The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (15 page)

“You
have no idea.” Jason struggled to keep his voice down.
“You haven’t boxed yourself into a corner like I have. You still
have options, Whit, possibilities. I’m not going to have you making the
same mistakes I did, especially when you’ve got a wife and a kid to look
after.” He stopped himself and pointed to the Plymouth. “I
don’t have time to explain this to you. Now get in before I hog-tie you
to the roof.”
Jason saw that his brother’s eyes were wet.
Whit looked away, ashamed. “You saw them today?”
“Yeah.”
“How … How are they?”
“You’ve got a cute kid. Don’t know how you managed it. And a
fine wife, in a lot of ways, and I definitely don’t know how you managed
that. But they miss you, Whit.”
“I can’t.” He shook his head. It wobbled awkwardly, his skull
loose on its perch. “Just let me go. Tell them you couldn’t find
me. Tell them I’m dead. Tell them—”
Jason put a hand on his shoulder. “C’mon, brother. We’ll make
it.”
He nudged Whit forward. That got Whit’s feet moving toward the Plymouth,
and, as on the dance floor, he appeared unable to fight the momentum. Jason
walked a step behind him and took a snort from his flask. He was about to tap
Whit on the shoulder and ask if he wanted any when he heard a man’s
voice.
“Jason Fireson?”
To his left, from the direction of the street, three men approached. They
stopped ten, fifteen paces away. The speaker was in front, a gruff, portly
type, a square crammed into a circle. He wore a snap-brim hat and
a gray suit. Behind him were two other men, one in a suit
and the other, younger, wearing the newest-looking cop uniform Jason had ever
seen.
“Excuse me?” Jason said. The Firesons stopped and turned,
Jason’s right hand hidden behind Whit’s back. His shoulders were
squared and his feet firmly planted.
“State police. You’re under arrest.” There was a badge, then
a gun. Behind the men a bus moaned its way down the street. The headlights
didn’t reveal any other figures in the background.
“You’ve got the wrong guy,” Jason said, shaking his head. He
still held the flask before him with his left hand. An arc light glinted off
the steel.
The men began moving toward them.
“Jesus, Jason,” Whit croaked.
A sudden burst of applause from within the gym. Whit and Alice were no longer
the most recent losers. Two of the cops’ heads tilted and Jason dropped
his flask from his left hand. Before it had even hit the ground he’d
unholstered his gun with his right and fired three shots.
The crowd was still laughing and jeering, the gunshots only so many taps of a
snare drum in their delirious little world. Jason put his other hand on
Whit’s shoulder and pulled him down as the shots multiplied.
His fake eyeglasses fell from his nose as he and his brother ducked behind the
sedan parked on the grass. The guns paused for breath. He dared to lift his
head again and fired twice more. He ducked and glanced at Whit, who despite his
red eyes now looked very awake indeed. Another burst of gunfire from the cops,
and the shattering of glass, then silence.
Jason opened the car door and motioned for Whit to crawl in. He followed,
crouching out of view, and popped open the glove compartment. It took Whit a
second to realize he was expected to reach in and grab the revolver. Jason
shifted his gun to his left hand so he could fish out his keys with his right.
Then he sat up, blindly fired two rounds out the window, and started the
Plymouth with his other hand. Gravel sprayed as he pulled out as fast as he
could. The teenagers’ glowing cigarette butts had vanished like fireflies
and the lot behind him might as well have been a black wall.
A shot to his left. People were screaming now; the secret was out. He fired in
return.
Jason hadn’t turned on his headlights and he almost missed the body as he
was pulling out. But there it was, to his left, faceup. He slowed down
just enough to look at it, see the young face. He knew
him. From where? Jesus, from Ma’s kitchen. The tree planter, the skinny
former accountant, who could not possibly have been a cop. A badge helplessly
dangled out of his jacket pocket.
And as Jason’s mind raced through his mother’s boarding house, he
noticed, too late, more movement to his right. Whit fired twice, the shots
echoing mercilessly in the tiny car. Jason hit the accelerator just as the cop
was falling down.
“I got him!” Whit cried. “Oh Jesus, I got him!”
Jason couldn’t tell if Whit’s voice was panicked or thrilled, but
he didn’t have time to ask. The Plymouth’s speed kicked in once it
made it to the asphalt. Jason turned his neck like a crazy man to scan in all
directions, but there was nothing to see. No roadblock? No backup? He raced
through unusually calm Friday-night streets, uttering silent prayers as he ran
reds.
An hour later, they were racing through the kinds of country roads Jason had
lived on during his bootlegging days. But he’d never run any routes
around here, so he didn’t know these particular roads. It was cloudy,
too, so he could only hope he was headed west, toward the border.
“You’re going to have to move your family,” Jason said to
Whit after a long silence. His adrenaline had faded by then and he spoke calmly.
Whit was not nearly so placid; though his dance-marathon experience had him on
the verge of narcolepsy, each time his eyes shut he was immediately awakened by
the encroaching and nightmarish realization that he had just killed someone.
“It won’t be safe for Veronica to stay in Ohio.”
“Jason,” Whit said, choosing his words carefully, remembering the
slap in the face. “There’s no way around it now. I’m in this
with you.”
Jason just kept driving. The night had turned cold but he kept the windows down
because Whit smelled so terrible. After another minute Whit said his name
again, and Jason abruptly pulled over. He killed the headlights and there was
nothing beyond the windshield, no world at all except what the brothers were
carrying with them.
“Just tell me we won’t be arguing the whole time,” Jason
said, staring straight ahead. “I swear to God, I can’t take your
grumbling much longer.”
“I won’t argue. I’ll be the model accomplice.”
“Model
apprentice.”
“Whatever you say.”
Jason turned and finally looked at his brother. He felt a heaviness in his
stomach, pulling at him. It was fairly easy to make risky, even dangerous
decisions when he was on his own, but it would be so much harder with a brother
to protect. Worse, inviting family into the gang would mean inviting
introspection, forcing him to take the kind of look at himself that he had
studiously avoided. He wished for the hundredth time that Whit had been able to
live a quiet, stable life managing Pop’s store, the way Jason had always
envisioned. Things had turned out so differently than he’d expected. He
didn’t want to think about how much of the blame was his.
“I’ve tried to protect you from all this,” Jason said.
“But I suppose you’ve made it clear that, if left to your own
devices, you’ll get yourself killed any day now. So I might as well let
it happen on my watch. That way I’ll at least be able to explain to Ma
exactly how you got killed, instead of, I don’t know, just stumbling upon
your corpse in an alley someplace.”
“That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Don’t get used to the sentimental stuff,” Jason said.
“I can be a hard boss. There’s a way to do things, and we’ll
show you how, and you’ll do it exactly that way. I’ll need to teach
you a lot, and you’ll need to listen a lot. A lot more than you’ve
ever demonstrated the capacity for, to be quite frank. Sound like you can
handle that? Once you get a couple days’ sleep and shave off your
blisters?”
There were other reasons for Jason’s relenting, one of them being a
mistaken belief that Whit’s recent near-death experiences—that
night, and at the hands of the Lincoln City cops—would have purged him of
his rage at the banks, at the cops and the judge who’d put their father
away, at anyone who wielded an ounce more power than he did. But Jason would
soon learn that Whit’s rage was not something that could be beaten out of
him. Or even killed out of him.
“Can the next endeavor be Third National of Lincoln City?” Whit
asked.
“No, it cannot.”
“Why not?” Already Whit was demonstrating a reluctance to follow
orders.
“For one, it’s local, and we’d have
cops on our tail anytime we came back to town.”
“That problem seems to have presented itself anyway.”
“And, second of all, it’s too personal.”
“What’s wrong with personal? What’s wrong with really goddamn
wanting to rob that bank?”

What’s wrong, indeed? For here they were, months and many crimes later,
driving north to find Marriner and cobble together what they could of the
broken bricks and crumbling mortar that had once constituted their gang. With a
newly unified group, they would plan one last endeavor. And this time, since
they were believed to be dead, since the police could not possibly be on the
alert for them, they were setting their sights on that familiar, formerly
untouchable foe.
The bank that Whit believed killed their old man was going to be robbed by the
dead Firefly Brothers.

VIII.

T
he goggles no longer chafed at the skin
above Darcy’s ears. She wondered if that meant they had slackened with
time or if her skin had toughened to the pressure. Her eyelids, however, did
not react so agreeably: they itched as though the cloth stuffed inside the
goggles were infested with mites.
“I really would like to scratch at my eyes, please,” she said
again.
“No dice. And if you ask again I’ll scratch them myself with
sandpaper.”
She had heard a number of voices, her invisible guards in this mystery room,
and had privately assigned them names. She recognized this voice as belonging
to The Particularly Mean One.
Darcy had finished her breakfast, bitter coffee and toast that should have been
rescued from its hell thirty seconds earlier. This was the second full day,
meaning the third since they’d taken her.
They had driven her through the city and then on a highway for possibly an
hour. Then they had brought her into a house where their footsteps echoed too
loudly in her ears. She had been given a hard chair to sit on and was told not
to touch her goggles, that someone would always be beside her, watching. It was
true; even when she heard voices in another room, there was still breathing
nearby. Someone had eventually brought her a cheese sandwich, and guided her to
the bathroom. She was given some degree of privacy in those moments but was
always told to “be
quick about it,” and
warned that they would be able to tell from her hair if she dared to adjust the
goggles.
Then it was back into a car for a longer drive. She guessed it was night, when
they would be less conspicuous escorting a hostage. Time was unknowable for
her—the goggles were not only stuffed with dark cloth but also, she
suspected, painted black. By the time the car stopped, she would have believed
it was eleven P.M. or four in the morning, would have believed they were in a
Chicago suburb or in Oklahoma or Saskatchewan.
Darcy felt half drunk and queasy, her head pounded by the dueling drummers of
fear and confusion. Jason was alive, but she had been kidnapped, and these men
believed him to be dead. She had been given a glimpse of a long, lonely,
desolate life, then rescued from it for approximately ten glorious minutes
before being confined to darkness of a more tangible sort. Memories of the day
she’d met Jason kept flashing through her mind in cruel contrast to this
very different abduction; the men’s voices were hushed, full of aggression
and alarm, lacking Jason’s sunny chivalry. She told herself that the
telegram from Jason changed everything, that his being out there somewhere
rendered this episode a mere inconvenience, but she didn’t entirely
believe that.
Her mood darkened as time passed. Based on the way the voices ricocheted off
the walls, she knew only that she was in a small, mostly unfurnished room. She
was seated for hours each day in a wooden chair, her ankles tied to its legs,
her calves and buttocks deadened into numbness. She never would have imagined
the sheer torture that came simply from being unable to cross her legs or
twitch her feet. At night—she knew it from the different calls of the
birds, and the humming crickets, and the cool breeze from some half-open
window—her feet were untied and she was guided to an upholstered chaise
that they brought in from another room. Her legs again were fastened, as well
as her arms, and she was given a thin sheet. They assured her that she was
being watched as she lay, which did not make sleep come any easier.
When you first close your eyes, the screen before them seems to glimmer and
glow, the vanishing colors leaving an aura of their past selves, like light
from a dying star. But as time passes and your eyes stay shut a brute darkness
takes hold. Darcy saw the blackest black she could have imagined, a permanent
winter.
This was her world now. The seclusion and deprivation made her too
conscious of the rope on her ankles, of the goggles on
her eyelids, of her swollen legs. By day her right arm was free, thank God, and
she scratched obsessively at her other arm and side. She chided the men for
submitting her to this infestation of mosquitoes—couldn’t you at
least put me in a room with a screen on the window?—but they insisted
there were no bugs, that the itching was imaginary.
And so, today. She heard a plane overhead. It occurred to her that she had
heard one such plane each day. She asked what time it was.
“About noon.”
This was a different voice, not The Particularly Mean One but the one she
thought of as The Lovable Thug. He had a deep and slow voice, and from the way
he spoke to her she could tell that he felt uncomfortable with the way they
were treating a lady. The others were tight-lipped and borderline abusive, but
she could work on this one.
“I suppose that means my peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich is on the
way.”
What bothered her was that she hadn’t noticed The Particularly Mean One
leave and The Lovable Thug enter. Were they really that quiet? Had she fallen
asleep? Or was her mind allowing different scenes to blur together, forcing one
character to become another, like an amateur play with too few actors for so
many roles, the slain Mercutio rising to play Paris and die again?
“You don’t like peanut butter and jelly?”
She had insulted him. “I love it. I deeply admire the interplay of
complex flavors. Sometimes I serve it for dinner.”
“You’re joshing me now.”
“Well, a girl needs to have
some
fun. Regardless of the
situation.”
“That’s the right attitude to have, miss. Just keep your spirits up
and this’ll be over soon.”
“Does that mean things are progressing?”
“I think so.”
“They don’t tell you much, do they?”
“I know enough.” Again he seemed insulted, and she smiled.
The first night, they had handed her a pen and a pad of paper and dictated a
message to her father. She didn’t remember what it said, and she
hadn’t the faintest idea how legible it wound up being. But the basic
message
was that they had her and she was safe but
these men “meant business” (she remembered that phrase, the cliché
almost comical) and that her father should do whatever they asked.
“I’m not exactly close to my old man,” she had dared to
interject.
“Well, you’d better hope this brings you closer to him,
dearie.”
A voice disguised by a rasp, which she thereafter identified
as The Threatening One.
“Or it’ll spell big trouble for
you.”
She paused, the pen rigid between her fingers. “And how exactly do you
spell big trouble? It starts with a
B
, right?”
“Hilarious.”
The man had continued with his dictation.
“How much are you asking him for?” she inquired when they’d
finished.
“Enough questions, dearie.”
“Don’t I deserve to know what I’m worth to him? Or to
you?”
“You’re worth nothing to me. You need to understand that.”
She knew there were others in the room, but this man, the ringleader of her
invisible circus, seemed to enjoy employing the first-person singular.
“But,
like I said, you’d better hope you’re worth a lot to your old
man.”
“All right, but my advice is to ask him for cold hard cash, and no
cars.” She knew she sounded flippant; it was an act, of course, but if
she could convince herself maybe her nerves would calm down. “His cars
are designed to fall apart after four years. Insider information.”
“Thanks for the tip. Any other wisdom you’d like to impart?”
“Wisdom, no, but a criticism: I think it’s rotten that you stole my
idea.”
Indeed, this had been
her
plan for embezzling money from her crooked old
man. The Firefly Brothers would kidnap her, demand a steep ransom, and, after
they received it, she and Jason would disappear together. She would eventually
write her father a letter explaining that she was all right, that the nameless
crooks had released her and she had decided that it would be best for her and
her father to go their separate ways. She had never been able to persuade Jason
to act on this plan—too complicated, he always said—but now these
strangers had the audacity to do so. It was as if they had stolen not only her
physical person but also something from inside her.
Darcy sighed as she sat, on the third day, in the room with The Lovable
Thug. She liked him. He had apologized whenever he swore
in her presence—gallantly but unnecessarily, as she herself had cursed a
number of times in his without reciprocating. He had even procured some aspirin
and water when she confessed to being hungover that first night. He sounded to
be in his early thirties, uneducated, likely an ex-convict.
“I assume by this point my father has agreed to your request? Payment and
delivery are being arranged?”
“Don’t worry about all that,” he said, not unkindly.
“We’re on top of it.”
“So what’s your name, anyway?”
“Can’t tell you our names, miss.”
“Well, I can’t very well go on calling you
you.”
“Why not?”
“Because then how do I tell you apart from the others?”
He thought about this. “I don’t think you’re supposed
to.”
“At least
make up
a name.”
“Can’t do that, either.”
“Whyever not?”
“Boss told us that if we made up any names we might accidentally reveal
some part of our identity’r something.”
“Very well,
I’ll
make up a name for you. I’ll call you
Rufus.”
“Why Rufus?”
“Would you prefer something else?”
“I told you, I’m not allowed to ma—”
“And do you always follow orders, Rufus?”
“When it’ll result in a big paycheck, you better believe I follow
orders.”
“How big of a paycheck?”
“Let’s see …. Split seven ways, it should bring me about
thirty or so. Minus the laundering fees. Bastards bleed it out of you, pardon
my cuss.”
So there were seven of them. “That really is an awful lot of money. I
should be flattered.”
But what she felt was worried. Two hundred thousand dollars? Jasper Windham was
hardly Henry Ford, even in the best of times. And, from what she had surmised,
Windham Automotive had not glimpsed such times in a long while. As the rest of
the industry consolidated in Detroit, her old man had stubbornly held out in
Chicago, clinging to the gangland
connections that
kept his workers from causing trouble. But such connections carried their own
price, and Windham Automotive was slipping behind the pack. Greed was blinding
Darcy’s kidnappers to a certain unfortunate truth: there was no way her
father could pay two hundred thousand.
She opened her mouth but realized, as the first syllable made its mad escape,
that telling them this would be a mistake. So she ended the sentence before it
began.
Hoping to distract herself from this new fear, she started over. “Tell me
about yourself, Rufus. Something interesting.”
“Can’t do that, miss.”
“Very well, tell me something about yourself that no one else
knows.”
“Why do you think that’s any different?”
“The reason your boss doesn’t want you to tell me your name or your
vital statistics, presumably, is because that way I could later give the
information to the authorities, who would use it to discover your identity,
correct? If you told me you were a former longshoreman from Baltimore, for
example, and they have a list somewhere of underworld characters who in their
youth packed crates out of Baltimore, you’d be finished. But if you tell
me something about yourself that no one knows but you, then it can’t be
connected to you. You see?”
He seemed to puzzle over this, wanting to trust her but frightened of the
snares she had surely hidden somewhere.
She sighed. “Oh, just make something up.”
“No, it’s okay. I’ll tell ya something no one else knows.
Once I robbed a dead man.”
“Now,
this
sounds good.”
“It was in Chicago. I didn’t even know about the crash until a
while after it happened, ’cause it’s not like I owned
stocks’r nothing. But when I got to Chicago I started hearing more and
more people talking about it, worrying about it, comparing what all
they’d lost. It was weird to hear that, all these people who’d had
so much more’n me, and now they’re all panicked that they
don’t have quite as much more’n me than they used to. I started
hearing how people were jumping out of windows. Stockbrokers or people who had
all their money tied up in things they didn’t even own, and now they
couldn’t pay back what they’d never had in the first place,
and they owed more’n they could get their heads
around. Talk about real crooks—and now they couldn’t handle it, so
out the windows they went. You heard the stories. My God, it was—”
“Yes, I’m familiar with the stories, Rufus.” She was angry
now, but it was her fault for getting him started. She could stop him, but then
he might hear the pain in her voice.
“Well, I’d just been bumming around that day, checking in on some
old friends, you know, back in town and hoping to find a lead on work or
something, anything. I’d been inside the Loop most of the day and now
I’m on Wacker Drive, maybe about four o’clock. It was early autumn,
I think, one of those days that was colder’n you thought it’d be.
But the sun was out and I remember the shadows, how long they are when
you’re surrounded by the downtown buildings like that. And, just as
I’m thinking that, I look up.
“I see this guy—and it’s not like it took me a second to
figure it out, it’s not like him being in midair confused my mind’r
anything like that. I knew exactly what it was, right away. I’d always
figured they’d fall limp, you know, as if they were dead already.
Resigned to it. But this guy, his legs were cycling, like he was hoping to ride
away, and his arms were flailing. Like maybe he’d actually thought he
could
fly and was only now realizing his mistake.”
Darcy was thinking of her mother. It had been five years ago, before death by
skyscraper was considered a business decision.
Emotional problems
, her
father had tried to explain to her. Hysteria, then depression.
Surely you,
too, had noticed
. But Jasper Windham had not known of the letter his wife
had posted to their daughter only moments before opening that window. She had
written to Darcy about her father’s affairs, cataloguing his various sins
and even naming some of his conquests. She had failed to produce a male heir,
had suffered all those miscarriages after the birth of their daughter, and
couldn’t take his blame or hostility any longer. She had written Darcy
the letter and posted it from her husband’s tenth-story office while he
was away in some strumpet’s bed. And then she had transformed herself
into a bird, and then an anvil, and then a corpse.