Johnny was fast. Charles was faster.
Mind to arm, arm to hand, hand to trigger, trigger to hammer, hammer to cartridge, cartridge to powder, powder to bullet, the need to act and the act itself were almost simultaneous. Charles felt energy and purpose coursing through his veins, liberated at last from the long discipline, and instantly alchemized into pure gunfighter’s hunger to win. 157345C, all its safeties carefully disabled, streaked from where it was to where it had to be without thought or motive but only instinct, and Charles fired three times so fast, he seemed to have pulled a Thompson gun from his pants. His finger was a jackhammer against the trigger, firing before the recoil impulse could distract the gun muzzle, itself locked in a grid of hand, wrist, and forearm muscle crushing so tight it could have rendered the steel into pure diamond. He did not shoot well, but he did shoot fast. The first bullet grazed Johnny on the right side, the second went in behind the shoulder, and the third, the killer, off the gun’s inevitable rise, hit Johnny square in the back of the neck, blowing a blister the size of a quarter into that stretch of flesh, continuing through the low brain on a slight upward angle, then exiting rather tidily from just beneath the right eye.
—
EONS LATER, IT seemed, but in the same second, Hollis fired once, Hurt twice, each of the three a lethal but not immediately effective body shot, each of the three moot. Dillinger was done after Charles’s third bullet had eviscerated most of his right-skull gray stuff.
His knees went, and like a sack of potatoes tossed off a truck, he hit the ground with a thud that could be heard in the instant of silence decreed by the thunderclaps of the six shots delivered in so small a fraction of time. He pitched forward onto the bricks of the alley, and Charles was surprised to see they’d progressed that far along Lincoln, but there the man lay, a pool of red spreading like a flood from his perforations, collecting in a lake of blood next to his head. The hat had fallen away and his feet were oddly pigeon-toed.
Charles knelt by the fallen man, who still breathed out of reflex, and when he saw the now gray lips muttering, bent close to hear the last words.
“I’m not dressed for company,” Johnny said, and if there was a passing then, Charles missed it, as the eternal stillness of the dead just seemed to fall from nowhere and drape the body, no trespassers allowed.
With his left forefinger Charles touched the carotid, that river of blood that united brain and heart running shallowly through the neck, and could feel no pulsations.
“He’s gone,” he said to Hurt, who now leaned close to him, staring at the downed man, the blood, all of it bright, all of it shiny, in the power of the streetlights.
When they rose, they rose into a new world, one without Public Enemy No. 1 in it. It took a second, or possibly two, for this electric news to dazzle the crowd. And then—chaos.
Charles, with Hurt and Hollis as fellow centurions, stood mute above the ruined man, while some kind of crazed energy radiated from the crowd. The magic of the name turned into sheer electricity.
“It’s Dillinger!”
“Jesus Christ, they got Dillinger!”
“Just shot him down, you know, bang, bang.”
“I don’t believe it!”
“Look at him. Big Public Enemy Number One, flat-faced, in an alley.”
“Ever see so much blood?”
“Did they have a machine gun?”
“That tall cop, he’s the one. Man, did he shoot fast.”
“Never gave the poor guy a chance.”
And then it was Purvis stepping into the light—the limelight, actually—and taking over.
“Folks, folks, you have to move back and give us room! Anybody hurt, anybody else shot?”
“This lady here is slightly wounded.”
“Okay, ma’am, just relax, we have medical on the way.”
Other agents flooded in, chasing a few ghouls from Johnny’s body, where they had knelt to dab their handkerchiefs, hat brims, even the tip of a tie, into his blood. The reinforcements formed a cordon, driving against the crowd’s need to see, to be close, to participate in something called history. Sirens rose as the Chicago police, called by half a dozen, poured into the scene en masse.
Zarkovich seemed to have battled his way to Charles.
“You really blasted the sonovabitch. Man, great shooting.”
Then it was Purvis.
“Charles, congratulations. I don’t have to tell you what this means. You’re the best.”
Charles nodded, turned to indicate Hollis and Hurt. “These fellows were in on it too. It’s them as much as me.”
“I’ll make sure the Director knows.”
Someone suggested that Charles and his cohort move away from the body, to a Division car, and there relax and wait for Sam to arrive. Meanwhile, reporters—was it the smell of blood in the air that drew them?—arrived, along with photographers, who angled in for shots, each flashbulb a miniburst of illumination that blanched color from what it touched and created shadow and design and drama and artistic unity where there had been nothing but randomness. The hollowed-out pops of the bulbs firing became the preeminent sound and visual signature of the event as it imploded from reality into journalism.
“Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” said Charles to Hurt and Hollis, and he pinched a Camel out of its half-empty pack, slipped it between his lips, and fired it up over his Zippo. The smoke felt great as it rushed into and inflated his lungs, bringing with it just the slightest softening toward blur. He was surprised how weak he felt. The comforting curve of the Ford fender supported him, and he tried to relax, to shake the heebie-jeebies, to eliminate the images of the automatic ripping to life as he pumped the three faster than a burning jackrabbit into Johnny. You don’t want to treasure the killing part, only the shooting. It was good combat shooting—that was a compliment he allowed himself.
He watched as an ambulance nosed its way down the jammed Lincoln to pull up to the scene at the alleyway. Two attendants got out, opening the rear door, but the crowd was too thick and too intense to be penetrated by a gurney, so finally six agents just formed an ad hoc funeral squad and lifted Johnny, still facedown, and lugged him to the ambulance. An arm spilled out loosely, the hand, a big athlete’s hand, now utterly relaxed. The guys got him into the ambulance without much in the way of ceremony or dignity and laid him on the floor. They turned him, awkwardly, so that his empty eyes peered upward. Charles could see vivid stains spattering the white shirt where Johnny’s life fluid had arrived after he’d been deposited on the alley surface. Someone had put the straw hat on his chest, as if at a country funeral.
“You two,” he said to Hollis and Hurt, “go take a last look so you remember it good and will always have a sense of what you done here tonight and take proper pride in it.”
The two slipped off for that rite, just as Sam Cowley emerged from the death site, pushed his way through the crowd, and got to Charles.
“Charles, please, shake my hand. Outstanding.”
“I heard we hit two gals.”
“It’s nothing. Grazed them. They don’t even have to go to the hospital. They’re already bandaged and giving our folks statements.”
“That’s good.”
“Charles, I know you must be exhausted, both physically and mentally. I want you to get away from this circus, go to the office, file your report, then go home and take the next couple days off. See a ball game, have a drink or two, ride the roller coaster at Riverview or the zeppelin at the World’s Fair, go to the big science museum. Or just sleep. I don’t want to see you until Wednesday.”
“Yes sir.”
“And I don’t mind telling you, the Director is immensely pleased. I was on the phone with him when the shooting occurred. We could hear the shots. It was a tense few minutes until the news arrived. I shouldn’t have worried. As I said, this time we had the gunfighter.”
/>
“Just want to know: was he armed? I fired before I saw a gun, but he sure as hell wasn’t reaching to itch a mosquito bite.”
“Colt .380 Pocket Model, loaded and cocked. Another half second and he could have shot you or some poor lady in rhapsody over Gable.”
“Good. Good to know. Sometimes it happens, but I don’t cotton to shooting the unarmed.”
“Don’t you worry, Charles. You saved a batch of lives here tonight—your own, Hurt’s and Hollis’s, people in the crowd, and all the people he may have killed on down the line. And you may have saved the Justice Department’s Division of Investigation.”
26
GLENVIEW, ILLINOIS
July 23, 1934
IT WAS A GOOD DREAM. Les was in the Forest Preserve on a beautiful fall afternoon, with Helen and Ronnie and Darlene. J.P. was there, and so were Fatso and Jimmy Murray and the others. Then Johnny came along, on a bicycle, with his gal, Billie Frechette, waving and rushing to join them. The sun was bright but not hot, the waters sparkling, the pines filling the air with that spruce perfume, and everybody was happy. Even goofy Homer showed up, with that whore gal nobody liked, but Homer was on his best behavior and, for once, his jokes were actually funny.
Then it dissolved. Someone was shaking him. He forced his eyes open to see Helen’s grave face just above him and knew from her drawn and pinched look that something bad had happened.
“Uh—” He struggled to find some clarity of mind and vision. The bed was so warm, he wanted to curl deeper into it, sink into its safety and protection. He didn’t want to be awake. He didn’t want to hear what she had to say and to deal with it. But there was no escape.
“Les! Les, they killed Johnny last night. They shot him outside some movie show downtown. It’s in all the papers and all over the radio.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Les.
“Federals. They shot him down like a dog. He didn’t even get his gun out!”
Les cranked upright, putting his bare feet on the cold floor, hoping to shock some electricity into himself. Oddly, he felt no grief, only the arrival of a large bundle of confusion. What did this mean? What else was happening? Who talked? Were the detectives outside even now? How much time did he have? He was going to see his kids tonight, was that off? Would his mother assume he had been killed too? That’s the way her mind worked these days. Where were Fatso and J.P.? What about the big Rock Island train job? What would—
But then the grief struck.
It struck hard, heavy, and hurtful. It amazed him how much pain he felt. Johnny, gone! How could that be? He’d just met with the big guy a day ago. Johnny: bigger than life, with a lopsided smile for everybody, a glad hand, a twenty-spot for every loser, cool when lead was flying, smart where the planning was needed, able to hold everything altogether on force of personality. It was as if a huge hole had been ripped in the sky and was sucking stuff out into nothingness, and he felt inadequate to patch it, to save what remained.
“I told him to be careful. But the big dope thought everybody loved him so much, nobody would ever rat him out. If they were waiting, he was ratted. The idiot. He had to live like a king ballplayer instead of a guy on the run, which is what he was. Some clerk notices him going in and calls the Division, and they show up and hose him down.”
Helen hugged him to make the pain stop hurting. It didn’t work much, but he appreciated the softness and looseness of her breasts against him, the warmth of her body, the sensation that she would give him everything she could and never let him down, and that she, and a few others, stood for what was worth preserving in the world.
Of course next to arrive, as if by on-schedule railroad, was the rage.
The Division! Those bastards. They were so new at this stuff, how’d they get so good so fast when at Little Bohemia they’d been clowns and fools, tripping on their own size 14s. In his mind, he saw them standing over poor Johnny and pumping bullet after bullet into him, maybe with a big Thompson gun, laughing and hooting. In fact, he knew it had to be that lanky champion who’d stood still as a sculpture on Wolf Road while Les’s squirts raised the dust all around him and he just coolly returned fire, even clipping Les’s brim! That guy! That guy!
“Les, are you all right?”
“I am, I am. Just shook-up a little. Honey, put a pot of coffee on, I need it to get my brain working straight. I’m going to hop in the shower. Where’s J.P.? Does he know?”
“He hasn’t showed yet.”
“Okay, after the coffee, we have to pack. We’ve got to make tracks until this settles down and—”
“But the kids!”
“I know, honey, I’m disappointed too. But I’m telling you, we’ve got to scram. We’ll go somewhere else, to a town that ain’t so hot, I’ll get a big score set up, and then we’ll be out of the life. It’ll all work out, you’ll see.”
—
LES WAS OUT OF THE SHOWER by 7:20 and into his glen plaid double-breasted over fresh white shirt with red foulard tie by 7:30. Always had to look sharp! What was the point of gangstering if you didn’t look the part?
At 7:35, J.P. showed with the car. Les poured him a cup of joe.
“You heard about Johnny?”
“Just a few minutes back, Les. Jesus Christ, we just were drinking with him a night or so ago.”
“Shows how fast it can happen. Anybody on you?”
“Nah. Empty streets all the way over. None of those black Fords with two guys in ’em. We’re clear.”
“For now.”
“What’s our move?”
“Our move is, out of town, fast and far. Like . . . by eight.”
“Jesus, you ain’t messing around.”
“J.P., we don’t know one damned thing about this yet, and I ain’t hanging around for further developments. Maybe the Italians ratted out Johnny and—”
“The latest—I just heard this on the radio, it’s not in the papers yet—is some bimbo he was renting a room from blew the whistle. She made him and then used him to leverage a beef with Immigration. Some foreign dame, they want to ship her out. She tipped off the Division boys, and wore a red dress so they could spot her at that movie. They’re calling her the Lady in Red. She’s the one who—”
“I ain’t buying that. They always put out some cover story to make it sound like it was nothing but dumb luck. That way, they cover up what’s really going on, and who they’re really talking to, and until we know what’s really going on, we have to make ourselves scarce. Are you ready for a long drive?”
“Sure, Les. I’m with you, you know that. I always am. What about Fatso and Carey and Jimmy Murray?”
“Right now, it’s every man for himself. But they’re small fry, no way the Division is going to waste manpower on them.”
“Should we call Homer or Charlie Floyd? They’ve got names, they’re famous. Along with you, they’ll be next on the Division squash list.”
“I don’t have a number for them, and if I stop to make inquiries on the subject, that’s just what Mr. Melvin Asshole—excuse me, Helen—Purvis wants.”
“You can’t talk that way around the kids!” called Helen.
“The swearing really ticks her off,” Les confided.
“Dames got rules. All of ’em. Anyway, you’re right on the getaway, Les,” said J.P.
“That’s why I’ve lasted so long in this business. Hell, I’m almost twenty-six!”
Both laughed for the first time that day. They were young, beautiful, deadly gangsters after all. The world knew, loved, feared, and, best of all, respected them. The business involved a lot of fast moves as part of the craft, and if you couldn’t do that, you didn’t belong, as they both knew. Both knew they could lock themselves in a car and put hundreds of miles behind them in a day, rough roads or smooth, paved or dirt, grinding the American highways and state lines to powder behind them. That was p
art of the craft too.
“I got over fifty-five hundred dollars from South Bend still left,” Les said. “That’ll get us a long way. Maybe somewhere in Oklahoma or Arkansas we can pick up some more dough, some little country bank or something.”
“Got it. Oklahoma? We’re not headed to L.A. or Reno? They’re friendly towns.”
“And the Division knows that! No sir. We’re going to Texas. I got my eye on something Mr. Lebman has in San Antonio, and it can’t be any hotter there than it is here.”
“Is Helen okay with this?”
“I am fine,” said Helen from the bedroom. “Les always figures the right move.”
“Boy, did you get a peach!” said J.P.
“Ain’t that the truth. Now, let’s get the machinos in the trunk. The ammo too, though we could use a lot more. I want to be on the road before eight.”
27
McLEAN, VIRGINIA
The present
“ARE WE GETTING ANYWHERE?” asked Bob. He sat in the easy chair in Nick’s den.
“Well . . . sort of. Let’s take a look. Evidence the old goat wasn’t an FBI agent—no mention in files, no official acknowledgment, no mention in any history of the period.”
“Doesn’t sound to me like we’ve made a dent in it.”
“The best thing is the retyped report pages, with what could have been Charles’s name replaced by a name of the exact same length as his own.”
“That one is pretty solid,” said Bob. “The others, not so much.”
“Voice in memo analyzing South Bend robbery, shooting, typical Swagger in understanding the dynamics of shooting situation. Then there’s the culture of the Director’s Bureau, where his word was absolute and the ability to erase dissenters from memory was just like Stalin’s. It certainly wasn’t beyond him to do it. If your grandfather was disappeared, I’ll bet others have been too.”
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