The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (31 page)

XXII.

M
any things vanished from Agent Cary
Delaney’s memory the moment Chief Mackinaw hit him with the news: the
long drive out to Points North; the clouds of locusts along the horizon; the
conversation or lack thereof offered by Buzz Gunnison, the burly agent with
him; the nagging fear that he was wasting his time.
All that disappeared when Mackinaw confessed, “The Firefly Brothers were
dead when we found them.”
Cary sat up. “What?”
Mackinaw rapped his chest twice, pursing his lips to conceal a belch. Points
North was farm country, yet the chief had the type of gut one didn’t
often see on farmers. His head was equally round, and the thin gray hair atop
it looked displeased by the heat and by the repeated application and removal of
his hat. The small room smelled of tobacco and spit, a map of the county adorning
one of the paneled walls.
“I know this looks bad. Things got a bit out of hand, and we just
didn’t see how—”
“Wait, wait, go back.” Cary shook his head. “What happened
that night?”
“We received an anonymous call from somebody claiming to’ve spotted
Jason driving into town. It was almost midnight, but the caller said
they’d stopped opposite each other at an intersection and his headlights
shined right at Jason, said he was sure it was him. When
we asked the caller who
he
was, he hung up. So we didn’t put much
stock in that. A little while later, we got another call from a trusted fellow
saying he’d just driven past the abandoned Reston farmhouse and heard
something suspicious, like fireworks or tinder popping, maybe squatters
starting a fire to cook over. So I sent two officers to check it out.”
Chest whack, muted burp. “The house is set back a couple hundred yards
from a small road. The officers drove up partway, didn’t see any auto
parked by the house, though they did see fresh tracks in the driveway. Checked
out the house through their binoculars, saw that some lights were on in one
room. Curtains were parted just enough for the officers to see what looked like
a submachine gun lying on top of a table.”
“So you sent in the cavalry,” Cary said.
“I surrounded the place with eight officers and five volunteer deputies.
Called out to the felons on the bullhorn to come out and surrender, but
didn’t get a reply. No one ever redrew the curtains on that one window,
and we never saw movement anywhere. We searched the barn and found a ’32
Terraplane, hood still warm, but then it was a hot night, so they could have
driven in an hour or two earlier. We honestly weren’t sure if they were
in the house or not, and we started thinking about how Jason had escaped from
that federal ambush in Toledo.” Cops loved to bring that up when feds
were in the room, Cary had noticed. “Still, we had officers who knew the
property and knew there were no secret trails or tunnels. The light that was on
never went out, and no others ever went on.”
“And eventually you got impatient,” Gunnison said. Gunnison was one
of Hoover’s cowboys, a longtime Tulsa cop the Director had recently lured
to the Bureau. A virile forty-three, he had arms that could have snapped the
neck of a bull. Cary had nothing in common with him, but he knew that a rural
police chief would have laughed at his own, schoolboy attempts at questioning.
Gunnison’s mere presence in a room was usually enough to conjure
information.
“Yes, we got impatient. I’d decided that we’d storm the place
within an hour if it came to that, and it did. We fired tear gas at some
windows, though, honestly, most of the canisters just bounced off the screens,
so we had a big ol’ gas cloud funneling at the base of the house. There
was no
breeze that night, so it kinder just hung
there. Fired through the windows with our two submachine guns, and again, no
response. Then a team of six went in, followed by another four. We finally
found the Firesons in a back room. Whit had taken the one shot to the heart and
Jason was riddled pretty good all over the chest.”
Surely Cary had misunderstood. “Shot by your men, right?”
“No, it couldn’t have been us—we hadn’t fired on that
room. They’d been dead the whole time.”
“So … everything in the report, about a gunfight, about your men
shooting them …”
Mackinaw folded his hands on his desk and looked down at them. “I know
this does not reflect well on me or my office. All I can say is, things kinder
spiraled out of control there. Everyone was so excited that we’d caught
’em, and they
had
been shot up, and we
were
all carrying
guns, and we really did feel like the public deserved some sort of …
triumph to end the Firefly Brothers story, so—”
“So you lied,” Gunnison said in a bored tone. “Lied to the
press, lied to police in other towns, lied to the Bureau of
Investigation.”
“When you put it that way, I know it sounds—”
“Wait, wait,” Cary suddenly remembered. “I thought the
Firefly Brothers killed one of your officers that night?”
Eyes again on his meaty hands. “Officer Fenton was accidentally struck by
a fellow officer’s bullet. Like I said, the boys were awful excited, and
the lights in the house didn’t work, and the layout was different from
what our officers had remembered, and all that tear gas, my God….”
“I can’t believe this.”
“I really don’t see any reason why we would need to go public here.
Losing their bodies was embarrassing enough.”
“It certainly was,” Gunnison agreed.
“How long had the brothers been dead when you found them?” Cary
asked.
“Maybe a few hours. Could have been right about when the second caller
said he’d heard something when he drove by the house. Or maybe a few
hours earlier.”
“There’s no chance that they, I don’t know, shot themselves
when they realized you’d surrounded them? A suicide pact?”
“No. We never heard a shot.”
Suicide would not have been the brothers’ style; they would have come out
firing even if they were surrounded by a hundred marines. “And the
bodies—they were definitely the Firefly Brothers?”
“Of course.”
“Chief Mackinaw, I’m sure you’ve heard some stories
circulating that the Firefly Brothers themselves are still circulating out
there. Now that you’ve admitted to … all this, I’m wondering
why we should believe that you ever had the Firefly Brothers in your custody.”
“You can’t be serious.” This time Mackinaw was the one who
seemed shocked. “Look, I know we made some mistakes here, but we had the
bodies. We let press come into the morgue and take pictures, for God’s
sake. Just what are you accusing me of?”
“We certainly wouldn’t accuse you of incompetence,” Gunnison
said.
“Look, it was a madhouse once we made the announcement. Not only were we
overrun by reporters from the entire Midwest, but every Tom, Dick, and Harry
came by to take their own pictures, snip a locket of hair, shake the dead
hands. They call people like that
morbids
, and, God as my witness, I
never realized how many morbids we had in this country. We had ’em
showing up at the farmhouse so they could dab handkerchiefs in the
brothers’ blood, tearing the walls apart to fetch bullets. Never seen
anything like it.”
“It sounds like you did an excellent job of maintaining order,”
Gunnison said.
“I have thirteen officers under my command, Agent Gunnison, some of
’em part-time. Easily five hundred people came to the morgue in
less’n twenty-four hours, and almost that many to the crime scene.”
“Well, maybe if you’d involved the Bureau from the beginning we
could have been helpful.” Cary gave him an icy smile. “Now,
let’s get back to when you and your officers were heroically storming the
building. You find the bodies already dead. Please tell me you at least
determined cause of death.”
“Shooting, like I said.” Mackinaw gave him a look like Cary was the
moron here. “Bullets.”
“No, I mean who and how, caliber …”
“Might have been an accomplice. Or the perpetrators could have gotten
there first, laid an ambush. Could have been a
prearranged meeting and one side decided to pull a double cross. Whoever shot
them was likely a trusted person, given the close-range nature of it all, the
perfect shot on Whit. But it’s impossible to say.”
“So … the anonymous caller who said he saw Jason drive into town.
You’re thinking that was the killer?”
“Probably.”
“Surely that wasn’t the extent of your investigation.”
“Like I said, they’d been dead maybe a few hours. Bodies still
warm, but then it was a hell of a hot night. Blood patterns showed they
hadn’t been moved.”
“What kind of weapons had been used?” Gunnison asked. “Had
the Firesons drawn their weapons, or did they seem taken by surprise?”
Mackinaw glanced out one of his windows, as if he would much rather be rocking
on a porch and complaining to his wife about the needling existence of federal
dicks. “The room was filled with firearms, though it’s unclear
whether the brothers had been holding any when we got there. Again, it was
chaotic, and if there
had
been, say, a pistol by one of their hands, one
of my men would have moved it.”
Cary shook his head—so even before the crime scene had been vandalized by
fanatics the police themselves had rendered it useless.
“And we’re not entirely sure what kind of bullets killed
them.”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t perform an autopsy.”
“We did, but the bullets that we removed—”
“They disappeared, too.” Cary finished the thought for him, almost
laughing. “Of course. The morbids again.”
Mackinaw nodded.
“Your report says the bullets taken from the bodies matched your
officers’ automatic pistols and Thompsons,” Cary said. “But
at this point I’m assuming that, too, was fiction.”
“Is this farmhouse even there anymore,” Gunnison asked, “or
did a twister take it up the next morning?”
“I acknowledge the fact that we in Points North did not do our jobs as
professionally as we could have,” Mackinaw said. “No world-famous outlaws
had ever visited upon us before.”
“Okay, let’s talk about money,” Cary said.
“Be happy to. Last I checked, you boys still
hadn’t sent us that reward check.”
Cary dead-eyed him. “I meant the Firefly Brothers’ money. Your
report says they were found with sixty-eight thousand nine hundred two dollars
on them?”
“Correct.”
“We expected them to have considerably more, judging from their last bank
job, so—”
“So this means they laundered the Federal Reserve money and paid a big
chunk of it as a launderer’s fee.”
“That’s what we figured, and once you send the money to our
headquarters we can confirm it by checking the numbers on the bills. If
it’s been laundered, maybe we can determine where it came from.”
Though he knew the odds of such a determination were minuscule. “The way
you’ve been keeping it after all this time, Chief Mackinaw, it’s
almost like you’re holding it hostage.”
“I don’t care for your putting it that way, son.”
“He’s not your son,” Gunnison snapped. “He’s a
federal agent, and he, like myself, is tired of spending his time investigating
lazy and incompetent cops instead of smart and enterprising criminals.”
With that, Cary and Gunnison stood.
“I guess we’ll be in touch, Chief Mackinaw,” Cary said.
“Once we can make sense of all this. In the meantime, try to keep your
men from committing any major felonies.” They left without shaking the
lawman’s hand.

XXIII.

J
ason opened his eyes and stared into
the lidless gaze of an animal almost too ugly to be real. Its bald head lurched
to the side, stunned by the sight of moving carrion.
“Beat it.” Jason waved at the vulture. He slowly rolled onto his
back, then touched his neck and face, glancing at his chest to make sure the
vulture hadn’t torn off any chunks. The bird paced the room, staying a
few feet from Jason but not yet admitting defeat. It squawked in outrage.
It had happened again. He wasn’t dead—at least, not anymore.
Jason looked at his left hand and saw that Darcy’s earring was impaled in
his palm. He pulled the metal hook from his flesh. “Ouch.” A prick
of fresh blood welled.
He had smelled her when he crawled into this room. Her perfume had been faint,
and now he couldn’t smell anything but the foulness of death.
He was disgusting. His skin felt like a rubber suit, old sweat congealed and
cooled and reheated again. A window was open, and desperate avian hunger had
gnawed through the screen, but still the room was hot. It looked midday, the
sun too high to be seen, the surroundings bleached and dry. He stood. He had
indeed soiled his pants.
Unholstering the automatic he’d been unable to use the night
before—at least,
it felt
like it had been only one night—he
explored the upstairs. In the other two bedrooms he found some clothes, as well
as a
Thompson inexplicably left behind. Some of the
clothes were short and squat, undoubtedly belonging to the bastard who’d
killed him. But others would fit him well enough.
He heard movement from below. Slowly he walked downstairs, his pistol leading
the way. Flies everywhere. The naked dead man at the foot of the stairs was
still naked and still dead. Jason stepped around him, carefully avoiding the
many puddles and trails of blood, some his own. Through a doorway he peered
into the kitchen, where another body lay beneath the table. The house smelled
very bad indeed.
The movement had come from dogs. There were three of them, surrounding the man
on the couch whom Jason had gunned down first. Jason couldn’t see their
snouts, but he knew what they were doing. He yelled at them to git. They
didn’t listen. Looking to his left, he saw Whit’s slumped
body—head still down, for which Jason was thankful. At least the dogs
hadn’t gotten to Whit yet. Jason fired into the ceiling and the dogs
craned their heads at him, startled but still unmoved. Yelling and stomping
like a madman, he chased them from the building. Two of them leaped through the
windows Brickbat had shattered, and the third escaped out the kitchen door.
Jason took the quickest of glances at the body on the couch, enough to see that
the dogs had already done quite a job.
He turned back to his brother and said his name. No reply. He decided he
didn’t want to look at the face. He crouched before Whit and lifted his
body over his shoulder. It didn’t feel as stiff as it probably should
have, but Jason was no expert. Carefully he carried Whit to a powder room,
knocking the toilet seat down with his foot, then leaning forward and lowering
Whit onto it. Whit’s head flipped back and smacked against the wall.
Jason didn’t look away fast enough. His brother had been shot in the
forehead. The hole was small and round and black, burned by the mouth of
Brickbat’s gun, and no blood seemed to have escaped from it. It had all
come out the back. Jason looked down, then stepped out and carefully closed the
door so no hounds or vultures or jackals would be able to nose in and disfigure
his brother.
There was a bathroom upstairs. Taking a shower might not have been the wisest
use of his time, but he felt too foul not to. And Jason Fireson always did his
best thinking when he looked good.
His chest was unmarked, so the vest must have stopped the bullets from exiting
his body. But they’d certainly done their damage. He looked
over his shoulder to the small mirror and saw the wounds
in his back, at least seven of them. They were gaping and strangely black, not
just holes but omissions, erasures of his self. He twisted an arm behind his
back and touched one, fingering the hardened roll of skin puckering around it.
He dressed in borrowed clothes, keeping only his shoes, the keys to the
Terraplane, and his shoulder holster and automatic. Downstairs, the scavengers
had not returned, and Whit was still inanimate.
“Hurry the hell up, Whit. I don’t want to deal with this by
myself.”
There appeared to be no logic to their plight: at the Hudson Heights fiasco,
Jason had died first, yet Whit had woken first. Now, the opposite. And still he
couldn’t remember what had killed them the first time. He tried not to
think of the possibility that Whit might not awaken, that he might be left to
wander these nonsensical badlands alone.
He should have tied Whit to Veronica’s bed to prevent his brother from
following him this far. Even when Jason tried to do the right thing, to protect
those he loved, things only came out wrong. The right thing was confusing, and
difficult, and sometimes Jason wondered if it was in fact a nonexistent ideal,
like heaven or the American dream. There was no right thing. You did what you
did for whatever reasons occurred to you at the time, depending on whichever
emotion was running thickest in your blood. Your desire and fear and adrenaline
and longing. You made your choice and came up with the reasons later.