The Burning Day (3 page)

I went back to channel surfing, hoping to find some edifying entertainment. I skipped the movie channels and tried to find something informative. I found a show, ostensibly about food, that featured a portly bald man eating worms and larvae. I switched the channel. A group of heavily equipped men were hanging around an abandoned warehouse at night, trying to find ghosts and not having much luck. One of them had a shaved head. He looked a lot like the man who’d been eating bugs on the other channel.

I decided to catch some news before throwing in the towel altogether. On the local news, there was a recap of the local mob violence. According to the dour young female anchor, the Birmingham Police were bracing for an all-out war on the streets, one that could break loose any day. The anchor then moved on to a story about a placid, sunny Florida town that was being overrun with huge pythons. The report featured archival footage that showed the town as a dream vacation spot before it had been despoiled by the enormous reptiles. I watched with subdued interest.

It seemed that many people had bought the reptiles in the 1980s and 1990s as part of the exotic pet fad, only to find that the snakes grew ever larger, and required ever more food. When economic crunches came along, many of those people could no longer afford to feed their beloved monsters. Most of the snake owners were apparently Florida residents, and, doing what they felt was the humanitarian thing, they had let the huge constrictors loose in the swampy, prey-filled environment of the everglades. There, the fearsome animals had found a new home. In short, they had thrived.

Now, the snakes’ numbers had grown enormously, and they were menacing towns up and down the Gulf Coast, like the tiny idyllic town that was the subject of the news report. I shook my head. There you go, I thought. If man cannot find serpents in the Garden of Eden, he will bring them there himself. Then he will lament their presence, as if it were none of his own doing.

As I browsed the cable channels, unbeknownst to me things were unfolding across town in a way I could never have foreseen. I didn’t get that from the television news, or any of the illuminating programs I flipped through; I was to learn about it all, days later. Although I didn’t know it at the time, two men were talking in the back room of a bar. I had met both of them, one very recently and one a long time ago. What they were talking about was going to have a tremendous impact on my life, the life of certain people moving around me, and the fate of the city itself.

Chapter 3

The conversation had started out unpleasantly. One man was trying to strike a bargain. The other was, in the beginning, listening patiently if noncommittally.

“What I have here is a real chance to score some big money,” one man, the visitor, was saying. “I just need a little help locating a certain broad.”

Behind the desk, Longshot Lonnie O’Malley sat still as a snake, coiled and ready to strike. “Why should I help you?” he said. “So you have a scheme to rake some lawyer over the coals. Good for you. It’s not exactly my racket. If that’s all you got to lay on the table, you’re wasting my time.”

The other man became immediately patronizing, and tried to cover his fear. “Oh, I understand that, Mr. O’Malley. There is no way I would have come here if I didn’t have something for you that I believe would be of tremendous interest and value to you. By the way, the man in question is an accountant. Perhaps quite wealthy.”

“Whatever. So out with it already!”

“Of course. First, allow me to provide a little background.” Longshot sighed, but his visitor held up one hand. “Please. I assure you, all will be made clear. A friend and I were associated with a certain woman; we all used to partner together, the three of us. She left a few years back, trying to go straight. We lost track of her for a long time.”

Lonnie raised an eyebrow. “You mean you were a bunch of grifters.”

 
The other man raised his eyebrows, as if offended by Longshot’s choice of term, but then shrugged it off, and went on: “Whatever you want to call it. Mary eventually turned up right here in Birmingham, just a few months ago. I was in the area on some business and when I happened to see her, I thought ‘Well, what do you know, there’s good old Mary.’ Small world, as they say? So I followed her to see what she was doing with herself. She’d been married to this accountant, like I said, and I wanted to approach him for a loan, so to speak. I re-introduced myself to Mary and told her we were going to take the guy down. But I got a little surprise. She told me she couldn’t, not this time. I told her she had to, or the husband would find out some things about her that might interest him.”

Longshot’s visitor paused, as if considering how to phrase some difficult idea. When Longshot drummed his fingers, the man gave a start and went on.

“But it didn’t go as I’d planned. Mary kept stalling me. She wasn’t afraid of me like she used to be—like she ought to be. With what I had on her, I could ruin her, send her to prison. She knew that. But it made me very curious. I smelled more money. So I kept dogging her tracks, trying to find out why she was being so . . . gutsy. Last Saturday, I got lucky. I snapped a picture of her with her new boyfriend.”

Lonnie’s eyes were beginning to glow malevolently with impatience, so the man hastily reached into his jacket and produced a photograph, which he placed squarely on the desk and spun with his fingertips for Lonnie to see.

“Mr. O’Malley, take a look at that.”

The murderous glow slowly faded from Lonnie’s eyes. The blue eye twinkled. The green eye slowed in its circling and came into focus with its paternal twin.
 

“Well, now, that is interesting,” Lonnie commented as he peered down at the picture. The photograph had been taken covertly, obviously through a windshield, but there was no mistaking its subject. The picture clearly showed a model-quality redhead, getting a kiss on the cheek from none other than Francis Lorenzo, Head Capo to Don Ganato, the boss of the Ganato crime family—Longshot Lonnie O’Malley’s greatest and deadliest enemy in the corporeal world.

When Longshot Lonnie O’Malley looked up from the picture, both Irish eyes were smiling. The man across from him let out his breath as quietly as possible, and smiled back. Longshot reached down and opened a drawer and produced his ever-present bottle of Bushmills Irish Whisky, and two clean glasses.

“Would you like a drink, Mr. Morton? Because I think we have a lot to talk about.”

Dominic Morton’s smile brightened. He rubbed his hands together and leaned forward in his seat. “Mr. O’Malley, don’t mind if I do.”

Chapter 4

If anyone had ever asked him, “Mad Dog” Maddox would have told them that he worked for a living. If the listener was really unlucky, he might even go on to explain just what type of work that was, and survive the explanation. His was the kind of work that required no time clock to keep track of his hours. Indeed, the hours he kept were strange, because they depended on when he could catch other people unaware. Mad Dog collected money that was owed to a certain businessman. His employer was the kind of guy who tolerated no nonsense and no mistakes. Mad Dog was good at what he did—he had to be.
 

Mad Dog’s boss was a man named Lonnie “Longshot” O’Malley, the nephew of long-dead crime boss Big Thom O’Hearn, an Irish immigrant who had started up the numbers rackets on the North Side of Birmingham in the early 1960s. Big Thom had died as few men in his line of work ever do, at home and in bed, as the 1980s came to an end. Since he had died childless, the rackets fell to his unstable nephew, Lonnie O’Malley, to run. He had run them, all right.

In five short years, Lonnie, who had just turned twenty when he inherited the rackets, had turned the numbers business into a going concern. No one made book in Metropolitan Birmingham without getting his nod. In time, though, numbers were no longer enough for him. Lonnie branched out into the soft money rackets that surrounded strip joints, floating card games and unlicensed back alley gambling of all kinds. He hired an army of thugs. Pushers had to pay him regular tribute, or they ended up in body casts or got found dead in back alley dumpsters. The most brutal hoods of every stripe came to fear and respect Longshot Lonnie O’Malley and his knuckle-dragging foot soldiers. Most of the low-lifes on the north side of Birmingham had to cough up to his goons on occasion, to stay in whatever sleazy racket they had picked for themselves. It was business, after all.

E Pluribus Unum,
it said on the money that was the singular reason for the existence of Lonnie’s empire. And, just as it was proclaimed on all of those dollars and coins,
e pluribus unum
, I am one of many, the same might be said of Mad Dog Maddox, the man who came to collect those dollars and coins. He was one thug out of a large school of thugs. But he was of a singular vintage. He took great pride in his collecting, and collecting was what he was all about this fine morning.

Mad Dog parked his car on the corner of Third Avenue North and Forty-First Street. He walked toward the offices of Merle Building Supply. Mr. Merle was a business man who couldn’t pick a winner at the horse track, it seemed. He owed Longshot Lonnie O’Malley over nine thousand dollars. He was behind in his payments, and this required the presence of Mad Dog Maddox.
 

Mad Dog had blue eyes that looked just a little out of focus. He wore a constant, dreamy smile beneath a perpetual five o’clock shadow. There was something a little off about the smile, an odd quality that perceptive people might detect, that maybe children or the very aged might sense as disturbed. For most people, though, who did not pay much attention, Mad Dog Maddox passed muster, and some of them even found the smile infectious. That only added to his danger, because Mad Dog Maddox was a killer.

Mad Dog’s father had named him Hubert Third Battle of the Isonzo Maddox. The strange middle name came from an engagement in the First World War in which the boy’s grandfather, then an Irish conscript in the British Army, had earned a medal for valor. The grandfather had also borne the name of Hubert. As a boy, Mad Dog had suffered vicious derision and had endured several beatings over his unfortunate name. He had tried shortening it to Hubert Isonzo, but this hadn’t helped much. All of this had changed after he had begun to refer to himself as Kevin, the name of his twin brother who had died at birth, until one day when he was in the seventh grade, a petty teacher had revealed his complete actual birth name to the entire class. The class had erupted into cruel laughter. That day, he had endured harsh treatment from his classmates, just as before.
 

This time Kevin, AKA Hubert Isonzo, had taken action. He had patiently waited in the parking lot after school, laying in wait for the teacher. When he appeared, young Maddox had beaten him to death with a length of heavy iron pipe that he had stolen from the school machine shop. Even as he had beaten the man to death, he had worn his strange, peaceful, quite vacant smile.

He’d been thirteen at the time, so he had been spared prison. After four years in juvenile detention, he’d been back on the streets, an unruly youth of seventeen, wised up, grown up, and looking for real crime to get into. His fellow inmates at juvenile reformatory had given him the name Mad Dog, a pun on his last name. It was a name he found he liked, much more than Hubert Third Battle of the Isonzo Maddox.
 

When he had gotten out of the reformatory, Mad Dog had quickly found that he had no marketable skills, so he started drifting. One thing he had done successfully was kill a man. Almost inevitably, this became his line of work. He had eventually drifted down to the South, finding work in Atlanta, Miami and New Orleans. Finally a job had taken him to Birmingham, where he had come to the notice of Longshot Lonnie O’Malley.

The fact that he was of Irish extraction had caught Long Shot Lonnie O’Malley’s attention. The fact that he was a homicidal maniac made him doubly attractive to Lonnie, who snatched Maddox up and put him to work collecting. Mad Dog proved to be very good at it. Longshot Lonnie often complimented Mad Dog on his abilities, and rewarded him for his successes. This made Mad Dog Maddox feel proud, because he’d never been much good at anything before.

Today, Mad Dog was collecting a bill that was three months past due. Mad Dog didn’t show up unless an account was way behind. He was Longshot’s last resort guy, he liked to think. When the guy who owed money to Longshot Lonnie kept stalling, and it looked like they thought they would get away without paying, Lonnie had someone give Mad Dog a call, and he went forth to collect or punish. Lonnie had made such a call to Mad Dog today. So here he was.

Today Mad Dog was amused. Here he was, up on Third Avenue North, visiting a hardware store, of all things. It was an old-fashioned sort of place, and looked to have been in business in the same place for ages. It had that quiet air that family-run places always seem to have. When Mad Dog walked in, little brass bells tinkled. Pretty quaint, he thought. He looked around. The place was jammed full of merchandise, but free of dust and very orderly.
 

The guy behind the counter in the middle of the store was a regular-looking guy, as far as Mad Dog could tell. He was a little on the short side, with gray hair and a kindly look about him. He looked like somebody’s grandpa, Mad Dog thought. The older man looked up, saw Mad Dog standing there, and like most people, made the deadly assumption that here was just a regular Joe, just some harmless, dumb-looking-guy with an infectious smile.