G-Man

by Stephen Hunter

  “Should we have gotten dogs, Charles?” Mel asked.

  “You need something for them to read scent,” said Charles. “They can’t work without a scent. And since we ain’t got nothing off of Floyd but reports, they’ll just bark and shit and cause trouble.”

  “Good, good, I knew I made the right decision.”

  Everybody laughed. Mel, as always, was the charmer.

  “I love it when I make the right decision,” he added, to more laughter.

  Outside, where all eyes were trained intensely, East Ohio farmland rolled by, but in this part of the state, just off the big river, almost in Pennsylvania and the real East, it wasn’t the endlessly flat farmland of legend but instead hillier, full of clumps of gaudy orange-red trees, shadowy glades, small valleys, bare knobs, crosscut by streams, dotted with ponds, land that glaciers had torn all to hell a couple hundred thousand years ago, pushing boulders up here, squishing them down there, almost as if the ice sheets were designing a landscape in which desperadoes could hide efficiently. Wasn’t much to grow on land so scrambled, so it was mostly small dairy or sheep or cattle spreads owned by hard workers who worshipped as hard as they worked and were as hospitable to outsiders as hard as they worshipped.

  “If these people weren’t so damned decent,” said Ed Hollis, “we wouldn’t have any trouble at all. In Iowa they’d call the cops the first sign of a stranger. Here, they invite ’em in, give ’em dinner, and a free night’s lodging, a new suit of clothes, and loan ’em the car and the daughter.”

  Everybody laughed again.

  “I take it they’re more careful with their daughters in Iowa, eh, Ed?” asked Mel.

  “Damn, look at one of those gals and you end up in jail! It was easier to get into law school than to get a date with my wife. I had to submit more forms, some in triplicate!”

  Everybody laughed. Hollis could be funny.

  Despite the heavy weapons they carried and the prospect of killing at any moment, the four were in a good mood, maybe happy to be out of the Chicago Office pressure cooker, and Mel, freed from the awkwardness of his situation, was especially relaxed, as he probably saw this as a way to get back in the Director’s good graces. At the same time, he had no problem deferring the tactical issues to Charles.

  “Where is that damned boy?” wondered Mel. “You’d think he’d have sense to know the jig was up by now, get tired of sleeping in mud and begging for sandwiches from farmers’ wives, and turn himself in, if only for the hot food.”

  “He’s not what you call blessed in the brain department,” said Ed. “But, about now, he’s probably figured out it’s over.”

  “That ain’t how their minds work,” said Charles, looking intently out the window as trees and small hills covered in pasture grass rolled by. “They always think they can get away with it. They just don’t believe in no odds, and they don’t learn no lessons. They’re just as stubborn as they are stupid.”

  “Farm ahead,” noted McKee. “Maybe he’s on lunch break again.”

  “He sure does like to eat, doesn’t he?” said Mel. “I never met a hungrier bank— Hey!”

  They all saw it. The farmhouse was on the right, behind a mailbox with the name CONKLE painted on it, and the farm’s standard features included auxiliary structures—a barn, sheds, silo, and corncrib—and a car had just lurched to a rough halt on its journey out, then jerked backwards, in a rush, behind the corncrib, which, loaded to the brim with cobs, offered concealment from the road.

  “Oh, boy,” said Mel, “another brilliant move by Pretty Boy. Don’t keep driving, as if it’s a normal trip. No, halt and pull back. Make sure we notice.”

  Hollis stopped the car, and the four agents peeled out, as Purvis gave a hands-up halt signal to the trailing vehicle and indicated with the same crude gesture that the four East Liverpool officers should move in on the oblique rather than going straight up the gut as he and his agents were about to do. The four men in blue got out, all with lever-actions or pump guns, and began their circle around toward the back of the farmhouse.

  On the crouch, the other three agents began to close in on the vehicle behind the corncrib. The next sound was pumps gliding back, then being slammed forward, primed for firing. Charles went alone on the right. He didn’t need help because he held the Thompson locked against his shoulder, but downward at a forty-five-degree angle. The thing was a beast, especially with the flair of the drum guaranteeing extreme awkwardness, but it was otherwise so brilliantly designed that all the weight seemed to pull it toward the target, and you couldn’t heft it without feeling that near-gravitational force yank it toward the act of shooting. He’d checked the bolt—back—and with his thumb felt that the safety was off and the fire selector set on full automatic.

  It was a sunny afternoon, twilight just coming on, the air crisp and biting, a brisk north wind pushing down from the higher latitudes, chilling all in its path, yet aside from the rush as it poured across the land, not a sound could be heard anywhere. It was a good day for killing, as fall seems to stir the blood for the hunt.

  When Ed and Sam seemed to have almost completed the circumference of the corncrib but hadn’t quite come into the open to face the car, they looked to Mel, a little behind, who nodded and then yelled, “Floyd, Justice Department! Give yourself up. We’re heavily armed and we will shoot!”

  Another moment of silence, and Charles, on the right, eased forward just a bit, edging around the wire cage jammed with the corncobs, drying out to make winter feed for the Conkle cattle. The old car eased into view, and he could see two men in it. The door opened, one of them, in overcoat and hat, spilled out, a heavyset guy in his thirties, with a square face with a look of bitter determination on it. It was clearly Pretty Boy, but Charles held fire, as it was still possible his hands might fly up. And even if they didn’t, there was that fellow still in the car a little too close for comfort.

  Floyd appeared to study the issue for about a tenth of a second, then dipped, spun, and took off. He raced across the front yard, through an orchard of apple trees, and Charles’s companions opened up with shotgun and automatic pistol, blowing the hell out of the low-hanging branches, so that they disintegrated into a spray of twigs, sprigs, dry russet leaves, and chunks of fruit, a sudden blizzard accompanied by the roar of the guns. Yet Floyd scampered through this inclement element without missing a step, as he in fact found a surge of power in himself, knowing that he could easily outrun the range of the shotgun or the pistol, and he ran like hell.

  He took off at a diagonal into the field behind the farmhouse, his obvious goal another line of trees a hundred yards away. Head down, his strong legs attacking the turf like a running back’s, his arms clawing in rhythm against the atmosphere, his shoulders bobbing and weaving to that same rhythm, he made astonishing headway, opening up the distance in seconds.

  “Charles,” yelled Purvis from the left, still invisible behind the crib, “bring him down!”

  Without willing it, he drew the Thompson gun to shoulder and rotated it upward, and his two strong hands clamped its two swept-back grips hard against him, mooring the heavy thing solidly. Through his right eye, through the aperture in the rather too complex Lyman ladder-style rear sight, and at the point of the blade of the front, he tracked the running man, computing for deflection, velocity, and trajectory, rolling smoothly in pace with the runner’s speed, and when all equations suggested to him they had been solved, his finger feathered against the trigger. With a hydraulic spasm, as if operating in an environment of thick jelly, the gun fired four times in less than a third of a second, with only the last shot seeming to miss the target, as the Cutts compensator on the muzzle compensated, as usual, nothing. Four spent shells tumbled to the right.

  Over the top of the gun, and through the sudden screen of gun smoke, he saw a thin gray smear of blur, which seemed to appear from nowhere, as Floyd took his shipment of lead hard, and wen
t down hard, as if his knees had been poleaxed, and he rolled in the high grass, squirmed, wriggled, tried to rise again.

  “Give him another squirt!” screamed Mel.

  Charles set about to comply, but at that instant two East Liverpool officers were on the fallen man, subduing and disarming him.

  “Good shooting, Sheriff,” said Mel.

  “Nice work,” said Ed. “Man, you’re a terror.”

  Charles thumbed the safety, set the gun at a forty-five-degree angle upward toward the Ohio sky, tucking the butt into the well of his hip with the trigger untouched by his finger.

  “Let’s see what we have bagged,” said Mel.

  They set out to examine the downed man.

  “Hope it ain’t the postman,” said Ed.

  “Maybe it’s the Widow Conkle’s boyfriend,” said McKee.

  “He tried to outrun the Thompson,” said Charles. “Only Pretty Boy Floyd could be so stupid.”

  It was indeed Pretty Boy. He lay in the grass, his coat twisted, his hair a mess, his face knitted in pain. He was punk tough even now, with a prizefighter’s aura of physical strength though clearly broken in bone and pierced in flesh by the bullets. But he didn’t seem to be worried about his wounds or his fate. He was okay with it. The world wouldn’t see Charlie Floyd go soft at the end. The two officers stood over him.

  “He tried to get cute with these,” one of them said, holding out a .45 automatic he’d stripped off the wounded man. The other officer had one too.

  “What’s your name, fella?” asked Purvis, kneeling.

  “Murphy,” said the man, as if he was hungry to get in a bar fight. Maybe they could kill him, but, goddammit, they couldn’t pacify him.

  “Sure looks like Charlie Floyd to me,” said Ed Hollis. “Same square-headed hillbilly mug, same pig eyes, same Negro lips.”

  “Fuck you, G-Man,” said the man.

  “You’re Floyd,” said Purvis.

  “Yeah, I’m Floyd,” said the man, sneering. “I just made you famous!”

  “How bad you hit?”

  “Stretch there hit me three times in the brisket. I’m done for.”

  “I’m afraid you are,” said Purvis. Then he turned, rose, and said, “Okay, I’m going to take the car and find a phone to call Washington. You ride with this guy to the hospital or the morgue, whichever, I’ll catch up.”

  “Yes sir,” said Charles.

  “Nice work, fellas. The Director will be proud.”

  He turned, and as he jogged back to the car, they could see other police vehicles pulling up to the Conkle farm, perhaps drawn by the sound of the shots or the smell of the blood.

  McKee leaned over Floyd, who was knitting in pain as he adjusted to his fate. Now the accumulation of blood seeping out from beneath him was beginning to show.

  “Got anything to say, Oklahoma? Was that you at Kansas City?”

  “I ain’t telling you nothing, you sonovabitch,” Floyd said.

  “Okay, pal, if that’s your choice, that’s your choice.”

  “Fuck you,” Floyd said. “I’m going.”

  47

  EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

  Early November 1934

  “TONY!” yelled Les.

  Tony Accardo turned, saw his old pal, and ran to him. They had a nice embrace, as both had grown up in the Patch, that tougher-than-tough square mile of West Chicago where so few made it out, but both of them had. Both were successes. Tony was a high-level manager in the organization, yet to be named but referred to colloquially as “The Italians,” under a Mr. Nitto, known incorrectly to the press as a Mr. Nitti. Les was a true star, now Public Enemy No. 1.

  “Good to see you, pal!”

  “Good to see you!” said Les. They were outside the new Marshall Fields Department Store, on the main street of the little city just north of Chicago, with its own miles of beautiful lakefront. Evanston was, as well, a city of elms, and the smell of burning leaves choked the air, as every fall the good folks of the town burned the fallen leaves in the street. A clock overhead showed that it was exactly 1 p.m., as Les had planned.

  “Brrr! Come on, it’s cold, let’s get inside somewhere.”

  Tony—“Joe Batters,” to the trade—crossed the street, and Tony led Les down a brisk block, across Orrington Avenue, right at the library, turned past the Carlson Building, walked a few dozen feet farther, and then dipped into a restaurant called Cooley’s Cupboard.

  “Whoa! Hate the chills,” said Tony. “The older I get, the thinner my skin gets!”

  “Ain’t it the truth!” agreed Les. “I’m just up from the South. Texas. I forgot how cold Chicago gets.”

  They found a booth in the place, which was done in hardwood after the fashion of something Medieval. It was a popular joint, now abuzz with lunchers, many from the big Carlson Building next door, Evanston’s only skyscraper and leading professional building.

  “You’ll like this place. They do curly fries up real good. I can’t get enough of ’em.”

  “Sounds great,” said Les.

  “And no booze. Evanston’s still dry, but I know you’re a teetotaler and don’t like boozy slobs all over you.”

  “God bless the WCTU!”

  They both laughed, as indeed Evanston was the national headquarters of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, their building not a block away.

  “So how’s Helen?”

  “Great. Love her so. Best gal in the world. How’s Ginny?”

  “Ah, she’s fine. You know, they get touchy, kid two out, kid three on the way. I got something on the side downtown, so I still get my fun in, though not as much. You’d never do the deed with nobody but Helen, though?”

  “That’s right. I’m a one-woman guy, God help me. He made me a bank robber, but he also made me a guy who only fucked one gal in his whole life and considered himself lucky each and every time.”

  “Les . . . God, you haven’t changed. Still stubborn, brave, one-track. Crazy, maybe, but honest crazy, no-bones-about-it crazy, crazy with guts, still going strong, even as they’re bringing you guys down, one at a time.”

  “That’s me.”

  It was an entrance into the subject Les had in mind, but he decided not to force it. Instead, he and Tony chatted about old times, remembered scrapes, near misses, bad cops, good cops, mentors, enemies, grudges, allegiances, who had gotten whacked and who still kicked around—this, that, and the other thing—and if you’d noted them in the back of Cooley’s, eating chicken in gravy with curly fries and drinking Cokes, you’d have taken them for insurance men, each well turned out, in sleek suits, starched shirts, bright ties, shined shoes, nice hats, looking so bourgeois it would break your balls to find out what the deal really was.

  “So anyway, Les,” Tony finally got around to asking, “I love you, but you ain’t here to hear that, you got something going on. What can I do for you? I owe you, buddy, and always will.”

  “Ah, that’s old stuff, forget all that,” said Les, knowing it was impossible to forget all that. In 1924, when both were sixteen, they’d boosted a haberdashery in Melrose Park, just west of the city beyond Oak Park, and when they came out, the beat cop was waiting. He grabbed, they squirmed, and Les got away clean, but Officer O’Doyle, or whatever his name was, laid eight inches of kibosh on Tony and, when he was down and out, cuffed him. Then he dragged him back to his feet, hauled him to the nearest call box, sat him on the curb, and started to call in the paddy wagon for the bad boy.

  Since it would have been Tony’s tenth or so infraction, he was looking at hard time. Since they’d clunked the haberdasher so hard, he never woke up, it would have been murder in the first degree. At sixteen, Tony wouldn’t have gotten the sizzle seat, but he was looking at forty years in Joliet. No big place in River Forest, no Ginny, no two kids, number three on way, no downtown side action, no place in the
Nitto organization, no prospects except getting drilled by jigaboos in the shower every day until 1974.

  But before Officer O’Whatever could punch the phone, Les jumped him from the roof and laid him out with a brick and laid him out cold. Les hadn’t run a step. He’d doubled around to set his pal free. You don’t buy loyalty like that. It took a few minutes of rummaging, but they got the key off the slugged cop, popped the cuffs, and took off, laughing wildly in the night.

  “I do need a favor,” said Les. “I don’t think I ever asked you for one, even when Capone’s people told me to go blow.”

  “So shoot. I’ll see what I can do, you know that.”

  “You mentioned the guys going down. Johnny, Homer, now Charlie. You don’t even know that I got jumped by a cowboy, who almost parted my hair permanently, just barely scrambled out of there with my head still in one piece.”

  “Well,” said Tony, “I hear that Floyd got himself blown out because he ran into a tree.”

  “I did some jobs with him. Yeah, the guy was no genius. Dumb as a cockroach. But still—the other guys were all smart, careful, professional, the best. Seeing them notched, feeling myself almost done the same way, it’s damned strange when nobody came close for eighteen months before. It just suddenly starts happening. See what I’m saying?”

  “I’m listening.”

  Les laid it out, his fear that the only outfit that could collect and coordinate intelligence from all over the Midwest and put together a solid idea about when-where on the bank robber stars was the one run by the Italians, and that they had decided as policy, for some reason, to put all these Thompson gunners out of business.

  “Well, I haven’t heard anything like that,” said Tony. “Honestly, it don’t make no sense, because while the Division is so busy hunting you guys, we’re just oozing into this and that. Jesus, Les, you have no idea where we are. Not just whorehouses and clubs and the book. No, in unions, in shops, in the movies, for god’s sake, controlling the racing wires, radio. Man, we are everywhere!”