Bay City Blast

Chapter four

When other members of his engineering school graduating class went out to build bridges and highways and spaceships, Samuel Arlington Gregory got a job with a handgun designer.

It was a career the twenty-three-year-old Gregory had been pointing toward ever since he had been a little boy and had spent the summers at his grandfather's farm near Buffalo.

Grampa Gregory was a tall man with muscled, sloping shoulders who gave the impression of being built out of tanned weathered leather.

His friends called him Moose and everybody in the small New York town was his friend, because that was the way Grampa Gregory lived his life. He went to church every Sunday and stayed awake. When a neighbor's barn burned down, he was the first to volunteer to help build a new one. He lived by his word and they said in the town that Moose Gregory's handshake could be put into the bank and it'd draw interest.

He was the most middle-American of middle-Americans, except for one idiosyncrasy. He believed that the day was not far off when the Indians who had once owned and inhabited that section of the country would rise up to try to take it back.

"When that day comes, Sammy," he would tell his only grandson, "we've got to be ready. A man's got to defend what's his. You know what I mean?"

"The Indians aren't going to fight with us, Gram-pa," the eight-year-old Samuel Arlington Gregory would say. "There aren't even many Indians left."

Moose shook his head at the small boy. "Don't let them fool you. They're out there." He looked around and leaned close to the boy. "The Mafia's working with them this time. They want the Indians to get it back because they'll be able to take it away from them easier. You know what I mean?"

And young Sam Gregory would nod, even though he wasn't sure what his grandfather meant by the Mafia. The boy had come to hate his summers on the farm. He went because his parents made him go, expecting that it would help build character in the young boy. All summer long, he worked for his keep. He tried to spend as much of that work time as possible around the house helping his grandmother, a warm, cuddly woman whose smell was redolent of biscuits and dumplings and eggs and bacon. His grandfather frightened him with his talk of Indians and the Mafia, and also just because he was a big man in a big man's world. The boy did not take any solace in the knowledge that one day he would be a man and join that man's world. It was his nature to be frightened by the future, just as he was frightened of his grandfather.

And never was he more frightened than on Saturday afternoons during the summer when Moose Gregory would take two rifles, a 30.06 and a .22 caliber, down from a rack in the lightless wood-paneled living room of the farmhouse. The young boy would trail his grandfather out into the woods that ringed the 240-acre farm and that stretched, as dark as pitch, for miles in each direction. No flicker of sunlight seemed ever to have reached the forest floor.

The old man, carrying both rifles under his left arm and a bag of bottles in his right hand, would stop at a small clearing deep in the woods. He would stack a dozen bottles in one end of the clearing, on stumps, in the fork of trees, on an old hollow log. Then he would come back and direct young Sam to strip the .22 rifle and clean it. Sam would take the rifle apart, clean it with an oiled rag his grandfather kept in a waterproof pouch, and then put it back together, all under the old man's intense gaze.

Only then would Grampa Gregory give Sam bullets, .22 caliber long rifle shells. The boy slipped the shells into the ammunition reservoir of the repeating rifle, and then at his grandfather's direction fired at the bottles.

Generally he missed, and his grandfather would kick dirt, and tell him with a chill in his voice, "When the Indians and the Mafia come, you're not going to be much help, boy."

Sam would reload and try again, usually with no better results.

"You're trying too hard," the old man said. "You're holding that rifle like it's poisoned and you're afraid it's catching. You have to make it feel like part of your body. Like it belongs to you and you love it. Like this." And the old man would raise his 30.06 and, seemingly without sighting, pull off a half dozen shots that would scatter bottles and glass chips ten feet high in the air. Young Sam Gregory hated the sharp report of the guns; he hated the sight of the bottles flying; and even though he did try, he could never get the hang of it.

The old man and the boy would stay in the woods until the pocket of his grandfather's red plaid mackinaw, in which he kept a boxful of .22 caliber shells, was empty and then they would trudge back to the house.

And occasionally, the old man would notice that the boy was upset over his failure and he would clap a large hand on his shoulder and say, "Some people ain't maybe cut out for firing guns. But that doesn't mean you aren't worth a lot. Everybody can do good in the world in their own way. That's why we were put here." And young Sam would hope that was the end of the target practice, but next Saturday, the old man would reach up to the living room rack and take down the rifles again for their regular foray into the woods.

As he grew older, the boy began to read all the books he could find on rifles and handguns. With money he earned he bought himself a target rifle. He never learned his grandfather's secret of making the rifle feel a part of his body, but he learned to shoot by using telescopic sights and mechanical tricks. He developed a gadget that would automatically alter the weight of the trigger pull on a gun, so that even if he did jerk it while firing, it would be too late to have any efiect because the bullet was already on its way. Later, he devised a wrist brace to help a marksman hold a heavy handgun without wavering or swaying. He made his own guns.

And all the while, he hated guns and shooting, but something in the back of his mind kept him at it, because he wanted to prove something to his grandfather.

After engineering school, the first thing he invented was a new kind of cartridge, whose slug fragmented. However, unlike other fragmentation shells that scattered in all directions, the Gregory shell fragmented in a steady predictable pattern so that when fired at any target, one of the pieces of slug was sure to take the target down.

It was years since his grandmother had died and Grampa Gregory was living alone on the farm, still working it himself, when Sam showed up one weekend with a box of his new shells and challenged him to a shooting match.

The old man was now in his seventies. He was still big and strong looking, but to young Sam, the smell of death seemed to be on him, the feeling that this giant oak of a man had already been splintered by life's lightning and was just waiting to die.

Wordlessly the two men walked out into the woods. The only concession to the change in age was that on this trip young Sam Gregory carried the bottles.

He set the bottles on the ground, fifty yards from where his grandfather stood. He was careful to space them far enough apart so that none of his new fragmentation shells would take out two bottles at once.

He walked back to his grandfather and started to load the .22 rifle.

"Hold on, son. You ain't gonna clean that piece first?" his grandfather said.

The younger man nodded and took the weapon apart, cleaned it and reassembled it.

He loaded it and stood next to his grandfather.

"Which six you want, Grampa?" he asked.

"I'll take the ones on the left," the old man said. He moved back and sat down on a tree stump, then lifted his rifle to his shoulder and pulled off six rapid shots. Six bottles shattered and the old man looked at his grandson.

"Not bad, Grampa," Sam Gregory said. From a standing position, he raised his rifle and squeezed off six rapid shots. The last six bottles shattered.

When he turned to look at his grandfather, the old man had a strange look on his face.

"I guess you're ready for those Indians and that Mafia now," the old man said softly. Even as he spoke, his face was turning a pained pasty white. His rifle dropped from the crook of his arm. He tried to raise both hands to his chest, but before he could, the old man fell backward off the tree stump. He was dead.

Back at the munitions plant, Sam continued working on the fragmentation bullets, altering and modifying them for a large range of guns from rifles to pistols. Then he devised a new type of handgun, built for the fragmentation shells, and coupled with a new scope of his own design. The telescopic sight contained a series of lenses, mounted in such a way that the gun could be used at arm's length, and the intensified-light image on the scope would be as clear as watching a picture on a miniature television receiver. On the scope's ground glass, around the image of the target, were a series of rings that corresponded to the approximate distance from the target. At 100 yards, if the target was somewhere in the center ring, the frag shell was certain to bring it down. At fifty yards, the target object could be anywhere within the two center rings and the shooter would be certain of hitting it. At twenty-five yards, the target could be anywhere in the scope, and the fragmentation bullets, now redesigned out of a softer metal that did more damage on impact, would be guaranteed to kill.

It was literally a gun that could not miss, and when Gregory had refined the design, he did two things. First, he resigned from the weapons company. Second, he patented the scope and the bullets and the handgun.

Soon after, he sent specifications of it to the Pentagon. Four months later, after signing a twenty-million-dollar contract to produce the guns for the Army, Sam Gregory was a rich man.

And, he realized increasingly as time went on, a bored one.

At his estate in Elberon, New Jersey, he tinkered with the design of other weapons, but his mind was not really on it.

He thought often of those days in the woods with his grandfather. Even at the end, he had not been able to beat the old man honestly in a shooting match. Was there anything else? The old man had often talked about doing good in the world, and that was the way he had tried to live his life. Maybe, just maybe, Sam Gregory thought, he might just be able to do more good than his grandfather had done.

One day, coming back from New York where he had seen his tax lawyer, he ran into a monumental traffic tie-up coming out of the Holland Tunnel in Jersey City. To avoid the traffic, he had turned off the highway, and found himself wandering along the streets of Bay City.

All Sam Gregory knew about Bay City was that it was a waterfront town that had fallen on hard times. In the old days, his munitions plant often had delivered goods to dockside for shipment to Army posts overseas, but all that business in Bay City had stopped years before.

Trying to get through the town, he made a wrong turn and found himself on River Street, the long thoroughfare that fronted the city's old decaying piers. Up ahead of him, near the curb, he saw a black chauffeured limousine. That surprised him. Bay City was not the kind of community for chauffeured limousines. He saw a man get out of the back seat of the car, flanked by two ugly-looking bodyguards.

"A greaseball," he said to himself and pulled to the curb to watch. The man was Mafia. He knew it. He could tell.

And down the block he saw another. And around the corner, another.

Sam Gregory's mind was clicking as he drove through the town and when he saw the small office of the Bay City Bugle, he went inside and bought copies of each paper for the last six months.

When he took them home and read them, he realized what had happened.

Somehow, an outsider, Rocco Nobile, had come into the town, gotten himself installed as mayor and was now turning the city over to the Mafia.

Suddenly, Sam Gregory wasn't bored anymore. His grandfather had told him so often to do good, and he now had found the good thing to do, the thing that would give his life meaning and purpose.

He would drive the Mafia from Bay City.

A touch of asthma, a sinus condition and a generally runny nose had kept Sam Gregory out of the Army, but even without military experience he knew that he needed a battle plan and soldiers to carry it out if he were to win his war against the Mafia.

It took him two weeks to get his army together.

There was Mark Tolan. He was a brooding, muscular, dark-haired man who had been court-martialed in Vietnam for proving the no-miss capability of the Gregory Sur-Shot handgun, primarily against women and children. He had tried to call Gregory as a defense witness at his court-martial, apparently on the unique legal theory that if he could prove how easy it was to kill with that gun, the court-martial board would understand why he had plugged two dozen women and children. Gregory had appeared, but Tolan, a career sergeant, was still thrown out of service. He had been working for the last four years in a drive-in restaurant.

The second member of the team was Al Baker whom Gregory had met one night in a New York restaurant. Baker had told him that he was a member of the Mafia who had fled the organization and lived, and offered to organize Gregory's weapons factory if he had any union problems. He had given Gregory his card which Gregory had saved, but had never known why. He remembered his grandfather's worries about the Mafia and would never have anything to do with anyone in the mob. But now... now that he was fighting the mob, a man with Baker's connections and knowledge would be a definite asset, particularly since he had long ago left the mob. He did not know that Al Baker was a small time numbers runner whose closest connection with the Mafia had been seeing The Godfather twenty-three times and thereafter practicing talking like Marlon Brando.

The final member of the team was a former actor who had taken to writing Gregory a lot of letters after an article about the gun designer had appeared in a national magazine. The letters had quoted Shakespeare a lot and praised Gregory's inventions and prayed, forsooth, that the weapons would only be used on the scum of the world which deserved that kind of end. Gregory liked the writer's literary style — it was the fanciest thing he had ever seen — and had started to correspond with him. The actor's name was Nicholas Lizzard. He was an emaciated six-foot-five. He carried a doctor's leather bag with him, in which he carried makeup for disguises. His skill was such that, fully made up, he could mask his height and look barely six-feet-four.

All four men now sat around poolside at Sam Gregory's Elberon estate.

Gregory was drawing a chart. He listed himself as the commander in a big pencil-drawn box. Below that he had three other smaller pencil-drawn boxes. In them he put the army's names: Mark Tolan, Al Baker, Nicholas Lizzard. He drew ones connecting all the boxes.

"This is our table of organization," he said. He looked around the table. Nicholas Lizzard was pouring a refill of iced Vodka into a tall water glass. Mark Tolan was sighting down the barrel of an unloaded Gregory Sur-Shot at a concrete duck on the far side of the swimming pool. Only Al Baker was looking at the chart. He was rubbing his hands together nervously.

"Nice table of organization," he said. "Like we had in the Mafia, when I was a soldier, before I managed to escape with my life. Want me to tell you about it?"

"Not right now," Gregory said. He turned toward Mark Tolan. "Stop that," he said. Tolan was staring down the sights of the Gregory Sur-Shot at a point halfway between Sam Gregory's eyes, squeezing the trigger. Behind the butt of the gun and his hand, his face was impassive, darkly brooding. He gave no sign that he had heard Gregory, but he turned quietly in his chair and began to draw a bead on birds flying overhead. Under his breath, Gregory could hear him saying softly, "Bang. Bang."

Gregory looked at Nicholas Lizzard, who was just finishing his glass of Vodka, and casting eyes at the bottle. As he reached for it, Gregory got it first, and set it on the flagstone patio under his feet. He leaned over and snatched the Gregory Sur-Shot from Mark Tolan's hands. Tolan wheeled in his chair, his face red with hate, his cold eyes narrowed with rage. It was the face of a homicidal maniac, Gregory realized, and he decided that Mark Tolan would be the number one captain in his war against the Mafia.

"Now listen, you three," Gregory said. "You know what's wrong with you?"

"Yeah, we're poor," Baker said.

"No. Like me, you're bored," Gregory said. "You've got nothing to do in your life. You, Baker, you're busy fooling around with unions, and you, Mark, you're a short-order cook in a quickie restaurant, and you, Lizzard, you're an actor without parts."

"Man of many parts," Lizzard said, somewhat thickly. "Many parts."

Tolan laughed derisively.

"Hark," said Lizzard. "I do believe that Jack the Ripper chuckles."

The thin actor had his chin on his hands on the table. Tolan growled and lunged across the table with his own hands, reaching for Lizzard's throat. Lizzard recoiled. Tolan missed. He looked toward the gun in Gregory's lap.

"Stop it, you two. Stop it," Gregory said.

"Yeah," Baker said. "The Mafia's got more discipline than this. We act like this, we ain't got no chance. You wanna know how the Mafia woulda done this?"

"What do you know about the Mafia, you clown?" Tolan said. Gregory realized they were the first words Tolan had said since arriving, except for "Bang, bang" under his breath.

"Enough. Enough," Gregory said. "You see what I mean? You men, all of us, we're so bored, we don't have anything better to do than to pick on each other. Picky. Picky."

"Dicky doo,"' said Tolan.

Gregory ignored him. He pointed at each of the three men, in turn, with his Eberhard Faber Mongol 482 #1 yellow pencil.

"But that's all over now. We've got something to live for. We're going to live big lives. They're going to know we were here. We're going to live huge."

"Ah, life, its sweetness challenges me," said Lizzard, who had returned his head to his hands and was drifting off to sleep.

"How we gonna live?" Baker said. "I'm giving up a good job union organizing."

"Money's not your worry anymore," Gregory said. "We're an army and we're a well-financed army. And the enemy is the Mafia in Bay City. We're going after them, boys."

"Good," said Tolan. "Kill 'em all. Blow their eyes out. Shoot their brains all over the street. Gut shoot them so they die slow. Fill them up with compressed air and let them blow up. Skin them alive before we shoot them. Toss their guts in the street. Set fire to their intestines."

Lizzard retched. Baker covered his mouth with his hand so he wouldn't throw up on the table.

"Well, something like that," Gregory said. He pointed with his pencil at the table of organization. "This is it. Our army. We need a name."

"What for?" said Baker nervously. He did not want anyone to find out he was connected with these loonies.

"If we don't have a name, how will we get fan mail?" Tolan said.

"That ain't funny," said Baker.

"We need a name because we want them to know who's after them. We want them to fear the dark," Gregory said. "To know that each step could be their last. To know that each person they pass on the street might live only to see them die. We want them to be afraid as they have made others afraid. That's why..." He pointed with his pencil. "That's why we need a name." To emphasize the point, he grabbed the pencil in both hands and snapped it. He looked at the broken piece in his right hand, then looked around the table. Tolan was looking up toward the sky, pointing his index finger at birds, going "Bang, bang" under his breath. Lizzard seemed asleep. All Gregory could see was the thinning hair on the top of his pink head. Baker was looking around nervously as if expecting the backyard to be raided.

"That's it," Gregory said. He held up the rubber-tipped end of the pencil. "From here on in, I'm The Eraser." He waved the eraser over his head. "And you're... you're all ... The Rubout Squad."

"Who do I kill first?" asked Tolan.

"Can I have the Vodka back now?" asked Lizzard without raising his head.

"You was talking about us getting paid," Baker said. "How much and when?"

"We're going to get them all," said Gregory. "The goons and the gunsels and the ginzos. And most of all, that corrupting mayor, Rocco Nobile."