Then from out of nowhere a figure materialized in front of me, and a shotgun barrel was beginning to rise my way when I heard Bob Wallace say in an iron-hard voice, “He’s an officer!”
The man didn’t react. Wallace flicked on the flashlight he held in his left hand, and put the beam on the cop’s face. I got a quick glimpse of a surly young troll with a pair of disapproving Bible Belt eyes, then I heard an ominous click as Wallace cocked his Python. I raised my own Browning and clicked off the safety. The man squinted for a moment against the light, as though he was trying to make a decision. Finally he lowered the gun, gave us a brief nod, and faded away. That was the last time I ever saw him.
Wallace and I hurried over to where the fallen trooper now lay clutching his guts. The kid looked up at him, his face white and strained in the dim light. Bob knelt down and shined his flashlight at the wound for a moment, then raised his head and yelled, “Somebody radio for an ambulance!! This boy is hurt bad!!”
Five minutes later cops were everywhere, and right on their heels came the reporters and the TV camera crews. Prominent among them was Blanchard’s newly minted buddy, Perp Smoot.
Forty-four
Two days later Nell and I went up to Greenville to visit her family. On the way I proposed and she accepted. Before supper the night we arrived I asked to see her father alone. Once again the aged bourbon flowed into the fine crystal glasses, and I formally asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage. The man was visibly moved by my thoughtfulness in doing so. Of course he realized that Nell and I were both self-willed adults who’d do as we pleased, but with his kind the old rituals and the old courtesies mean everything. He gave me his blessing, wrung my hand, and welcomed me to the family. After that we got down to a serious discussion about the carnival caper. I told him about seeing Blanchard with Lodke that day in Jackson, and I told him what I’d discovered at the library in Jackson. When I finished his face was grim.
“You know, Manfred,” he began, “somehow what you’re saying doesn’t surprise me a whole lot.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Well, his lying to you about that highway patrol commission, for one thing.” Then he reached up and tapped the side of his head with his forefinger. “And for about a year now this niggling little voice in the back of my mind has been telling me that rascal was up to something big. You see, Curtis has always been the kind of guy who’d try to finesse you into doing things you would have done anyway if he’d just asked you right up front. It’s just his nature, I guess.”
“I’m relieved that you’re even willing to listen to me about this,” I said. “After all, he’s your friend and…”
“Not really a close friend. Besides, when I said ‘Welcome to the family,’ I meant welcome to the family.”
I couldn’t help but grin. “We’re not quite married yet, Mr. Bigelow.”
“Details, details,” he said, waving his hand in dismissal. “I’m a pretty good poker player, and I’d bet on you any day over Curtis even if you weren’t engaged to my daughter.”
“I appreciate that, sir. And I realize I should have told you about seeing him with Lodke that day up at your hunting lodge. I just thought it might be too much to lay on you, your not knowing me any better than you did.”
“I understand,” he said, nodding sympathetically.
“I’m just glad to find out that I’m not the only one with suspicions about the man,” I said.
“I’d say they were a little more than just suspicions. I mean, after all, he didn’t even give those bastards a chance to surrender.”
“No,” I said. “And that was the biggest surprise of the night to me. If I’d known he was planning an outright massacre I wouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
“So there you have it,” he said.
“Yes, but we’ve
got nothing that even borders on proof at this point. But we’ve got his association with Lodke, and the raids he’s made on jobs Lodke has steered. Plus the fact that he sent Nell down there to spy on me, which was pointless.”
“But why in hell did he do that?”
“To throw us together, for one thing. Besides, he wanted her on his team so he could use her federal contacts to massage the federal investigation.”
“He’s been using me there too,” he said ruefully.
“How so?” I asked.
He refilled our glasses from the decanter on his desk. “Through my close relationship with Congressman Ruben Dowell. Ruben’s an old friend of mine, and he’s vice chairman of the House committee that oversees the Justice Department.”
“There’s something else,” I said. “I’m convinced that I was supposed to catch a stray round or two that night.”
“Oh, come on!”
“No, I really am,” I said firmly.
“What makes you think so?”
“Well, for one thing he tried his best to keep Bob Wallace out of the raid. You see, with Wallace out of the way, he would have been the only one who knew who I really was and what I’d been doing. That’s the only reason I can see since this had been planned as a joint Texas/Mississippi task force operation, and Bob’s participation had been understood from the beginning. But Bob’s a tough old bastard, and he refused to be excluded.”
Then I told him about the hard-faced man with the shotgun who’d popped out of nowhere the minute the shooting stopped. “Add to all that the fact that he lied about that highway patrol commission I was supposed to have—”
“But why would he want you dead?”
“Why not? I was the undercover man, and I might have gotten a little too close to Sparks and Lodke and heard some things I wasn’t supposed to hear. So why not just get me out of the way for safety’s sake?”
“You said ‘for one thing.’ What’s the other?”
The Sweet and the Dead Page 20