by Peter Gent
The small man kicked again.
“Do what I tell you. You are barely necessary, so don’t become a problem. Being ten foot tall don’t make a shit to a good machine gun.”
He kicked the seat a final time.
Terry Dudley broke his stare into the rearview mirror and stepped out of his Cadillac in the shade of the big oak.
“Hey, Taylor. Surprise! I’ll bet you didn’t expect to see me.”
BACK AT THE CROSSROADS
TAYLOR STOOD ON THE porch and watched the seven-foot-two-inch gangling, loose-jointed basketball player-turned-union politician move around the back of his Cadillac.
Taylor was baffled by what ritual formalities to observe. Salutation? Handshake?
Taylor watched Dudley approach.
“If you touch me, I’ll kill you, I swear.”
Taylor was moved to speech by the sudden clear breeze that ruffled and rustled the live oak’s leaves. The sound shook him awake.
“Let’s get this shit over with,” Taylor said. “I have been waiting for guys like you my whole life.”
Taylor decided to take a strong offense because he had little defense. He certainly was not going to let this giant man get much closer on the basis of his shit-kicking grin.
“Taylor, old buddy? You pulling my leg?” The tall man continued moving. The day was cold and he was in shirt sleeves, a brown and black pullover with horizontal wide stripes. He wore expensive slacks and high-top black tennis shoes. Freedom-of-movement clothes. The Emperor’s clothes.
“The Emperor of the Western Hemisphere’s new clothes lack substance and style,” Taylor said. “You’re naked, Terry, but I see you brought a couple new tailors with you.”
He kept coming, a sick smile on a pasty face—the look of the overmatched, searching no longer for a way to win but a means of escape. He didn’t want to go the distance. His nerve gone, Terry Dudley kept ambling toward the porch. The grin paralyzed.
“Stop, goddammit!” Taylor put out his hand and moved slightly up the porch to keep his vision clear to the Cadillac and the two shapes in the back. “Stop or I’ll kill you where you are.” Taylor growled just loud enough for the Union director to hear. “You motherfucker.”
Dudley continued moving until Taylor spit the very last word; then, the seven-foot-two-inch, 250-pound frame hit the invisible shield.
Taylor Rusk never thought profanity was useful in gaining important results in serious disagreements, but it stopped Terry Dudley as effectively as Ox Wood.
“Taylor, what’s troubling you?”
“Just stand there and don’t move for a second.” Taylor had Johnny C.’s .45 stuck in his back pocket, locked and loaded, cocked, ready to fire. If he reached for it, events would assume a momentum of their own.
He was stalling, but he didn’t know for what.
“What’s the problem here, Taylor?” Dudley changed his tack.
“Things are fine; let’s keep them fine by everybody standing still for a minute.”
“Come on, Taylor ...” Dudley tried to take a step forward.
“Too fast! Talk slow and don’t move.” Taylor kept his voice low, his eyes flicking from Dudley’s pale face to the car under the live oak tree. His accusation was unwavering. “You had them killed. You.”
“No ... it wasn’t ...” Dudley faltered. He could not keep all the balls in the air, could not maintain enemies to the front and rear.
“They were told to find a file, not kill anyone.” Terry Dudley, the giant among men, regained himself, his command, his conviction. “It was unfortunate, but the information that we thought they had was official Union property. It was confidential! The owners would have ruined the Union with it. Broken us, the rich bastards. Fortunately, the file didn’t exist. Tommy and Bobby were unfortunate victims, martyrs for the Union.”
“Knock off your solidarity rhetoric, Terry. There is a file.”
Taylor was exasperated, embarrassed, not angry. The monumental stupidity of it all. “They’re going to kill you too. You know that, don’t you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Hey, look me in the eyes. Notice anything different?” Taylor pointed with forked fingers at his own face. “I don’t believe you, see?” Taylor blinked. “Look around you. Hear the birds, smell the air ... listen to the wind in the oak tree. There’s weather coming. Okay, now, look at the two stooges in the back of your car. Get it? It’s a brand-new world,” Taylor said. “You lose. Do you really believe that you are using them?”
Dudley was a fish being quizzed about the water. He didn’t remember way back before the means became ends and the ends became an inside joke. A great believer in basic techniques, he became a creature defined by techniques. He’d learned how to compete, how to play and how to win. He’d learned what to say, but he never knew why. Terry Dudley knew a game was being played: he’d planned to win.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Players really want to be heroes! Not technicians, not goddam organized labor or the head nigger of the League. Heroes don’t build bureaucracies. You’ve spent their money, lives and careers organizing the same union over and over. You surround and insulate yourself with greedy ass-kissers. You have a staff kept loyal with a million-dollar payroll. That is players’ money!”
“I want to help the players.”
“Just like you helped Hendrix out of the plane in the Yucatán. You want to help you. You.” Taylor looked over at the two shapes in the car; they seemed to be getting restless. He yelled and waved. “How you all doing? I’ll be right on over.
“If you think that whoever replaces the Cobianco brothers needs you, I refer you to A.D. Koster’s mute testimony on the security of being in the middle. You are a dead man,” Taylor said. “You just ain’t got the word.”
“They have no reason to want to kill me.”
“That’s not the issue. Do they have any reason to want you alive?” Taylor replied. “You’re dirty now. Looking clean was your only quality.”
“What do you mean?”
“Obviously you put this deal together quickly. Hymie, there, in the back of your car, who I met over a Louisville Slugger, works out of New Orleans.”
The wind began picking up and the live oak rattled and groaned. The men in the car were tired of waiting. They had a plane to catch. Taylor sensed their discomfort and dangerous impatience.
“Think back.... What kind of deal did you make?” Taylor was sliding down the porch, slowly trying for the corner of the house before all hell broke loose. “What were the terms?”
“You wouldn’t understand. You’re against the Union. You superstars always help the owners more than anybody! Heroes? Stars? Assholes!”
“Question too hard?” Taylor eased slowly away; the men were getting casually out of the car. “Okay, what did you actually sign?” Taylor kept on. He could see the two men’s weapons clearly now.
“Just a letter making Stillman Union counsel and chief financial officer.” The director seemed genuinely mystified. The look struck Taylor as perfectly ironic.
“What do they need you for, Mr. Director?” Taylor laughed. “You put Charlie Here-Let-Me-Hold-Your-Wallet Stillman right back where he was before Hendrix went after him. You just became an extra ball to keep in the air and you’re supposed to be the juggler.”
“But I helped them get the sixteen million to get Suzy’s half of the Franchise.”
The wind began to roar through the trees, the temperature dropping fast, the sky turning rapidly gray.
The two men, Hymie and Patch, moved around the car, and Taylor mistimed their movements badly. They were good at what they did. No wasted motion. He couldn’t make the corner of the house before they started shooting. Taylor Rusk was quickly flanked and trapped.
Terry Dudley still had his back to them in confusion; he didn’t see the activity in Taylor’s eyes. It was when Taylor reached back and pulled the automatic from his back pocket that Dudley seemed t
o sense any activity separate from himself or his wishes. The events quickly achieved the awful unstoppable momentum generic to high-level violence.
Taylor crouched with a two-hand grip, trying to get a bead on the small man with the submachine gun.
“No, Taylor—now, that’s silly.” The tall, eternal organizer reached out. “This can be worked out.”
He was right. He was just wrong about how and why.
The first burst from the Uzi tore across the man’s long back, knocking his huge body into Taylor, crushing him to the ground, the twitching, jerking, dying body pinning the quarterback down. The warmth oozed from Terry Dudley’s body, soaking Taylor and the dry, hard plateau ground. Dudley’s jaw was slack, his eyes wide in surprise and confusion.
The wind was howling, the storm closing fast. The two shooters from New Orleans had to shout above the wail of the northwest wind, screaming down from the Arctic Circle. The live oak whistled and cracked. Kicking ass and taking names. Texas weather.
Taylor’s right arm was free and he still held the .45. He lay still, watching the two shooters approach. Shitting, pissing, bleeding Terry Dudley shivered and died on top of him. Oozing away, leaving the stench of decay and death.
Hymie moved toward the two men heaped in the bloody pile. He planned to pump a load of buckshot into each man’s head.
Taylor saw him coming. He lay still, let the big son of a bitch get close. The .45 was cocked, safety off, ready to fire. Taylor watched Hymie with one eye and waited.
Too long. He mistimed again. He had let himself run down, stop completely. It threw off his timing and execution.
Taylor was just raising the .45 when Hymie snapped up the shotgun quickly and fired his first blast, shredding Terry Dudley’s head and Taylor’s shoulder.
Even from the hiding place inside the cast-iron bathtub, next to the rock shower stall, Wendy and Randall heard the sudden wind. They had a mattress pulled over them.
Randall giggled when the sudden wind banged open the kitchen door.
“Sshhh!” Wendy brushed his soft cheek and smiled, keeping up the illusion of a hide-and-seek game. In her other hand she gripped her pearl-handled snub-nosed revolver. A useless fetish. If the shooters got this far, they would shoot through the mattress.
The sound of the wind almost covered the first bursts of fire, but the second explosion was so close to the house that the cast iron vibrated with the shock.
Taylor had time to return since the last explosion. He was not coming.
“Momma, I’m getting hot,” the boy complained. “Let’s quit and get out.”
“Shush. Stay here.” She clutched him against her. “Taylor wants us to wait till he finds us.” She didn’t know why she whispered. It hardly mattered.
“I don’t want to wait.” He began to struggle. “I’m scared....”
Wendy grabbed the boy, firmly holding while gently talking. She hoped they shot through the mattress.
She could feel the footsteps vibrating up the clawfeet of the old cast-iron tub.
It was so hot.
Hymie saw Taylor’s right arm coming up as he blew off the back of Terry Dudley’s head.
The Union director was doomed from the moment the Man from New Orleans decided to take the call from Stillman. Charlie Stillman was a businessman who would never be as grasping as an ambitious man like Terry Dudley. That was the problem with jocks, the Man knew: they all thought they were special, immortal. Heroes.
Dudley was dirty and the Union was dirty, so the director became the cutout man who would solve both problems. The Man called it “housekeeping.”
Charlie Stillman would make the players’ pension fund available to New Orleans when the big money started rolling in. He would keep better books and cut better deals. The more things change ...
Hymie blew off the head of the cutout man. He planned to do the same to Taylor Rusk, but the hand with the .45 never slowed, even after the first shotgun blast. Hymie knew he didn’t have time for a pump. Hymie knew his tools and he didn’t have time. He watched the blue automatic flame and buck, the breechblock slamming back and forth, ejecting the empty cartridge and cleaving another live shell into the barrel, all in a flicker. Two shots. For Taylor Rusk, better late than never.
Hymie ran completely out of time.
Beneath the dead weight of the deposed director of the Union, splattered with bits of his skull and gray matter, Taylor struggled frantically. He was beginning to get dizzy, sick; his left shoulder was no longer numb. The pain rolled over him in black waves. He was losing blood, lots of blood, mixing with Dudley’s in the caliche.
“Goddam you, I’m bleeding to death!” He slugged the dead man. “Even dead, you screw up ... even dead.” He gasped and began to feel cold.
Falling back, he looked up into the gray sky. The clouds stretched out, running in front of the wind. Runaway clouds, stampeding overhead, chased by the cold that was seeping into his body. The cold and the damp.
He knew he was dying, but he didn’t care.
He watched the cattle running overhead.
“Cowboy ... change your ways,” he groaned.
He didn’t want to look surprised dying like Dudley. Or tormented like Tommy McNamara. Or crazy like Simon.
“Or ... forever you ... will ... chase ... the Devil’s herd ...” He was so cold, so sleepy. His shoulder didn’t hurt anymore ...“forever ... across ... endless ... sky.” He had gotten most of the words.
He heard the shooting inside the house as he fell into the black.
He felt himself falling upward to the endless, endless sky. Forever.
It wasn’t so terrifying.
Patch, the small man, stepped into the house from the porch just as Hymie fired the first blast into the two men on the ground. Patch could see almost the entire house from inside the front door. Except the bathroom.
The bathroom door was closed.
Patch quickly glanced at the other rooms. It seemed pretty obvious the woman and kid were in the bathroom. Patch was amazed how many people end up in the bathroom. He walked over to the bathroom door. Inside, Patch heard voices. He looked out the front window.
Hymie was hurriedly jacking his pump gun. Patch watched impatiently.
More muffled sounds in the bathroom caused Patch to look over the heavy oak door and check the knob. No lock. Deadbolt? Maybe.
Outside, the muzzle blast sounded sharper—not the heavy boom of Hymie’s shotgun, but two quick bangs. Patch looked up to see Hymie and his shotgun sailing backward; somebody had jerked the big shooter clean off the world.
Patch was stunned, taking a deadly moment deciding whether to bust into the bathroom, finish off the woman and the kid or go kill the goddam quarterback first.
It didn’t matter.
Patch didn’t own a moment.
Bob Travers owned every moment since Patch came through the door of the house.
The bodyguard was crouched cross-legged in the back bedroom closet.
All six rounds .38 Special hollow points hit Patch.
Not one slug went completely through his body, although they made an awful mess of the insides.
Taylor Jefferson Rusk fell from the endless sky after a short, romantic, painless pursuit of the Devil’s herd. He fell with much more pain and fright than he had risen.
Toby had begun the replacement of the blood as soon as he got him on the couch. He increased Taylor’s oxygen supply with a nasal cannula.
Taylor’s brain stopped its dreaming as the oxygen brought the nerve centers to full consciousness of the awful damage Hymie’s shotgun had done to his shoulder.
The pain jerked Taylor awake.
“I’m not dead?” He could see Toby over him, shaking his head. “Anybody dead?”
“Not on our side.”
“Hurt?”
“Nope.”
“What about me?”
“We gave you up on points at the start, then played the spread.”
Taylor looked at the bot
tle of whole blood and the tube leading to his arm.
“O negative,” Toby said. “Your favorite flavor, right?”
“Where’d you get it?”
“We carry everybody’s flavor. We are professionals.”
Pain shot through Taylor’s left shoulder and arm. “I liked it better dead.”
“That comes plenty soon.”
“How about something for the pain?” Taylor whispered.
“Naw. Thanks,” Toby said. “I had a couple of drinks right after all the shooting. That’s enough.”
“I mean me,” Taylor said.
“Geez, I don’t know, Taylor. You been shot. You sure you should do drugs so soon?”
Toby laughed and left the room. When he returned with the syringe, Taylor was asleep.
EPILOGUE
THEY LAY ON PANTHER Rock above the swimming hole.
Below, their three children splashed in the slow-running creek. It had been a dry spring and the Dead Man was low. Randall was swimming in the hole while two-year-old Matty Ellen Rusk played with Simon Taylor D’Hanis Rusk on the shallow limestone bottom.
They had adopted Simon Taylor D’Hanis just before Matty Ellen was born.
“Ginny Hendrix is bringing Billy and Bobby up in the morning. They’re going to stay the summer.” Wendy rubbed oil on the white furrowed scars on Taylor’s left shoulder. “I hope these don’t burn. They always burn.” She applied more sunscreen while he watched the children.
Wendy stopped rubbing but kept her hand on his shoulder.
He looked up at her.
She was staring off to the east, where the creek sparkled in the morning sun.
“What is it?” Taylor squinted down the creek.
“It’s at the low-water bridge,” Wendy said. “I can see the heat.”
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