Two Trains Running

by Andrew Vachss

He started the Impala, pulled out of his parking space, and drove several blocks down Lambert. He was not surprised to see still another black-and-white before he turned back in the direction of the Hawks’ basement.

  The patch of broken ground between two short blocks had never been used for sandlot baseball games. Choked with rubble, it looked like the place where junkyards dumped what they couldn’t sell.

  Dett pulled alongside the vacant lot. Stepping out briskly, he opened the Impala’s trunk, reached in carefully with both hands, and extracted a crosshatched weave of Scotch tape. He sprinkled dirt lightly on the sticky side of the weave, turning it cloudy. Using his back to block what he was doing, he reversed the weave so that it adhered to the license plate on the rear bumper. Then he stepped back to inspect his work, satisfying himself that the plate was unreadable, even at close range.

  The Roadmaster was still in place, almost directly under a working streetlight. Dett parked ahead of it on the one-way street, climbed out, and walked slowly back. A wine bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag was in his left hand. His walk was determinedly steady—a drunk who knew he was loaded.

  The drunk’s walk got sloppier and sloppier as he neared the Buick. By the time he was ten feet past the car, the booze seemed to get the upper hand—he slumped against a deserted building for support.

  A minute later, the drunk was sitting on the sidewalk, his back to the building, chin on his chest. Under the brim of his hat, his eyes swept the surrounding terrain like a prison searchlight after the escape siren sounds.

  Less than twenty minutes had passed when two men turned the corner to the drunk’s left.

  Dett watched, Two! registering clinically in his technician’s mind.

  As the men came closer, Dett’s eyes noted that they were both wearing black topcoats and pearl-gray snap-brims. His mind dismissed the information, focusing on the vitals—they were approximately the same height.

  Anyone watching would have seen a drunk struggling to his feet, using one hand to brace himself against the building wall. The drunk stumbled toward the two men, weaving slightly.

  One of the men parted his topcoat, revealing a white silk lining as he reached into the pocket of his slacks and pulled out a set of car keys.

  Dett staggered down the sidewalk toward them, a wet-brain on autopilot, determined to walk home despite the ground rippling under his feet.

  Slow down, Dett said inside his mind. The movie playing on the screen of his eyes began to crawl forward, frame by frame, as his world telescoped down to a narrow tunnel.

  At five yards, Dett made a pre-vomiting sound. The man with the car keys involuntarily drew back, looking at Dett in disgust. Dett tossed the paper bag to his left. It seemed to hang in the air for seconds, pulling the eyes of both men into its arc before the bottle inside shattered on the sidewalk. The one with the car keys shook his head in contempt. The other, more experienced, was already reaching inside his coat as Dett drew his pistol from under his left armpit—Exhale . . . slowly, slowly—and gripped it in two hands, the left hand pulling back against the slight forward pressure of the right, wrists locked.

  One man’s hand was already under his lapel as Dett’s .45 cracked. The shot caught him in the center of his chest, dropping him instantly. Without shifting his feet, Dett ratcheted his shoulders a few notches and cranked off another round, nailing the other man in the stomach.

  Dett bent forward and carefully shot each man between the eyes. He turned and walked unhurriedly past the dead bodies toward his car, the .45 dangling at his side.

  No lights went on. No sirens broke the night.

  Dett slipped his pistol back into its holster and kept walking, moving quickly through the slow-motion movie reel unfurling all around him.

  The ignition key was already slotted in the Impala, the protruding portion wrapped in black electrical tape so it wouldn’t catch the eye of any casual passerby. The door was unlocked. It only took Dett a long heartbeat to get in, start the engine, and smoothly pull away.

  Dett drove to the pawnshop. But instead of parking in front of the building, he pulled around to the side, and opened the padlock to the chain-linked lot, using a key the pawnbroker had insisted on giving him.

  When he drove out a few minutes later, Dett was behind the wheel of the Ford, dressed in laborer’s clothes. His hands reeked faintly of gasoline. He was unarmed.

  * * *

  1959 October 04 Sunday 03:09

  * * *

  “What did he say? Exactly,” Dioguardi demanded.

  “He said, ‘Tell your boss, the next package I deliver, I won’t use the mail.’ Then he hung up. Fucking cocksucking—”

  “He didn’t ask for anyone, Vito? Like last time?”

  “No, boss. It was just what I told you, word for word.”

  “Would you know the voice if you heard it again?”

  “I . . . Maybe, I don’t know, Mr. D. It was a white guy. Not a kid, but not too old, either.”

  “He didn’t have any kind of an accent?”

  “No. It was like . . . it was like talking to a machine. What do we do, Mr. D.?”

  “When he calls again, you tell him I want to talk.”

  “Maybe he won’t—”

  “Yeah, he will,” Dioguardi said, grimly confident.

  * * *

  1959 October 04 Sunday 03:23

  * * *

  Moonlight transformed the gleaming aluminum skin of the Air-stream trailer into a shimmering, eye-tricking image, like a metallic mushroom growing in a dense forest. The trailer was mortally wounded—first ripped and torn beyond repair in a head-on collision with a hell-bound semi, later stripped of anything that could be turned into cash, and finally left to rot in a far corner of the junkyard. A red dot glowed from somewhere inside what was once its doorway.

  “It’s almost half past, Omar,” Kendall said to Rufus.

  “I know what time it is, brother.”

  “They was never so late before.”

  “You got someplace to be, K.?”

  “Yeah, man. Always. Right here, with you, wherever you is. All I’m saying—”

  “That’s them,” Darryl interrupted, as jaundiced headlight beams cut the night.

  A dark-gray panel truck turned into the entrance to the junkyard. On its side were the words “Acme Transfer Company” in red, flowing above a painting of a deliveryman wheeling a file cabinet on a hand truck, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to display bulging cartoon biceps.

  The truck did a slow-speed slalom through the piled-up car corpses until it came to a cleared area where the remains of the trailer sat.

  “Why it always got to be two of them?” Kendall whispered to Rufus.

  “There’s more than two of us,” Rufus answered. “They’re the ones walking into the lions’ den.”

  “Don’t ever feel like that to me, brother. Those some spooky motherfuckers.”

  Rufus was already on his feet, moving toward the truck, which had come to a gentle stop.

  A man emerged from the passenger seat, dropping lightly to the ground. He was dressed in a black leather jacket over a white turtleneck jersey and blue jeans.

  Like he bought that whole outfit an hour ago, Rufus thought to himself. And look at those shoes—they’re made for a suit. “You’re late,” he said aloud. “I wasn’t sure you’d be coming.”

  “We had to take a detour,” the man said. He was a couple of inches shorter than Rufus, with a face older than his trim physique.

  “I’ve got your money,” Rufus said.

  “And we’ve got your goods,” the man replied, twitching his mouth.

  As they spoke, the driver climbed out of the truck, walked around to the back, and opened the doors.

  Mutt and Jeff, Rufus thought, noting the driver’s height. But they shop at the same store.

  The shorter man made a “Welcome to my establishment” gesture with one hand, indicating two rows of neatly stacked wooden crates.

  “I don’t see any
—” Rufus said.

  “Everything’s there,” the man cut him off. “You’ve got four to a crate, so that’s twenty-four total. Behind, you’ve got extra thirty-round magazines, plus five thousand rounds.”

  “We said fifty.”

  “You said fifty M1s,” the man corrected Rufus. “What you’ve got here, my friend, is two dozen M2s. They may be Winchesters, but they’re not the kind you could walk into a gun shop and buy, not ordnance like this. It’s all military, right out of the armory. Brand-new and perfect. An operation like we run, if you want to keep doing it, you take the opportunities as they’re offered. Twenty-four is what we could take out safely. So we know we can always go back.”

  “The price—”

  “The price is the same,” the man said. “And it’s cheap at that. The M2s have a selective fire switch. You know what that means?”

  “Yeah, I know what it means. But two dozen machine guns still means only two dozen men can hold them. My buyer wanted fifty, like I said.”

  “This load is what we have, friend. You want it, or not?”

  “I want it. But not for no—”

  “We didn’t drive out here to bargain, friend,” the shorter man said. “If you don’t want to take the package, we know other people who will. The only reason we even bothered to come all the way out here was because you’ve been such a good customer.”

  “I don’t see why we can’t . . . adjust the price,” Rufus said, resentfully.

  “We took the same risk for twenty-four as we would have for fifty,” the man said, his tone indicating he considered his position very reasonable. “And we’d spend just as much time in prison if we were caught. We have expenses. People to pay, all along the route. Nobody we had to pay wanted to hear about any ‘adjustment.’ Look, like I said, you’re a good customer. We’ll make it up to you on the next shipment. What do you say?”

  “I’ll get the money,” Rufus said.

  “Good. We’ll start unloading, then.”

  * * *

  1959 October 04 Sunday 04:19

  * * *

  “I still think it was stupid, Fred,” the driver of the panel truck said to the man next to him. They were back on the interstate, twenty miles from the drop-off point, heading west. “What if they had refused the load?”

  “You don’t understand those people, Milt,” the man in the passenger seat said. “They expect us to try and change the deal, from time to time. If we didn’t, they’d get suspicious.”

  “So what if they did? So long as they take the guns, what difference does it make?”

  “The difference it makes is, maybe, the difference in our careers, partner.”

  “I don’t get what you’re saying, Fred. We were told to—”

  “What I’m saying is, this whole thing started as an assignment. The Bureau needs to know who’s buying guns, and the best way to know that is for us to be in the gunrunning business.”

  “Right. So?”

  “So knowing who’s buying guns isn’t the same thing as knowing what they’re going to do with them.”

  “You think they’re going to just tell us?”

  “Well, they did kind of tell us, Milt, if you think about it. That is, if you count that fairy story about some nigger in a junkyard who’s an international arms trafficker,” the shorter man said, scornfully. “Still, up to now, they haven’t asked us for anything except what we’re supposed to be selling. Guns. Now, we know something from the kind of guns they buy, don’t we? Sure!” the shorter man said, answering his own question, as was his habit. “But think what we might learn if they got the idea we could get inside an armory somewhere. Who knows how far they might go?”

  “That’s why you told him—?”

  “Exactly!” Fred said, clapping his hands in self-satisfaction. “I planted a seed. That’s what the Bureau calls initiative, partner.”

  * * *

  1959 October 04 Sunday 04:26

  * * *

  “I don’t like those boys,” the cadaverous man said.

  “I don’t like them, either,” Rufus replied. “But I like what they deal in.”

  “Every time we make a buy, they get a real good look at you,” the cadaverous man said. “And they know this place, too.”

  “Yeah. But K-man already made the calls. By daybreak, those guns are going to be on their way to ten different places.”

  “They only brought two dozen.”

  “So some units will get less than we planned on. But these are real machine guns. We never had any of those, before.”

  “I don’t like dealing with whites, brother.”

  “For what we need, who else could we be going to?” Rufus said, not expecting an answer.

  * * *

  1959 October 04 Sunday 08:08

  * * *

  The North Side block was a solid chunk of attached, identical two-story buildings—retail establishments, with apartment units above.

  Behind the block was an alley almost as wide as a two-lane road, with a row of garages facing the rear of the buildings. Exposed wooden stairways provided access to the rear doors of the second-floor apartments. The railings sported a fresh coat of cream paint. A couple of tenants had decorated their portions with flower boxes. A portable barbecue grill stood on one landing, an armchair covered with a canvas tarp on another.

  The Shamrock Inn’s façade was sun-faded brick, with a pair of narrow, vertical-slit windows standing like sentries on either side of a heavy black oak door. To its right stood a laundry; to its left, a dry cleaner.

  Above the Shamrock, two men sat at a small table covered with red-and-white-checked oilcloth. The table was placed precisely in the center of a bare room, set well back from the thickly curtained front windows.

  “That’s a mighty big slice of honeycake you’re feeding me here, Sean.”

  The whiskey-roughened voice belonged to a small, compact, ginger-haired man with a deeply cleft chin, dressed in a white corduroy shirt buttoned to the throat, neatly pressed chinos, and lace-up brown work boots. His features placed him somewhere between his late thirties and early fifties; his eyes were a deceptively soft blue. The lobe of his right ear was elongated, like a piece of pulled taffy; the left lobe was missing, leaving a ragged edge. His hands looked as if they had been grafted onto his body from a man twice his size.

  “Not a word of it, Mickey Shalare,” the ruddy-faced man across from him said. He was in his mid-sixties, wearing a double-breasted blue suit that emphasized his considerable bulk. “It’s sweet, that I won’t deny. But it’s gospel-pure, on my mother’s love.”

  “It’s really going to happen, then? The coalition?”

  “It’s already happened, my son. By Thanksgiving, it’ll be locked down tighter than a church secret.”

  “You really think this country’s ready for one of us at the top?”

  “One of us? Oh, I wouldn’t think so,” Sean replied, a grin flashing across his face and disappearing quickly, a subliminal message. “But a Catholic? That can be done, yes.”

  “People in this part of the country—”

  “—vote the same way they do everyplace else, Mick. One at a bloody time. And not nearly so many of them as could. A lot of folks here, they don’t even bother.”

  Sean paused, catching the expression on the younger man’s face. Then, clearing his throat dramatically, he spoke again. “Sure, we understand there’s some . . . bad elements in these parts. But you think those boys who like to dress up in hoods and robes are going to try burning a cross on the White House lawn?”

  “Not them,” Shalare said contemptuously. “They don’t have the bottle for it. But—”

  “You’re going to tell me that there’s plenty think like them, though, are you? Well, listen to me now: their votes don’t count.”

  “How can they not count, Sean? The ballots are blind.”

  The bulky man took a slow, contemplative sip from a heavy brown mug. His posture shifted subtly; his voice took on an almo
st professorial tone. But his words were hard metal, without even a trace element of condescension. “In this country, the way they have it set up, there are only two parties. If you want to cast your vote for the idiot who promises you a worker’s paradise, or for the moron who swears he’s going to ship all the darkies back to Africa, well, you can do it. But your vote won’t count, do you see? You’d be at a horse race, betting on a pig.

  “Besides,” the bulky man continued, running a hand through his thick, reddish gray hair, “it’s the big cities where the real numbers are. And that’s where we’re the strongest. Strongest by far, I do promise you.”

  “And if this should happen, it will mean . . . what, for our people?” the ginger-haired man asked, a beveled edge to his flinty voice.

  The bulky man changed position so that his elbows were on the table, his body language inviting the smaller man to do the same.

  “This kind of talk . . . it’s not meant for anyone to hear.”

  The smaller man’s complexion darkened as quickly as a finger-snap. “Are you saying that I—”

  “Ah, Mickey Shalare,” the bulky man interrupted, holding up his palm for silence. “Do you think any of us forget how you held your own against all the King’s men, even down in the pit of their dungeons? Right after the Gough Barracks it was when they came for you, and there’s good and true men who wouldn’t have breathed free air these past years, were it not for your devotion.”

  “Yes, and . . . ?” the ginger-haired man said, not softening.

  “And I never forget what my mother taught me at her knee, son,” the bulky man said, dropping his voice and glancing over his shoulder before returning his eyes to Shalare’s. “Poverty’s bad, but stupidity’s worse. Green, that’s the color of grass, too.”

  “I had a mother, myself, Sean,” the smaller man said, his oversized hands splayed on the tabletop. “Below us is my own place. The apartments on either side of this one, the only tenants are women whose husbands are never coming home, and they don’t keep company, understand? There’s a pigeon coop on the roof, and the boy who takes care of them is the youngest son of Michael McNamara himself. Here, where we’re sitting, it might as well be a Bogside estate.”