The Desert Dago

by James Dargan

  “So, if that's true, what side of the law are you on?” Randall looked at Lyson like he had stolen money off a blind boy. “Tell me?”

  “Ah, c'mon, I don't need to put up with this shit, Phil... Leave me the fuck alone. And stop trying to load me with the guilt trip thing.”

  “I'm not. I'm just trying to rid the world of all the wrong.”

  Lyson knew Randall's wife's death had hit him hard, and that his mind had fractured from the main frame of reality ever-so-slightly. Respect was due:

  “I know, Phil, I know... But, I dunno, please don't do what I think you're gonna do.”

  Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land introduced itself modestly off the back of the loud and furious Great Balls of Fire.

  “My wife used to love this song,” Randall then said, his eyes vacant now, somewhere else, in another era when he and his beloved late spouse were together.

  “It sure is a beautiful song.”

  The two sat in silence until the last note faded.

  Randall stood up.

  “Are you going somewhere, Phil?” Lyson asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Don't do it, please – don't be stupid.”

  Randall walked out of Cactus Jack's in the kind of mood that people jump off bridges from. He realized he couldn't rely on the one person he had thought he could. He knew his strategy.

  THE GILA RIVER MONSTER

  The source of the Gila River was in the Black Range, situated in New Mexico, but it flowed westward into Arizona, where it finally emptied into the Colorado River, at Yuma. As a river there were many more impressive, but it wasn't to be laughed at, either, as it flowed through verdant valleys and sun-burnt desert.

  Four women had been found mutilated in that river source, all within ten miles of each other just south of Phoenix, over a period of three years between 1940 and 1943. Charles Ryder had been caught, tried and found guilty of their murders: the sentence: death by lethal gas. Unfortunately, he had escaped somehow from the penitentiary at Florence, and was on the run for more than a year until cornered by private detectives Philip Randall and Dick Devereux - who had a contract with the Arizona state correctional facilities as bounty hunters.

  “What do you want to do?” Randall asked his partner, Devereux, who was getting on in years and panting as they had just conquered a steep hill.

  They were twenty miles from Flagstaff, deep in the San Francisco Peaks (the original San Francisco in the continental United States) and had been on Charles Ryder's trail for a good while. Ryder – who had spent his childhood in Arizona as a boy scout and who had served in France during World War One in the summer of 1918 as a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old, seeing front-line action in the Second Battle of the Marne – had given as good as he had got. The two private investigators turned bounty hunters were now exhausted but determined to get their prize.

  They had followed Ryder to what they supposed was his secret hideout. The place, a hunter's log cabin, was covered from the back by ponderosa pine and aspens, making it impossible to outflank the murderer. The only way to him was a frontal assault.

  “Leave it to me,” Devereux answered as he began to walk away.

  “Where you going?” Randall asked.

  “Get down and take cover. I'll be back in a sec.”

  Randall, his Winchester Model 12 in his hands, stooped down behind the log that offered him protection. Dusk was approaching, and it was getting darker. He quickly lost sight of Devereux, who vanished between the trees to the left of the cabin. This was nothing new. Devereux had always been a loose cannon, his own man, fitting to no one’s taste but his own, distressing at times and rarely sobering. But that was how he had been designed – and he always seemed to come out unscathed at the final bell.

  Randall wanted some assurances: he called out to Ryder half a football field away in the cabin:

  “Are you in there, Ryder?!”

  Silence except for a bald eagle's squawk from above. Randall tried again.

  *****

  It was completely dark now. Randall looked at his watch. Devereux had been away for over an hour. He was worried. The bald eagle's squawk had been replaced by the hoo-hoo of a great horned owl. He knew the criminal was inside, biding his time, waiting for the opportunity to kill both him and his partner.

  A branch snapped from Randall's right. He jumped up, his rifle pointing forward at a target he could not see. Devereux's face appeared from the darkness out of nowhere.

  “How you been keeping?” Devereux said with a wry smile as he pushed his business partner of seven years down on the ground.

  “Where have you goddamn been, you sonofabitch?!”

  “Keep your voice down.” Devereux placed his index finger against his lips. “Is he in there?”

  “Why you asking me?” Randall asked in a tone that begged an answer. “What have you been doing for the last hour?”

  “Reconnaissance work.” Randall scoffed at the comment. “Whatcha laughing at?”

  “I'm just saying.”

  The lightheartedness lasted but a second, until:

  “You out there, motherfuckers?!” Ryder shouted.

  “We are!” Devereux answered.

  The bounty hunters weren't expecting any back up to arrive after Devereux had called them off, which meant they were on their own.

  “Well I'm coming after you!”

  “I think it's the other way, Ryder!” Devereux said.

  “Fuck you!”

  Devereux wanted Ryder to pay – anyone who harmed women deserved nothing less.

  “Are you gonna come out with your hands up or are we gonna have to come in there after you?!”

  “Screw you!”

  “He isn't going to budge an inch, Dick,” Randall then said.

  “I know.”

  “So, what do you suppose we do, then?”

  “I dunno yet, I'm strategizing.”

  “Are you?” Randall said with a smirk.

  “Yeah.”

  “We need a plan, Dick.”

  “I know.”

  Although Ryder had killed women, he was a dangerous man for his own gender, too – any psychopath was: in 1929 – while working as a day labourer - he had brutally murdered two Mexican men in a Calexico bar brawl when one of them had spilt his beer 'accidentally on purpose'. To get revenge, he followed the two wetbacks out of the saloon and murdered them in cold blood in a back alley, disemboweling one and cutting off the pecker from the other and, just for good measure, stuffing it into his mouth. Ryder had never been accused for that crime but ended up confessing to it anyway when caught for the Gila River Murders, taking a certain pride in telling the Phoenix detectives every detail of the event that had taken place more than fifteen years prior.

  “So, cocksuckers, how you gonna get me?!” Ryder said. He fired three rounds off his Winchester rifle which followed with a whoopee. “How?”

  Devereux and Randall ducked for cover.

  If the two bounty hunters had anything going for them, it was that Ryder was a terrible shot. They wanted a long-distance engagement rather than something up close and personal. Ryder was an infamous whizz with a knife.

  “Listen, we've got to do something,” Randall said, thinking about his wife and two daughters back home in Tucson.

  Devereux, too, had his love interest – he was still with Joan 'Honey Bee' Smith, but the love had gone. The sparks had been hot when they had met seven years before, but Joan didn't like Arizona. She wanted to return to her hometown of Philadelphia. Not that Devereux was complaining – his late wife's and daughter's souls still haunted him every night along with Bertoni's face.

  “I know,” Devereux answered.

  They were being paid a lot of money by the State of Arizona for the privilege.

  Ryder let off another volley of bullets indiscriminately.

  “So, what should we do?” Randall said after a pause, lying behind the log, supine, while Devereux was still only crouched behind it in his heroic
stance of defiance.

  “Leave it to me,” Devereux said.

  Devereux rushed off again - but before he did, Randall had managed to capture his stare: it was one of foreboding.

  “Come back here!” Randall shouted, though Devereux had long gone.

  Devereux, meanwhile, had managed to get to the back of the cabin. He burst through the door with all guns blazing (he only had a Colt 1911), surprising the fugitive into the bargain. Devereux hit Ryder with a slug in the left shoulder and one in the foot. Ryder got three off himself. He hit Devereux in the chest. The ex-cop went down. Just as Ryder was about to finish him off, Randall – who had heard the gunshots go off from outside and acted quickly – made his appearance and fatally wounded Ryder. Randall had no time to say his last farewell to the serial killer, because Devereux was lying in a pool of blood, face down.

  “You okay there, buddy?” Randall said to Devereux after he had turned him over. Randall was now cradling his friend's head in his arms. “You’re going to be all right, Dick, I swear.”

  “It's all... over... for me, Phil, can't you... you ... see,” Devereux replied, spluttering blood.

  “Don't you goddamn say that, you dirty sonofabitch.” Devereux turned his head with a struggle. He was looking at Ryder's body. “I got the schmuck, I got him,” Randall added.

  “Yeah, you did.”

  “I'm going to get you out of here, Dick, and get you a doctor.”

  “Don't... waste your time... I'm done for. I've had my day and have been... Ah, glad about-”

  “Don't speak. Shut up.”

  But Devereux didn't care. Soon he would be in the place where he had always wanted to be:

  “I'm going there, Phil, I'm really going there!”

  “Where's that, Dick?” Randall said, fighting the tears that wanted to flow.

  “The heaven-ly... place, the...”

  Devereux's sentence tailed off and he closed his eyes, dying in Randall's arms.

  SPECTACLE OUTSIDE THE FOX THEATER

  There was a knock on the door. Randall, in bed, glanced at his watch. It was 10.11am – late for him. He was usually up before seven. And now he knew why: the drink he had consumed the night before. He got up, put on his housecoat and struggled to the door.

  “You look like shit.” It was Detective Jack Lyson.

  “Thanks.”

  “Can I come in?”

  Randall walked away without saying a word. Lyson entered anyway.

  “You want a coffee?” Randall asked, facing his TPD ex-colleague with a grimace.

  On the kitchen table was a bottle of vodka and several Coca Cola 6 1/2-ounce bottles.

  “I didn't know you drank that much?” Lyson asked.

  “I don't.” Randall had forgotten to clean the table from the previous night's degeneracy. He felt embarrassed. During his years at the Tucson Police Department – as well as his time in the Bayside City force – he had been known as a sober character, both in personality and when it came to a tipple. “What about that drink?”

  “A coffee, yeah,” Lyson answered.

  “So why you here?”

  “I don't know other than I thought you were gonna cut your own throat when you left that bar the other day.”

  “Don't bullshit me, Jack.”

  Over thick, black coffee they discussed how it was and how it would be. As they did, the caffeine worked on Randall. Soon after, he perked up and was on top form again.

  “So what, are we gonna nail this prick?” Lyson asked.

  “Are you sure you're with me?” answered Randall, surprised.

  “Course I am.”

  “And why the change of mind?”

  “I dunno.”

  Randall was distrustful of most people: it kept him alive when other people died.

  “You know it's going to be dangerous?”

  “We are dealing with Quatrocchi.”

  Lyson had met Quatrocchi by chance once, unaware who he was, booking him for speeding while Lyson was a uniformed officer back in '48. Back then the wise guy had just moved out to Arizona with his family on a temporary basis. The young cop pulled over the mobster on the opposite side of the street from the Fox Theater on W. Congress Street. Coincidentally the movie Key Largo with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall had just finished, and a flood of people were leaving the place.

  “Your name and driver's license, please?” Officer Lyson asked the man in the car, a white 1947 Chevy Corvette, as flashy a ride as Lyson had pulled over in his short career. The man argued his case in broken English. “Where you from, buddy, outta town?”

  “Yeah.” Quatrocchi looked at the cop – if this had happened in Brooklyn, he would be already on his way. “Excuse, Officer, but I am in a rush-a, capiche?”

  Eventually Quatrocchi handed over his license. The cop examined it in detail, looking back and forth at the document in his hand and the guy’s face in the driver's seat.

  “Can you step outta the car, please, sir?”

  Quatrocchi was dumbfounded. Only a guy with bigger balls than Salvatore Giuliano, 'The Sicilian Robin Hood', would say that to him.

  Do you know who I am and what I represent in my organization? Quatrocchi wanted to say before he realized he didn't know how to say it in the language of his adopted country properly.

  “Of course, Officer,” Quatrocchi answered, seeing the crowd of people on the other side of the street. If the cop tried to embarrass him, he would give as good as he got and give them a show.

  “Can you face the vehicle, spread your arms and put ‘em on the car?” Lyson said.

  Quatrocchi did as he was told. The scene was creating quite a stir for the onlookers outside the Fox Theater.

  “See what-a you do, you pig-a?!” Quatrocchi said with a smirk.

  That comment didn't win him any friends in the TPD for sure. Lyson had had out of town schmucks before, but never a Dago with a fancy car.

  “I'm arresting you on charges of insubordination and non-compliance with a police officer while performing his duties...”

  Quatrocchi scoffed. Words were words. Like in the last book he had read by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Satre, Words. The Manhattan media and the members of the other four New York Families thought Quatrocchi was stupid, that he couldn't string a sentence together, that he couldn't make sense of his adopted language. But... oh... God, get him to express himself in Sicilian and it would be enough to make Luigi Pirandello rage with jealousy.

  “Go ahead-a, Officer.”

  He arrested Quatrocchi and the mobster spent the night in a cell.

  Lyson left Randall's place, a plan of sorts established between the two to get the dirty Dago behind bars and out of their good, honest town forever.

  ARLINGTON

  Quatrocchi thought he had it made regarding the deal with Clearwater. What he didn’t know, however, was Randall and the guy who had arrested him twelve years before were coming after him now.

  “You want me to arrange a flight for you to Dallas, sir?” Dimissio asked his boss.

  “Yeah, for first thing tomorrow.”

  “I’ll get on it.”

  *****

  The next day Quatrocchi was in Dallas with Dimissio, Silvestri and Mazzia just in case the Texan tried something. Since he had been in Arizona, Quatrocchi was doing more and more of the work a simple soldier or capo at best should have been doing. He was now a real ‘hands on guy’. Ten years earlier, while living in New York, Quatrocchi had acted as a real boss, with all the personality traits expected as head of one of the Five Families.

  Clearwater picked them up outside the airport.

  “So where are you-a taking us?” Quatrocchi asked Clearwater.

  “To the factory.”

  “The Buick factory?”

  “Yes.”

  Forty-five minutes later they were at the car factory in Arlington.

  “This place is fucking huge!” Silvestri said from the back seat.

  And it was. One of the biggest in t
he country.

  Clearwater had told his factory floor manager and second-in-command, Earl Bowen - along with other management in on the Buick scam - that his ‘guests’ were ‘out of town’ maintenance contractors from the East Coast interested in a contract repairing the factory’s conveyor belts.

  “When we go in, keep to the plan what we said and let me do the talking. Okay?” Clearwater said.

  “Okay-a, okay-a, you’re the boss-a,” Quatrocchi answered with a smile.

  Clearwater didn’t know how long he had to live but wanted to stay alive for as long as possible for the sake of his wife and kids. His greed had got him in the end – how long did he expect to go on doing what he was doing and making a load of cash without either his chiefs in Detroit or mobsters finding out? Unluckily for him, the latter had got wind of it first.

  *****

  The tour of the factory had gone well. In celebration, Clearwater arranged a night on the town in Dallas at a Greek restaurant and a strip club afterwards. In Dallas, Quatrocchi wouldn’t be meeting with his friend and fellow mobster, Joseph Civello, boss of the Dallas crime family, who had been indicted for his participation in the Apalachin meeting in ’57 and was currently on trial for it.

  “Who were they?” Earl Bowen asked Clearwater distrustfully after the Sicilians had taken a cab to their hotel, the Dallas Hilton. They were taking a stroll around the factory floor with Cuban cigars in their mouths. The sound of clanking, metal on metal, welding, sparks, and the great American noise of car production blanked out anything they were saying that could land them in trouble.

  “I told you, Earl, there’s no need to worry.”

  “Fucking Italians, that’s what.”

  Earl Bowen didn’t like Italians, like he didn’t like any of the ethnic minorities that plagued his state and country. Furthermore, he was a prominent member in the Dallas chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Evil by nature, he once tortured a dog owned by a black boy just for the fun of it.

  “They’re not Italians.”

  “So, what,” Bowen began, sniffing the end of the cigar as it burnt slowly, “three dark-haired schmucks with broader New York accents than James Cagney and you’re telling me everything is legit?”