by Ralph Dennis
“Shit,” Hump shouted back at me, “I think you got my eyebrows.”
I steadied the shotgun again and let the other barrel go in the direction of the guard booth. While I pulled the shotgun back into the car and broke it open, Winters leaned out of the passenger window with his Ml carbine. He ripped off part of a magazine, spraying the gate opening. It was like hanging a big sign out there: don’t go near it. I thumbed out the spent shells and reloaded.
Fifty or seventy-five yards from the gate, I thought we had made it. We were almost there, and it seemed that they hadn’t fired at us at all. I began to feel that the fire we’d poured in their direction had made them dig holes, holes they weren’t about to climb out of until we were out of the compound and gone.
The jeep headlights hit us then, quartering in from the passenger side of the car.
“Shit!” Jim Winters turned his body and braced the carbine on the window ledge. He emptied the rest of the first magazine in a single burst. The barrel of the carbine hit the roof of the car as he moved it upward and ejected the empty clip and jammed another into place. I slid across the seat and got the window down on that side. The jeep lights bounced across me, and then were gone. I knew they were getting close, too close, and I guessed that they would turn soon and move parallel with us, giving the stud with the shotgun his crack at us from deadly range. I put that out of my mind, aimed for the hood of the jeep, and then moved it lower, toward the tires. I let go with both barrels. One headlight went out and the jeep swerved and skidded. In the seat in front of me, Jim Winters opened up with another burst from the carbine. The other headlight crunched and went out.
We flashed by the gate booth and onto the bumpy, rutted road that led to the highway.
“That last part was out of some fucking James Cagney movie,” Hump said.
“Only we didn’t get hit a single time. That must be some record.”
“You crazy?” Winters asked. “The front of this car, I bet you could drain spaghetti through it.” Winters leaned back in his seat and dug a hand into his left shoulder. While I watched, blood flowed through his fingers and down his arm. “I’ve got the proof of it, right here.” I dug out a clean handkerchief and handed it to him. He opened the shirt and pressed the folded handkerchief over the wound.
“It’s not bad,” Winters said, “but it’s messing up my good threads.”
“The replacement’s are on Hump and me,” I said.
“Done,” Winters said.
Art waited for us at the base of the road, where it joined the main highway. His unmarked police car was wedged across its two-car width. Hump braked and I got out running. Art came around the rear of the car and met me. “Got Hugh. He’s in the trunk.”
Hump got out and opened the trunk and pulled a dazed Hugh Muffin from the compartment. One of Art’s men got Hugh by the elbow and hurried him over to Art’s car. “Winters got hit in the shoulder.”
“In my car,” Art said. “We go by the emergency ward on the way in. We can use the siren, too, if we have to.”
I nodded. I was still looking down the road, waiting to see if there was any pursuit. So far, none. Maybe there wasn’t going to be any. At least I hoped not, now that we were at the highway. I left Art for the moment, and Hump and I helped Winters into the front seat of the police car.
“Thanks,” I said. “And we’ll be by to see you tomorrow.”
“And don’t forget your threads,” Hump said.
“I won’t.” Winters was tired, and it was hurting now that the shock was over. That was the way it was, first like a brick hitting you, then the real pain, after the stunned feeling left you.
I went back to my car and sat in the front seat, next to Hump. We waited while Art jockeyed the car around and headed it back toward Atlanta. For the first mile or so, we stayed with the police car. Then Art put on the siren and left us like we were standing still. It didn’t seem to matter, boing left. It was over, and I was getting the shakes. It took me à lot of fumbling around to get the glove compartment open. There was around two swallows of cognac left in the flask. I almost broke a front tooth trying to fit the flask to my mouth. I had my swallow and passed it on to Hump.
“God, I’m shaky,” I said.
“Two of us.” Hump tilted back his head and finished it off. As he lowered his head, he looked into the rear-view mirror. He passed the empty to me. “Company, Jim. I think it’s that clunker again.”
“The same one?” I twisted around and tried to get a good look at it. There was a car behind us. It might have been the same one. The headlights were out of line, one pointing skyward and the other toward the road. Beyond that, I couldn’t get a good idea of the make or the year.
“Hard to tell,” Hump said. “More likely, it’s some kid on the way back from seeing his girl out in the country.”
“You’ve always got such reasonable explanations,” I said.
“Youth being the way it is today,” Hump said, “he had time for one fast fuck and a good-night kiss.”
“If it’s the same clunker.”
I could feel myself relaxing, the pleasant warmth of the cognac spreading from my stomach outward. I tilted the empty flask and got another drop or two. It wasn’t enough.
The rest of the way into town, I kept an eye on the car behind us. When we reached the city limits, I told Hump to pull into an empty lot next to a filling station. Hump got into position and we watched the old Chevy go past. I didn’t get a look at the driver because the windows seemed fogged over. But the driver didn’t seem to be paying any attention to us. He went on by. We gave him a minute or two and started after him. There didn’t seem to be any sign of him on the street ahead, so I decided that settled it. I put it out of my mind altogether. All I wanted now was another drink.
We reached the department parking lot a few seconds after Art did. As we turned in, I could see that his doors were open and he was getting out, while a cop in the back seat with Hugh Muffin had him by an elbow and was yanking him out. I motioned Hump to a space about eight or ten cars from Art’s, and Hump wheeled into place. I got out and breathed the. cold night air. It stung my lungs and shook me awake.
I could hear Hugh then. They’d taken the tape from his mouth. “It was kidnapping, out and out kidnapping, taking me from the home of a friend at gunpoint . . . ”
“From a whorehouse,” Art said.
“From a nightclub,” Hugh insisted.
“A black whorehouse,” Art said.
It went on and on. Hump came around the side of the car and slapped me on the back. We stood at the rear of the car and waited as they came toward us. Art had Hugh by one elbow, and the other cop was on the other side of him. I didn’t see the third cop. I guessed they’d left him at the hospital with Jim Winters. I turned to Hump, about to say that we’d have to drop by the hospital the next day, when a man stepped out from the shadowy line of parked cars. He was between us, facing the approaching line of Art, Hugh and the other cop, and with his back to Hump and me. From the blue raincoat and the size of his body, I knew it was Eddie Spence. Hugh Muffin saw him first and raised his taped hands, as if to protect himself or begin a plea. It didn’t get very far. The flat crack of the pistol tore it off. The slugs hit Hugh and threw him back, like he’d been struck by a high-speed car head-on. Even as he was going down, another shot hit him in the back.
It stunned Art at first, the suddenness of it, and then his hand brushed his coat aside and moved for the gun on his hip. Eddie Spence turned slightly and lined up the .45 on him. Art brought his hands up and away from his body. The other cop did the same.
Either Eddie hadn’t seen me, or he didn’t care. I got the .38 out of my belt and gave Hump a shove that got him out of the line of fire, between two cars. I got into my target-range stance and lined up on the broadest part of Eddie, the body half from the waist up to the bullish neck.
“Eddie!” I yelled at him, “drop it in the road, and put your hands on your head.”.
Edd
ie went still, rigid, but the gun was still pointing at Art. “Is that you, Hardman?”
“Yes. Give it up, Eddie. It’s over.”
With his back still to me, Eddie said, “I knew you’d find him, Hardman.”
“Put it on the ground.”
His shoulders jerked in a slight movement, and I knew that he’d made up his mind. He was going to whirl toward me. “I’m not going to jail.”
“Eddie, you turn and I’ll drop you, so help me. Don’t make me do it.”
“Do it then.” He began his turn. Behind him, as soon as the eye of the .45 left them, Art and the other cop took flying dives to the asphalt. Not wanting to fire, watching Eddie, I almost waited too long. First he was in profile and then in three-quarters and, as he moved to full body again, I still didn’t want to fire. The .45 was clear now, up and moving downward as he sighted on me.
“Burn him,” Hump hissed at me, “burn him, goddamit!”
I dropped the hammer on him twice, and both slugs hit’ him chest high. He spun away, staggering, and fell across the tail end of a car. He slumped there for a few seconds and then he slid off it, loose and lifeless.
Art ran over to him and kicked the .45 away from him. It clattered toward me.
Hump came out of the darkness. “Well, there goes twenty thou and a wasted youth, all in the same night.”
“The poor sonofabitch. I guess he was in that clunker, after all. Saw enough to make his guess, and beat us here when I got foxy.”
Hump put a hand on my shoulder. “Screw that young love and what it gets you.”
That covered Eddie Spence. It belonged on his tombstone. I looked beyond Eddie’s body to the pudgy lump that had been Hugh Muffin. The other cop had checked him and now came toward us, shaking his head. “And all the money-grabbing shit, too,” I said.
I felt godawful. My head hurt, and I was sick to my stomach. I felt like somebody had crapped on me, and then turned off the water so I couldn’t take a shower. Sometimes it was like that.
In the next hour or so, Ben Coleman filled in the blanks on the parts we didn’t know. Hugh Muffin had been taking for years, since his first term in the state senate. The longer he remained there, the more clout he had, and the money got better and better. He was on his way to writing the last zero on his first million. And then Emily Campbell looked the wrong way that night in The Man’s parking lot and saw him. That had turned it all around. The deaths of Emily and Ferd had been to protect himself, to keep his identity covered. That was as far as he’d planned. And then Eddie Spence had appeared, and he’d seen the other possibility. He could take over The Man’s whole Atlanta operation and put in two hand-picked blacks to run it for him. He knew that all the deaths around Emily Campbell would be tied to Eddie Spence, sooner or later. Even the death of The Man. Knowing me, Hugh knew that I’d have to reveal the relationship between The Man and Emily after The Man was dead. That revelation would point it all back to Spence. And Hugh’d be covered, in the closet and clean.
But I started sniffing around in other directions. I even had doubts, as I’d told Coleman, that Eddie had killed Emily. From that time on, I was in the way, a spoiler. That was when Hugh turned Mullidge loose on me and imported the two guns from the Midwest.
With Hugh Muffin dead, Coleman tried to turn back into a Sunday-school teacher. He denied the statement he’d made earlier. Now, he insisted, his only involvement had been as a witness to the deaths of Lockridge and Alice Jarman. Beyond that, he hardly knew Hugh, except as Arch Campbell’s friend. In the earlier statement, given while we were planning the raid on the lodge, Coleman had said he’d been investing some of Hugh’s dirty money in land and beach-front property, mixing it in and disguising it among the investments he made for Campbell and a few of his friends.
I left Art to deal with all that, to decide how they’d charge Coleman. It was the department’s headache, and they were welcome to it.
Hump must have decided that I looked like hell. He said he’d stay the night at my place, just for the company. He drove us through the main part of Peachtree, past all the Christmas decorations, all the light and glitter. The streets were empty and bare and cold, and the decorations seemed pathetic rather than gay. It was Christmas Eve morning, and I still hadn’t done any of my shopping. And Marcy would be waiting for me that night, as soon as I’d put some of my scattered parts back together. If I could.
We never did get all of the twenty thousand dollars reward. Most of it had been pledges, anyway, and a lot of it dried up and blew away. Arch Campbell tried his best, and his collection came to around seven thousand dollars. It was better than nothing, but it wasn’t the windfall that Hump had been expecting.
The Man came back to Atlanta after New Years, and he breathed fire for the first hour or so. He didn’t like the raid on the lodge, and the others in the Black Eight were just waiting for him to get back to town and vote on whether to start a new landfill with Hump and me. After he calmed down a bit and heard us out, he agreed to cool the steam from the ruckus. We’d given him something else to worry about: the identity of the two hand-picked blacks whom Hugh had planned to put in his place. If he ever found out who they were, I guess he started the landfill with them.
It wasn’t a bad Christmas season, if you weren’t Emily Campbell or Eddie Spence or Hugh Muffin. Or any of the other dead.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ralph Dennis isn’t a household name . . . but he should be. He is widely considered among crime writers as a master of the genre, denied the recognition he deserved because his twelve Hardman books, which are beloved and highly sought-after collectables now, were poorly packaged in the 1970s by Popular Library as a cheap men’s action-adventure paperbacks with numbered titles.
Even so, some top critics saw past the cheesy covers and noticed that he was producing work as good as John D. MacDonald, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross MacDonald.
The New York Times praised the Hardman novels for “expert writing, plotting, and an unusual degree of sensitivity. Dennis has mastered the genre and supplied top entertainment.” The Philadelphia Daily News proclaimed Hardman “the best series around, but they’ve got such terrible covers . . . ”
Unfortunately, Popular Library didn’t take the hint and continued to present the series like hack work, dooming the novels to a short shelf-life and obscurity . . . except among generations of crime writers, like novelist Joe R. Lansdale (the Hap & Leonard series) and screenwriter Shane Black (the Lethal Weapon movies), who’ve kept Dennis’ legacy alive through word-of-mouth and by acknowledging his influence on their stellar work.
Ralph Dennis wrote three other novels that were published outside of the Hardman series—Atlanta, Deadman’s Game and MacTaggart’s War—but he wasn’t able to reach the wide audience, or gain the critical acclaim, that he deserved during his lifetime.
He was born in 1931 in Sumter, South Carolina, and received a masters degree from University of North Carolina, where he later taught film and television writing after serving a stint in the Navy. At the time of his death in 1988, he was working at a bookstore in Atlanta and had a file cabinet full of unpublished novels.
Brash Books will be releasing the entire Hardman series, his three other published novels, and his long-lost manuscripts.