Darcy tried to gather herself as she gripped the wheel, her fingers shaking, the chains dangling musically from her wrists.
The Ford had been sitting there God knows how long and the sounds it emitted were a warning that its resurrection would be brief. She and Brickbat bounced as she drove through the uneven field.
Finally, she could see the road. Brickbat told her to make a right onto it, and once she had he told her to go faster. To his chagrin, the Ford’s maximum speed was barely a jog.
“I think you’d best look after yourself alone, Bernard,” she said after gathering the composure to speak again. “You might as well admit that your little kidnapping ploy is a failure and run along before things get worse.”
“That’s so sweet of you to be thinking after my best interests. I appreciate it. But I happen to think it’d be best if I held on to you until I get that ransom from your old man.”
“How are you going to do that if you’re a one-man operation now?”
He didn’t answer. Jason had told her that endeavors turned deadly only when steered by incompetents or by undermanned crews. Brickbat qualified as both.
“About this ransom money, Bernard. My old man isn’t that flush. If you think you can siphon two hundred thousand off him, you’re bound for disappointment.”
He chuckled again. She’d never heard a more odious sound. “Don’t worry, kitten.”
“I’m quite serious. He’s going through hard times as well—relatively speaking, of course, but still, your negotiations will drag on rather longer than either of us would like if—”
“I said not to worry. It’s all taken care of. You’ll see. Or then again, maybe you won’t.”
As the sun rose, the sky took on the same scoured, yellowish hue as the earth beneath it. The horizon was blurred, the difference between the two realms invisible or at least meaningless. The farms here looked inactive; she hoped they were, for she would have felt pity for anyone attempting to grow something from such desiccated soil. Already she had passed two abandoned cars and the splayed bodies of three horses. It occurred to her that she hadn’t passed anything living.
Jason was still alive. She repeated this to herself, a silent mantra. No matter what false evidence might be presented to her, she would not believe in Jason’s death. There were many things you could believe in these days, like all those practitioners of communism and anarchism, the Ouija board enthusiasts and palmists and other bedeviled members of various cults. They sought to impose their bizarre narratives on a world turned even more bizarre, sought to contain the madness with their stories. Here is your villain, here is the obstacle, here is how to be transformed from victim to hero. Everyone frantically searching for a new meaning of life, because only then could you create a meaning for death. Jason was all the meaning she needed, and, she told herself again, he had to be alive.
The Ford’s pace slowed to more of a canter. Also, it was rather low on gasoline.
“I ain’t falling for it, kitten. Speed up.”
She tried to accelerate but the Ford refused. Her disbelieving passenger moved toward her, pressing his foot on hers. Hard. Her toes were crushed, but the Ford was only going slower. Despite the pain, she realized Brickbat’s gun was closer now; he was holding it with his left hand, which was leaning against the steering wheel as he focused his attention on the accelerator. My, those fingers were large. But they were distracted, and surely he was weak from blood loss, and perhaps …
She released the wheel and grabbed the pistol with both hands. Its barrel was pointed out the window and when she tugged the automatic slid from his grasp, but not fully. She couldn’t wrench it free. With his other hand he struck her right forearm. He leaned into her with his massive body and the wheel was spun counterclockwise. The Ford veered off the road with an emphatic burst of energy that surely consumed whatever it had left. The tires slid into a ditch, and had the Ford been capable of greater speed its passengers would have been flung through the windshield. Instead they were merely jolted, and the gun was back in Brickbat’s mighty hands. It snapped forward and struck her.
Her eyes watered and her hands formed a steeple over her nose. The pain made her inhale sharply and not want to let the air out.
“That wasn’t even very hard. The next time will be. In your mouth, taking out some of those pretty white teeth. And then I’ll get really mean, understand?”
She nodded, closing her eyes. She heard his door open, and he told her he would flag a ride. She finally let herself breathe. She would not cry. She would not complain. She would see Jason again. And she would certainly get that gun.
They had taken her wristwatch the first night, so she didn’t know how long she sat there while Brickbat stood a few feet away, hands in his pockets. Eventually she heard a car approaching. She turned her head to see it, coming from the direction they’d been heading. A maroon DeSoto sedan. Driving on such a long, straight road, it seemed she heard it for minutes before it finally reached them.
Brickbat moved into the center of the road and as the DeSoto slowed he held out a palm. His other hand was in his pants pocket, where he’d hidden the gun. Darcy thought about honking the horn as a warning to the oblivious driver, but she didn’t see how this would help her.
Brickbat strolled to the DeSoto and she could hear him talking to the old man at the wheel. Then Brickbat’s pistol introduced itself, silently, the driver raising his hands.
“C’mon out, kitten.” She paused a moment, wondering if she had any options, but could find none. Out she went.
Brickbat glanced inside the DeSoto, then checked the glove box and the trunk. “Take shotgun,” he told her. “You can drive, old man.”
The DeSoto’s owner was gaunt but in a regal sort of way. His white hair was carefully parted on the right side and he had intelligent, forceful eyes, like a Civil War general. He wore a tan suit over a white shirt and a blue patterned tie. Detracting somewhat from his formal bearing was the fact that he needed a shave and, from the look of those eyes, a good night’s sleep.
Brickbat sat in back, behind Darcy. He told the old man which direction to head and to drive at exactly the speed limit.
Darcy was just noticing something else about the driver’s appearance when Brickbat asked, “What happened to your neck, old-timer?”
The skin of the man’s face and hands, like Darcy’s, was the pale white of one who hires others for their labor, but his neck was red and lashed with abrasions.
“I was hung two days ago. I was killed.”
Darcy didn’t stir. Brickbat chuckled, then said, “Seems I keep running into dead people. How about that.”
Darcy’s nose throbbed and she searched the long horizon for evidence of anything in this scorched world that might still be alive.
XXII.
Many things vanished from Agent Cary Delaney’s memory the moment Chief Mackinaw hit him with the news: the long drive out to Points North; the clouds of locusts along the horizon; the conversation or lack thereof offered by Buzz Gunnison, the burly agent with him; the nagging fear that he was wasting his time.
All that disappeared when Mackinaw confessed, “The Firefly Brothers were dead when we found them.”
Cary sat up. “What?”
Mackinaw rapped his chest twice, pursing his lips to conceal a belch. Points North was farm country, yet the chief had the type of gut one didn’t often see on farmers. His head was equally round, and the thin gray hair atop it looked displeased by the heat and by the repeated application and removal of his hat. The small room smelled of tobacco and spit, a map of the county adorning one of the paneled walls.
“I know this looks bad. Things got a bit out of hand, and we just didn’t see how—”
“Wait, wait, go back.” Cary shook his head. “What happened that night?”
“We received an anonymous call from somebody claiming to’ve spotted Jason driving into town. It was almost midnight, but the caller said they’d stopped opposite each other at an int
ersection and his headlights shined right at Jason, said he was sure it was him. When we asked the caller who he was, he hung up. So we didn’t put much stock in that. A little while later, we got another call from a trusted fellow saying he’d just driven past the abandoned Reston farmhouse and heard something suspicious, like fireworks or tinder popping, maybe squatters starting a fire to cook over. So I sent two officers to check it out.” Chest whack, muted burp. “The house is set back a couple hundred yards from a small road. The officers drove up partway, didn’t see any auto parked by the house, though they did see fresh tracks in the driveway. Checked out the house through their binoculars, saw that some lights were on in one room. Curtains were parted just enough for the officers to see what looked like a submachine gun lying on top of a table.”
“So you sent in the cavalry,” Cary said.
“I surrounded the place with eight officers and five volunteer deputies. Called out to the felons on the bullhorn to come out and surrender, but didn’t get a reply. No one ever redrew the curtains on that one window, and we never saw movement anywhere. We searched the barn and found a ’32 Terraplane, hood still warm, but then it was a hot night, so they could have driven in an hour or two earlier. We honestly weren’t sure if they were in the house or not, and we started thinking about how Jason had escaped from that federal ambush in Toledo.” Cops loved to bring that up when feds were in the room, Cary had noticed. “Still, we had officers who knew the property and knew there were no secret trails or tunnels. The light that was on never went out, and no others ever went on.”
“And eventually you got impatient,” Gunnison said. Gunnison was one of Hoover’s cowboys, a longtime Tulsa cop the Director had recently lured to the Bureau. A virile forty-three, he had arms that could have snapped the neck of a bull. Cary had nothing in common with him, but he knew that a rural police chief would have laughed at his own, schoolboy attempts at questioning. Gunnison’s mere presence in a room was usually enough to conjure information.
“Yes, we got impatient. I’d decided that we’d storm the place within an hour if it came to that, and it did. We fired tear gas at some windows, though, honestly, most of the canisters just bounced off the screens, so we had a big ol’ gas cloud funneling at the base of the house. There was no breeze that night, so it kinder just hung there. Fired through the windows with our two submachine guns, and again, no response. Then a team of six went in, followed by another four. We finally found the Firesons in a back room. Whit had taken the one shot to the heart and Jason was riddled pretty good all over the chest.”
Surely Cary had misunderstood. “Shot by your men, right?”
“No, it couldn’t have been us—we hadn’t fired on that room. They’d been dead the whole time.”
“So … everything in the report, about a gunfight, about your men shooting them …”
Mackinaw folded his hands on his desk and looked down at them. “I know this does not reflect well on me or my office. All I can say is, things kinder spiraled out of control there. Everyone was so excited that we’d caught ’em, and they had been shot up, and we were all carrying guns, and we really did feel like the public deserved some sort of … triumph to end the Firefly Brothers story, so—”
“So you lied,” Gunnison said in a bored tone. “Lied to the press, lied to police in other towns, lied to the Bureau of Investigation.”
“When you put it that way, I know it sounds—”
“Wait, wait,” Cary suddenly remembered. “I thought the Firefly Brothers killed one of your officers that night?”
Eyes again on his meaty hands. “Officer Fenton was accidentally struck by a fellow officer’s bullet. Like I said, the boys were awful excited, and the lights in the house didn’t work, and the layout was different from what our officers had remembered, and all that tear gas, my God….”
“I can’t believe this.”
“I really don’t see any reason why we would need to go public here. Losing their bodies was embarrassing enough.”
“It certainly was,” Gunnison agreed.
“How long had the brothers been dead when you found them?” Cary asked.
“Maybe a few hours. Could have been right about when the second caller said he’d heard something when he drove by the house. Or maybe a few hours earlier.”
“There’s no chance that they, I don’t know, shot themselves when they realized you’d surrounded them? A suicide pact?”
“No. We never heard a shot.”
Suicide would not have been the brothers’ style; they would have come out firing even if they were surrounded by a hundred marines. “And the bodies—they were definitely the Firefly Brothers?”
“Of course.”
“Chief Mackinaw, I’m sure you’ve heard some stories circulating that the Firefly Brothers themselves are still circulating out there. Now that you’ve admitted to … all this, I’m wondering why we should believe that you ever had the Firefly Brothers in your custody.”
“You can’t be serious.” This time Mackinaw was the one who seemed shocked. “Look, I know we made some mistakes here, but we had the bodies. We let press come into the morgue and take pictures, for God’s sake. Just what are you accusing me of?”
“We certainly wouldn’t accuse you of incompetence,” Gunnison said.
“Look, it was a madhouse once we made the announcement. Not only were we overrun by reporters from the entire Midwest, but every Tom, Dick, and Harry came by to take their own pictures, snip a locket of hair, shake the dead hands. They call people like that morbids, and, God as my witness, I never realized how many morbids we had in this country. We had ’em showing up at the farmhouse so they could dab handkerchiefs in the brothers’ blood, tearing the walls apart to fetch bullets. Never seen anything like it.”
“It sounds like you did an excellent job of maintaining order,” Gunnison said.
“I have thirteen officers under my command, Agent Gunnison, some of ’em part-time. Easily five hundred people came to the morgue in less’n twenty-four hours, and almost that many to the crime scene.”
“Well, maybe if you’d involved the Bureau from the beginning we could have been helpful.” Cary gave him an icy smile. “Now, let’s get back to when you and your officers were heroically storming the building. You find the bodies already dead. Please tell me you at least determined cause of death.”
“Shooting, like I said.” Mackinaw gave him a look like Cary was the moron here. “Bullets.”
“No, I mean who and how, caliber …”
“Might have been an accomplice. Or the perpetrators could have gotten there first, laid an ambush. Could have been a prearranged meeting and one side decided to pull a double cross. Whoever shot them was likely a trusted person, given the close-range nature of it all, the perfect shot on Whit. But it’s impossible to say.”
“So … the anonymous caller who said he saw Jason drive into town. You’re thinking that was the killer?”
“Probably.”
“Surely that wasn’t the extent of your investigation.”
“Like I said, they’d been dead maybe a few hours. Bodies still warm, but then it was a hell of a hot night. Blood patterns showed they hadn’t been moved.”
“What kind of weapons had been used?” Gunnison asked. “Had the Firesons drawn their weapons, or did they seem taken by surprise?”
Mackinaw glanced out one of his windows, as if he would much rather be rocking on a porch and complaining to his wife about the needling existence of federal dicks. “The room was filled with firearms, though it’s unclear whether the brothers had been holding any when we got there. Again, it was chaotic, and if there had been, say, a pistol by one of their hands, one of my men would have moved it.”
Cary shook his head—so even before the crime scene had been vandalized by fanatics the police themselves had rendered it useless.
“And we’re not entirely sure what kind of bullets killed them.”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t perform an
autopsy.”
“We did, but the bullets that we removed—”
“They disappeared, too.” Cary finished the thought for him, almost laughing. “Of course. The morbids again.”
Mackinaw nodded.
“Your report says the bullets taken from the bodies matched your officers’ automatic pistols and Thompsons,” Cary said. “But at this point I’m assuming that, too, was fiction.”
“Is this farmhouse even there anymore,” Gunnison asked, “or did a twister take it up the next morning?”
“I acknowledge the fact that we in Points North did not do our jobs as professionally as we could have,” Mackinaw said. “No world-famous outlaws had ever visited upon us before.”
“Okay, let’s talk about money,” Cary said.
“Be happy to. Last I checked, you boys still hadn’t sent us that reward check.”
Cary dead-eyed him. “I meant the Firefly Brothers’ money. Your report says they were found with sixty-eight thousand nine hundred two dollars on them?”
“Correct.”
“We expected them to have considerably more, judging from their last bank job, so—”
“So this means they laundered the Federal Reserve money and paid a big chunk of it as a launderer’s fee.”
“That’s what we figured, and once you send the money to our headquarters we can confirm it by checking the numbers on the bills. If it’s been laundered, maybe we can determine where it came from.” Though he knew the odds of such a determination were minuscule. “The way you’ve been keeping it after all this time, Chief Mackinaw, it’s almost like you’re holding it hostage.”
“I don’t care for your putting it that way, son.”
“He’s not your son,” Gunnison snapped. “He’s a federal agent, and he, like myself, is tired of spending his time investigating lazy and incompetent cops instead of smart and enterprising criminals.”
With that, Cary and Gunnison stood.
“I guess we’ll be in touch, Chief Mackinaw,” Cary said. “Once we can make sense of all this. In the meantime, try to keep your men from committing any major felonies.” They left without shaking the lawman’s hand.
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers: A Novel Page 30