Hooligans (2 page)

“No
problem,” said the captain.

The two crewmen had not quite reached the stem tanks of the sailboat when the hatch to the cabin

suddenly slid back and another man jumped on deck from below. He was holding a submachine gun.

The mate uttered an oath and reached for the pistol in his belt but he was too late. The man with the

machine gun raked the deck and bridge of the trawler.

Bdddddddddddddt...

P,dddddddddddddd...

The windshield of the captain‟s cabin exploded, showering glass across the deck. The first burst blew

away the captain‟s chest. He flew backward through the door and landed on his back on the bridge.

His foot twitched violently
for
a few seconds before he died.

The second burst ripped into the mate as he clawed under his coat for the
.38.
It lifted him high in the

air, twisted him around, and tossed him halfway across the deck. He fell like an empty sack, face

down, most of his head blown away.

The remaining
two
crew members, the ones who had boarded the sailboat, turned wild-eyed toward

the gunner. The shirtless man stabbed one of them in the chest with a bowie knife. He fell across the

stern, babbling incoherently. The man with the submachine gun fired a burst into the chest of the last

crewman, who dropped the gas can and flipped backward over the railing into the sea.

The shirtless man pulled his knife free, cleaned the blade on the dead man‟s pants, and tossed his

victim overboard.

The shooter sent another burst into the light and it exploded into darkness.

It was all over in thirty seconds.

They worked very quickly, searching the boat. It took less than half an hour to find their prize. They

transferred the three small, heavy bags to the sailboat, threw the captain and his mate into the sea,

doused the trawler with gasoline, and set it afire.

The shirtless man cranked up the engine of the sailboat and guided it away from the trawler; then,

setting the wheel, he joined the shooter and they checked out the prize.

“What d‟ya think?” the shirtless man said, leaning over and staring into one of the bags.

“Beautiful,” the shooter said. He moved behind his partner, took a .357 Magnum from his belt, and

stepped closer.

“Sorry,” he said. He held the gun an inch or so from the back of the shirtless man‟s head and

squeezed the trigger. The gun roared and the bullet smacked into the back of the
man‟s
head,

knocking him forward against the railing.

The shooter reached out for the body but it fell sideways, was caught for an instant in the line of the

foresail, and then rolled over it and plunged face forward into the sea.

“Shit!” cried the shooter and made a frantic last grab, but it was gone. The body bobbed to the

surface like a cork on a fishing line, then went under.

The shooter ran back to the tiller, shoved the throttle on full, and turned the boat sharply around. He

searched for ten minutes, hoping to get a glimpse of his victim, but he finally gave up.

He was a mile or so away when the gasoline on the trawler exploded, spewing up a broiling ball of

fire that for a moment or two rivaled the rising sun.

He watched the trailing smoke grow smaller and smaller until he could see it no longer.

1

ACE, DEUCE, TREY

Going back to Dunetown was worse than going to Vietnam. I didn‟t know what was in store for me in

Nam; I knew what was waiting in Dunetown.

As the plane veered into its final approach, memories began to ambush me, memories that pulled me

back to a place I had tried to forget for a lot of years, and to a time that was, in my mind, the last

green summer of my life. After that, everything seemed to be tinted by the colors of autumn, colors of

passage. Dying colors.

The colors of Nam.

Brown, muddy rivers. Dark green body bags. Black cinders where trees and villages had once stood.

Cray faces with white eyes, waiting to be zipped up and shipped back to the World and laid away in

the auburn earth.

Those were the hues that had painted my life since that summer. 1963, that was the year.

A long time ago.

For over twenty years I had tried to erase the scars of that year. Now, suddenly, it was thrust back at

me like a dagger, and the names and faces of another time besieged me. Chief. Titan. Wally Butts and

Vince Dooley. Teddy.

Doe.

Time had dulled the blade, sanded down the brittle edges, but it had only sharpened that one persistent

pain. Doe Findley was the last fantasy I had left. I had flushed most of my other dreams, but that one I

hung on to, protecting it, nurturing it, seeking shelter in it, and I wasn‟t ready yet to surrender it to

reality.

It was raining, a steady downpour, as the small jet swept in low over the marshes. I squinted through

the oval window, tear-streaked with raindrops, looking for something to orient me in time and place. I

suppose I was expecting that same one-room shed that passed for a depot, with its coffee machine and

half a dozen chairs they jokingly called a waiting room. Time plays crazy head tricks on you. In your

head, time is a freeze frame. People don‟t grow older; the paint on houses doesn‟t chip or fade; trees

don‟t get taller. The grass doesn‟t even grow.

What I really expected to see through that window was the past. What I saw was a low, glass and

chrome terminal, exploding strobe lights limning the runways, other jets jockeying for position. There

was more action on the runway than in Las Vegas on a Saturday night. Twenty years is a lot of reality

to swallow in one dose, but that‟s what I got.

As I scampered down the stairs from the plane and across the ramp through the rain, I remembered

something my father used to say:

“Anything that comes easily isn‟t worth having.”

Well, actually it was my mother who said it. My father died in action in the Pacific three months

before I was born. I was never very much for geography, but by the time I went to school, I knew just

about everything there was to know about the island Guadalcanal. I knew its geographic coordinates,

its shape; I knew it was barely one hundred miles long and thirty miles wide and that it was our first

offensive target in the Pacific. And I knew that on August 20, 1942, at 22:15 hours which is quarter

past ten at night, Captain J. L. Kilmer, First Marine Division, ceased being my father and became my

mother‟s legend. I grew up with his Purple Heart and Navy Cross framed beside his picture over my

desk so I would never forget him. Guadalcanal will always be an ugly, worthless, sliver of real estate

in the middle of nowhere that nobody should‟ve died for. Later, I was to learn firsthand about that

kind of dying.

Anyway, his LST was blown out from under him on the first wave going in. He never even got his

feet wet.

But I know about my old man, about what he believed, and about the place where he died. My mother

made sure about that. The lessons she taught me while I was growing up always started the same way:

“Your father used to say.

Then she‟d hit me with the payoff line.

I was probably sixteen or seventeen before I figured out that in order for my father to have passed on

to my mother all the bromides fed to me during my formative years and attributed to him, he would

have had to talk constantly, twenty-four hours a day, for the entire two years they were married. My

father image was created by my mother. But it worked. By the time I got on to her, I figured my dad

at twenty-two was wiser than Homer, Socrates, Newton, and Ben Franklin all rolled up in one. Funny

thing is, I guess 1 still do.

“Your father used to say, „Anything that comes too easily isn‟t worth having.”

1 should have listened to that reprise as I ran through the rain, but I had other things on my mind, It

went in one ear, out the other, and never slowed down along the way.

When I entered the Dunetown terminal, I was slapped back to reality in a hurry. It was a city block

long, with a moving sidewalk, a twenty-four-hour snack shop, a fancy European-type restaurant, and

two bars.

In the time it took me to walk the length of the terminal and pick up my bags, I saw a first-class dip

from Albuquerque named Digit Dan Delaney, two hookers from San Diego whose names eluded me,

and a scam artist from Detroit named Spanish Eddie Fuereco, spinning the coin with a mark in a

seersucker suit and a Hawaiian shirt.

„They were all working. „That told me a lot.

The lady at the airline counter had an envelope for me with car keys, registration, confirmed

reservations at the Ponce Hotel, and a map of the town showing me how to get there. There was also a

message that had been phoned in twenty minutes earlier:

“Urgent. Meet me at emergency entrance, city hospital, soon as possible.‟

It had been phoned in by a Lieutenant Morehead of the local police. And that reminded me of why I

was there, which certainly wasn‟t to weep over my lost youth. A man named Franco Tagliani was the

reason I was there, a mobster who headed an outfit called the Cincinnati Triad. For five years I had

dogged Tagliani; for five years I had listened to his voice on wiretaps, watched him through

binoculars, snapped pictures of him through a telephoto lens. For five years I had tried to bring

Tagliani and his bunch down. I had tried everything due process would allow.

Zip.

In those five years I never got close enough to him to tip my hat good morning. It was embarrassing,

five years and nothing to show for it but a goose egg.

„Then he had disappeared. And with him, his whole bunch. Poof, just like that. „The magic trick of the

year. And now, nine months later, he had popped back up. And in Dunetown, the last place on earth I

cared to be. Thanks a bunch, Franco.

This time we were going to play hard cheese. This time the score was going to be a little different.

I finessed the hotel and drove straight to the city hospital. The lieutenant was waiting at the entrance,

an enormous man who towered over me.

“I‟m Morehead,” he said as my hand disappeared into his. “Call me Dutch.”

“Jake Kilmer,” I said.

Five minutes later I came face-to-face with Franco Tagliani for the first time. He was in a drawer in

the basement freezer with a hole in his back, a nick in the shoulder, one more in his forehead, and an

insurance shot in the right eye.

The tag on his toe said his name was Frank Turner but I knew better.

In the drawer beside him and lust as dead was his number one boy, Nicky Stinetto. He had been shot

three times, two of them good-bye hits. His tag said he was Nat Sherman, another lie.

Both bodies were badly burned, both had multiple body hits. Two different guns. You don‟t need to

be a coroner to tell the difference between the hole a .22 makes, and one made by a .357.

“Couple of pros?” I suggested.

“That or Wyatt Earp,” Morehead said. He went on, sounding like an official police report. “The

homicides occurred at approximately seven fifteen p.m. at the residence of the deceased, Turner. . . or

Tagliani, whichever way you want it. The shooting was followed by an explosion. We‟re working on

the bomb angle now. Tagliani‟s old lady got caught in the blowup. She‟s up in ICU, hangin‟ on by her

pinky.”

I looked at my watch. It was a little after nine.

“You‟ve put together a pretty good sheet on this thing, considering it happened less than two hours

ago,” I said.

“We got a play-by-play on tape,” he said and winked. Billy Morehead, head of the Special Operations

Branch, local police, had Kraut written all over his battered face. He stared down at me through pale

blue, hooded eyes that lurked behind gold-rimmed glasses. Morehead was the size of a prize bull with

hands like cantaloupes, sandy hair going gray, a soft but growling voice, and a penchant for swearing

in German, all of which had earned him the nickname Dutch. He was cordial, but cautious, and

although I had known him for only thirty minutes, I was beginning to like his style.

I said, “Well, so much for them. Let‟s hope his widow makes it. Maybe she saw something.”

“She‟ll never stool if she did. They‟re all alike.”

There was nothing more to do there until the autopsy, so we went up to the intensive care unit on the

second floor. Mrs. „Tagliani looked like she was on her way to the moon; lines sticking out of both

arms, a mask over her face, and behind the bed, three different monitors recording her life signs, what

was left of them. The coronary reader seemed awfully lazy, bi, bin, bipping slowly as its green lines

moved across the centre of the monitor screen, streaking up with each bip.

Nobody from the family was in sight. asked Dutch about that. He shrugged and smoothed the corners

of his Bavarian moustache with the thumb and forefinger of each hand.

“Probably hiding under the bed” was his only comment.

The intern, a callow young man with a teenager‟s complexion, told us the widow had suffered firstdegree burns over seventy percent of her body, had glass imbedded in her chest and stomach, and had

been buried under debris which had caused severe head injuries.