Hot Springs (46 page)

“You old bastard,” said Earl. “You go down and we’ll be back for you.”

“You do it, goddammit!” said the old man.

“Shit,” said Earl, and yanked five pieces of tape in rapid succession, which lit the flares. He felt them hiss and burn and their explosive heat. But his eyes were closed, he didn’t look into them, he edged to the door and then dumped them on the ground.

“Run!” he commanded, but Carlo was already gone. He followed, and he had a sensation of the old man spinning in the other direction, and he heard the .45s blazing, one in each hand, fastfastfastfast, the old man fired and as Earl ran he saw in the glow a man rising with a tommy gun but slowly, as if blinded himself and Carlo threw the crowbar from ten feet with surprising grace and accuracy and the heavy thing hit the gunman in the chest and hurt him badly so that he stepped back and fell.

The boy ran on and Earl ran too, out of the glow, and they heard the heavy blast of the BAR and answering shots from D. A.’s .45s.

Suddenly it was a dirt blizzard. Around them erupted fragments, dust and debris as the carbine gunner got onto them, and the boy stumbled but Earl was by him, had him, and pulled him down into the stream.

They heard the BAR. They heard the .45s. They heard the BAR. They heard no more .45s.

“Come on,” said Earl. “Come on, Bobby Lee. You got to go now! It don’t matter that it hurts, you got to go now, with me.”

And Earl had the boy and was pulling him along, in the dark, through the low tunnel.

“Did you get them?” asked Owney.

“I think two got down in some kind of ditch. The one out back, Herman finished him.”

“Shit,” said Owney. “They’d better not get away. Goddammit, they better not get away. If one got away, you know which one it was.”

Johnny yelled. “Herman, lad, circle around and see where them boys gone. You other fellas, you converge on the shed. We’re coming ourselves.”

Getting the cumbersome apparatus off the flatcar was not an easy thing but with Jack Ding-Dong doing the labor, they managed. Then Jack carried the heavy battery unit, and Johnny walked ahead with the rifle, scanning through the scope. Owney was just behind.

“On the right,” said Johnny, and Owney looked and saw a Jayhawker, just a young kid, lying spread out on the ground, his dark suit sodden with blood.

“They’re all over the goddamned place. We done a good night’s work, we did,” said Johnny.

“Over here,” yelled Herman.

They walked on, past poor Vince the Hat de Palmo, who was conscious again, in the ministrations of Red Brown, though he gripped his chest as if he’d been hit by a truck there.

“Them flares blinded me,” he said to Johnny.

“There, there, lad,” said Johnny. “They blinded me too.”

At last they reached a culvert, saw the water glittering through it.

“That’s where the bastards went. Trust a rat to find a hole. Where does this go?”

“Under the streets,” said Owney. “Goddamn. Goddamn, the cowboy got away.”

“But he’s running scared, probably hurt. He’s no problem, Owney. Not for a time. He’ll mend, he’ll come for you. We’ll find him first and put him down. Damn, he’s as sly a dog as they come, isn’t he? How in Jesus’ name did he know of this culvert?”

“I know what I’ll do,” Owney said. “I’ll call the police.”

“Johnny, Johnny?”

“What is it?”

“He’s still alive.”

“Who’s still alive?”

“The old man.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Owney, turning.

He walked with Johnny quickly back to the shed. In the hollow behind it, the old man had fallen. He lay soaked in his own blood, jacking and twitching with the pain. Herman must have hit him five times, and Johnny two or three times before that. But the gristly old bastard wouldn’t die.

“He’s a tough boyo,” said Johnny.

The old man looked up at them, coughed up a red gob, then looked them over.

“So you’re the fellows done this work? Well, let me tell you, Earl will track you down and give you hell on earth before you go to God’s own hell.”

“You old turkey buzzard, why don’t you hurry and die,” said Owney. “We don’t have all night for your yapping.”

“Owney, I marked you for scum the first time I laid eyes on you and I ain’t never wrong about such things.”

“Yes, but how come then I’m the man with the gun, eh, old man? How come you’re lying there shot to pieces, bleeding out by the quart?”

“Takes a lot to kill me,” the old man said. Then he actually smiled. “And maybe you don’t have enough pecker-heft to get it done.”

Owney leaned over him and shot him in the forehead with his Luger like a big hero.

They ran crouching through the darkness and in a bit of time the slight illumination of the opening disappeared as the underground course of the stream turned this way or that.

“Jesus, I can’t go on,” moaned Carlo.

Earl set him down, peeled back his coat and his shirt.

The carbine bullet had blown through him high in the back and come clean out the front. He bled profusely from each wound.

Earl tore the boy’s shirt, and wadded a roll of material into each hole, the entrance and the exit, as the boy bucked in pain and tossed his head. With the boy’s tie, he tied a loop tightly that bound the two crude bandages together. With his own tie, he quickly hung a loop around the boy’s neck, to make a crude sling.

“Let’s go.”

“God, Earl, I’m so damned tired. Can’t you go and get help while I rest?”

“Sonny, they will see you when you can’t see them and they will kill you. If you stay, you die. It’s that simple.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“I know you can. You ain’t hit that bad. Someone has to survive to talk for them boys that didn’t. Someone’s got to remember them boys and what they did and how they was betrayed.”

“Will you pay them back, Earl? Will you get them?”

“Damned straight I will.”

“Earl, don’t. D. A. didn’t want you in trouble. D. A. loved you, Earl. You were his son. Don’t you get that? If you go down, then what he did don’t mean a thing.”

“Now you’re talking crazy.”

“No, no,” said the boy. “He sent me to investigate you ‘cause he was worried you had a death wish. And then when I found out about your daddy, he told me to get back and not say nothing about it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but you’re wasting your breath. My daddy’s been dead a long time.”

“Your daddy just died a minute ago and his last wish was that you live and have a happy life, which you have earned.”

“You just shut that yap now, and come on.”

“Earl, I’m so tired.”

“Bobby Lee, you—”

“Pm not Bobby Lee, Earl. I’m Carlo Henderson. I ain’t your little brother, I’m just a deputy.”

“Well, whoever you are, mister, you ain’t staying here.”

With that Earl pulled him to his feet, and pushed him along through the hot, sloppy water in the darkest darkness either of them had ever seen.

Hot Springs Creek was a sewer and a drain. It smelled of shit and dirty bathwater and booze and blood. As they sloshed along, they heard the skitter of rats. There were snakes down here, and other ugly things that lived under whorehouses and fed on the dead. Maggots and spiders, broken glass, rotting timbers, all lighdess and dank, with the stench of bricks a century old and the banks a kind of muddy slop that could have been shit.

“How much further, Mr. Earl?”

“Not much. I don’t hear ‘em trailing.”

“I don’t neither.”

“That goddamned infrared gizmo was probably too heavy to carry along down here, now that I think about it.”

“Earl, how’d you know of this place?”

“Shut up. Don’t be talking too much. Another couple of hundred feet and we’ll begin to think about getting out.”

“Getting out?”

“Yeah. You’ll never make it if we go all the way to the other end. You’ll bleed out. It’s another mile and a half ahead. But all the speakeasies, the baths, all them places got secret exits, just in case. We’ll get through one of them.”

“Earl, I am so tired. So goddamned tired.”

“Henderson, I don’t b’lieve I ever heard you swear before.”

“If I get out of here I am going to swear, smoke a cigarette and have sexual intercourse with a lady.”

“Sounds like a pretty good program to me. I might join you, but I’d add a bottle of bourbon to the mix. And I don’t drink no more.”

“Well, I ain’t ever had no sexual intercourse.”

“You will, kid. You will. That I guarantee you.”

He pulled the boy out of the water and up the muddy bank, where he found a heavy wooden door. It seemed to be bolted shut. The boy sat sloppily in the mud, while Earl got out his jackknife and pried at a lock, and in a bit old tumblers groaned and he pulled the thing open two feet, before it stuck again.

He got the boy up, and the two of them staggered onward through a chamber, up into a cellar, around boxes and crates, and upstairs, and then came out into corridors. The temperature suddenly got very hot, and they bumbled toward a light ahead, and pushed through a door, and found themselves in a moist hot fog with apparitions.

“Get a doctor, get a doctor!” Earl hollered, but what he heard was screams as shapes ran by him, scattering in abject panic, which he didn’t quite understand, until a naked old lady with undulating breasts ran by him.

He fell to clean tiles which he soiled with the slop on his shoes and pants as other women ran by, screaming.

And then a policeman arrived, gun drawn.

“Get this boy to a hospit—” he started, but the cop hit him, hard, in the face with the pistol barrel, filling his head with stars and pain, and he was aware that others were on him, pinning him. He heard the click as the handcuffs were locked about his pinioned wrists. Then someone hit him again.

Earl lay in the city jail. No one interviewed him, no one asked him any questions, no one paid him any attention. They let him shower, and gave him a prison uniform to wear, and took his suit out for cleaning. He seemed to just brood and smoke and had trouble sleeping. Late one night, a decent bull who’d been a Marine led him from a cell into an anteroom and let him call his wife, to tell her, once again, he had survived.

“I knew,” she said. “They didn’t have your name in the papers with those other poor boys.”

“That’s the one thing they got right, then.”

“All those boys, Earl,” she said.

“It was just so wrong,” he said.

“Earl, come home. That is the devil’s own town. You’ve given it every last thing and what’s it got you?”

“Nothing.”

“Earl, it’s not worth it.”

“No, it’s not. It never was. All them boys gone.”

“Earl, you can’t think about that. It’ll kill you.”

“I know. I should think of other things: how’s that baby?”

“Kicking a bit. A little kicker, if you ask me.”

“I’m coming home as soon as I can, sweetheart. I will be there when it comes.”

“I know you will or die trying,” she said.

He watched it play out in the newspapers over the next few days. He thought he was beyond surprise, but even he had trouble believing what came next. The New Era had it thus:

JAYHAWKERS AMBUSH SELVES

Seven Die in Railyard Mixup

Members of the Prosecuting Attorney’s special raid team evidently got in a gunfight amongst themselves in darkness last night in the Missouri and Pacific Railyard.

Seven men were killed, including D. A. Parker, a legendary FBI agent who shot it out at one time with the gangster chieftains of the ‘30s.

Sources indicate that Parker was the leader of the unit, known in local parlance as “Jayhawkers,” after the Kansas brigands that bedeviled Hot Springs before the Civil War.

“I am exceedingly disappointed in Mr. Parker,” said Fred C. Becker, Garland County Prosecuting Attorney. “He was a man of experience but evidently in his advanced age, his mind began to deteriorate and he made a number of bad judgments. Night operations are tricky, as I learned firsthand in Italy in the United States Army. I will forever hold myself responsible for my lack of foresight in not replacing him with more rational personnel. I feel the pain of this loss immensely. And I take full responsibility.”

Sources gave this account of the night’s events.

Acting on a tip, Parker took his unit to the railyard, where he suspected a train robbery, similar to the Alcoa Payroll Job of 1942, was being engineered.

In the darkness, his men got separated. For some reason, one of them fired and all the others began to fire at indistinct targets.

When it was over, seven men, including Parker, lay dead.

The state papers in little Rock were kinder, but only a little bit. In all, that seemed the verdict: an idiotic D. A. Parker leading his little ragtag band into the railyard on a fool’s errand, where out of sheer stupidity it self-combusted. The Jayhawkers had killed themselves.

Earl knotted the rag up into a ball and tossed it across the cell. He lay all day and night. It was not unlike the war. He just stared at a numb patch of ceiling, trying to work out what had happened and why. He tried not to think of the boys and the brief spurts of fire that took them down so neady, and how well planned, how ingenious the whole thing was. He tried to exile the grief he felt for the good young men and the rage he felt for Becker and Owney Maddox and this Johnny Spanish, the professional bank robber, who must have set the whole thing up.

He tried so very hard, and he tried hard not to think of the mute coffins, lined up and shipped without ceremony back to their points of origin.

On the third day, he was taken from the cell into a little room, and there discovered not Fred C. Becker but Becker’s head clerk, a ferrety little man with eyeglasses named Willis O’Doyle.

“Mr. Swagger?”

“Yeah. Where’s Becker?”

“Mr. Becker is working on important cases. He could not attend.”

“That bastard.”

“Mr. Swagger, attacking Mr. Becker verbally will not do you any good in this room.”

“Am I being charged with anything?”

“No. Not if you cooperate.”

“Jesus Christ, he gets seven men who fought and bled for him killed and I’m supposed to cooperate?”