Tales of the Bagman

by B C Bell

  But something went off in his head.

  Fifteen years ago—after the death of his father—something in Frank McCullough just shut down. After that he had been forced to spend some time with foster parents he never talked to or about. He spent six months in the city without talking to anybody, not even the fathers at St. Joseph’s. He dropped out of school. Got caught running numbers and sentenced to the reformatory. Then after that, he just disappeared. Hopped a train. Nobody really knew. Then one day some kid named “Mac” showed up on the ball field, went from left field to pitcher in two innings. And nobody called him Frank anymore.

  Ask anybody on the street. Mac McCullough was an alright guy. Kind of goofy, but alright. A survivor. Smart. Crazy luck with dice, great with the ladies, kind to dogs and children, give you the shirt off his back. But to those that knew him best—the people that had known him back when he was just Frank—something had happened to the kid. Something died inside of Frank. Something that made him angry.

  And every once in a while… Something came back.

  It was Mac McCullough that lay down in the alley propping himself up against the wall, hiding in the shadows, rubbing his busted face. But then he looked down at the holes in the knees of his pants and stared—and Mac McCullough was not Mac McCullough anymore. Mac had been hiding in the dark. But it was a primal force that stood up.

  Somebody in the back of the car mumbled a question and Spider exploded in a random series of vowels and consonants, waving his arms and pointing with the authority of a carnival barker. He backed the car up and pulled it into the alley, the headlights cutting the shadows like a razor blade. The two men jumped out, entered the alley and got in front of the car, each one standing in the headlights.

  “He ain’t here!” the pinstriped one yelled over his shoulder. He looked around at all the bricks and bashed ash cans around.

  “The hell he ain’t!” Spider growled back. “There ain’t no way out!”

  The man in the leather jacket kicked a can into the corner. “I don’t get it. He was barely able to crawl in here. Where’d he go?”

  Spider Donlan was cursing through his teeth and hitting the wheel of the car with both hands. “He’s here, dammit! He’s hiding! Find him!”

  The gunman in the passenger seat glanced from the darkness of the alley toward Spider, and figured he was safer in the alley. He opened his door carefully so it wouldn’t scrape the brick wall—he didn’t want to scratch the finish and make Spider any angrier. Then he stepped out with the door wedged in front of him. He reached for his shoulder holster. A shadow fell over him.

  He glimpsed only a wraith’s silhouette, plunging from the fire escape above, a shadow hurtling downward. The wraith plummeted through the air, and thrust its elbows into both sides of his neck. The gunman went down wondering how the darkness had gotten darker. The gun clattered off the concrete.

  “It’s McCullough! The fire escape!” Spider screamed, pointing upward across the alley. He flung his door open and pulled a gun out of his coat. Spider’s face appeared above the car, a nine-millimeter Luger stretched over the top, aimed at Mac’s head. Mac grabbed the unconscious gunman by the lapels and spun, using him as a shield. Three bullets holes popped open in the man’s back as Mac unholstered his revolver. He fired once and planted a bullet just below Spider’s shoulder. Spider bounced off the brick wall cursing and screamed:

  “Hit him! He killed Mace!”

  Mac fired again as Spider ducked behind the car.

  The two men in the alley turned around. The goon in pinstripes reached into his coat. The dockworker in the leather jacket already had his arm extended with a .45 automatic in it. Mac fired twice and ruined the brown leather jacket. The dock worker dropped.

  Mac rotated his stance and fired two shots at the man in pinstripes. The guy rolled up like a blanket and fell into the corner behind two ash cans. Mac wasn’t sure if he’d hit him or not. He only had one bullet left.

  Spider edged toward the open sedan door so he could fire through the car.

  With his gun still in his hand, Mac set it on top of the sedan’s open door and planted the other hand on top of the car. By the time Spider got a shot, Mac was suspended over the car in a momentary handstand as he flipped over the front of it. He ducked beneath the front bumper and fired into the darkness of the corner, using his last shot to keep the man in pinstripes busy. Pinstripes gasped and something clattered behind McCullough, who had already turned back around to face Spider.

  Mac popped the cylinder out of his .45 and slid the refill cartridge out of his coat pocket. He reloaded in record time. He’d been practicing.

  “…plunging from the fire escape above…”

  He swung the butt of his gun into one of the car’s headlights and fired a shot into the other. The alley went black. Firing one more shot over Spider’s head, Mac then hurled himself into the darkness where the man in pinstripes was hidden.

  The pinstriped gangster lay behind two ash cans in the corner, clutching his wounded left arm and muttering foxhole prayers to the blood seeping between his fingers. “OhGodOhGodOhGod, I’m hit. OhGod. PleaseI’llneverdoanythingagain. JustthisoncepleaseGod…” Maybe he didn’t want to be a mobster after all.

  Mac’s leather-clad fist shot into his jaw twice, fast and hard, knocking the back of Pinstripe’s head into the wall. The gangster bounced off one of the trash cans a second time, spilling it into the gloom.

  Spider fired blindly, bands of light slashed into the shadows, his pistol pointing where Mac no longer was. Mac heard the Luger’s clip eject and hit the ground. Spider was reloading the German automatic. Mac leapt toward the front of the car, unseen, and then—

  Nobody moved. The only sound in the air was the rattle of the El tracks as the trains’ sound wound higher as they approached, then lower as they departed, even further away, oblivious of life and the fight for it in the alley below. A gaslight hissed in the background, nothing else, not a sound. Mac crouched in front of the car, holding his breath, listening for something. Anything. Minutes passed with only the sound of the gas whispering wick of the street lamp.

  Then, the scrape of shoe leather on cement. Mac turned his head to the side, subconsciously, in an effort to hear more, and the car engine roared to life. Spider was in the driver’s seat. He revved the sedan and, with the throttle to the floor, popped the clutch. The car jumped forward, crushing scrap, garbage, wooden crates and everything else in front of it. Spider laughed as the car collided with the wall before he had a chance to hit the brake. Gears ground as he put it into reverse and pulled back to the alley’s entrance, straining to see into its murky depths all the while. Spider’s eyes shifted from left to right. He couldn’t see, but he should have heard something. McCullough had to have been in front of the car.

  And he had been. But the second Mac heard the engine he hadn’t had time to get out of the way. Even if he could have, how would he know if Spider might crank the wheel into the corner and run right over him? Mac hadn’t had time to think of how to survive, he’d barely had time to act. As the car had jumped forward, the front bumper had almost caught him in the chest, but in an act of sheer desperation Mac grabbed the front bumper and pushed himself forward—toward the wall that would have crushed him, had he not been able to then swing under the sedan. All this happened in a split second. One moment he’d been holding onto the bumper as if he were trying to stop the car, the next moment he’d been dragging under it, only to let go in the nick of time. While Spider had been laughing and backing up the car, Mac had been laying on the ground between the two front wheels.

  Mac stood up in the shadows, just off the front left fender of the sedan, his gun pointed directly behind the driver’s seat. He wasn’t smiling anymore, either. He was exhausted, light-headed. His jaw clenched and his eyes narrowed. He was trying not to black out. For a moment he weaved and all
he could see was a tiny pinpoint of light. The oncoming darkness was fought by sheer force of will.

  When he opened his eyes again, it was as if he had passed out, yet was still standing. He’d dropped his gun but evidently remained unseen. Spider was leaving, backing out of the alley and into the street, looking into his rearview mirror. If he had chosen to go right instead of left, the fight would have been over.

  But Spider decided to go left. So when he straightened out on Lincoln the driver’s side faced the mouth of the alley. Spider’s view went from the mirror to the windshield without once glancing to the side. Where, if he had looked, he would have seen Mac McCullough stepping out of the shadows, looking up from the holes in the knees of his pants and directly at Spider Donlan, the driver—who was still smiling stupidly behind the wheel. The red in McCullough’s eyes wasn’t just from being tired.

  Something big and mean exploded out of the alley and into the street. Spider hadn’t finished shifting into first before the phantom he had faced in the alley transformed into a howling banshee.

  “THAT WAS A BRAND NEW SUIT, SPIDER!” Mac screamed, hunched over, clenching his fists beside the car window.

  Spider looked over just in time to see the man he thought he had run over reach into the car and grab him by the throat. Mac knocked Spider’s fedora off with his other hand, grabbed him by the hair, and pulled him out of the car.

  “DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH THIS SUIT COST ME?” Mac roared.

  Spilling headfirst through the window, Spider tried to reach into his coat for his gun as he was dragged onto the sidewalk. Mac held him by the collar and pounded him in the head until he lost count. Spider dropped the gun and sank backward toward the running board. He held both hands, shaking, in the air as a sign of surrender.

  “Dammit!” Mac said, and punched him in the jaw one more time. “That was a really nice suit…” He was holding the ruined coat open, looking inside it as if he was considering taking it to a tailor.

  Spider looked up at Mac with a pleading, guilty expression. Mac looked back down at Spider, his eyes narrowed in anger all over again. He grabbed the gangster by the lapels, and the tremors in Spider’s hands seemed to fan out all over his body. Then Spider fainted.

  Mac pulled the comatose body up toward his chest as sirens began to drone in the distance. He considered taking Spider with him so he could question the big chicken later—then he remembered the dead men lying back in the alley. Spider Donlan had shot his friend “Mace” in the back and then tried to blame it on McCullough. The best way to prove different was to put Spider’s little Luger gun back in his little Luger shoulder holster, and let him tell the cops all about it. Mac could always find a way to talk to him about it later. The electric chair was more of a threat than Mac would ever be, and Spider would have to wait at least a month or two on death row, anyway. Surely, he couldn’t stay passed out the entire time.

  Mac tossed Spider Donlan into the street on his face, jumped behind the wheel of the car and slammed the door as he shifted into first. He took a left down the next alley and continued coasting behind houses for six blocks, then abandoned the car there, deciding he’d be better off walking the rest of the way home. He could, barely, but he didn’t want a bunch of policemen knocking on his door in the morning and asking him a bunch of questions. Not that he was afraid of the cops; he just didn’t want them waking him up.

  Staggering down Walcott he decided he had made the right decision the moment he saw the flashing lights.

  His apartment was already surrounded by cops. And firemen, too.

  Chapter IV

  Burned Down, Blacked Out

  Mac stood on the corner a block away from his apartment. He stopped only momentarily, just long enough to see what was going on. A squad of firemen was busy hosing down what was left of the building, and his neighbors were walking around the yard in their bathrobes, guarding the furniture and few personal relics they might have managed to save from the fire. There were two detectives in suits asking the people in bathrobes questions, and the uniformed cops that weren’t standing around guarding the furniture of the people answering, were trying to run off a collecting crowd of gawkers.

  Good luck with that, Mac thought, it’s like a free fireworks. He stopped to observe from the corner for a moment, wondering if the firebug might still be around. He decided if they were, they weren’t the professionals he thought he was facing. Then again, Spider wasn’t exactly a professional, and he was probably the one that had done it. Either way, it wasn’t going to get his stuff back.

  He didn’t care about the furniture, or the dishes he hardly used. Although he really liked that frying pan, maybe he could go back and get it. Then it hit him—his books. He’d worked years to build a convincing front as a construction contractor and now all his records had gone up in flames. And that was something he couldn’t afford because he had a feeling the police might be taking a closer look at his accounting records any day now. Well, he did keep half of the old stuff in a safety deposit box, but he’d have to re-write the rest of it from memory. Then he remembered the important stuff: his collection of pulp magazines and a brand new Philco radio! Now, what did they have to go and do that for?

  First of all, his pulp collection had been like a library of crime. Every hero should have one. It was like a reference library. He could always go over it to see what he should do given any situation. It was how he had known when to wear a mask, how he should have a secret hideout, it was something he’d practically learned his unstable moral code from—not that he thought it was unstable—without it he’d be in jail.

  OK, so I’ll get new pulps, he thought. With any luck, no foreign madman will try to take over the country with a death ray or some poison gas epidemic until I can read up on it again. He almost made himself laugh.

  Then he thought about the new radio. Not only was he going to miss The Lone Ranger—a guilty pleasure he kept hidden from everybody—but it was baseball season!

  Rats.

  He watched the last of his ashen roof collapse under the weight of the water onslaught from the fire department and decided to move on. At least he was only renting. He could always get new stuff.

  Now he just had to figure out if Spider had burned down his place because he knew Mac was The Bagman and had broken up his bank courier ripoff? Or, was Spider working the bank courier job for Slots, and Slots had decided to burn him out? And was Slots burning him out because Mac had taken down Tony—Anthony—and bailed on the rackets? Or did Slots know Mac was The Bagman?

  He’d just gotten around to reasoning that maybe Spider had done it because Spider was just a weasely jerk, when Mac realized he needed a place to stay that night. Since he didn’t know where, he went in to the all night Rexall and grabbed a cup of coffee. The grill man behind the counter looked at Mac like he was some sort of feral child. Mac looked down at the holes in his knees and, noticing he had blood on his hand when he wiped it across his forehead, thought the guy might be right.

  He ordered a grilled cheese and a second cup to go, afraid he’d attract too much attention to himself if he stayed in the store. Both the coffee and the cheese were stale and too strong—but that was what he needed if he was going to find the strength to walk anywhere. He picked up a stack of notebooks and a few pencils while he waited.

  He had a million people he could call for a place to stay but it was almost four in the morning. He skulked his way back over to Crankshaft’s garage. “Ooooooh, a Masterlock,” he muttered to himself and pulled out his lockpick set. “I’ve really got to get a key.” The padlock popped open and he unwrapped the chain from the gate.

  He took Crankshaft’s bottle of bootleg whiskey out of the desk—not just because he needed it, but to get even for changing the padlock, too. Then, after writing two pages that wouldn’t make any sense the next morning, he decided to go on down and check out the garag
e. He flipped on the lights to his secret hideout.

  Yeah, he could always get new stuff. Besides, how many other people in Chicago had a secret hideout? Besides the mob. How many good guys? He was glad he had this place. It looked like he was going to need it.

  He took one glance at the Graham Blue Streak Eight stored in the corner with a tarp over it and offered a toast with Crankshaft’s bottle. There wouldn’t be another car on the road like it. The newfound sanctity of his fortress emphasized the fact that he should keep the car a secret, too. He pulled the tarp off and took a look at it, toasted it again, and noticed Crankshaft had installed some kind of electrical connection to the bumper. Tail lights? He’d have to ask him about it in the morning.

  He washed himself up in the slop sink and realized this was the first chance he’d had to spend some time down here. He crawled inside the driver’s seat and noticed a book laying on one of the shelves over his new work station. Crankshaft had left a textbook there. Looked like chemistry. He considered getting out of the car and fetching the book to read, but he was asleep before he’d finished the thought.

  Mac didn’t wake up until three o’clock in the afternoon, Crankshaft shaking his shoulder. He had fallen over sideways in the seat of the Blue Streak, a Big Chief notebook still in his lap, and the chemistry textbook lying next to him. He woke up as if startled, and then growled when he realized where he was, clenching his head in one hand.

  “Hey, sleeping beauty, figured you might want to wake up while it’s still daylight,” Crankshaft said, leaning in the car window.

  “No. No, not really.” Mac looked down at the remains of his new suit and groaned.