Aces & Eights

by Dale Lucas

  “She’s the owner and operator of this establishment,” Flood said coolly. “She’s your host, Dolph, and you’re my guest here this evening. You will show her the proper respect, or you can go enjoy an evening elsewhere.”

  Storms glared at his boss, teeth bared in something between a snarl and a grin—the Queen Bee couldn’t tell which. “This is how it’s goin’ down, Harry? You’re sidin’ with a nigger against me?”

  “This isn’t siding, Dolph,” Flood said. “This is being a good guest. You wanna roar, go do it in one of your own places—one of those Yorkville chophouses that serve your piss and let you walk all over them. Here, you’re on my tab, and you’re in her joint; you’ll show some goddamn respect or you’ll leave.”

  Storms snapped his fingers at the thick Bavarian moll who sat opposite him and she shot to her feet without a word. “Then I’m leavin’.” He turned to Madame Marie, poking a finger in her face. “You’re on the shit list, lady.”

  “Everyone’s on your shit list, Dolph,” Flood muttered. “Get out of here before you make any more of a fool of yourself.”

  Storms yanked his date away from the table and marched toward the entryway. Just before reaching the foyer, he lunged toward a potted palm nearly as tall as he was and toppled it, spilling its earth and fertilizer on the polished hardwood floor.

  Just as the palm’s big pot shattered, a pair of ellipsoidal lights above the band sparked and exploded with pops as loud as gunshots. The band’s groove faltered. Some of the folks seated down front shrank and ducked, as though someone had opened fire.

  Storms saw this, thought it a wonderful, well-timed coincidence, and laughed all the way out the door, pointing and grabbing his belly like a school-yard bully who’d just shoved a skinny kid into a puddle of mud. As his laughter faded, Marie noticed something more.

  Another fight had broken out down front, this one between two white men in tuxedos. They were well-scrubbed and no doubt perfumed, but they’d come to fisticuffs nonetheless.

  “Mr. Flood,” the Queen Bee began, by way of excusing herself.

  “Come around later,” he said softly. “When things are under control.”

  She moved away from him, toward the rumpus. A fist flew and one of the white men reeled. The ladies at the table with them screamed.

  Behind her, something shattered and someone else screamed: a man this time. She jerked toward the commotion and saw a fat old Negro in a fine suit singing Dixie, holding aloft a bleeding hand. His drink glass had, apparently, exploded in his grip.

  The band lost its beat—or rather, found a new one. The jazzmen in their dinner jackets looked to the drummer on his dais. He hunched over his kit, face straining, as though under some alien influence. The veins in his temples and throat throbbed, his eyes narrowed, and his teeth gnashed. He pounded out a new beat: primitive, relentless, arrhythmic—blackest midnight in 5/4 time.

  What the hell is happening? the Queen Bee wondered. But she already knew.

  Then there was a sudden, shattering thunderclap from somewhere out back—so loud that it rocked the building. The drop lights swayed and the crystal sang.

  Everyone shot to their feet and stampeded like a herd of maddened buffalo for the exit.

  XX

  The bomb blew mid-air, at the crest of its arc, after Gideon heaved it. Gideon was thrown backward a good ten feet by the blast.

  It hurt. He couldn’t breathe and his ears rang. But he was alive. Blessedly alive.

  In moments, all sorts of kitchen folk surrounded him, alternately yanking him to his feet and encouraging him to sit down.

  “Where is he?” he shouted. “Where is that little bastard?”

  He tore through the crowd of onlookers and concerned faces, trying to locate the bomber. There he was: Calvin. Slack-faced, melon-headed Calvin. He fought the grip of those three busboys and Lyle the line cook, screaming, crying, a dark spot on the crotch of his coveralls where he’d pissed himself.

  “I’s just doin’ as I’s told!” he screamed. “Please, sir! Please, sir! Please, sir! Papa said he’d cut the rent! I had to pay the rent!”

  Gideon burst through the cordon of onlookers. He tore Calvin from the busboys’ collective grasp and punched him square. He felt Calvin’s front teeth give under the weight of his fist, and his nose collapsed with a squelchy crunch. Calvin fell, but Gideon held him. Blinded by shock and by the gout of blood and snot from his broken nose, Calvin cried out of a mouthful of broken teeth.

  Gideon dragged the fat feeb across the kitchen floor toward one of the prep stations—a chopping block where the raw beef and poultry was prepared.

  Nobody seemed to understand what was happening. They just watched, curious and still in shock from the explosion.

  Calvin kept screaming, trying to wipe the blood from his eyes, unable to break Gideon’s grip.

  Gideon heaved him against the chopping block. Calvin’s head connected with a hollow thump, and down he went, moaning and reaching for his thumped noggin.

  Gideon felt a strange satisfaction. He’d heard the hollow thump of Calvin’s skull. His hearing was already returning. Good news.

  But business was in the offing. He snatched up a big meat cleaver still tacky with beef gristle, lifted it high, and brought it whistling down.

  When the blade cleaved Calvin’s thick melon skull, he heard that too.

  XX

  The Queen Bee fled the rush and backed herself toward the windows at the front of the club. As the patrons clotted in the doorway to the single front exit, she turned and tore back the high, sheer curtains on the front windows to get a good look at the street below. A few trickled out at first, then more, and finally, like a dam giving way, something seemed to burst, and a glut of well-dressed bodies burst forth in a panic, flooding the street. Screaming, they scattered and collided. Some fell, trampled in the stampede.

  For just a moment, the Queen Bee thought that someone had called the cops: there were a number of black sedans fanned out in a loose formation across Lenox Avenue, all attended by small detachments of men in coats and hats.

  And masks. Simple, loose face masks, like those worn by desperados in a western flicker-show.

  Then the Queen Bee realized that the men on the street were all carrying guns.

  Someone gave an order and they opened fire on the fleeing customers.

  The Queen Bee turned away from the window. She needed to sit down. Her head swam and her knees felt miles away. She’d sit, and she’d wait, and when Gideon found her, she’d ask for his piece and she’d shoot herself. Most of the time, she was a fighter; a scrapper; she took shit from no man and she turned lemons into lemonade. But this was her breaking point. She gave up. She wanted a bullet in the brain, and she wanted it with all expediency.

  She barely made it three steps, though. Before she could take a seat and wait for someone to come and relieve her suffering with a bullet, she fainted dead away.

  XX

  Harry Flood knew that the imperative of the moment was to stay upright. His bodyguards Mikey and Doyle, made that a little easier but they were caught in the crush, too. Once on the street, Flood had been eager to break from the crowd. He pressed himself back against the front face of the building next door to the club and waited for the panicked patrons to disburse.

  But then the shooting started.

  Flood tugged Mikey and Doyle in front of him and crouched, back to the brownstone’s brick façade, the two big Irishmen towering before him like bulwarks, guns drawn.

  The crowd circled and seethed like a swarm of ants after someone had stepped in their pile. Machine gun chatter and the boom-chaka-boom of shotguns roared in the night. There were screams, but from Flood’s hiding place, it seemed as though the people in their evening finery barely understood. When the guns sang, those that didn’t fall to the hail changed direction and collided with more of their fleeing fellows. It was a mess; a turkey shoot.

  It had to be House. Flood cursed the West Indian warlord and gav
e him due respect all in the same breath. That was a helluva play: set off a bomb out back; chase the clientele out front; wait with loaded weapons; open fire.

  Ten to one, the bastard wasn’t trying to slaughter the lot, or even pick out strategic targets. No, he was just doing his damndest to make the Queen Bee’s business tank in night one. Nobody would patronize any supper club she opened now, thinking that House or some other player uptown might cause a ruckus of this sort and use the patrons for target practice.

  The man had balls as big as meteors; Flood had to give him that.

  And he made a mental note to see the bastard killed if he could: wet works of this sort—big, loud, messy, and non-particular—were bad for business. House had to be silenced, for good.

  The guns kept snarling. A knot of scattering Anglos in furs and pricy coats hit the pavement not a stone’s throw from where Flood hid, their blood steaming in the cool night. Flood heard someone in House’s retinue laughing behind his outlaw mask, urging fire this way and that—Down them slicks! Take out that bitch in the fox-fur! Bottle of rum if you can get one of the fellas to use one of the ladies as a human shield!

  Fucking savages!

  A clatter of machine gun fire and Mikey withered, crumpling to the pavement. Flood immediately drew himself sideward, using big, broad Doyle as his main shield now.

  “Boss, we gotta skin!” Doyle shouted, crouching lower, returning fire with his Smith & Wesson six shooter.

  “Up the avenue!” Flood shouted above the racket. “Bust into that pharmacy about a block north! Tell me when the fire goes after a crowd running away from us!”

  Doyle nodded. Flood waited, breathing deep, preparing himself.

  Then he saw a shadow on a brownstone façade across the street detach itself, and come plummeting down, landing hard on the roof of one of the parked gun-cars. The windshield and windows shattered. The gunmen nearest the car shrank and cursed.

  Flood blinked.

  It looked like another Negro, but this one was dressed for Halloween: a long, black coat; a flowing, serpentine red scarf; a scowling skull-painted face under a mess of natty black braids and a top hat.

  Not a second after landing, the skull-faced Negro’s hands shot forth and tossed something into the midst of the gunmen. They were small and round, and Flood thought that they were grenades. But then they burst in the midst of separate, closely-spaced knots of gunmen, and Flood saw explosions of spectral blue and red flames, and heard the gunmen screaming and fall-ing to the pavement, and wondered what grenades made those colors. Flood couldn’t see the men engulfed in those flames, but he heard their screams. And their screams didn’t stop.

  Then the stranger had a heater in each hand—twin .45’s, black finish, gleaming in the darkness. As House’s gunmen turned their smoking barrels on the stranger, the stranger put those heaters to use.

  The .45’s spat fat tongues of flame, fanning a lightning-quick barrage into the nearest gunmen. Before that group had fallen, the Witch Doctor leapt off the car he stood upon, landed on the roof of another, and laid down another hail of fire. More of House’s men fell, guns all clattering to the pavement.

  “Boss,” Doyle said. “What the—”

  Flood barely realized that he was on his feet now, watching, eager to see what unfolded as—

  Every gun in House’s retinue swung toward the witch doctor and opened up. The Halloween spook emptied his pistols into the firing line, leapt off his car mount, hunkered down while the machine guns and shotguns tore into the Buick’s opposite flank, and reloaded. It took him three seconds, maybe four. When the .45’s were full and jacked, he stowed them in his coat, lifted a pair of Tommy guns fallen beside a pair of dead hoods nearby, and sprang up to meet his assailants again.

  Flood couldn’t believe his eyes. The crazy spade skated sideward in a long, broad arc, a Tommy gun cradled in each arm, and opened up on his assailants. House’s men swarmed for cover or returned fire. Half of them fell in the blazing lead rain. Flood was sure the Witch Doctor took direct hits, but the Tommy guns kept chattering away in unison. Finally they both came up empty.

  The Witch Doctor was still standing. He dropped one Thompson, gripped the other by its charring-hot barrel, and laid into the nearest gunmen using the machine gun like a Louisville Slugger.

  Doyle’s need to flee had evaporated, just like Flood’s. The two watched, amazed.

  House’s gunmen thinned. No more than a dozen remained. As three more went down, blatted head-on by the Witch Doctor’s arcing Thompson, the others fell back to reload.

  But they were too slow. Just as the first raised the muzzle of his weapon, Flood saw that the skull-faced stranger now had a shotgun in hand. He jacked it, hipped it, and let it rip. The blast took two of House’s hoods in their faces, and both dropped, heads half-sheared.

  The rest of the gun-barrels rose: reloaded, hungry, ready.

  The Witch Doctor pulled his .45’s and finished the job he’d started. In moments, after the loud bang-clatter of his guns fell silent, there was no more gunfire on the street... just the sound of men bleeding and men dying, and the patrons who’d not succumbed entirely lying about on 5th Avenue, crying out for help, for lovers, for cops, for ambulances.

  Flood watched from his safe distance. The Witch Doctor put bullets in a pair of still-moving hoods who crawled toward fallen weapons, then raised his .45’s high and fired off a short burst into the air. It had the desired effect. The crowd put their heads down, screaming, terrified.

  Then, as Flood stared in amazement, the crazy spook charged the façade of Aces & Eights, leapt off the pavement, cleared the jutting marquis, and crashed through a second floor window lickety-split.

  A running jump, on pavement, arcing twenty feet up into a second-floor window. After taking out about two dozen hardened Harlem gunmen.

  Now there was something you didn’t see every day.

  Flood was duly impressed.

  Chapter 14

  Gideon left the line cooks to clean up Calvin’s remains and rushed toward the main dining room when he heard the commotion of hundreds of feet pounding for the outer door.

  He, Dorey, Croaker, and a few others climbed the stairs beyond the kitchen and stomped up to the second floor. The stairwell gave out onto a short corridor, and that corridor opened onto the dining room, down front, near the stage.

  Intermingled with the thump-thud sounds of their own shoes pounding up the stairs, they heard the rattle of gunfire from the streets. The rattletrap thunder continued, punctuated here and there with shotgun blasts and small arms fire, as they made the second floor and rushed out into the dining room only to find the place empty.

  Well, mostly empty. A few dancing girls, stage-hands, and bandies still fled the wings. And across the dining room, on the dais, Gideon saw the Queen Bee lying unconscious in a heap on the floor, surrounded by a slow-closing circle of strangers. Gideon shouted before he even saw who surrounded her.

  “Queen!” His voice rocked the room like an explosion.

  The patrons surrounding the unconscious Queen Bee turned to face him—and Gideon realized they weren’t patrons at all. It was Papa Solomon House and his West Indies, circling her like a pack of jackals. Some had their guns drawn. House had his walking stick. They seemed to be studying her with an eye toward how to finish her.

  Gideon still held the bloody cleaver he’d used to whack Calvin. Throwing it at this distance wasn’t an option. So in one smooth motion, the cleaver moved from his right hand to his left, his now-free right hand dove into his coat, and his chrome-plated .45 jumped free. Gideon leveled it at House.

  “Hands off, you son of a bitch!” he cried.

  House gave command and one of his big bodyguards knelt to snatch up the Queen Bee. As Gideon squeezed the trigger, House’s other bodyguard—the one called Wash—stepped in front of House, raising a sawed off shotgun to his shoulder and letting loose with both barrels.

  Gideon knew his shot took Wash, but he didn’t know where
. He threw himself down; felt the sting of buckshot, spread wide at such a distance, but still drawing blood. Then the picture windows at the far end of the room shattered and House and his soldiers were all shouting, terrified by some new arrival.

  Flat on the stage, Gideon craned his neck and tried to get a look at what, or who, had just arrived.

  It was a man with a skull-face under a top hat and a nest of dreadlocks. He wore a long black coat; sported a slithering red scarf; bore coal-black .45’s in each gloved hand.

  Baron Samedi—the Cemetery Man.

  The Dread Baron.

  Gideon wondered who the Baron had come to collect. In the next instant, he got his answer.

  The Baron opened fire on House’s men, sweeping his twin pistols right to left in a broad arc, muzzles throwing tongues of flame, casings leaping this way and that like a swarm of brass flies. Gideon wondered what his men were doing behind him but didn’t care. He had to get the Queen away from House and his goons. He had to move.

  He checked behind him to see that his boys were backing his play, then gripped the meat cleaver in one hand, his pistol in the other, and charged.

  He saw Papa House and Timmons dragging the limp Queen Bee between them toward the entryway. Wash scooted sideward before them, ready to lay down cover fire and act as a screen. Gideon raised his automatic but knew he couldn’t fire without risking the Queen.

  He tried to circle wide, to put the Queen out of the line of fire and give himself a better bead on Wash.

  Wash saw this, threw down his empty two-barrel scattergun, and drew a pair of Webley pistols from his long, camel hair coat.

  As Gideon bore on, another of House’s goons retreated out of the line of the Dread Baron’s barrage of hot lead. The goon turned just in time to see Gideon bearing down on him; raised his .45 to take out Gideon and give House and his bodyguards a clean getaway.