Hot Springs (Earl Swagger)

by Stephen Hunter

  “What? You said—”

  “You remember I asked you to make that call yesterday concerning a place on Malvern Avenue. We used that to set up an opportunity that looked very promising,” said D.A., hoping to cut off the tirade that accompanied Becker’s instruction in any raid plans that masked the prosecuting attorney’s deep ambivalence about the use of force and his own physical fear, which was immense.

  Fred rose.

  “Folks,” he said, “honey,” acknowledging his wife, “I’ve got to run. There’s work to be done and—”

  At that moment came the sound of gunfire. Machine-gun fire. It rattled through the night, a liquefied rip familiar to each man who’d served in a war zone. It could be no other sound. If you’ve heard it once you know it forever.

  Fred’s face went bloodless.

  “Sounds like the boys are doing fine,” said D.A.

  23

  What is wrong?

  He didn’t know. But some weird vibration of distress hummed in his ear. Something somehow was wrong.

  Two cars, lights dimmed, pulled down the alley, passing him, coming to rest at the rear of Mary Jane’s. Silently, the doors sprang open, and eight members of the rear-entry team got out, cumbersome in their vests with their awkward weapons. Without noise they assembled into a stick as Slim led them to the door, a shotgun out before him and aimed at the knob. Except for a scuffle of feet and the breathing of the men, muted but still insistent, it was quiet.

  What is wrong?

  Then he knew.

  They would know we’d also come in the rear because that’s our signature. We go in multiple entrances simultaneously. We swarm in: that’s D.A.’s best trick. Therefore, knowing that, they will have to ambush us from the rear.

  But how?

  There’s no room to fire from the building at men this close and there’s no sign of men moving in on them. The alley had been entirely deserted this whole time: only Japanese Marines could hide so silently.

  Then Earl knew where they’d be.

  They’d be down the block. He recalled a truck parked there, on a cross street, a good two hundred feet ahead, and he instantly diverted his gaze down the alley, trying to see through the dark.

  Suddenly from the front, the sound of guns firing angrily, long bursts chewing the night apart, bullets blowing into wood and glass.

  Then Earl saw movement in the dark. He couldn’t make it out clearly: just a sense of movement as one darker shade of blackness moved twenty-five feet and planted itself directly across the alley exit to a cross street half a block down.

  He waited, forcing his concentration against the subtly differing shades of blackness.

  He thought he saw something squirm and believed it to be a tarpaulin being pulled back to reveal men hunched over the lip of the truck bed, as if settling in to aim.

  Earl fired: the BAR chopped through its first magazine in less than two seconds, and far off he saw over the jarring sights the flashes and puffs as his bullets jacked into something metallic, possibly a truck, lifting dust and sparks from it. He slapped a new magazine in fast, and fired another long burst into it, holding the rounds into it, watching them strike and skip off. A shot, then a second, came from the truck bed, and then somehow a gas tank went, lighting up the night in a roiling orange spume and in its concussive force lifting the truck ever so slightly and setting it down. A man in flames with a Thompson gun ran from it, dropped the gun and fell to the alleyway.

  Earl looked back to Mary Jane’s to see the last of the rear-entry team race into the place.

  • • •

  The car pulled up out front.

  They were so tense their breaths came in dry spurts, like rasps scraping over a washbucket.

  “Okay,” said Stretch, just barely in command, “you know the drill. Let’s go. Peanut, you’re on the big gun.”

  “Gotcha,” said Peanut, sliding down behind the fender of the car, raising his Thompson as he fingered off the safety, and checked with the same finger to make certain the fire selector was ratcheted toward full auto. His front sight bobbed and weaved but then stabilized and came to rest on the man slouching at the table in the barroom.

  The three remaining men, their loads in their hands, charged up the walk to the storefront. It wasn’t far, maybe twenty-five feet. They kicked open the door and screamed “Raid! Raid! Get your hands up!”

  • • •

  Jape saw the door open, goddamn! and was so excited he thought he’d piss up his pants. He kicked the table away to brace the Thompson against his hip, feeling his hand curve over the huge hundred-round drum to grab the foregrip and hold it tight.

  “Raid! Raid!” came the shouts, and as he raised the weapon he had the consciousness of glass or something breaking and it was as if he were being mauled by a lion who leaped at him from nowhere, and from that sensation there came the sensation of drowning, sinking, falling, all of it toward fatigue and ultimately sleep in darkness.

  • • •

  The three at the door were not aware that behind them Peanut had fired, bringing down the barroom gunman with one perfectly placed burst. They were themselves unarmed, except for handguns still holstered. What they carried, two apiece, were buckets half filled with screws, stones, pieces of broken glass and scrap wood, and quickly, each lobbed his burden, one then the other, into the bar to the stairway, where the buckets hit, and emptied their contents in a rattle of things scraping and clanking and falling and crashing. It was no substitute for the sound of human feet in a normal world, but in the superheated one of house combat—gunshots now came from behind too, for some odd reason—it was enough to confuse the gunner upstairs, who now fired.

  Nathan, the prison-hardened Murfreesboro Grumley behind the weapon, simply kept the butterfly trigger depressed. The gun, mounted on a securely heavy sled tripod, fired for about two minutes, and it poured down such a hail of 8-mm fire that the floor which absorbed it shattered, while broken flooring nails flipped through the air, amid the clouds of other debris that flew. The gun was so terrifying that D.A.’s plan simply fell apart.

  The front-entry team retreated hastily to its car and took up cowering positions. The rear-entry team, all eight men including Frenchy and Carlo, collected in a choke point just out of the beaten zone, unable to think, talk, signal or otherwise function intelligently in the rawness and the hugeness of the sound. Courage was beyond the question; it was meaningless in the face of such a volume of fire, and the men looked at each other bug-eyed and confused. They needed a leader and he didn’t get there for another thirty seconds, though without his vest and with a BAR.

  “Get back!” Earl screamed, for he knew that the gunner would soon see he was firing at nothing and would swing fire.

  They scuttled backward, and in the next second, the gunner de-ratcheted his gun from the sled tripod, swung it radically to the right and sent another eight hundred rounds through the wall into the hallway where until that second the men had been.

  The gunfire atomized the thin plaster and wood wall that separated the stairwell from the hallway. Dust and chips flew; the air filled with poisonous brew.

  Earl waited now until he heard a clink.

  That meant a belt had run out and he heard crankings and clankings as Nathan attempted to speed-change to a new belt. But instead of racing out, Earl merely scrunched along the now-blasted hallway, raised his BAR along the same axis the bullets had just traveled, and fired an entire magazine upward through the shattered wall of Mary Jane’s.

  He rammed another magazine in, fired it in a flash. Then he slithered around the stairwell and looked upward. He could see nothing in the floating smoke and plaster and wood powder.

  An odd noise came to his ears. He tried to identify it but his ears rang so from all the firing that it took a second or two. Then he had it: it was a steady drip … drip … drip.

  Earl looked and saw—blood. It coagulated on the top of the stairway, paused, then dripped down, drop by drop by heavy drop, un
til a tide overtook the individual drops and began to drain off the top of the stairs in a jagged track.

  “Hey, up there,” he called. “This don’t have to go on. Ain’t no lawmen hurt yet nor no citizens. Y’all throw your guns down and come on out.”

  He thought he heard the scurrying of men, a hushed argument.

  As he crouched there, the blood rolled down the steps with more force, and to his left and right raiders came to flank him, setting up good shooting positions.

  The silence wore on, but then they heard what sounded like shuffling.

  “Get ready,” whispered Earl.

  They could track the shuffling down the hallway until at last a figure emerged. It was a Negro girl, about twenty, in a slip and a pair of high-heeled shoes. Her face was swollen, her eyes red and huge. She clutched herself with her arms. Her lips trembled. She seemed shaky on her heels.

  “You be careful, missy,” Earl said. “You come on down and you’ll be all right. We don’t mean to hurt you or your friends none.”

  “Sir, I—”

  The bullets hit her in the back, blowing her sideways against the wall; she jackknifed, her eyes rolling up, then fell forward off the top stair. She rolled down the stairway, arms and legs flung this way and that, her head bobbing loosely. Earl grabbed her, and held her close, getting her blood all over him. He felt her struggle to rise, watched her eyelashes flutter as if to make a last claim on life, and then she died in his arms. He was holding her hand so tightly he thought he’d break her fingers.

  “Hey, you lawmen,” came a low Grumley voice. “You come on up and git more of that. We got lots of it up here fer you too. And we got four more nigger gals up here and they ain’t gittin’ out alive, ’less you go and get our truck.”

  “Your truck is blown all to shit,” Earl called back. “I lit it up my own self and whoever was aboard is burnt crispy. You hurt any more of them gals and I will personally see that you leave here in a pine box. You come out or you’ll toast in hell tomorrow morning, that I swear.”

  He turned to the closest man to him, who happened to be Frenchy.

  “You know where my car is?”

  “Yes sir,” said Frenchy.

  Earl took Frenchy’s Thompson and spare magazines, unscrewing the stock bolt as he spoke.

  “You head on back there and open the trunk and git me some more of them BAR magazines. I’m clean out. You bring ’em to me, ’cause I may need ’em.”

  “Can I have my gun?” said Frenchy nervously.

  “Go on, git the goddamn magazines!” said Earl, pushing him rudely back down the hallway.

  He had the bolt out and tossed the stock away. He turned to Stretch.

  “I’m going to head up for a lookie-see. Y’all stay here.”

  “Earl, you ain’t got no goddamn vest.”

  “I can’t move with the goddamn vest. You hold here but you wait on my signal. You got that?”

  “Earl, we ought to wait till—”

  “You do what I tell you!” Earl said, his dark, mad eyes boring into the boy, who turned away under the assault.

  • • •

  Bitterly, Frenchy ran by other crouching raiders out into the alley. Twice he was stopped by men who wanted to know what was going on, but he ran onward.

  He got to the alley and saw that each end was now blocked by police cars, whose red lights flashed into the night. A light came on him and he pulled his vest aside to show the badge on his chest, and ran ahead, getting to Earl’s car.

  He opened the trunk, and found a boxful of BAR mags, all loaded.

  Suddenly two policemen and some kind of plainclothes detective were there by him.

  “What the hell is going on, bud?” asked the detective.

  “We may need backup. They have four Negro girls held hostage upstairs. We killed a batch but there’s more.”

  “Hell, we ain’t going in there. Sounds like a goddamned war.”

  “You go to Becker!” Frenchy said hotly. “He’ll tell you to come up and support us.”

  “I ain’t getting no men shot up over nigger whores, bud. You goddamned Jayhawkers started this one, you finish her up. I don’t work for no Fred Becker.”

  “Where is Becker?”

  “He’s up front posing for photographers and I got a feeling he’s pretty goddamned upset over this goddamned battle thing y’all got going in Mary Jane’s.”

  “Yeah, well, fuck you and the mule you rode in on, Zeke,” said Frenchy, and then turned and ran with the mags.

  He was halfway there when he heard the sound of tommy guns.

  • • •

  Earl slithered ever so slowly up the staircase, climbing over the debris of screws and what-not. When he reached the halfway point he could see over the edge into the hallway. Spread out and gazing resolutely at the heaven he’d never enter lay a mean-looking old Grumley boy, his eyes black and blank as diamonds. He lay in his own blood and a litter of hundreds of shells. Another boy lay a few feet away, his hands clenched around his belly, which blossomed blood.

  Earl pointed the Thompson at him.

  “You best show me your hands or I will finish you right here,” he said.

  “I am so gutshot I am going nowheres, so you go ahead and finish me, you law town bastard,” said the man, who turned out to be but a boy of twenty, though his face was clenched in pure adult hatred.

  “Lay there then and bleed,” said Earl. “It don’t make no matter to me.”

  He slipped up another step, saw that the feed lid on the big German machine gun was still up, meaning it could no longer be fired. He slipped a bit farther forward, grabbed the snakelike curl of ammo belt that lay beneath the gun, and gave it a yank. He held it, then yelled, “Watch out, coming down,” and flicked it downward. He signaled with his fingers: three, then he pointed to his handgun.

  Obediently, three raiders—Slim, as senior man, Terry and Carlo, who were next in the stick—yielded their Thompsons to others and slid up the steps until they were just below him.

  “They must be down at the other end in one of them rooms, but they got them gals. If you have to shoot you use your pistols and you aim carefully, you got that? You shoot at Grumleys, not at motion. They may push the gals out first. Shoot their legs, their pelvises and wait for the girls to break free. Then you go for chest or head. Got that?”

  “Earl, they got machine guns!”

  “Y’all do what I tell you or I’ll get three more birds and you can go wait in the cars.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I’m going acrost the hall. You cover me, you got that?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You make sure you got your goddamn vests on.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Okay. On the count of three. Ready. Three!”

  Earl jumped across the hall, almost slipped in Grumley fluid and empty shell casings, but made it. Just as he ducked into a room, a man at the end of the hall stuck his head out with a tommy gun and blasted a lengthy burst at him, but immediately the three raiders returned fire, driving him back.

  “I think I got him,” said one.

  “I don’t know,” said another.

  Earl, meanwhile, looked around the room. Squashed into the corner and holding on dearly to each other, two more Negro gals cried softly.

  “Y’all be quiet now,” said Earl. “We’re going to get you out, okay?”

  One of them nodded.

  Earl peeked around the corner and saw nothing. He nodded over to Slim and held out two fingers, cranked his thumb back to indicate he was sending the women over.

  Slim nodded.

  “Okay,” he said, “y’all get over here and get ready to run. I’m going to fire a little bit. They won’t be shooting. You just jump over to the stairs and go on down and somebody will take care of you. Don’t you pay no mind to the shooting I’m going to do. You got that?”

  Both nodded.

  Earl stepped out into the hall, and fired half a magazine into the ceiling at the
rear of the corridor, watching the bullets tear into the plaster. The two girls dipped across, where they were grabbed by Carlo, who ushered them downstairs.

  • • •

  Frenchy returned to the hallway adjacent to the stairwell, breathing hard. He could see that the action had moved upstairs. He bent over and retrieved Earl’s BAR, took one of the magazines, and implanted it. Then he cranked the bolt back.

  The thing was heavy, and as he had his pockets jammed with other loaded magazines, he felt quite a burden as he rose. He walked around to where other raiders crouched at the foot of the stairs. He could see three others up there.

  “I got Earl’s gun reloaded,” he said.

  “Well, he seems kind of busy just now,” said Eff.

  “Well, hell, he sent me to get ammo for that gun and so he must need it.”

  Eff and the others just looked at him.

  “Look out,” he commanded. “I’m taking it up to him.”

  Frenchy pushed his way by them and began to edge his way up the steps.

  • • •

  Earl watched the room at the end of the hallway. He heard a motion, like a squirming or shifting, and the next thing he knew a man laid out with a shotgun and fired. He felt the sting of pellet, but fired too, finishing off the magazine. The bullets whacked chunks of plaster off the wall and the Grumley boy slumped and fell amid a white cascade of shattered masonry.

  Frenchy started when the gunfire suddenly erupted. At that moment also his foot found a puddle of Grumley blood that had coagulated on the fourth step. Before he knew what was happening, he slid downward, struggled for purchase and fell hard. He clenched as he fell and was aware that he squeezed off a five-or six-shot burst of automatic rifle fire. Men ducked and fell to avoid the shots, and the gun pivoted in his descent, still pumping, and sent a load of bullets through the window, blowing it out in the process.

  But then he was down, hard, his ass suddenly hot with pain from the fall.

  “Jesus Christ, Short! What the hell are you doing?”

  “I fell, goddammit. Is anybody hurt?”

  “You are a lucky son of a bitch,” someone said. “You didn’t clip nobody down here but you’re going to have to pay for a new window.”