Sledgehammer

by Walter Wager

  “What about me?” demanded Samuel Roosevelt Clayton.

  “We’ll straighten out your legal problems in a couple of weeks,” the Atlanta SAC promised. “In the meantime, you’ll go to a private cell at the Federal penitentiary in Atlanta. You’ll be in our custody until your trial. With Davidson as your counsel, I’d bet on a fast acquittal.”

  Handcuffed and visibly depressed, Pikelis’ men were being loaded into the FBI cars—two to a vehicle.

  “You’re damned lucky that you didn’t kill anybody in all this fighting,” MacBride observed. “Goddam lucky.”

  Williston looked at Carstairs; it was true. Although neither of them said it, it was also—suddenly—chilling. Frightening.

  “We never intended to kill anybody,” protested Arbolino.

  “No, it wasn’t in the plan,” Gilman confirmed.

  The teacher looked at him. He hadn’t changed at all, despite everything that had happened. Samuel Mordecai Gilman still believed in plans.

  The Federal agents turned to go.

  “Can we take one of the extra cars, one of the Pikelis cars, to get back to town?” Carstairs asked.

  MacBride glared.

  “That’s private property, Mr. Carstairs. You’ve broken or bent enough laws without adding auto theft,” he warned. “Besides, we’ll be impounding those vehicles as evidence.”

  “I’ve got a date with a girl—a very difficult date—at the country club,” the millionaire explained.

  “You’re going to tell her the whole story, Petie?” the singer asked.

  “It’s my only chance. I can’t afford to lie to that girl anymore.”

  Williston studied his tense face.

  “I didn’t know you cared, Petie,” he said.

  “Neither did I—it wasn’t in the plan—but I guess I do. At my age, I’m growing up—I think.”

  “What about the guns, Petie?”

  Carstairs shrugged, sighed.

  “A grown man doesn’t need such toys—such ugly toys—I think,” he answered.

  “I hope,” he added a moment later.

  A siren sounded somewhere down Route 121, and Mac-Bride turned to speak into his radio once again.

  “What am I going to tell her?” Carstairs wondered. “I mean how am I going to tell her, and what is she going to say? What is she going to say about that?” He gestured toward the Cadillac.

  “We didn’t shoot her father,” Gilman argued rationally, “although he deserved to be shot and hanged and otherwise punished for many terrible crimes. Just tell her the truth—it was an FBI roadblock.”

  The blond socialite who was so successful with women looked at Gilman in disbelief. It was no wonder that the man from Las Vegas was alone; he believed that facts and logic and mathematics really counted in human relationships.

  “What do you think, Tony?” the millionaire asked.

  The stunt man sighed, thinking of his own wife.

  “No rules—you know that, Pete,” Arbolino reproved. “Get to her and hold her; that’s what I’m going to do with my woman as soon as I can.”

  He’s smart, Judy Barringer thought.

  The siren grew louder; an ambulance and a car filled with FBI agents pulled off the road and stopped beside the battered Cadillac. The agents nodded to MacBride, sat silently in their sedan with their machine guns across their knees and their eyes on the white-suited doctors.

  “DOA,” a redheaded intern called out in matter-of-fact tones after examining the chauffeur briefly.

  He looked around at all the armed men, shook his head in awe.

  “You boys had some shoot-out, huh?” he marveled.

  “There’s a man inside who may not be quite dead yet,” Williston said in tones that were surprisingly loud and harsh.

  The intern sniffed, strode to the car and peered inside.

  Then he opened the rear left door, reached in and recognized the man sprawled there.

  “It’s Pikelis!” he announced as if he’d discovered some wonderful new spray deodorant.

  “Little Johnny Pikelis,” the young doctor marveled, “so he finally caught it?”

  Then the intern’s professional training prevailed, and he told the ambulance driver to get out the litter. While this was being done, the intern began his preliminary examination. He shook his head uncertainly.

  “Two slugs—at least two,” he estimated soberly. “Don’t know what the hell we’ll find inside. Lots of bleeding—that’s for sure. It doesn’t look good…Say, what happened—if it’s any of my business?”

  “It isn’t,” said MacBride.

  “Aw, come on, Marty,” urged the ex-bartender.

  It was ridiculous.

  “He tried to run an FBI roadblock,” Williston explained bluntly, “and they machine-gunned the car. Strictly routine, strictly correct procedures, strictly legal.”

  MacBride nodded, shrugged.

  “Get him out of here, dammit,” the Special Agent in charge of the Atlanta office ordered.

  They carefully placed the wounded racketeer in the litter, began to load it into the rear of the ambulance. After some maneuvering, they slid the litter into place and turned to enclose Waugh’s corpse in a plastic “body bag” that they pushed onto the floor of the vehicle. The intern climbed up into the rear compartment, leaned over Pikelis and then turned to stick out his head.

  “He just said something. John just said something,” he announced with an odd half smile.

  “Yes?” questioned the millionaire.

  “He said—quote—bastards…You’re all bastards—that’s what he said.”

  “Maybe he’s right,” speculated Williston.

  The blond singer shook her head.

  No, he was wrong.

  The intern waited a moment, closed the door from the inside and rapped on the back of the driver’s interior window. The white ambulance pulled away, turned onto Route 121 and headed toward the city—with the FBI escort car thirty yards behind.

  “What do you think?” the teacher asked.

  MacBride hesitated, answered.

  “Maybe he’ll make it, or maybe he’ll be dead by the time they reach the hospital,” the FBI supervisor calculated. “He’s a mean old bastard, you know, and a tricky one. You can’t tell about that kind.”

  It might almost be better if he died.

  Several of the people who stood beside the ruined Cadillac thought that, but no one said it. After a few moments, MacBride and Booth walked away to speak with their colleagues, and Williston yawned in weary, uneasy relief.

  “It’s over—I guess,” he declared. “I’m glad its over.”

  Arbolino nodded in agreement.

  “Me too. We were lucky, you know, but the luck had to run out. I was starting to wonder about the whole thing anyway,” he confessed.

  “The whole thing?”

  “You know what I mean, Andy. Whether it all made sense. I’ve been trying to remember that quote from Jefferson, the one that explained why we were right.”

  Williston closed his eyes, tried to recall the passage that he’d used to justify the operation as morally correct.

  “I seem to have forgotten it,” he admitted, “but it was something about men’s right and duty to overthrow despots or tyrants—by force, if necessary.”

  “The Declaration of Independence said almost the same thing,” reminded Gilman. “When a long train of abuses and usurpations,” quoted the man with the excellent memory, “pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute depotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security…July 4, 1776.”

  Williston sighed.

  That had been a long time ago. It was still philosophically sound in principle, but you could use the same argument to justify the violence of Maoist extremists on college campuses, black militants or armed rightist fanatics. The Constitution spoke of the citizen’s right to bear arms, but where did it end? Wel
l, at least Sledgehammer hadn’t killed anybody.

  “I’ll let you know if I remember it, Tony,” the teacher promised.

  “Drop me a card if you do. I’m going home.”

  “And you, Sam?” Williston asked.

  “Vegas, on the next plane.”

  “Petie?”

  “I’ll stick around here—unfinished business.”

  Kathy Pikelis.

  Judy Barringer smiled, squeezed her lover’s hand.

  “He’s got that ashtray-emptying and home-cooking look,” she whispered.

  “What did she say?”

  “Nothing important, Petie,” Williston lied. “Come on, we can all ride into town in the truck and trailer. I’ll drive.”

  Ninety seconds later, the panel truck towed the trailer out of Crowden’s Caravan Camp and Professor Andrew F. Williston pointed the Ford toward Paradise City. The woman beside him was humming softly, but he didn’t even try to identify the song. He was thinking of what her doctor had said about her splendid pelvis and child-bearing facility. Maybe, maybe it was possible. If Carstairs could grow up, anything was possible. Williston considered the prospect until the Saturday-night traffic on Route 121 grew so heavy on the edge of Paradise City that he had to concentrate completely on the driving.

  He could still hear her humming beside him, and he began to hum with her as they crossed the city line.

  To avert crank calls and gastric upsets by the disturbed or confused, let it be clearly stated that this is entirely a work of fiction about imaginary people and places and events. What’s more, I made up all the names of the characters too—so please leave me alone.

  W.W.

  More from Walter Wager

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