Big Shots and Bullet Holes

by B David Spicer

  I finally left my hiding place and crept over to Braun. His ragged breath hissed in and out. He bled freely; the dark red blood that meant your life could now be measured in minutes. I stood there for several seconds before he saw me.

  “Oh, Christ. It’s you.”

  “Hello, Braun. You’re looking good.”

  “Pull me out of here.” He gasped air into his lungs. “Pick up the cigarette. I don’t want to burn.”

  “Tell me the names on the list, and I will.”

  “Hurry!”

  “The names, Braun. I need to know them.”

  He blinked up at me. “Dasch. George Dasch.”

  “Who else?”

  “Harm ... Harm. Heinrich ... Har ...” He blinked one last time, then lay still. I closed his eyes just as the stream of gasoline approached him. I didn’t bother trying to move him. Instead, I tore through the garage door and across the lot. I took cover behind the rusted-out hulk of a deuce-and-a-half. Then I heard the swoosh of the gas igniting, and a second later the fuel tank exploded. I crouched and covered my head as burning debris sailed over and all around me. When I looked up, the Fritz Brothers’ Trucking Company had one less garage to worry about. The roof had been obliterated and everything else crackled as it burned.

  Smoldering bits of the roof smoked beside me, hissing in the rain. I tiptoed through the conflagration and crossed Carr Street to the abandoned filling station, where my car waited for my return like a loyal dog. I leaned against the fender and tried to pull a snipe out of the pack, but my hands shook too badly and I couldn’t manage it. So I just stood there, shivering and shaking like a palsied old man, when I had places to go.

  I heard the howling warble of the black-and-whites, and within a couple of minutes I watched them descend on the fiery remains of the garage like a pack of hyenas. The long red trucks came a minute or two later, but they didn’t do anything when they got there. The damage, it seemed, couldn’t get much worse, and even with their miles of hoses they couldn’t offer much more water than what the sky threw down at them.

  A car roared to a stop next to mine and a man jumped out of it. “There you are! What the hell are you doing?” Paolo didn’t sound happy.

  “Trying to light my cigarette. Feel like helping?”

  He slammed the door of his car and steamed toward me like a locomotive. “This isn’t a joke! You led me on a wild-goose-chase and now I look like a fool!”

  “Are you gonna light my smoke or not?” I finally managed to get one between my lips.

  He hissed a lungful of air between his teeth, but dutifully struck a match and set fire to my tobacco. “You’re a real piece of work, Cassandra. You lied to me.”

  I huffed out a jet of blue smoke. “Yeah. Are you surprised?”

  “I shouldn’t be.”

  That made me smile. “No, you sure shouldn’t be.”

  “Why did you send me to Elsinore Tower?”

  “To get you out of my way. I don’t need a cop hanging around.”

  He gestured broadly toward the inferno across the street. “Really? I think you’re right, Kissy, you need a psychiatrist! Or maybe a nanny!”

  “I needed a friend.”

  He ran his fingers through his blond curls and took several deep breaths. Finally, he leaned against the car next to me. “Can I have a drag?”

  “I thought you quit.”

  “So did I.” He snatched my cigarette and took a long puff before handing it back to me. His eyes closed and he held his breath for a handful of seconds. “Thanks.”

  “Anytime, copper.”

  “Stop calling me that.”

  “I will when Paolo comes back.”

  He shook his head. “You’re so damned stubborn.”

  “So are you.”

  “What happened over there?”

  “Who’s asking? Officer Belvedere or Paolo Belvedere?” I tossed my spent butt into a puddle.

  “I’m the one asking.” He grinned.

  “Gottlieb and Braun are dead.”

  He glanced at the fire. “In there?”

  I nodded.

  “Kissy, I think you’d better tell me everything.”

  “In a minute. How long does it take to get to the airport from here?”

  “Lunken? About ten minutes if we take Columbia Avenue. Why?”

  I frowned. “That’s not right. He said it’d take half an hour normally, twice that because of the rain.”

  “Who said that?”

  I tugged at my lip. “Could he have meant a different airport?”

  “Who might have meant a different airport?”

  “Greene.”

  He turned to face me. “Colonel Greene?”

  “Yeah. He bought the list from Braun. With lead.”

  Paolo heaved a huge sigh. “Thank God.”

  “No. Greene killed Martingdale.”

  “What?”

  “He bragged about it to Braun. I also watched him order his men to kill Braun’s goon. He’s got his own agenda, Paolo, and it’s not in America’s best interest. He’s headed to an airport that’s thirty minutes away from here.”

  Paolo’s brow creased as he thought. “He might have meant Watson Field. It’s northeast of town. It’d take about that long to get there.”

  I opened my car door. “Do you know where this place is?”

  “Yeah.” He got in the car. “More or less.”

  “Let’s go.” I turned the key and my Chrysler snarled to life. “When we get there, we’re doing things my way.”

  Paolo shook his head. “I hope Watson Field has insurance.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The lateness, the night, the foul weather, or some other providential power kept most of the traffic off the streets and out of my way. I stomped the accelerator to the floor and the engine screamed like the hordes of hell as we tore through town on our way to Watson Field. Paolo alternated between demanding an accounting of what happened in the Fritz Brothers’ garage and reciting the twenty-third Psalm.

  “Why didn’t you just shoot him, then?”

  “He had two goons with machine guns with him! Besides, I wanted to find out as much as I could about his game. My jaw damned near hit the floor when he burned that list.”

  “So, it’s not about money.”

  “Everything is about money. We just don’t know how it’s about money yet. It doesn’t matter; I’m still gonna plug him.”

  “No, Kissy. I can’t let you do that.”

  “He shot Norman!”

  “You don’t know that for sure. Even if you did know it unequivocally, I can’t let you shoot him.”

  “Damn it, Paolo, we’ve been through this before! This time I know who I need to kill, and you’d better not stand in my way!”

  “Norman is alive, Kissy.”

  I swallowed around the lump in my throat. “Mary isn’t.”

  Out of the hinterlands of my vision I saw him wince. “I know that. You didn’t think I’d forgotten, did you?”

  “I think you want to forget; I think you try your best to forget.” I felt one rogue tear escape from my eye. “I can’t forget. I see her face every time I close my eyes—unless I pour a pint of rye down my neck first. I see her, laughing, happy, alive ... then blood ...” I couldn’t go on.

  “Cassandra, it wasn’t your fault. Because of the flood, everything fell apart. People got beaten half to death for stealing eggs, for God’s sake. The whole town was in chaos.”

  I stared straight ahead, the telephone poles careening past the car. “I saw him.”

  “I know you did.” I could barely hear his voice.

  “I heard the shot and ran outside. She held her hand out in front of her, staring at it like she’d never seen it before. Her blood covered it, blood from the hole in her chest. It ran down her fingers and onto the sidewalk, just twenty feet from the edge of the floodwaters. When she fell, I caught her, and that’s when I saw him. He still had the gun in his hand, and he had a sneer on his f
ace. Two other men ushered him into a car and they drove away. It was too late for him though; I saw him. You’d followed me out the door, so I know you saw him too.”

  “Yes.”

  “I know you knew who he was.”

  “Yes.”

  “He meant to gun me down, not Mary. He shot the wrong girl. I swore then, and I swear again right now, I will find him, and I will kill him. Just like I’m gonna kill Greene for shooting Norman.” My knuckles had turned white on the steering wheel. “You just need to tell me his name, Paolo.”

  “You know I can’t. It’d make us both murderers. I’ve been in firefights as a cop, and I’ve shot a couple of hard cases that wouldn’t come in without a fight. One of them even died.” Paolo rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Hell, he was just a punk kid running moonshine up from Kentucky, but he had a gun and I have no doubt he’d have killed me if I hadn’t have shot him first. You don’t know what it’s like living with that kind of guilt. I pulled the trigger and now some mother’s son won’t be at the table come Thanksgiving.” He turned to look at me. “Let it go, Cassandra. Let me arrest Greene, and I guarantee you he’ll spend the rest of his life rotting in a prison cell.”

  “I tell ya what, you give me the name of the guy that shot Mary, and you can have Greene.”

  Paolo threw up his hands. “I give up, Kissy. There’s no getting through to you at all. The woman I loved, the woman I asked to marry me, wasn’t a remorseless killer obsessed with vengeance at any cost.”

  I tossed him a scowl. “That woman is dead. She died five years ago when you refused to help her.”

  “Dammit, I was saving your life!”

  “All you saved was the husk. Everything else died when Mary’s heart stopped beating.”

  He remained quiet for several minutes before he spoke again. “It always comes back to this point, doesn’t it? Me doing what I think is right, and you hating me for it. I can’t win. No matter what I do, I lose.”

  “Sounds like being a cop is a real pisser.” I clenched my teeth on my cigarette.

  “It is when you’re around.” He pointed through the bleary windshield. “Slow down, the airport’s just ahead.”

  I turned onto the road he indicated, and we drove past a jumble of little shotgun shacks until the airport finally appeared out of the rain. I turned off the car’s headlights as I pulled into the parking lot beside the double-hangar. Two other cars sat in the lot as well as a large fuel truck. I parked behind the truck, out of sight of the other cars.

  Paolo spun the chamber of his .45 double-action Army revolver. “I know what you want to do, Kissy, but I’m asking you to remember what’s at stake. We need to interrogate Greene. Hundreds, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives are at stake. We need to take Greene alive.”

  I shot him a dirty look. “You’re just saying that so I won’t kill him.”

  “Is it working?”

  “Not really.” I said it, but even as I did, I knew it was working. I’d seen the newsreels of the Dunkirk evacuation, those tattered and bloodied men fleeing from the tide of Nazi expansion in Europe. Those soldiers weren’t American, but I could easily imagine that they were. How could I weigh my vengeance against the lives of hundreds of thousands of servicemen?

  Paolo opened the door and stepped out of the car. I waited a few seconds before joining him. We peered around the edge of the fuel truck. “Paolo? Are you being serious?”

  “About what?”

  “About needing to interrogate Greene to save soldiers’ lives?”

  He blinked. “Yeah, Kissy. I’m being serious. Not everybody is endlessly running a con. We need to know what he’s up to. That means we need to bring him in alive.” He carefully studied the cars parked next to the hangar. The Colonel’s white Packard sat there, sporting brand new tires, and beside that stood a maroon Chevrolet. Paolo frowned. “That’s Avery Brightman’s car.”

  “The guy in charge of the local Feds?”

  “Yeah. Why would he be here?” He crept over to the cars and peered into them through the glass. He hurried back and crouched down beside me. “There’s a dead guy in Greene’s car. Young fella, pinstriped suit. He’s been popped in the back of his head.”

  “Greene’s gun-hands both had on pinstriped suits. He shot one of them back at the garage. Looks like he doesn’t want any loose ends.”

  “Yeah, he’s cleaning things up real good.”

  A pair of voices carried through the rainfall, and we pressed ourselves against the hangar wall.

  “You can’t take off in this downpour, Colonel.” Paolo looked at me and mouthed the name ‘Brightman.’

  “It’s only a little water. Besides, it has to let up sometime. It can’t rain all the time.”

  Brightman chuckled. “Okay, if you say so Colonel.”

  “You’re gonna take care of that mess, right?”

  “Yeah. I’ll send Pressman out to pick up the car. He’ll know what to do with Corporal Wills.”

  “Thank you, Avery.”

  “No, thank you, Colonel. I’ll be ready on the 12th.”

  “So will I. I’ll make sure I’m with the president when everything starts to happen. We’ll see what that lily-livered cripple has to say then! He’ll have no choice but to follow my recommendations. Drive safe, Avery.”

  “Will do.” Brightman dropped into his Chevrolet and rumbled out of the parking lot. Greene stepped into view and opened the trunk of his car. He pulled out the satchel of cash and a leather suitcase and reentered the hangar.

  I whispered into Paolo’s ear. “Looks like he’s leaving town. Whatever we’re doing, we need to do it now.”

  Paolo held up a finger and peeked around the corner of the hangar. “Whatever’s going on, Brightman might be in it too.” We could hear Greene thumping around in the hangar, just on the other side of the concrete from where we stood. Paolo pointed down the wall, toward the far end of the hangar, and we sloshed through the standing water as quietly as a couple of rampaging hippos. As we moved up the short side of the building Paolo sketched out his plan. “We’ll get inside, make sure he’s alone, then we flank him. We know he’s armed, so be careful.”

  I nodded, but he startled me by pressing his hand against my left cheek.

  “Kissy, if it comes down to a firefight, shoot to wound. Aim for his legs. We need him alive.”

  I rolled my eyes. “So you keep telling me. I got it, okay?”

  The hangar didn’t have the huge doors that some other airports had; the front of the structure simply gaped open. Several one- and two-seater planes skulked in the darkness. We tiptoed inside. Whatever nefarious business Greene had at the airport was in the adjacent hangar. The two hangars connected to one another by a smaller structure that housed the business office and a variety of workbenches and toolboxes. From where we stood, we could see into this area through a row of grimy windows. A single desk lamp burned, and Colonel Greene stood beside it, talking into a wall-mounted telephone. His left side faced us.

  “No. I said I needed Jacksonville, Florida, not Jackson, Mississippi! I’m trying to get ahold of Commander Holt, Naval Air Station, Jacksonville. Yes, Florida!” Greene slammed his fist against the wall. “Florida! Florida!” His cigar migrated from one corner of his mouth to the other. “Finally. Commander Holt, please.”

  I shot a glance at Paolo, but his raised eyebrows didn’t answer any of my questions.

  After waiting a minute or two, the connection seemed to finally get made. “Gerald? Is that you? Thank God! I’ve been trying to get through for ten minutes. Yes, it’s done. Looks like the fifteenth or sixteenth, so make sure Ponte Vedra Beach is nicely deserted. Well, I don’t know. Schedule a training exercise somewhere else. Look, no, that’s your problem, Holt. Just get it done. There’ll be four of them landing there. They’re all meeting here in Cincinnati, on Independence Day.” He laughed. “No, a total coincidence, unless the Abwehr has a sharper sense of irony than I give it credit for. Just be ready on the
fifteenth or sixteenth. I’m on my way back to Washington. I have a meeting with the Secretary of War, and then the president. Despite a few setbacks, everything here is on schedule.”

  Paolo moved across the floor on his hands and knees until he made it to the far side of the doorway, then he stood up and pulled out his gun. He peeked around the corner and shot me a nod.

  Green continued his conversation. “Avery’s taking care of that. The Bureau’s up to its nose in anonymous tips. They won’t pose a problem. No. No. No, look Holt, I’ve got to go. We’ll talk after everything. Yes, goodbye.” He slammed the receiver onto the hook and spat out the stump of his cigar.

  Paolo stepped into the room with his gun trained on Greene. The Colonel’s mouth widened into a ‘O’ and his brows rode high on his forehead.

  “Colonel Alfred Greene! Don’t move! You’re under arrest for murder, conspiracy, and treason!”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Belvedere? What the hell are you doing here?” Colonel Greene didn’t raise his hands or even seem intimidated by Paolo’s .45 Colt.

  “I told you, Colonel, you’re under arrest.”

  Greene laughed. “What? You don’t have the authority to arrest me. Just who do you think you are?”

  “I’m the guy that’s gonna put you behind bars, Greene. You’re a murderer and a traitor.”

  Greene laughed again. “Oh really? Who says so?”

  “I do.” I stepped into the room with my stolen snub-nose .38 glued to Greene’s forehead. “I saw you kill Braun and his man, Affen. I saw you shoot your own man just because he got wounded. I saw you burn down the garage.”

  His smile wilted and fell off his face. “You. You’re that broad we found in the suite at the Aristocrat instead of Gottlieb. I see Belvedere didn’t take you to the nuthatch. What did you do, offer to bed him if he let you go?”

  “That’s enough, Greene! It’s been hard enough to keep her from killing you this long; don’t antagonize her.”

  He waved his hand and made a dismissive sound in his throat. “If all you’ve got is the testimony of one lunatic, Belvedere, you’ve got less than nothing, and you know it. Now put down that bean-shooter before I start to get sore.”