Eliot shot one of the men off the rooftop; Hector took down the other. Both fell four floors and made moist, cracking sounds as they slammed into the pavement behind the FBI agents’ car.
Those FBI bastards were ducking down in their seats, the agents using their “latitude” to refrain from helping, Hector saw, gritting his teeth. Craven sons of bitches.
The Feds’ attention seemed to be focused on the machine gunners who’d driven in on the milk truck. While they were looking that way, Hector fired three shots straight into the Feds’ car.
Hector put one shot just an inch or two above the driver’s head, shattering his window. The Feds fell out of the passenger side door of their car then, cursing and firing at the men who’d come in on the milk truck. The FBI boys were all tiger now that they felt personally threatened.
Eliot opened the passenger’s side door of his car and beckoned. Hector saw Jimmy run around to the back of Eliot’s car and begin shooting at the roof of the brownstone. Jimmy yelled, “Heads up, Hec!”
Hector pulled Katy closer as a man fell off the roof of the brownstone and crashed at their feet. Hector grabbed Katy and manhandled her over the dead man’s ruined body, propelling her into Eliot’s car. She slid in and Jimmy yelled, “Over the seat, Kate!” She awkwardly skidded over and into the back seat as Jimmy slid in next to Eliot. Jimmy yelled, “High time we fled, Hec!”
Hector waved back at him with his gun, then looked up over the concrete staircase. One of the machine gunners was making a run toward Eliot’s car.
Either Hector or one of the Feds put that man down. Hector thought about making a dash for his dropped machine gun—he sure would have liked to add that wicked security blanket to their weapons cache. But it would have been suicide.
Hector had been counting his shots; with his old Peacemaker, that was a vital thing to do in a gunfight. He figured he had one bullet left. So he shot out the front driver’s side tire of the milk truck, then ran to his Chevy. Hector got her in gear, backed out of the driveway and tore off.
Meg’s voice from the backseat: “I moved Shannon to the floor when the shooting started. She didn’t even wake up. Are you okay, Hector?”
“I’m fine,” he said thickly. Eliot’s car was coming up fast behind them. The Feds were still shooting it out with the remaining machine gunner.
Meg said, “And Katy?”
“Okay. She’s in Eliot’s car with Jimmy.”
“How’d they find us?”
Hector sighed. “Don’t ever tell Jimmy I said this, but I’m beginning to trust his cop partner a hell of a lot less than Jimmy does.”
20
The path they’d chosen was a fairly obvious one—the only sensible road open to them: they’d pick up Route 42 and ride it down to Route 40—the Old National Trail—two hundred seventeen miles of slush and snow and two-lane roads lending themselves to all-too-easy ambush. Milk run? Sure.
They stopped around eleven at a mom-and-pop place for some meal between breakfast and lunch, most of them opting for eggs or the like.
At their second stop for a proper lunch, Jimmy, Eliot and Hector decided to spend the night in Yellow Springs, a college town not far from Dayton. Once there, Eliot and Jimmy would contact the lawyer, Gibson, and arrange the final details for turning the girls over to the attorney for federal protection.
As they may their way to Dayton, Hector felt this little stab of pain as he saw signs for Springfield, Ohio. That was the town where Brinke was born, the wide-spot-in-the-road she’d fled in terror and disgust and never returned to. Hector had never been there, and even if he wasn’t pressed to be elsewhere now, he doubted he could bear to see it.
They found a small inn on the outskirts of Yellow Springs, sitting at the fringe of the Antioch campus, some joint that mostly catered to the visiting parents of college students. Because of the holiday break, the inn, like the rest of the town, felt deserted.
Jimmy and Eliot shared a room; the ladies had a room and Hector took one to himself—a move he justified by citing his need to write and the early morning clatter of his typewriter. They put the women in the center room that had an adjoining door with Hector’s. Potentially useful, of course, that extra door.
They took their dinner in a place downtown. Jimmy and Eliot clearly saw a night of drinking and boozy war stories ahead of them. Hector figured writing in his room was probably out of the question: Eliot and Jimmy would insist he participate in their spirit-stoked reveries if he was close at hand.
So Hector envisioned finding a bar in which to write. He was just getting ready to put on his overcoat when the door between their rooms opened. Meg said, “Could you use some company, Hec?”
“Absolutely.” He smiled regretfully. “But not just yet, okay? Missed my writing time this morning and that’s very bad luck and a bad habit that’s far too easy to sustain. I truly hate to break my routine. But trying to write here is going to be a problem with the boys in tow.”
Not to mention the distraction of having Megan merely one wall away.
She nodded. “Understood. Just in case things go haywire, where should I look for you?”
“There’s an old stagecoach stop on Main Street,” Hector said. “It’s a pub these days. I’m told the college literati congregate there to write, so I’ll maybe blend-in there in my rickety way with pen and notebook. Hell, maybe some of that youthful zeal and literary inspiration will rub off.”
“You don’t need any inspiration,” Meg said. “Not that kind.”
He kissed her. “I’ll come back and fetch you around nine, okay?”
A sad smile. “Oh, it’s surely a date, Mr. Lassiter.”
The three block’s walk to the inn was eye-watering cold. The snow had become brittle and crunchy underfoot.
The pub’s clientele was a mix of old locals and sullen-looking undergrads who hadn’t made the run home for the holidays. A mangy Christmas tree stood in the corner by the jukebox, decorated with beer bottle caps and promotional coasters for seasonal ales and hard liquors. A Bing Crosby LP of Yule tunes was cranked up loud.
Taken together, it all almost made Hector yearn for a proper Christmas tree.
He bypassed the bar and made his way into a slightly quieter backroom that offered tables and booths. Several solitary younger types sat in various booths, crouched over notebooks and legal pads, scribbling away.
It was Hector’s kind of place for certain: the flavor of watering hole that in his youth he’d have burned down the hours, filling the pages with ink. The place brought back vague memories of the Closerie des Lilas, or Le Select in the best of the old days.
He snagged a corner booth in the back that gave him a line-of-sight shot back to the bar area and right on to the front door—a place where he’d have plenty of time to prepare if any unfriendly types happened in.
After ordering a beer and whiskey back, and being brought a complimentary bowl of thirst-bolstering pretzels, Hector got out his notebook and fountain pen and knuckled down to work.
No warms ups, no preludes and no false starts.
Hector resumed by completing the sentence he’d left unfinished the morning before—a trick he’d long ago evolved to kick-start his composition process. That and never writing himself out were the vital secrets of writing to Hector’s mind. They were what made him seem so much more prolific to peers who bitterly admired or acidly rued Hector’s compositional speed.
That and not over-thinking it.
It wasn’t about W-R-I-T-I-N-G for Hector.
It’s was just writing, lowercase, no italics.
His trade.
Or so he told myself each time he sat down to do it.
Hector wrote longhand for more than an hour, lost in the country of his story. When he sensed he was close to writing the well dry, he stopped cold, once again at mid-sentence.
He read back all that he’d written, making just a few small tweaks along the way. He figured to get back to Meg a good bit ahead of schedule. He closed his n
otebook and smiled.
Someone cleared his voice and said, “Excuse me, Mr. Lassiter? Mind if I join you for a few minutes? Could I please stand you another beer?”
It was a youngish man. The stranger had thick black hair, dark eyes and a likeable enough smile. He looked a bit too old to be a student. But he was no federal agent, and no thug, either. Of that much Hector was certain.
The man held a fresh pitcher of frothy beer and his own frosted mug. Hector scented writer.
Hector nodded. “You know me?”
“So you are Hector Lassiter. I was pretty certain of it. I’ve read your books for many years.” The stranger arched one of his dark, bushy eyebrows and smiled. He had a dimple in his left cheek. His diction was crisp and precise. He ended his sentences by placing stresses on the last word of every sentence. “I know you from your dust jacket photos,” the stranger said.
“Please, call me Hector.” He gestured at the empty bench opposite. “Snug in and take a load off, Mr.—?”
“Rod,” the stranger said. “My name’s Rod.” The younger man filled Hector’s mug, pouring down the side of the glass to tamp down the head. As he did that, Rod said, “I’m a student here at Antioch. Studying on the G.I. Bill. Or I was. Graduated earlier this year. Took a radio job in the Queen City. But our friends are all back here, so with the holidays…?” A sheepish shrug.
That explained his age—Rod was a brainy Vet. “What exactly did you study, Rod?”
“Writing.”
So he was right. Hector said, “Poet? Aspiring novelist? Short stories? You know, the kind of stuff they print in the Antioch Review?” God, but Hector surely hoped not.
“It seems I may be too populist for that,” Rod said. “More of a commercial writer. Or so I’m told.” This rueful smile. Hector had seen it before, right there in the mirror.
“Books, plays… screenwriting, mostly,” Rod said. “There’s a difference between living as a writer—what most around these parts seem to want to do—and making a living as a writer. I want to do the latter. I need to do that. I see this as my career. I’ve got a family to support. I want to go at television, and I mean to do that, full bore. It’s like a new frontier for writers, I think.”
The boy was on a roll: Hector just smiled and sat back, watching Rod go.
Something in Rod’s ensuing monologue reached Hector.
“I want to be intellectual and commercial,” Rod said, intense eyes and gravel-voiced. “I really believe it can be done, Hector. It’s not conforming, either. Not at all. I’ve never written beneath myself, never. Friends from school taunt me for my interest in television. They sneer and say I’m selling out. But I’m not some meek conformist. I’m a tired non-conformist.” He grimaced. “Like it or not, television is here to stay. Of that much I’m certain. These Kefauver hearings and the interest in watching them on that strange tube are just another sign I’m right.”
Rod smiled and shook his head. “And I’m motor-mouthing like a star-struck jerk, aren’t I? Sorry, but it’s just kind of overwhelming to meet a man I so admire as a writer. The career you’ve charted, Mr. Lassiter, is just the kind I aspire to. Popular writing, but smart.”
So writing was indeed his intended trade.
Rod was doing it for the art, but not above the money. Hector loved him already.
“We’re just folks, so you call me Hector,” he said. “And sounds to me like you’ve got the winning attitude.”
“Well, I’ve already sold a few things.”
“That’s great, Rod.” Hector hoisted his mug and they toasted. “To working writers,” Hector said.
Rod licked his lips as he lowered his glass. “As it happens, I’ve been studying some of your scripts these past few weeks,” Rod said. “I notice in interviews you disparage your own film work, but you’re a natural screenwriter, Mr. Lassiter. Really one of the best screenwriters currently going to my mind. Your dialogue is nearly always pitch-perfect. Very naturalistic, yet character comes through in your dialogue.”
Hector waved a hand. “That film stuff pays the freight for what the book advances don’t always cover,” he said. “You know, things like cars… clothes. Food and libations. That sort of necessary stuff.”
Rod said, “Have to say, I was pretty stunned to look up from my notepad and see you sitting here, writing. Didn’t know you ever made it up this way. And so close to Christmas? You have family around these parts?”
Hector winced a little. “God, tomorrow is Christmas Eve, isn’t it? I’d completely lost track.”
“So, do you have family around these parts, Hector?”
“No, I’m sort of out this way on unexpected business,” he said. “A favor that keeps growing in scope. Headed to Dayton tomorrow, then probably back down to New Mexico.”
“Shame it’s holiday break,” Rod said. “I’m sure the university would love to have you speak to the English department. I’m sure they’d pay you to do that.”
“I’ll be long gone before school resumes,” Hector said. “And I don’t cotton much to that kind of public speaking, Rod. I’m happy to sign ’em when some reader like you puts the arm on me along the way and hands me back a book I wrote. But talking about my writing in front of people? Just don’t enjoy it, between us. It’s best, I think, just to keep well out of way of your own writings. And from what you said about your classmates, I’d irk the ones at the university every bit as much as you do, my friend. Hell, probably more. I’m a writer, not an author—you know, full caps with swirly serifs.”
Rod smiled and lit a cigarette. “How do you expect the young ones studying writing to learn if the seasoned pros like yourself don’t share the knowledge?”
“Studying writing?” Hector smiled and shook his head. “Must confess, that I don’t get, either. Sorry, but you’re talking to the wrong hack writer, Rod. I never even graduated high school, kid. I lied about my age and ran off to the wars, first down in Mexico, then over to Europe. Stayed on there a time, living in Paris while teaching myself to write—one true sentence. I had no writing teachers like you mean. Not even mentors, per se. Hell, Gertrude Stein taught me flat nothing about crime writing. In the end.”
Hector was overstating, of course. He’d learned some important and valuable things about prose, about echo and repetition, from Gertrude. The most important things he’d learned from that other female writer—the far more fetching Brinke Devlin.
Through a haze of cigarette smoke, Rod said, “What are you working on now? A novel? A screenplay?”
“Been in a kind of novel phase lately,” Hector said. “The film stuff coming my way hasn’t been compelling and I’m okay for cash presently. Most of the film stuff lately offered me has been punching up dialogue for lackluster melodramas or requests to adapt the works of other crime writers.” Hector waved a hand. “Only thing worse than adapting your own work is chewing the cud of some rival writer. What are you working on, Rod?”
“More scripts. I’d like to have my own television series some day soon. An anthology kind of thing, but dark. Slightly macabre. Shadows and substance.” Grinning sheepishly, he said, “It’s my pipe dream.”
“You Ohio writers are a breed apart, you know,” Hector said. “Ambrose Bierce… O. Henry. You Buckeye boys like your twist endings and gothic settings, don’t you? You are a dark but enticing crew.”
“I was born in New York.” Rod’s brow furrowed. “O. Henry was from Ohio?”
“Started writing here, anyway,” Hector said. “In the state pen in Columbus. One of those prison writers, like Cervantes, maybe. Fella name of Chester Himes got started in the Ohio State Pen, too. That one’s a prickly son of a bitch in person, but I like Chester well enough in small doses.”
And Bierce? Hector couldn’t tell that story. He’d sworn an oath of secrecy to Bierce himself.
Talk of prisons and writers reminded Hector of Meg and a similar conversation. He felt an obligation to get back to her. He pulled out his pen and opened up his notebook. Hector sli
d them across the table to Rod. “Here, please scrawl your address down there and I’ll keep you in mind, friend. I don’t say yes to every film project that comes my way. Maybe I can send you some work. I’d dearly love to do that.”
Rod half-smiled. “But you haven’t read any of my stuff.”
“True, but I like your attitude and poise,” Hector said. “I’m going to trust my instincts that you’re worthy and capable.”
The younger writer inscribed his contact information in Hector’s notebook and passed it back to the older writer.
Hector checked his name, read aloud: “Rod Serling—it’s a good name for a by-line.”
“Thanks. You looked like you were headed out, Hector. I truly didn’t mean to detain you. But I’d have kicked myself forever if I didn’t take the opportunity to have a drink or two with you. To chat a little.”
“I really enjoyed it, kid,” Hector said. “You headed out yourself?”
“Not quite yet.” Rod grimaced again and lit another cigarette. He offered Hector one of his smokes. Hector took it and fired them both up with my old Zippo. “I have trouble sleeping from time to time,” Rod said. He shifted uncomfortably. “How to put it? You see, since the war…”
Christ’s sake, that said it all.
Rod looked more than a little embarrassed. Hector smacked the younger man’s arm and stretched some hard truths. “Holy Jesus, you don’t need to say a word more, buddy. Hell, I don’t think I slept through a single night after World War I until about 1923. My best ex-friend Hemingway, either. I was so groggy with sleep deprivation those years I don’t even remember much about ’em.”
That was all true enough.
It was about 1924 Hector finally started to put it all behind him.
Sultry, exquisite Brinke had helped with that, though Hector had never told her so.
His best nights’ sleep in those haunted years came tangled in her arms.
More bitter regrets.
The Running Kind: A Hector Lassiter novel Page 12