“We’ll see how you handle the Irish boyos that run this town, and particularly those that wear blue. I know how the Irish mind works. The cops, especially the big shots, they’re loud, and they brag and shove and throw a punch, and they have big bellies, red noses, and a fondness for the pint, but that’s all bluster. Inside, they’re clever and cunning, and they pay attention. That’s why they run all the cities in America and three-quarters of the towns.”
“I hear you,” said Jessup.
“What that means is that somewhere in that big new building at State and Eleventh, they have what they probably call The Italian File. Or maybe they call it The Wop File. Everything they know about the Italians—how they work, who they know, what they make, what their plans are, how much they pay, who they kill, and, most of all, who they are—all that’s in there. But it’s not open for anybody but the top people, and access is guarded. They sure won’t share it with Justice, or, if they will, they’ll very carefully pick out what they give, and they’ll never give the full story.”
“You want in? Why not use the badge, go all official-like?”
“See, if I go to my boss, and he goes to Commissioner Allman, and he goes to his cardinals, and they talk about it, play it, test it, consider it, finally, eventually, some kind of tit for tat is arranged, and six months from now I’ll get a peep at a small part of it. But every Italian in the city will know a Justice man is looking at them, they’ll know who he is, they’ll know all about him, and they’ll start paying attention to him, as they try to figure out whether or not to squish him.”
“Probably an accurate summary.”
“But then there’s Dave Jessup, Chicago Herald-Examiner, smart-ass, big mouth, wiseguy. He knows the system, he’s studied it hard, knows where the skeletons are: who’s smart, who’s dumb, who’s strong, who’s weak, who drinks, who don’t, who can be touched and for how much. He knows how to operate, to pull in favors, to flatter the strong, to scare the weak, to rub on the magic lantern until out pops what I want.”
“I might know a little something.”
“I bet. Here’s how I want you to use it. I want somebody to go through The Italian File. It’s too big to move, and I could never get into the room anyway.”
“You want him to take it out? It must be gigantic!”
“No, of course not. But I want him to pull the file on everyone named Phil. It’s a common name among the Italians. There’s probably at least a dozen, but I don’t think there’s so many, it would take a crate to get them out. Pull them and get them to me. Maybe I’m in a car across the street. Give me an hour with them, that’s all I need. I’m only interested in one Phil. He knows me; it’s time I should know him. A photo of him attached to a bill of particulars would do the trick. Do you get it?”
“I do.”
“Can you make this happen?”
“It’s doable. The head of Gang Intelligence has a very nice summer cottage with six bedrooms in Petoskey, Michigan. Everybody knows. The story is, he bought it with money inherited from his wife’s father, one Seamus O’Sullivan. However, what I know that nobody else knows is that Seamus O’Sullivan was a drunken firefighter in Peoria, Illinois, who died when his future wife was thirteen. Believe me, he doesn’t want anybody else to know that.”
“You play hardball. I like that.”
“I do. And if all this should put those files in your hands for a bit, what would be the benefit for reporter Jessup?”
“When I kill Baby Face, you’ll be the first to know.”
53
WAUKEGAN, ILLINOIS
Mid-November 1934
LES CHECKED HIS WATCH. It was 4:30, getting dark. A cold wind blew in from the lake, but that was nothing new. His topcoat was tight, his scarf tight, his hat tight, his gloves tight—but he still felt the clammy chill of late Midwest fall.
“They ain’t coming,” said J.P. from the front seat. “They wouldn’t come this late, they don’t want to do it at night, and the sun is almost gone.”
“Les,” said Helen, behind the wheel, “he’s right. This is not the time, this is not the place.”
Les didn’t say a thing. He had the Colt Monitor across his lap, and, as usual, proximity to such an interesting, powerful weapon had him slightly jazzed. He didn’t want to give up on this place, he wanted to shoot, send a few Division cars into the gutter, trailing flame and smoke. He was also encased in his steel girdle, and though the seat supported the weight, the tightness of it and its coldness was discomfiting.
But it was indeed getting dark fast. Shadows lengthened across Route 42 on the northern outskirts of the small industrial city just beyond Chicago-commuting range, and the parking lot to the A&P was practically deserted, as most of Waukegan’s homemakers had gotten their supplies for hubby’s dinner and long since bolted for home. Across the street, a cheap motor hotel called the Acme had turned on its flashing-white-star road sign but had attracted no business yet.
He had to face it.
“Okay,” he said. “Helen, rev it up. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Okay if I put the Thompson down?” said J.P. “The goddamned thing is heavy and it’s squashing my balls . . . Excuse me, Helen.”
“Don’t talk dirty in front of Helen,” said Les.
“It’s all right, baby,” said Helen, as she eased the car into traffic. “J.P. was just being funny.”
“Ha-ha—I forgot to laugh. No, hold on to it. You don’t know, maybe they’re laying a few blocks off and want to jump us unawares . . . Hell, this thing is twice as heavy as that one.”
“Yeah, but you like it. Holding it makes you happy. It does, doesn’t it, Helen?”
“He does sort of like it,” said Helen.
The crew was getting rebellious. It was no fun sitting in a car in a parking lot on a frosty fall day in a crummy noplace like Waukegan waiting for Division gunmen to roll in. The steel was cold against their flesh; the heavy guns dented their muscles, giving off odors of lubricant, not a problem in short spells but hard to take after eight hours; and the thermos had run dry at 3, meaning they’d been without hot coffee just as the weather was turning bitter. And being this close to the lake meant the wind was windier and the cold was colder.
“All right,” he said, “we cross DePalma off the list. Tony told his number one guy that he’d heard from me, I was hanging out in Waukegan at the Acme, casing a job in Lake Bluff. If DePalma was our spy, he’d have ratted us out to the Division and we’d have gotten a batch of them today, and him tonight, and be on our way to Reno.”
“No to DePalma: I hear you. I want this done so I don’t have to wear this armor stuff ever again, but somehow I wasn’t in a machine-gun-battle-to-the-death mood today.”
“I’m always in a machine-gun-battle-to-the-death mood,” said Les.
They coursed down 42, finally reaching the civilized sectors of the North Shore, whose stylizations put humble Waukegan to shame. Now the road was called by the classier name of Sheridan, and it took them past big houses along the lakefront where the millionaires lived—Lake Forest, Highland Park, Winnetka, Kenilworth—all before reaching modest but pleasant Wilmette. There was even a casino in a little unincorporated area between Kenilworth and Wilmette called No-Man’s-Land, but its temptations were lost on the task-focused Les.
“Helen, turn your lights on. Yeah, J.P., put the gun down, keep your finger off the trigger, and don’t blow any holes in anything.”
“Agh,” said J.P., sliding the Thompson delicately to the floor of the automobile. He managed to do it without sending fifty hardballs into the door.
“That doesn’t mean go to sleep,” said Les. “Keep your eyes open, keep on the scan. Helen, watch that speed, we don’t want to be pulled over by some small-town clown cop. He’d see the guns and we’d have to dump him.”
“Yes, yes, yes, Your Majesty,” said Helen.
Pulling into Evanston, Helen suddenly found a topic.
“Say, honey,” she said. “You know, suppose the Division had showed. Bang, bang, bang—lots of bullets winging. The ones they fire at us—”
“They aren’t going to fire at us. We jump ’em first and put ’em out of the fight. That’s the plan.”
“But plans never work. So the bullets they fire at us, they go on into that A&P—housewives, kids, old people—is that a good idea? It gets the newspapers all twisted against us. And it gets some little children killed.”
“Helen, this is what we do. You know this is what we do.”
“She has a point,” said J.P.
“Another country heard from,” said Les.
“You’re sort of loved, like Johnny. Especially now that you’re number one and you’ve got such a cool name. You’re a hero for a lot of bitter folks—that is, until you machine-gun a baby in a carriage.”
The prospect of a dead baby didn’t engage Les a bit; instead, he turned to an old slight, and he heated up fast. “I should have been number one before Charlie Floyd. I don’t know why they . . . Anyway, what’s the point?”
“All he’s saying,” said Helen, “is that getting civilians killed doesn’t do us any good. You have to risk it for a bank, because the banks are where they are, downtown or on Main Street. But if we get to pick the spot, let’s pick a spot where Mr. and Mrs. America aren’t buying their Ann Page biscuits for Sunday dinner.”
Les grumped up, locked his eyes off in the distance, and turned to stone. He said nothing, as they reached Dempster in South Evanston for their western turn, then left—southwest—on Niles Center Road, angling toward Melrose Park. America rolled numbly by, the other America, not theirs, as they’d gone outlaw, gone for flash, spurts of pure adrenaline, fast profit, lots of cash, pix in the rags, but death always looking over their shoulders. It was okay, except when they rolled by a cemetery on the right and that got Les to feeling mortal instead of immortal (it happened occasionally) and he said, “Hey, look at that.”
“I hear they have dead people in there,” said J.P.
“All of ’em,” said Helen.
“When it’s time, drop me there,” said Les, squinting at the sign as the headlights scanned them. “St. Peter’s, a Catholic place, would make Ma happy.”
“Nobody’s killing you,” said J.P.
“When you get that in writing, let me know,” said Les.
But both Helen and J.P. knew that if he suddenly jumped off topic, Les had reached a decision.
Finally, he said, “We’ll do the Como Inn, Lake Geneva, next. That’s off by itself in the woods. No babies die because Mommy had to have Ann Page biscuits!”
54
OUACHITA MOUNTAINS
ARKANSAS
The present
ARKANSAS 88: it was the road of his life, same as it ever was. Well, almost; he passed the old place where he’d been raised, where he’d waved good-bye to his father for the last time on the last day of 1955, neither of them knowing it, and saw the familiar land now going through some process called development where new houses rose like ghosts against the fields he’d once roamed with a .22 hunting rabbits. He felt nothing but the cash in his pocket the place had finally deposited.
Beyond that came a nowhere village called Ink, still just a spot in the road, with a convenience store now run by hardworking Koreans, and beyond that to another nowhere place called Nokana, neither place figuring much in a childhood that was drawn west to the county seat, called Blue Eye, where Sam Vincent, in a sort of way, had become his father after 1955; and he’d gone to high school, been an athlete of note, if still enduring the stares that said “Poor Bob Lee, he’s Earl’s boy. You know, Earl got killed in 1955” until he could stand it no more and left, on the first day of the rest of his life, for Parris Island on his sixteenth birthday in 1962. So this flat stretch of road to Mount Ida, and then Hot Springs, meant nothing until he reached a certain turnoff and headed north, into the green bulk of the mountains in front of him.
He rose, he rose, he rose against the incline, past the trees, in Jake Vincent’s SUV, towing a rented Honda Recon, a four-wheel all-terrain vehicle that resembled a Harley after ten years’ worth of six-hundred-pound dead lifts and squats. At a certain point, the road quit. He parked, unhitched the Honda, opened the rear of the SUV, and removed a shovel, a pick, a crowbar, and a backpack containing a heavy flashlight newly primed with lithium batteries, six protein bars, four bottles of water, and a hunting knife, and secured all to the Recon cargo space by bungee cord.
He checked his watch. The sun was low in the west, pitching bright beams vertically in the west, the glow turning the edges of the ruffled clouds fiery. He took his iPhone out of his jacket—though still summer, it grew cold in the night the higher you went—and called Nick.
“I’m at road’s end, just about to head into the woods.”
“What do you figure?” asked Nick.
“An hour. But most of it’s uphill. I’ll be all right.”
“Call in every hour. I’ll alert the State cops if you miss two in a row.”
“Old lady! There ain’t another human within a hundred square miles.”
“That’s what they all say.”
He climbed aboard the Honda, turned the key, and it roared to life.
—
BRAXTON LISTENED.
They heard the phone go off, even if the microphone didn’t. Put in a pocket, all its information was muffled. Then, softer, the crank of the Recon engine could be heard, the change in pitch as it went into gear, and the thumpa-thumpa of the man negotiating the mechanical billy goat over trails meant for bipeds. That was all.
“Okay,” said Braxton. “An hour. All we got to do is wait.”
Rawley nodded.
“Let’s go to the masks. I don’t want to be putting them on when he’s here.”
The two balaclavas came out; each man pulled his over his head, until his face was but a black blank with eye slots.
“Now the kit.”
“The kit” was a hypodermic needle, loaded with 50ccs of sodium pentothal—truth serum. The point wasn’t the truth. The point was to inject Bob fast and put him under. He’d be asleep for forty-eight hours, wake up with a hangover, fuzzy memories, inchoate fury, and no idea what had happened. They’d be long gone, the guns long gone, maybe in Mexico by that time, and they’d be three million dollars richer, in cash, and it would be another week or so before clown-ass Leon Kaye figured out they hadn’t killed him, just knocked him out chemically, even if Leon had paid for the full hit.
“I ain’t killing that guy,” Braxton had said to Rawley, who nodded in agreement. “He’s a hero. I don’t kill heroes. Bad for the reputation. It would be like killing LeBron.”
Still, if they had to, they could: Braxton had a Serbu shorty, a Remington 870 cut down to a total of eighteen inches, with a pistol grip fore at the pump and aft behind the trigger guard, with a SureFire WeaponLight aboard, laser-equipped to put a bright red dot on any area that was about to get carpet-bombed by double-aught buckshot. At close range, it would blow a hole in a whale. Then there was Rawley with his Smith & Wesson .500 revolver. It was a giant framed wheel gun with a magic half-inch bore width that launched Double Tap 350-grain XPD buffalo stoppers at about 3,032 pounds muzzle energy. What it hit invariably returned to its pure atomic state. It too was guided toward accuracy by electronic application, another fine item from the SureFire inventory, a laser unit that projected the same red dot of destruction on anything it was aimed at. In both cases, the red dots were enough to end any argument without difficulty.
They had been helicoptered in on the other side of the mountain, moved by compass through the night with surprising grace and stealth for such big men, and set up, Imodium-prepped and diapered
for urination issues, by dawn. They had not moved an inch all day and rarely said anything, as Rawley monitored the StingRay cell site simulator in his backpack for progress reports and read a well-thumbed paperback of Borges’s Labyrinths. Braxton dreamed of the Dallas Cowgirl cheerleaders and a solid-gold Escalade, squished ants, ate energy bars, pissed in his diapers, and kept saying, over and over, “Three million dollars.”
—
HE TRIED NOT TO HAVE a memory-wallow when he pulled in. The foundations still stood, as they were stone. But the timber, unmaintained, had yielded in large part to rot. One wall remained erect, though it looked creaky, and part of another wall, though angled toward collapse and buttressed only by rotting slats. The interior was gutted, most of the floorboards broken, and tendrils had begun to insinuate their way through cracks, gaps, fissures, and collapse. It had the stink of the old and disused. Dust and spiderwebs and dead leaves and vegetative debris lay everywhere.
Against his will, he remembered otherwise: when the cabin was whole, when it was painted green, when his father and Sam Vincent and various other men had hunted there every fall. Rustic, never chic, it never leaked, held the warm in, the cold out. It had once had a porch where the men would sit after the day’s hunting, drinking bourbon, smoking cigars, telling stories, enjoying everything, but most of all enjoying being men. Much laughter while the boys were off in the yard, cleaning the deer, learning the responsibilities of the hunt that Field & Stream never wrote about. Then, when they were done, the boys might sit together in the lee of the porch, listening to the men talk, about politics, baseball, Razorback football, sometimes the war, though Earl never said a word on that subject and was never asked, as all respected the harshness of his five-island ordeal against the Japanese.
Now ruin and decay, the past. Dust and dead leaves of a distant cosmos. Untouched by human hands in decades. Again, he was good at repressing, the essential sniper talent, and so he finally tossed those memories down a hole somewhere in his brain.
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