G-Man

57

It could have been the road to nowhere. Trees — dense Wisconsin pines — deep on both sides, nothing ahead, nothing behind, no noise, just a sense of being removed from the real world. This time of year, there wasn’t much activity in the woods, and most of the ground vegetation had turned to thatching. A gray chill clarified the air, and breath turned to vapor.

“It’s spooky,” said Helen.

“It’s Wisconsin,” said Les. “Come on, you’ve been here before. Fish, deer, stuff like that. Farmers who talk funny—”

“Cheese,” said J.P.

“Last time, they put me in jail. Anyhow, the farmers are all inside by their fireplaces,” said Helen.

Les drove the newly stolen black V-8 Ford down this ribbon of dirt. He was all steeled up, as was J.P., and the Monitor and Thompson were cocked and locked, out of sight in the backseat well but could be up and in play in seconds, yet nothing was set to happen today. They had told Tony Accardo they wouldn’t be there for another few days and wanted to take the time to examine the layout, figure out routes in and out, switchbacks, other cars to steal in an emergency.

“I want to know which side road dumps me in Chicago and which one dumps me in Lake Geneva,” Les said.

In time, the nondescript road through the forest approached the lakeshore of the body of water that sustained a playground for Chicago vacationers, with plenty of room to speedboat, water-ski, and fish, under the blue sky amid the perfume of the pines. Before them lay the Lake Como Inn, a rambling, white-clapboard joint with country-house aspirations, including a long porch under a roof supported by three Doric columns, and out back were docks and a lakeside lawn, and cabins. Fifty yards farther down the shoreline, a two-story house stood, where the owner and well-known Mob pal, Hobart Hermanson, lived. In late November, however, the whole place had the look of abandonment, as all the vacationers were absent, the water was gray and choppy, and no speedboats flashed across its surface. A few Adirondack chairs shed paint in the chill, and the grass looked like Shredded Wheat.

“Boy, will Hobe be surprised to see us,” said J.P.

Hermanson was, among other enterprises, the Slots King of Wentworth County, who’d opened the place to the gangster trade. Most of the boys, going on back to Big Al, had logged vacation time there, including Les and J.P. Hobart had big-city aspirations in a small town, and had a speakeasy in the basement during Prohibition, serviced by none other than Jimmy Murray. Hobart always had a welcome for the profession; he enjoyed the excitement of hanging around with the big-time rollers.

As they pulled in, a guy in a suit came out onto the porch of Hobart’s house and watched them approach. They waved, the guy on the porch waved back, and Les looked at the man and, rolling down the window, asked, all friendly-like, “Hey, is Eddie around?” meaning Hobart’s gofer, Eddie Duffy, and the guy’s face locked up hard.

Then Les saw that he looked straight at the man who’d tried to kill him off Wolf Road and whom he’d tried to kill off Wolf Road.

Angular face, eyes hidden under a low fedora, a grim jot of mouth, in a dark suit like a funeral director’s. He had FEDERAL written all over him in letters two feet tall. The two faced each other for a second that lasted a decade, as each tried to wrap a brain around what was going on.

“You sonovabitch!” screamed Les, reaching for his .45.

After Uncle Phil’s message, things again happened fast. The next day, Sam, Charles, and several other agents took two cars to the Lake Como Inn. They reconned the place, made drawings, calculated fields of fire, places for cover, methods of locking off the complex once the prey was in the trap.

Two days later, Hobart Hermanson himself showed up at headquarters in Chicago. He figured which way the wind was blowing and he didn’t want to be on the wrong side in the Baby Face drama upcoming. He volunteered what he knew, told the agents he’d clear his people out so there’d be no civilians to worry about in the field of fire — Little Bohemia, anyone? Cowley made another trek up as the week progressed to see how preparations were going. He left Charles and two other men as early preparation, though Nelson wasn’t expected for another two days.

The agents took over Hermanson’s house, and kept a steady lookout, but on the third day, the twenty-seventh, they were running out of food, so the other agents, Metcalf and MacRae, went out to get supplies. They took Charles’s car, which he’d driven up in with Sam. Meanwhile, the Division car was parked around back, but, as it turned out, Metcalf had taken the keys with him on the shopping trip.

Charles sat in the front room, his pistol in his shoulder holster, but all the heavy weapons — two Thompsons and a BAR — were stored upstairs out of sight in case visitors dropped by. There was nothing particular to do except worry and hope, and he was doing both when he heard a car drive in. Had to be Metcalf and MacRae coming back from the grocery store. He thought he ought to help with the provisions, as he’d always hated the kind of officer who ran things but never pitched in.

He got up and pulled on his hat and ambled out.

It was about 2 p.m., the temperature about 45, a wan sun pushing half its light through high clouds, no blue anywhere in sight. No wind, as the pines were still and the empty elms and maples didn’t rattle in a breeze.

He smiled, noting immediately it wasn’t his Pontiac but a V-8 Ford, shiny black, as if just off the lot, and he wondered if someone had tipped the local cops, who’d come by for a look-see or a pitch-in, or maybe even some tourist or a friend of Hermanson’s. Through the windows of the car, he noticed the fellow on the passenger side waving, and he waved back, trying to put a smile on his face, though such an enterprise was always difficult for him, and as the car pulled to a halt, he watched the window roll down and the fellow, square-faced, youngish rather than oldish, oddly familiar, with hat low at his brow — a homberg, no less! — said, “Hey, is Eddie around?”

That was the instant Charles recognized him as Baby Face Nelson and the instant Baby Face recognized him as federal.

“You sonovabitch!” screamed Nelson, twisting as he went for his shoulder holster.

Charles beat him cold and had a mere six ounces left of trigger before his pistol fired, but Nelson had vanished.

Whoever was driving was quicker than either of them and punched the accelerator, and the V-8 took off like an Indy racer, throwing up a screeen of raw dirt that furled and flapped about Charles, and by the time he’d dropped to a kneeling position for a solid long shot, the car was too far away, and, not being an amateur, he had no call to waste hardball on phantoms. Instead, he fixed his eyes on the plate and read it: Illinois 639578.

It vanished in the next second.

Charles shook his head clear, turned to run to the Division car parked behind Hermanson’s, remembered that Metcalf had the keys, and realized he was frozen in place and time. And history.

Goddammit!

The rage and frustration broke like a falling wall in a six-alarm blaze, engulfing him, and he felt his whole body jack with fury and regret. If he’d made the recognition a half a second earlier, Baby Face might be gone, but he’d be wearing a hardball where his left eye used to be. A half a dozen other scenarios unreeled before Charles’s eyes in which, by this or that fraction or twitch or fate or zephyr of whimsy, Baby Face was in his gunsight one second earlier.

But it hadn’t happened. Baby Face was gone, and Charles could do nothing but watch the dust settle in the air from his roaring getaway.

Where were Metcalf and MacRae? Time seemed to coagulate in an ugly wound and would not advance. The world stood atomically still, with nothing moving anywhere except the last layers of dust that finally floated to its reunion with the road, and Charles put his full force of will into getting Metcalf and MacRae back — suppose they’d stopped for coffee? — so he could get on with the chase. But time, to say nothing of Metcalf and MacRae, refused to cooperate, and he was trapped there in a nightmare of frozen-solid paralysis.

“Goddammit!” howled Les. “I had him. I had the edge on that G-Man! I was going to put a slug into the sonovabitch.”

“Les, sure. But maybe there were ten more guys with Thompsons and Brownings in there, and you pop that guy and they hose us down like Bonnie and Clyde,” said J.P., hunched over the wheel, having roared down the road to U.S. 14 and cranked left to take them through the town of Lake Geneva.

“J.P.’s right, honey,” said Helen from the backseat. “You don’t know what was in there. It could have been curtains for us.”

That they were right — that J.P. had probably saved his life, that his plan was working, that the future as he had forecast lay perfectly ahead — did nothing to mollify Les. He wasn’t constructed that way, though he managed to get it through the vortex of red screaming rage that filled his brain that he should not yell at his wife and his closest friend.

Instead, he sat there and sunk into himself. He took on himself all the rage and frustration he felt, somehow distilled it into pure bravado, feeling it leak through his bones and his organs to his gut and, there, alchemize into something monstrous. It was the urge to destroy as pure as he’d ever felt it, to reach out and, in the infantile core of his mind, simply crush any and all in front of him until his ego was the only structure left in the world. He would, if he could, destroy the world, and if he went along with it, as it perished in cinders and grit, that didn’t particularly upset him. He felt Nietzsche’s pure happiness of the knife.

They got beyond Lake Geneva and in twenty minutes were into Illinois, on the straightaway that was Northwest Highway to Chicago.

“Now what?” J.P. finally asked.

Les slid out of his craziness slightly.

“Just keep going. Straight on, into Chicago.”

“Les—”

“Just do it,” screamed Les, who didn’t feel up to explaining.

More silence, and finally Les said, “Okay, okay, we have to get to Chicago, we know where. We have to be there when Phil D’Abruzzio gets back from downtown in his limo with his bodyguards. Okay, we know it’s him, he ratted us to the feds, we’re going to light him and his boys up like a Christmas tree, and then we’re done. Next stop, Reno. Next stop, peace and quiet. Next stop, retirement. This one last thing.”

More silence.

“Les,” J.P. finally said, “let’s think this through.”

“Nothing to think through,” said Les.

“Les, listen to J.P., will you please. As a favor to me.”

Les sighed.

“Okay, we know who to hit. But we also know the Division is on us. Nobody’s behind us, but you can bet they called ahead and they’re sending guys out from Chicago. Meanwhile, they’re on our tails, running hard, especially the guy who shoots so good. Nothing’s going to stop him short of a full Tommy mag. So we can be jumped at any time. Now, what about I take a hard right, head us west, and we’ll bunk tonight in Iowa? Right now, we’ve got a free run to make a getaway, nobody’s on us. Nobody’s behind us, nobody’s intercepted us. Okay, we do some soft time in Iowa, then, a week or so down the line, we come on back, do the D’Abruzzio thing, we pick up Helen, pick up the kids, and it’s on to Reno. So much less risk, so much fairer to Helen.”

“He’s got a point,” said Helen. “We don’t have to finish this thing today. We’re being chased we—”

“No,” said Les. “If they think about it, maybe they figure it out. The Division has connections with D’Abruzzio, maybe they alert him of the possibility. Maybe D’Abruzzio goes underground, or moves, or beefs up his security, and we did all this for nothing. He will be most vulnerable tonight. We have to do him tonight.”

“Les,” said Helen, “it’s—”

“Helen, please, this is how it has to be. This guy did us all, all us road bandits, Johnny, Homer, dumbbell Pretty Boy, and now me, I’m the last. It can’t stand. There’s got to be payment on those accounts. We owe it. Now, Helen — you too, J.P., if you want — I’ll drop you off at a motel and go on alone. With the Monitor and a Thompson, I can do it. Then I come back tonight and pick you up and off we go. If I don’t make it, Helen, I love you so, but J.P.’s a good man and he’ll take care of you, and I’ll die knowing you’re in good hands and that makes me happy. But this has to be done — don’t you get it? — it has to be done!”

They were silent. Who could speak out against such conviction?

“Okay,” said Les. “J.P., pull over. Let me drive now. You saved our bacon once, let me pilot us to the hit. You get some shut-eye so you can drive through the night.”

After the longest twenty-two minutes in history, Charles’s Pontiac straight-8 came up the road. Metcalf and MacRae, good men, if young, saw right away from his tension on the porch that something had happened.

“Sheriff, what’s going on?” Metcalf asked, getting out.

“He was here. Nelson, a little while ago, drove up big as life.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“He took off like a shot.”

“What’s he doing here so early?”

“I have no idea. Okay, you guys, out of the car, get the heavy weapons loaded, and come along as soon as possible in the Division vehicle. I’m going after them now.”

“Charles, you’ll never—”

“I ain’t sitting here. I also have to stop and call Sam. I have the plate number and the car make. Mark this: shiny black 1934 Ford V-8, Illinois 639578. I’m going after it now, you come along with the automatic stuff.”

“You don’t know where he’s going!”

“I’d guess back into Chicago. If not, then we lost him. But I have to assume it’s Chicago. I’ll tell Sam to send people the other direction, out Northwest Highway, with the car description. If he’s going to Chicago, we may still nab him.”

“He can’t be that stupid.”

“He can. Now, get out and start loading.”

They dashed into the house to unlimber the BARs and Thompsons, plus the ammunition that still had to be loaded into spare magazines. Meanwhile, Charles jumped behind the wheel of the Pontiac, turned the key, backed up, oriented down the dirt road, and accelerated out of the lodge property. It wasn’t five minutes before he was in Lake Geneva, and he pulled into a filling station, had the attendant fuel him up while he ran to a phone booth.

He looked at his watch; it was 2:30.

He got the operator.

“Law enforcement emergency, Justice Department, Chicago, Randolph 6226.”

In a few seconds, Elaine Donovan answered.

“Elaine, this is Swagger. Get me Sam — fast.”

Another second.

“Charles?”

“We had him. He just showed up and saw me and took off.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Sam.

“Sam, he’s in a 1934 shiny black Ford V-8, with two or three others, the license plate is Illinois 639578. He may be heading straight down Northwest Highway to Chicago.”

“I don’t have anyone. Lord, Charles, I’ve got the boys all over the place and no way of reaching them.”

“Well, if anyone—”

“No, Ed’s here, that’s right. Okay, we’ll load up and head out Northwest.”

“Sam, be careful. This guy’s crazy. He wants to go all the way. If you get him in your sights”—the thought of Sam in a gunfight with Baby Face Nelson filled Charles with horror—“fire. Don’t mess around with arrest orders or anything like that. He’s too dangerous. Put him down like a rabid dog and go home to your kids. Let Ed work the Thompson, he’s real good with it. Ed can take him, Sam. Please, don’t you try.”

“I hear you, Charles.”

58

“We know what happened on that last day,” said the one that talked, Braxton, according to the ID.

“And goobers can fly,” said Nick. “They can even carry passengers.”

“You don’t want to hear? Fine, we’ll do our time. We got some pals too, and it won’t be so hard on us as you think — ha-ha. And the sniper there, he’s got to spend the rest of his life wondering, What did them boys know? How’d they know it? And since we been living in his iPhone for six weeks, we know he’s as serious about this as anything on earth, except the welfare of his kids. Sniper, you want to just wonder? You’d pay that price to put two only sort of bad bad guys away for a few years?”

Swagger said, “Keep talking.”

“Look at him, Rawley,” said Braxton. “He’s all curiosityed up. He’s got to know.”

He laughed.

“You know, Rawley,” he said, “I think we should have just come in with Plan B in the first place. So much easier. Saves us all this stomping around in the woods. I wouldn’t have had to put on no diapers, though I have grown fond of the Depends lifestyle.” He laughed again, and even Rawley, who resembled an Olmec stone head settling into its second thousand years under the vines, cracked a smile.

“We’ll hear the pitch,” said Bob.

“You only get pitch. You don’t get no info. The pitch is enough.”

“We’ll see,” said Bob.

“Here’s the bargain. We tell you what happened. I prove to you it’s legit and can be backed up at any time. I also tell you where you went wrong and where Rawley went right. You are a hundred percent pleased with the info, and you believe it. You snip these cuffs, present us with the Monitor, and wave bye-bye. We’re over the hill in ten minutes. Oh, we get our guns back.”

“I’ll drop the guns at some place in Little Rock, if that’s the way the decision goes,” said Bob.

“You figure he’s on the level, Rawley?” Braxton asked.

Rawley nodded imperceptibly.

“That one doesn’t talk much, does he?” asked Nick.

“I speak when I have something to say,” said Rawley. “I save a lot of time that way. Okay, Sniper Swagger, you think you’re so smart, but I figured out your next move in the investigation, where the genius FBI agent here couldn’t, and I went ahead with it, so I have the document in question. That’s why I have the answers and you never will.”

“He can talk,” said Nick.

“He’s a goddamned genius,” said Braxton.

“Your initial problem was conceptual,” said Rawley. “As I followed the investigation, I have to say that you were certainly doing a professional job, and a few of the discoveries were impressive. Tracking Baby Face back to Lebman by means of the compensator, that’s very solid. But it’s also clear to me that you have reached the limits of your known world and it’s unlikely that you’ll get any further. What that represents is a failure not of logic but imagination. Your brains are limited by boundaries. You can’t see beyond them, have no concept of what’s beyond them, and, lacking that, no process for navigating them.”

“Don’t he talk purty?” said Braxton.

“No points for style and grammar,” said Bob, “only content.”

“Oh, it’s about to get interesting. Go on, brother, the floor’s all yours. Oh, Mr. FBI Man, sir, maybe you could change my diapers, as they’re beginning to chafe.”

Braxton enjoyed his own joke immensely, and Rawley did him the courtesy of letting him finish his laugh.

“You scoured the overworld,” he finally said, “that is, the bourgeois matrix of propriety, rule, order, documentation, memory, index, memoir, rumor, myth, and Google. You were thorough, precise, and diligent. But you never got close to the truth. The truth isn’t in the overworld. It’s in the underworld.”

He let that sink in.

“We Grumley, and all like us, we like what we do. And so we talk and remember and pass along. We know it’s historically important and explains so much. We know it tells us things you could never understand, many of the whys and hows of history. The fact that it’s ours, and not yours, is fabulously enjoyable.”

“Get on with it,” said Swagger.

“I looked at the same data you did, but I saw possibilities extending into our world. One of the things I noticed was that the single witness to that last day lived until 1974.”

“We read the Bureau interrogations of John Paul Chase,” said Nick. “He seemed to say a lot, but he really didn’t say much. He didn’t even call it a Monitor, just a machine gun.”

“He was a professional criminal and, as you will see, he had a mandate to lie. So he told the story that your people wanted to hear, and they were so pleased to hear it, they bought it. It became the narrative. But it’s far from the truth.”

“And you learned the truth?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, I had to find what remained of his presence on earth. Not easy. You could not have done it. But I saw he spent his time at Alcatraz, and I asked older Grumley to come up with names of other Alcatraz veterans. It took some time, but, one by one, I got in contact with these old salts and found one who remembered Chase as quite a mild fellow who, when paroled, went to live with a relative in Sausalito, his hometown. The birth records of Sausalito led me to the tax records, which led me to Chase’s great-granddaughter, and, through a lawyer, I approached, feeling my two hundred forty pounds and KILL and MAIM tattooed on my knuckles might scare her off. Through the lawyer, I put out a gentle tender. You could never have done that, Swagger, because the crucial connect with the ex-Alcatrazer is denied you. You could never have found him. And if you had, he wouldn’t have spoken to you, overworlder. He sang to me. This is why it’s so much fun being a criminal.”

Swagger said nothing. Dammit, he was impressed. Maybe he could have — but maybe not. Anyhow, Rawley was back on his pulpit.

“So here’s the John Paul Chase story. He was paroled in 1968. An old man but spunky. He went to live with a great-granddaughter and spent the next six years in pleasant circumstances in his hometown, painting bad landscapes. To Grumley, that’s a happy ending: comfort, memories, the sense of singularity and accomplishment the professional criminal feels, because no matter how you punish him, you’ve only punished him for a fraction of his crimes. He has the last laugh. And, believe me, John Paul had plenty to laugh about.”

“Where is this going?” said Nick.

“To the heart of the heart of the matter. Now, would you mind shutting up so I can finish?”

Even Nick’s irritation was tamed by curiosity. Was this it? Could this unlikely creature with his giant guns, tattoos, skull fractures, and over-brightened teeth actually know something?

“Initially, Chase was silent. He enjoyed it too much to share it. He never talked about the old days because that was his treasure and he enjoyed hoarding it. His great-granddaughter begged him to write it all down, but he wouldn’t because he said nobody cared and spilling it all for nothing would be disrespectful.”

“But he talked in his sleep?” asked Nick.

“No, the environment changed radically in 1972. Can you guess why?”

“You’re ahead of us on everything,” said Swagger, “I guess you’re ahead of us on 1972.”

“I guess so. The great American movie The Godfather is released, from the Mario Puzo bestseller. It’s the rare hit that deserves its fame and fortune, but it ignites a fire in popular culture regarding organized crime. Mobster, mobster, mobster, twenty-four/seven, and for the next two years three out of every four movies, and six out of every ten books, are about the gangster world. Can you imagine the impact this had on the old man living in the basement in Sausalito who knew things? It was like he was holding stock in a gold mine or Haloid before it became Xerox. So finally, he sat down and wrote it, the true tale of the end of FBI war on the motorized bandits, in a public park in Barrington, Illinois — oh, yes, and elsewhere — on November twenty-seventh, 1934. He wrote it down. I’ve read it. Several times. Would you like to, fellows?”

Silence.

“You know the price? Snip the flex-cuffs, hand over the Monitor and our artillery, and be quit of us, just as we will be quit of you.”

“You have the thing?”

“Not only do I have it, I have it not far from here. You’ll laugh at this, Swagger. Not only were we not going to kill you, we were going to leave it with you, so that when the sodium pentothal wore off, you’d know that you hadn’t been robbed, you’d been given fair value: your goods for ours. So you’d have no need to come looking for us. We don’t want you dogging us, any more than you’d want us dogging you. Call it professional courtesy.”

“How can I verify it? I mean, even if it’s authentic and you put it in front of me, how can I know it’s authentic?”

“Well, first of all, does it seem likely that Brax and I had a three-hundred-page handwritten manuscript in several ’thirties-era notebooks fabricated against the possibility of this occurrence? We’re smart, but nobody’s that smart. I’d guess you could have the rag content of the paper, the age of the ink, the fading of the cover pages, any number of forensic factors, analyzed.”

“That would only take six weeks. Do you want to sit in that hole in flex-cuffs for six weeks while we check? It’s okay by me.”

“I’m simply noting probability, not actuality. As for the actuality, he notarized his thumbprint on it. He knew that if he were going to have it published, instant authentication was part of the sale. So it’s got his notarized 1974 thumbprint and his Chicago 1934 fingerprint card. You can compare the prints. Even with the naked eye, you’ll see they’re the same.”

“Why didn’t his family publish it?”

“As you will see, they realized it tells a different story. Maybe they thought that the different story would do more harm than good. Maybe that’s an issue you’ll have to contend with as well. Wasn’t there a movie where some newspaperman says, ‘When the truth conflicts with the legend, print the legend’?”

“Liberty Valance,” said Nick, who knew of such things. “Starring John Wayne, the Charles Swagger of the movies.”

“Tell me where this manuscript is.”

“Snip, snip,” said Braxton.

59

Sam gave Elaine instructions to relay the Baby Face information and car ID and plate number to any agents who called in and then he went swiftly to the arms room.

“Okay, Ed,” he said, “Charles just called. I’ll explain later, but we’ve got to move fast. Nelson may be coming down Northwest Highway to Chicago. I have his make and plate. Maybe we can intercept him.”

Ed jumped.

“Sam, are you sure you don’t want to wait until we get some more fellows in? You and me against Baby Face, that’s a tall order.”

“The others will join us as they can. Charles is in pursuit from Lake Geneva. Come on, we’ve got to get cracking. What’s loaded?”

Ed keyed open the gun vault, revealing empty racks, but for one Thompson and one Remington riot gun.

“All the other stuff is out with the boys,” he said. “I just loaded up a drum for the Tommy.”

“Good, you take that, I’ll take the shotgun. I’ve fired a shotgun before, at least.” It was a short-barreled Remington Model 11, a semi-auto with a capacity of four rounds. It had come over from the Department of the Army, where it had been acquired for trench warfare.

The elevator doors opened and he and Ed stepped in.

They rode down the shaft to the government garage, headed to the Division section and toward a blue Hudson, Chicago Division car number 13. Ed jumped behind the wheel, Sam in the passenger seat; they laid the two weapons in the space beneath the dashboard and leaning upward to rest on the seat next to Sam. Ed turned the engine over, backed out of the space, and headed out of the garage. A bolt of gray sky hit them as they climbed the ramp to Adams Street.

“Go north to Touhy,” said Sam, looking at the map he’d taken out of the glove compartment. “That’s our fastest route to U.S. 14. Then we’ll head out that, with our eyes open for a shiny black V-8.”

“What if we run into him?” said Ed. “Are we going to follow?”

“We’ll just see how he wants to play it,” said Sam. “Maybe the Thompson will convince him to give up.”

“Anyone else,” said Ed, “but not this guy.”

“Can’t you go a little faster?” J.P. said. “They might be getting close.”

“We don’t want some country cop pulling us over for speeding,” said Les.

“Yeah, yeah,” said J.P., his mouth dry, no spit, his breathing hard and ragged.

The land changed after the Wisconsin border, the pines giving way to Illinois prairie, towns of no particular distinction, farm structures spread here and there in the little stands of trees.

Les looked back to Helen in the rear seat, where her seatmates were a Colt Monitor and a Thompson with a drum, plus assorted magazines and automatic pistols.

“Are you okay, honey?”

“I’m swell,” she said.

“See, no problem,” he said. “We’re way ahead of the game. That fed’s probably still trying to get his mind around it, he has no idea where we went to, he’s probably just going to file a report and call it a day. As I say, we hit D’Abruzzio without a hitch and then we’re home free. Next stop: Reno. J.P., you can get your girl Sally over from Sausalito and we can rent a house together. Helen, you’ll like Sally. You gals can go shopping, and J.P. and I’ll play golf or something. We’ll get the kids out pretty soon. It’ll be great.”

Why did none of them believe it?

Beyond Crystal Lake, the road turned due east for a while. It was flat country, though dotted with brush and clusters of trees. Two lanes, separated by a median strip, ran unerringly toward Lake Michigan, still thirty miles or so ahead. Traffic was sparse, no police cruisers were seen, and Les kept scanning his rearview mirror for evidence of a Division fleet, but nothing came over the horizon that wasn’t another civilian car dawdling through errands or sales calls. He began to relax. He could almost believe himself. Yeah, they were going to get away with it, and it would all be just fine, exactly as he had said. He cranked around and smiled at Helen.

“How’re you doing, sweetie?”

She smiled back.

“Just fine,” she said. “I hope none of these damned things go off, though.”

“They’re fine,” he said. “Just don’t get curious and start poking at them. You could blow fifty holes in the roof.”

The road turned again, though not so severely, adopting a forty-five-degree angle to the southeast. In time, they passed a wide spot in the road called Fox River Grove, of no consequence except as the locale for a well-known Mob watering hole called Louis’s and the bridge over the Fox River.

“Next stop,” said Les, who knew the road, “Barrington. Then we’re practically there.”

Charles drove. Since it was his own private car and not a Division vehicle, he had to stay just above the legal speed limit for fear of losing even more time being stopped for speeding by a local. His automatic weighed heavily under his left shoulder, though as a precaution against fast, sudden action he’d unsnapped the strap.

He ran into traffic, had to pull over for an ambulance, got caught behind an at-grade train crossing, each little incident putting him farther behind than where, ideally, he could have been. He ground his teeth, scanning the band of road ahead of him for the shiny black Ford V-8, but it never came up.

It seemed there were 8s all over the place, however, and each demanded a close examination, but none was the 1934 model year, or particularly shiny. Each one, as well, cost him some time.

He was driven by an image of Sam in a fight and the prospect ate a hole in his guts. He found himself secretly hoping that Nelson had been smart, had gotten off Northwest Highway as soon as he got into Illinois, and had chosen a less direct route into Chicago. He tried to put his mind inside that of the man he was hunting. It made sense. Knowing he’d been made by Justice, Nelson would default from the straight, clear, obvious highway into the big town and either worm his way in via the jiggly little roads of the North Shore or go wide around the city on a western arc and come into it from another direction. He might even have gone north from the Lake Como Inn and would now be headed deep into Wisconsin or would have turned again and be coursing west to Minnesota.

Why would he shoot like an arrow into Chicago? It made no sense at all.

The traffic out Touhy was not heavy, as it was still mid-afternoon, and they hit Northwest Highway by 3:15 p.m. Turning right, they began the angle out toward Wisconsin, still sixty miles distant, which would take them through small towns just at the edge of bedroom-community distance from Chicago, like Park Ridge, Des Plaines, and Arlington Heights.

Sam placed his hand on the two heavy weapons to secure them, to hold them still, to keep them from bouncing. He tried to think of something to say but came up with nothing. Though technically in command, he was well aware that Ed Hollis had been blooded at Little Bohemia and was Charles’s co-shooter on the Dillinger kill.

He looked over, took some pleasure in the young man’s calm visage and straight-ahead concentration on the driving issues before him. Ed betrayed no symptoms of fear; he didn’t appear to be breathing hard, he wasn’t abnormally blanched of color, he wasn’t licking conspicuously dry lips.

Fine, being paired with a solid guy like Hollis was a great break for Sam, whose insides trembled at the thought of what could lie ahead. He tried to order his heart to beat more slowly, his breathing to lose its rawness, his mouth to moisten. The body would not listen to his mind.

Think of the guns, he thought. Think of what Charles said. You concentrate on the gun, the shooting, that clears your mind of fear and you are able to operate. He tried to imagine looking over the flat receiver of the Remington and pulling the trigger, feeling the hard bark of the gun against his shoulder, and seeing the man of his many nightmares stagger backwards and drop. But the image disappeared and was replaced by another, of himself pulling the same trigger and nothing happening and him struggling, banging it, pushing levers and pulling cranks, trying to get it to work, while Baby Face Nelson, laughing, walked closer and closer…

“There,” said Hollis.

Sam looked at what was indeed a shiny black V-8 in the other lane, across the median, and his eyes locked on the license as his hand clenched the barrel of one of the guns.

Illinois 556091.

He breathed an involuntary sigh of relief.

“Close, but no luck,” said Hollis.

Sam said nothing. He wanted it to be Baby Face; he didn’t want it to be Baby Face. He wanted it to be now; he wanted it to be never. He wanted it to be finished; he wanted it to never start.

He laughed. Manhunts were such a trite, pulp thing, and yet here in life, as in pulp, the ending was the same. The head man hunter faced the quarry, gun to gun, face-to-face. It never happened that way except in pulp! In life, the boss was usually far away in an office or a thousand miles away in a capital city! Yet somehow this boss had ended up in this car with this riot gun.

They ran into some traffic as they hit a jog in the road just outside of Barrington; that little bedroom village contributed more than its share of cars to the traffic stream, and the two agents eyeballed each one, their car going the opposite direction, feeling both frustration and relief as each passing car turned out to be innocent.

Beyond Barrington, the traffic again thinned, and a sign announced that FOX RIVER GROVE would be next, six miles farther down. The land was flat, gone to thatch, the trees skeletal in late fall, the weather gray and chilly, at 40 degrees just cold enough to produce vapor from breathing to smear the windshield. Ahead, a single car came toward them. Yes, it was black. Yes, it was shiny. Yes—

“It’s them,” Hollis said.

Sam caught the first three numbers of the plate before the angle of passage took the view away: 639—

The cars passed, Sam turned, craning to verify the plate, and saw the last three: —578.

With a calm that surprised even himself, he said, “Okay, Ed, get us across the median and we’ll close on him.”

Without thinking, he took up the Thompson.

“Okay,” said Les, eyeing his rearview, “I got a guy coming around on us.”

He watched in the mirror as a heavy, dark vehicle raised dust as it bounced across the median, and, in profile, the car he made out was a dark Hudson. It hit the pavement, rammed its way through a hard left, and began to come after them.

“He’s Division,” Les said. “That’s what they drive.”

“Oh, hell,” said J.P.

“I wonder how he got on us?” said Les.

“Les, I’m scared,” said Helen.

“Honey, it’s nothing,” said Les. “We’ll let him get close, then J.P. will give him a squirt with the Colt rifle in the hood and blow out his engine and he’ll be dumped way out here with no way to call headquarters. We’ll get off this big road and zip into Evanston and lay up. Tomorrow, we’ll get a new set of wheels and go on with the plan. It’s nothing. J.P., you get that thing ready. Honey, get down on the floor, just to stay out of the way.”

His voice was falsely chipper, and he watched as whoever was behind the wheel of the Division car leaned on the pedal, and it seemed to go from very far away to damned close in a single second.

Beside him, J.P. leaned over the seat and pulled the Colt Monitor over the obstacle of the seat back and oriented it toward the back window, nesting it against his shoulder, his forearm on the seat back, lowering his eye to the sights, exactly when Helen slithered to the floor.

He could feel J.P. squirming, adjusting, fiddling with the heavy rifle, cocking it, checking the mag, trying to get comfortable in what was admittedly a tough position from which to shoot well off his knees on the seat, against the sway and jiggle and roar of the car. Still, J.P.’s clumsiness with the task deeply annoyed Les and he wished he’d been on the gun, J.P. driving, because he was such a better shot and so much more effective in action.

“Have you got him yet?”

“This car’s bouncing, that car’s bouncing, the gun’s bouncing, I’m bouncing, the whole world is bouncing. Maybe if you slowed down a little bit.”

“He’ll be by us if I slow down, and he’ll have shots into us and we won’t have a thing to throw back. Goddammit, hit him. Hit him!”

J.P. fired a short burst, insanely loud in the confines of the car, the smell of burning powder and the spew of flecks and debris, driven by the fury of gas bleed-off, as well as the hot-as-hell spent shells pitching into the Ford’s cabin, one scorching shell hitting Les in the bare neck and making him flinch.

He saw the Hudson evade left, out of the line of fire, through the galaxies of crack and puncture of the back window.

“Did I hit him? I had him good!”

“He’s still coming, he’s around on us, trying to get into the blind spot. I’m gunning it. Get ready to fire again.”

Les punched it hard, felt the small car buck ahead and put a few feet of distance between his vehicle and the government men’s, which brought the Hudson back into J.P.’s field, and he squeezed off another short burst, repeating the drama of the heavy weapon firing in the confines of the small cabin.

“Goddammit, I thought I had him.”

“He’s still there. The guy’s got a machino!”

Les punched again, spurting ahead, just as the rip of the Thompson announced that a squad of hardball had been launched. One or two of the five or six seemed to hit the Ford, announcing their arrival with a smack of rending metal upon penetration, and a shiver of vibration, but most of the rounds blazed off in the direction of Barrington.

“Go for the windshield,” Les screamed. “Kill these bastards!”

It was so hard. The gun was moving, the car was moving, dust filled the air, and Sam tried to hold the wedge of the front sight on the wavering image of the Ford a few dozen feet ahead, also roaring along at seventy-five miles per, but it was a total universe of swerve and jounce and tremble and shudder, the blur of the world, and even as he fired, he knew a rogue lurch had taken the sight off the target and, by the time he’d stopped shooting, he was staring at empty space above the Ford’s roof.

“Dammit!” he screamed to nobody.

The gun was so heavy, and he was resting the drum on the sill, trying to pivot with the wanderings of the two cars in the hot, blurry world of seventy-five miles per hour, but it was all but impossible. He pulled both grips tight against him, drawing the weapon hard to his shoulder, even as his back was in a strange twist in defiance of anatomical regularity, driving a pain into him, but as the car seemed to go calm for just a second. He had it, he was there, at about forty-five degrees to it, and he fired three and knew that two of them had blown blisters in the hood. Then the fragile relationship of car to car shattered in the random swerves of the chase and the Ford spurted ahead again, out of position for him to pivot the muzzle on it.

He looked in horror as the gunner in the Nelson car yanked his gun off the seat back, where it had rested for aiming through the window, cranked hard toward them, and just at that moment Ed hit the brakes, the Hudson fishtailing out of contention and the opponent’s field of fire, and the heavy sounds of the Colt were only sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The Hudson slid, wavering left, its tires grabbing for traction but finding none, and suddenly it was perpendicular to the direction of the road. Ed fought the wheel, finally got control of the car, but both saw that the gangster Ford had blown the chase open and was opening distance at a relentless pace. Ed cranked the wheel, stood on the accelerator, and rocketed ahead.

“He may have too much on me now, goddammit!” he screamed.

“Go, go, we can catch him!” Sam heard himself yelling, feeling magnificently without fear, his blood hot and angry, his instincts in a place they’d never been before, demanding that they close the gap, get into muzzle-burn range, and kill the gangsters.

“He’s slowing,” yelled Ed.

It was true. For unknown reasons, the Ford was decelerating, careening right, off the road to the shoulder, and then fishtailed down a dirt road, which had suddenly presented itself, where it came to a sloppy, dusty stop maybe fifty yards off Northwest Highway.

They roared by as Sam got the Thompson set again and dispatched a long burst, hoping to rake the car and send all its occupants to the morgue, but his shots started high, and went higher as they passed, while Ed pumped the brakes for control and brought the Hudson to a halt fifty yards or so beyond the turnoff.

“We’ve got him now,” yelled Sam, spilling from the car to get behind it, find cover, and resume firing.

“Bastard put one into the engine!” screamed Les. “I got no speed or acceleration.”

“Pull over!” screamed J.P.

Helen just screamed.

Les fought the dying car through a rocking right-hand turn, and as he transitioned from the pavement to the raw dirt of the smaller road, the windshield went red with dust, which typhooned through the open windows, blanketing everything in choking grit.

Then it was over, as the car came to a halt and its engine finally died.

At that moment the federal car flew by, trailing its own column of ruptured earth, even as one of the G-Men fired a Thompson burst as he passed them. It was bum shooting, and neither Les nor J.P. had time to react, or really any need to, the bullets spending themselves fecklessly far beyond their target.

“We take these guys, we grab their car, we detour into Evanston, it’s fine, it’s no problem,” Les directed.

Helen, crumpled in the rear seat well, screamed again.

“It’s okay,” Les said. “Sweetie, jump out and take a powder. Nobody’s going to shoot the woman. We’ll pick you up in a few minutes.”

Helen popped the door, rolled out.

“I love you, baby,” she yelled.

“I love you too, baby girl.”

She scampered away, as Les, outside on his side of the car, reached across the backseat for the Thompson gun, fetched it by its front grip, and brought it to the shoulder. Behind him, J.P., with the Monitor, squirmed out, slipped down the car body to the front tire, and came over the hood, bracing the heavy weapon on it.

“Try not to hit the car,” Les yelled. “We need it in one piece, and we need to do this goddamned thing fast.”

He brought his own gun up, oriented down the receiver, Lyman aperture to front sight, and confronted the blue Hudson, about a hundred fifty feet out, on the shoulder. It faced due south, while the Ford had died facing due west. Between them, the contested ground was a triangular chunk of grassy Barrington parkland unmarked by trees or bushes, just open ground, its yellow-brown grass alive in the chilly breeze, while, all around, skeletal trees stood in twisted postures, as if arranging themselves for the best view of the fun in front of them. Les squinched his eyes and could make out behind the Hudson the shapes of the two agents as they secured their weapons and set themselves for the fight of their lives.

Les raked a long burst across the rear of the Hudson, kicking yet more dust in the air. He heard the more convulsive blasts of the Monitor, as J.P. squirted a short welcome in the same direction; his bullets being faster and more powerful, they didn’t so much kick the dirt up as detonate it, blowing huge gouts of loam skyward, driving the guy who’d risen over the hood back.

The G-Man with the Thompson fired a long burst that pecked its way down the length of the Ford’s exposed side, blowing out windows, making the thing bounce and shudder as the bullets riddled the metal. Les answered with a mag dump, again aiming his shots into the ground just to the rear of the Hudson, again filling the air with a screen of grit, driving the Tommy gunner back. He wondered where G-Man number two was. No action from the other end of the car yet. Les came over to hunt for him, having just a little angle onto the car’s grille, but the fellow was too canny to make a dumb mistake like that, so Les’s burst was just an exercise in suppressive fire.

He dropped the mag, skittered back to the rear seat, and reached in to grab two more just as a burst of hardball blew through the door, shredding it, letting gray sky in through the new crown of twisted steel.

That was too close for comfort.

He rushed through the mag change, exposed himself briefly, and jacked out a short burst.

“We just gotta hold ’em!” yelled Sam from his position behind the rear of the Hudson, his Thompson trained on the Ford a hundred fifty feet away, as he scanned for targets. “There’ll be cops and State boys and even Charles here in minutes, maybe seconds. Just hold ’em.”

“He’s too far for the shotgun,” Ed yelled back from his crouch behind the wheel at the car’s other end, just below the crest of the hood. “Goddamn, I need a rifle!”

“I have ’em pinned,” yelled Sam. He ducked up, squeezed a small dose of lead off, then dropped down.

Ed had his Super .38 out. He rose over the hood, and though it was a long shot, he knew his chances improved with stability, so he placed the gun in both hands against the flat of the hood, held high, eyes pinned on the front sight, and fired three times at the hunched figure behind the hood whose automatic rifle was sending hellacious strikes toward them. He slipped down immediately after the third shot, hoping that one of these too-long attempts had connected but suspecting they hadn’t. He squirmed farther down and emerged around the grille of the Hudson and this time fired left-handed at the figure with the Thompson, again holding high, again doing everything right except hitting.

“Goddamn,” he screamed as the slide locked back, and he dipped back just as the earth next to him broke into spurts of dirt and grit, sending a sting of debris toward him. He reached into his suit pocket, yanked a Super .38 mag free, and slammed it into the shaft of the pistol grip, came back over again.

He saw Baby Face.

He saw him coming right at them.

“He’s coming, Sam. Hit him, hit him, hit him! He’s coming!”

Les fired, the gun quit on its own, and he looked to see a stovepipe jam at the breach, the shell trapped between the bolt and the breach opening at a weird angle. He pulled hard on the bolt, to no effect, felt a scalding column of steam rise from it.

This has to be over, he thought.

Every second we are stuck here, we are closer to going down.

I have to end this thing now.

He stood, slipped over to J.P., crouched at the other end of the Ford, and slid the Thompson to him.

“Fix this goddamned thing! Here, give me the big one.”

They exchanged weapons, J.P. taking the Thompson, looking at it, realizing the magazine follower had jammed the shell up too quickly. His quick fix was to hit the mag button and drop the defective mag, even as Les gave him a new twenty-round magazine. He locked it in, found the bolt free, drew it back.

Les grabbed two more Monitor mags out of the back, dumped the half-full one, and pushed a new one into the well.

“I’m going to finish these bastards,” he shouted. “Cover me, goddammit.”

He rose, the Monitor locked under his right arm, his right hand crushing the pistol grip, his left guiding the muzzle from the fore end, and began to walk toward the Hudson, squeezing out short bursts. He walked in a fury of hatred and fear, everything he was, or had dreamed of, expressed in the insane trudge into the guns of the Division, daring them to bring him down, not caring if they did, his mind crazy-bent on one goal, which was to kill. He walked, he walked, he felt three thumps as three hardballs hit him hard in the belly and chest but did not penetrate the steel that shielded his body from them. He walked, he walked, he fired, he walked, the shells flipped from the breach, the heavy bullets tore huge detonations of dirt and shredded grass skyward. He felt his legs light up in pure sting. He walked, he walked, he walked.

“He’s coming, Sam! Hit him, hit him, hit him! He’s coming!”

Sam slipped around the body of the car and saw the killer stomping furiously toward him, hat low, face red, bent over his automatic rifle in some kind of desperate concentration, and Sam got to him first. He put the wedge sight square in the middle of the chest and squeezed off a burst and knew that he’d hit with three dead-solid, perfect killing shots to the center of mass, but still the man came on, unperturbed by the death that had just eviscerated him.

Sam got back on target, this time leaning harder into the car for more support, clenching the gun to shoulder, and all his muscles tight against it, looking through the Lyman aperture at the front sight’s triangle, and squeezed off another burst, but at two rounds the gun went quiet.

What the hell?

He brought it down and realized he had no idea what to do. He banged hard at it with one hand, then pulled back on the bolt and it slid, perfectly and smoothly, locking back, and he looked into the breach that his move had opened and saw only emptiness where a cartridge should have been and realized, with horror, that the gun was empty and that he had no pistol and that—

It felt like he was kicked hard in the stomach twice, and a wave of dizziness crashed across him. The gun slipped from his grip, he tried to compensate for the spinning but he lurched forward, nose down, smelling the dirt and grass of Barrington.

Somehow, he found the strength to look up and saw the gunman twenty feet away, but having turned, now addressing Ed.

“Ed, Ed!” he called, not so much voice but heart, for he wanted nothing more than to protect the young man, but then it all went away and he blacked out.

Les saw the lawman go down, as by the application of a sudden bolt of energy his body moved by the velocity of what had struck him, not by anything he himself had done. He alchemized in a microsecond from alive and vital to sheer weight falling in obedience to gravity and hit ground, twitching. Les knew the man had taken two solid through the gut. He knew such hits had permanent results. He knew you didn’t come back from two Government .30s.

Another rage of bees tore at his legs, sending tendrils of angry pain through him. He turned and saw the other agent a few yards away, in mid-rush, as, having just abandoned his shotgun for empty, the man yanked on his pistol to bring it to bear.

But Les’s instincts had oriented the Monitor, and his instincts had motivated his trigger finger, and without willing or thinking, he felt the hydraulic spasms as the rifle fired four times in less than half a second, and one of the rounds smacked into the agent’s forehead, its force blowing his hat off as it cratered his face, which began to foam with blood. The man went down, hard and flat, stirred, rolled over, and then just lay still.

Suddenly it was quiet.

Suddenly it was over.

Les’s legs were on fire. The anesthetic of pure combat rage had abruptly quit and he felt the pain where he’d taken lead. He felt a dozen wounds, he felt the rush of blood, he felt steel clamps of hurt pinching hard, he felt the bones themselves crying to yield, to sag to earth, but he turned and yelled to J.P., then scanned for the approach of new enemies. Far off he could see people hidden behind stopped cars or peering around telephone poles, but no one wanted to enter the battlefield.

He limped to the Hudson, walked around it, and climbed in, dumping the heavy Colt Automatic Rifle in the passenger seat. The car was still running, as the driver had leapt from it at such a speed running for cover that he hadn’t switched off the ignition. Les dropped it into gear, legs still burning, and cranked the wheel, delivering the car in seconds to the Ford, which had been almost thoroughly eviscerated by the fight. It looked like it had been jackhammered by a crew of laborers. He pulled up next to it, stumbled out his own door, opened the rear door, and rolled in.

J.P. was on him in seconds.

“Load the guns and get us out of here.”

“How bad?”

“He had a shotgun. He put some buck in my legs, they hurt like hell, but I don’t think I’m bleeding out, and I couldn’t walk if he’d broken any bones.”

It took J.P. thirty seconds to toss the Thompson in, then he was behind the wheel and the car was in motion.

“Do you see Helen?” Les moaned from the backseat.

“No, I— Oh, wait. Jesus Christ, yes, here she is.”

Helen ran toward them as J.P. halted. She jumped in, screaming, “Oh god, baby, are you all right?” and J.P. punched it, the tires spinning on the grass, bucked to the pavement, and took off down Northwest Highway.

“Christ, it hurts,” Les was saying.

“It’s all right, baby,” said Helen.

60

There was no doubt about authenticity. The handwritten manuscript was spread over several stocks of old, old paper, dry as bone, delicate to the touch, a total of one hundred and fifty-one pages, all in the same hand, a big, looping, semi-literate cursive. None of it was written in ballpoint. You could track as the pencils, some blue, some red, some plain lead, wore to nub against the pressure of an eighty-year-old man’s rush of memories. It bore the title, handwritten in clumsy capitals, “THEY CALLED HIM BABY FACE!”

J.P. was no writer. His prose was barely serviceable, riddled with cliches and other forms of staleness, tripe, and banality. He frequently misspelled, had much trouble with tenses, and that American bugaboo: the mysterious apostrophe. But he wrote with energy, directness, and without any literary attributes, such as irony, sarcasm, archness, coyness. He just was racing death to get it all down. He almost made it.

But when they read the account, something almost magical occurred. In spite of its crudity, each man saw it as J.P. saw it — as if when the narrative intensified, J.P. became more of a writer, and pure memory elevated his prose — and by their need to know.

Nick put down the last page of his account of the battle. They sat at a dilapidated picnic table not far from the ruins of the cottage. It was sunny and quiet in the high woods, under a blue sky, where the mayhem just described was a million miles and eighty-three years away. Rawley had fetched the first chunk, stashed a few hundred meters away, while Braxton, still flex-cuffed but patient and obliging, played the hostage.

“Good reading, huh, boys?” he called, noting the completion.

They ignored him.

“No doubt those two guys were brave,” said Nick, “but they were so overmatched.”

“I’d hate to think of the rage Charles must have felt,” Bob said. “He could have handled Nelson and Chase, but he wasn’t there. Christ, the anger he must have felt.”

“This belongs to the Bureau,” said Nick. “It’s a perfect example of what not to do in a gunfight. It’s Dade County all over again. Or, rather, Dade County was Barrington all over again.”

He was alluding to an infamous Bureau gunfight where an anti-bank-robbery team had jumped a duo of heavily armed hard cases who wanted to go all the way. Who had to go all the way. Who, like their predecessor and icon, Lester “Baby Face Nelson” Gillis, had been dreaming of such an Armageddon in a very small space his whole life, and when it happened, he was ready for it, all gunned up, crazy-brave as any SS lunatic on the Eastern Front, and you could only beat him with courage, a mind as tough as his, experience, and bigger, faster bullets. That’s how Michael Platt killed two agents and wounded four more in three minutes of gunwork in August of 1987.

“Ballistics,” said Bob. “If you have ballistics on your side, you have God on your side.”

“Baby Face had the big gun, no doubt about it,” said Nick.

“That .30–06 on full auto must have been a terrifying thing. I’m just thinking that even as it hit the earth, even as it missed, it blew out such a chunk of planet, it had to drive the agents back, taken their aggression from them. In ’Nam, first tour, some of the RVNs were armed with old War Two stuff, and the BAR and the Browning Thirty did a job on any structure, any man, any vehicle, any anything they hit. There’s poor Sam, with a Thompson he’d never fired before, sending three-quarters of his shots into the sky or the dirt. There’s Hollis, a good man in a fight but stuck with a shotgun with a range of fifteen good yards before the shot pattern breaks apart. He goes to pistol, but he’s shooting a moving, advancing killer, while another one is suppressing him with full automatic.”

They were silent.

Then Bob said, “Charles Swagger would have shot Nelson in the knee, blown it out, and when he was down and still, shot him in the head, all from a hundred feet out. Then he would have set the car tank afire with Thompson tracer, and when Chase ran out in flames, screaming, he would have tracked him and blown his head off. And we wouldn’t be sitting here reading this.”

More silence.

Rawley emerged from the woods line, as before, his hands up.

“Last chunk,” he said, bringing the package over.

“This one’s got some surprises.”

Swagger took it, flipped through it, took a deep breath.

“You sure you want to read it now, sniper man? You may learn something you don’t want to,” said Braxton.

“Shut up,” said Nick.

“Fair warning,” said Rawley. “I’ve read it. He hasn’t.”

Rawley was right. Whatever Charles did or didn’t do, whatever he became, why his spiral was downward toward dissolution and death, it was here in this little nest of pages.

61

Just inside Barrington’s limits, the traffic backed up. Charles opened his door, and stood to see it was stopped by the presence of two police cruisers by the side of the road a hundred yards ahead. He got out his badge, got back in, and rolled down the window. Honking, he got enough room to maneuver to the shoulder, and progressed to the scene, where an officer halted him until Charles showed his badge.

The cop said, “Okay, sir, go on. They’re your people, all right.”

Charles felt his stomach drop out when the cop spoke. Never in a fight had he had such a feeling, but this one was straight off the cliff, all the way down, faster and faster, until he hit and was smashed to pieces.

He took a deep breath, moved ahead a few more yards to the police cruiser, and got out.

He could see Sam on the ground, blood everywhere on his lower trunk, the Thompson ahead of him in the grass, chinks of brass littering the site, a cop kneeling over, not doing much since there wasn’t much to do. Even from where he was, Charles could see the wound. He’d seen it before, in the war, and a fight or two along the way. The gut, straight through, blowing chunks and tubing out, opening a dozen unstoppable bloodstreams, pulverizing the mysterious organs that kept you alive. It was fatal.

He looked and a hundred fifty feet away saw the Ford, not so shiny now. Windows all shot out, one tire flattened, so the thing perched at a broken angle, dust and bullet holes all across it. From the site, he could pretty much read the story of the fight, and the tracks of the missing Hudson, heavy in the grass, told him the rest of the story.

He went to Sam.

The man had the death pallor, a rim of blood around his lips, his eyes sliding toward glassiness as he contemplated sky and nothing else. Flecks of blood dotted his skin. His Brooks Brothers striped shirt was seeped in magenta and flecked by kernels of black dried blood. His breathing was hardly there. But as Charles knelt, Sam managed to turn his eyes. Charles put his hand on the man’s shoulder, for there wasn’t enough energy left in him for him to lift a hand.

“Charles, he wouldn’t go down. I hit him over and over. I put that front sight on him, I fired short bursts. I know I hit him, but he kept on coming.”

“I’m sure you hit him bad, Sam. I’m sure he’s dead and they’ve dumped him in a hole somewhere. We’ll find him soon.”

“Oh god, Charles, I tried so hard. Tell my boys how hard I tried.”

“You can tell ’em yourself, Sam. They’ll sew you up and you’ll be back in no time.”

“How’s Ed, Charles? I haven’t heard anything, I haven’t seen him. I…” He trailed off.

Charles looked at the cop on the other side of Sam and the cop gave him the bad news with a quick shake of the head and Charles knew Ed was gone.

“They’re working on him now, Sam,” said Charles. “Like you, he’s going to pull through.”

“I know you’re lying, Charles. It’s okay. I was brave, wasn’t I? I did the job, the Duty. No one can say—”

“What they’ll say is that Division agent Sam Cowley stood up and shot it out with the most dangerous man in America. They’ll say that, because it’s the truth. You’re the best, Sam.”

“Charles, go now. Get him. He went south on the highway only a few minutes ago. He’ll stay under the speed limit. It’s the number nineteen car, blue Hudson, plate G45511.”

Charles nodded. He pressed Sam’s hand, and rose.

“The ambulance will be here in seconds,” he said.

The cop said to him, “Sir, you’d better take the guns along. This place is going to be hopping in minutes and there aren’t enough of us to keep control of the scene.”

“Good idea, Officer,” said Charles. He bent, picked up Sam’s Thompson, noting from the weight that it was empty. He walked to Ed — the blister of the entry wound was right above the eye — and picked up the Remington 11, also empty, and Ed’s Super .38. He walked back to his Pontiac and dumped them in the trunk, locking it. Then he had a second thought. He picked up the Thompson, hit the thumb latch, and slid the empty drum off the gun. In his trunk was a bag of assorted training items and he reached into it now, withdrew another fully loaded drum, fitted it to the rails on the receiver, and slid it home. He didn’t notice a T for “Training” painted crudely on its dark frontal surface. It locked solid. He pulled back the bolt, feeling the slide through resistance as the spring recoiled, until it too locked. Then he thumbed the safety prong to up — this is “On”—and put the weapon on the offside front seat. He thought he had time and returned to Sam.

“I’m going now.”

“Get him, Charles. I know you can.”

“You keep fighting and we’ll laugh about this on the patio one night.”

But he knew it wouldn’t be so, just as he knew what hope Sam had given him was lost now, bleeding out in the grass of a town nobody ever heard of, as the only man who could have saved him lay dying. He knew he had been killed too.

He went back to the car, turned the ignition, and accelerated, finding no traffic at all, as the crime scene had dammed the road. He drove less than a mile until he saw a phone booth outside a bar, cognizant, as he drove, of sirens as finally the ambulances pulled by.

He got the number out of his wallet, dropped in his nickel, the operator told him how much more it was, he dropped in another three dimes, and waited as she put the call through.

“Sorrento Social,” someone answered.

“Put D’Abruzzio on,” he said.

“Hey, who do you think you are, bud? Mr. D’Abruzzio is in—”

“I don’t care where he is. He’ll talk to me now. My name is Swagger. He knows who I am. Go get him.”

It seemed to take forever, but finally Uncle Phil was there.

“How the hell did you get this number, Swagger? What is—”

“Shut up, meatball,” said Charles. “Five minutes ago, Nelson shot and probably killed two Division agents in a town called Barrington, on Northwest Highway. He’s probably hit. Where would the nearest safe house be from there? He has to lay up. Where would he go?”

“Okay, I’ll find out. But later, you and I are going to have a talk about this phone number and what games you’re playing.”

D’Abruzzio put the phone down, and more hours, possibly even a month or two, dragged by. Finally, he was back.

“Okay, they say he’ll turn east on Palatine Road, somewhere off of Northwest up around you, just south of Barrington. It goes by the big airfield, then jigs a little at a religious place called Techny, and then it turns into Willow Road, but basically it’s a straight shot into Winnetka, which is next to Wilmette. Jimmy Murray has a house on Walnut Street, just off the downtown section: 447 Walnut. That’s his best shot, his fastest shot. But he’ll be pokey. He can’t go over the speed limit or he’ll get cops on him. If he’s cool enough to mosey along, he’ll be okay. Can you catch him?”

“Bet on it,” said Charles.

It was time to hunt.

62

“Wait a minute, sniper. Something you should know. Okay, sniper. Take it straight, deal with it.”

Bob fixed him with a hard sniper’s eye.

“What are you talking about?”

“This thing became just as big an obsession for me as for you,” said Rawley. “I called around, I talked to guys who told me stories told to them by their dads or granddads, who were cellmates of this fellow or that fellow, and I know what was said about it all. On our side of the street, that is — not the shit you call history.”

Bob waited.

“This story was big in the underworld in ’thirty-four, ’thirty-five, maybe even ’thirty-six. Somehow, it got forgotten as all the action moved to the East from the Midwest, where Dewey was going after the big New York people. Then the war came, and more stuff was lost, and so nobody remembered anything. But I found some memories.”

“Go ahead,” said Bob.

“You sure? You have an image of yourself and your kin, what kind of men you were, what you stood for. What’s it going to do to you to see that challenged, threatened. As I say, can you deal with it?”

“This is bullshit,” said Nick. “This creep is playing con games because he can’t do anything straight out. It’s not in the Grumley DNA.”

“The Grumley DNA is criminal, yes indeed,” said Rawley. “But inside of it, it’s about hillbilly honor and guts. It’s about standing straight and taking it, not ratting, not running, doing what’s right by a Grumley standard, even if death is the price. And maybe that describes Baby Face too, the big villain of the piece, but he gave it all up in payback for Johnny and Homer, and, in the fight of his life, walked straight into the guns.”

“That’s what Swagger is too,” said Nick. “With that minor detail, it does right by the standards of civilization, not by some backwoods clan of peckerwoods, chicken snatchers, cousin-fucking and sister-raping inbreds.”

“This fellow needs anger management,” said Rawley with a smirk. “His rapture over stereotype is quite disturbing. Antidepressants? Cymbalta? Zoloft? Anthrax? Okay, I am not shitting you, Swagger, it got around that somebody quit. One tin soldier ran away.”

“We ran into this one too. It’s crap.”

“We’ll see.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” said Bob.

“No, they say one of the Division studs called in, said, ‘Enough.’ He’d seen his buds shot to bits on the playground. He couldn’t take it no more. Too much blood, and he didn’t want to end up full of lead under the swings. He went away, just when they needed him most, back to Passel O’Toads, Arkansas. No names, but all fingers would point toward Charles, the man who shot Dillinger from behind and Pretty Boy from a hundred yards away.”

“Charles Swagger didn’t have no run in him,” said Bob.

“You don’t have no run in you. Maybe he did have run in him. Maybe not. I ain’t saying. I’ll let John Paul Chase tell the story. That is, if you’ve got guts enough.”

“He’s pure guts, goober,” said Nick.

Bob turned to page 152 of “THEY CALLED HIM BABY FACE!”

63

She had rolled his pant legs up, counted the holes — fifteen — and applied Mercurochrome to each one, painting orange over the red.

“How bad?”

“That stuff stings! But, generally, it’s better now.”

They had passed Curtiss Airport, taken a wide jog around some kind of religious place, and the road was now called Willow. It climbed a slope, crossed Waukegan Road, and they found farm-flatness on either side. Since it was chilly November, it was now dark, even at 6, and they rolled steadily on, through the sparse traffic of the sticks, with J.P. keeping a good lookout in the rearview as he held straight on.

“Anything?”

“Nah. Saw lights a few minutes ago, but they’ve gone now. He must have turned off. You okay?”

“He’s doing fine,” said Helen. “The bleeding’s stopped, no bones broken, and the bruising hasn’t started. Baby’s going to be fine.”

“Sure you don’t want a belt of hooch, Les?”

“Never touch the stuff.”

“Okay, we’re crossing Sunset Ridge Road, which means we’re coming into a nowheresville called Northfield, and just beyond it is Winnetka, and then a couple miles to Mr. Murray’s place in Wilmette. It won’t be long now.”

“Great,” said Les, snuggling his head against the warm and ample bosom of his wife, who held him close to her, her arms locked around his shoulders, her face next to his.

“I’m thinking clear now,” Les said. “I was sort of dingy in the head after I got shot up, but everything is clear now. We’ll go to Mr. Murray’s, someone’ll know a doc or a vet, they can dig these things out of my legs, and I’ll be good as new. Then we’ll visit our pal D’Abruzzio and be on our way.”

“You know what, Les,” said J.P. “I always thought it was a screwball plan, but you pulled it off. You made it happen. It turned on sheer guts, and you did it.”

“Yeah, me and an inch of steel.” Les laughed, and banged his fist against the sheet of metal under this shirt that shielded his vitals from the bullets of the law. “Bonk, bonk, bonk!” he said, “three times Mr. Federal nailed me in the boiler room with his machino and I didn’t feel nothing. Joke’s on him. He forgot to wear his. Bet he wears it everyplace in heaven!”

Les and J.P. laughed, though Helen felt a little squeamish laughing at the death of the federal officer, as she didn’t share Les’s rage at such men. If they had to die, they had to die, that was the bargain, but it was somehow wrong getting all sis-boom-bah about it.

“Les,” she said, “let the poor man rest in peace.”

“Come on, Helen,” said Les, “I made him famous. And since he’s a Justice Department guy, he should be glad he died for justice — my justice on Phil D’Abruzzio — instead of a lousy bank job or—”

Where did it come from? It was suddenly just there, beside them, angling in at their speed and clipping the fender hard. Les raised his head, as Helen screamed and J.P. fought the wheel for control, and saw a large dark car boring against theirs.

In the next second, the phantom had forced them off the road into a field, dark and immense, where J.P. hit the brakes to keep from spinning out of control, the car skidding as the locked wheels failed to bite into the loam, the car rocking, sliding, grinding, Les banging his head on the seat in front of him, Helen screaming again, the whole universe suddenly gone screwball, as nothing made any sense at all.

They came to rest a few dozen feet off of Willow Road, the intercepting vehicle angled ahead of them. At that point, its driver flicked on his own lights, so that his double beams cut into the Hudson’s double beams, and the area suddenly came alive in the glow of the illumination.

“Are you all right?” J.P. said.

“Take the machino!” responded Les, sitting upright, lifting the Thompson from the floor with a single arm and trying to get it over the seat to J.P. But he hadn’t the strength, even if it was the lightest of the two weapons available, and it fell back to the floor. His hand squirted to his .45 in the shoulder holster, as J.P. also went to pluck his pistol from concealment.

The door of the other car opened and a man stepped around it and into the light.

It was the G-Man. He had a Thompson.

64

“All right,” said Bob, “he’s there. I didn’t see any run.”

“Maybe it’s in the next chapter,” said Rawley.

Bob regarded him harshly, but such was Rawley’s intense sense of Grumley self-adoration, it made not a dent in the man’s smirk.

“I’m just trying to make you aware of what’s in the air,” he said. “I don’t want you feeling bushwhacked and getting all disappointed. Maybe Swagger, disappointed, doesn’t keep his word.”

“I’ll keep my word,” said Bob.

“But maybe I won’t keep mine,” said Nick.

“That fellow,” yelled Braxton from his seat on the edge of the hole, “bears watching. You keep your eye on him, brother.”

“I will, brother,” yelled Rawley back at him. Then, turning to Bob, he said, “So Charles has finally caught up with Baby Face. What happens next, do you suppose, sniper?”

“I’d say death in a hat comes to call on Mr. Lester J. Gillis,” said Bob.

65

full moon, but not yet risen off the horizon. Orange, maybe umber, throwing its thin hue across the known world. A cold and blustery evening. An empty field in a farm town in a Midwest as flat as the Atlantic when calm. Otherwise, not much information: no traffic, no lights, no sign of civilization. Wind rushing through the high, dry grass, the stalks rubbing and whispering against one another. A vault of stars across the sky, pinwheels and whirligigs and clouds of light a billion miles away. The intersecting beams of the headlamps of the two twisted cars throwing an odd lattice of brightness across the land, illuminating the still-settling dust.

They watched him come. Tall man, low fedora, open topcoat, white shirt, black tie. Gunman. Face grim, sunken, maybe cadaverous, but those eyes! Dark and mournful and without flutter or tremor: blinkless. He moved with panther grace, big hands loose and ready on the submachine gun. He stared hard at them, hard enough to melt the glass through which they saw him.

“We both draw and fire,” said J.P. “Helen, you get down and—”

“No, my arm is pinned behind Helen and you aren’t fast enough. Hold steady, hear him out.”

The agent opened the passenger door.

“Hands on wheel, Chase,” he said. “If I see them move, I’ll part your haircut with hardball.”

J.P. swallowed. It did not occur to him to defy.

“You,” he said to Les. “Out here, little man. You and I have business.”

“He can’t walk, sir,” said Helen. “His legs are shot up.”

“Then I will kill him where he sits,” said the agent.

“My legs are okay,” said Les. “And I’m not afraid. If it’s a gunfight you want, mister, you have knocked on the right door. I fear no man and back down from no man.”

The agent stepped away, insolently turned his back, daring them to shoot. They would not — they could not — for they all believed that among his talents would be seeing behind himself.

“Still got the steel vest, Les?” asked J.P. in a whisper, having not moved his head, his hair, or his hands.

Bonk, came the answer, as Les slid over the Monitor, hooked the Thompson, and removed himself from the car. The first weight of his body and all that steel against his legs produced fifteen jets of pain that made him wince and cave, but he steadied himself on the car door, took a step, and then another, and found the pain at first bearable and then forgettable. He moved out twenty feet and faced his opponent.

“You cut that steel loose or I will put one between your eyes and turn your friends to Swiss cheese,” said the agent.

Hell! How did he know?

Les set the gun down in the grass, reached into his jacket, and unbuckled the two supporting straps. As the second one went, the two pieces of steel fell to the ground and then toppled flat to earth.

“Les!” screamed Helen.

“Don’t you worry, honey,” said Les, eyes riveted on the G-man, “this boy wants to play with the machino. No man in this world can take me on the machino.”

He picked the Thompson up, easily hefting it to his midline, where it rested in the familiarity of his two hands.

“You say we have business, sir?”

“I am Charles Swagger, Special Agent, Department of Justice,” said the man. “I hearby place you under arrest for multiple outstanding felony warrants, including first-degree murder this afternoon, against federal agents in Barrington, Illinois, those warrants forthcoming. I order you to surrender your weapon and raise your hands or prepare to face the consequences.”

“I am Lester J. Gillis, wrongly called ‘Baby Face’ by the newpapers, and you will have to take me the hard way,” said Les.

Two men, thirty feet apart. Each cranked a bit, quartering himself with respect to the other, with the Thompson gun on the diagonal across his body. They held still, each exploring the other’s face and body, reading what data the smear of lights from moon and headlights permitted, reading the position of the hands, the set of the chin in the jaw, the narrowness of the eyes, the tension, or absence of same, in the muscles of the face. Another second passed as the face-off approached — first, anticlimax; then farce, or even parody; and then—

Moon, wind, chill.

Les was fast as a burning cat. In pure blur he leveraged the big gun up and his talented eyes read the line that extended from back sight to front sight to target, calculating angles and muscle energy, graceful as any skeet champion, matador, or épée artist, a man with a true gift for the gun, all reflexes and experience that no instrument yet devised could measure, and he felt his finger find and caress the trigger straight back so there’d be no torque and the gun would hold true to the intentions of its shooter but—

The rustle of dry grass, the hum of double-winged navy FF-1 vectoring low toward Curtiss, a reveler’s far-off honk from a Model A.

Les had talent, more than most. Charles had genius, more than all. His speed had no place in time and his imagination saw the weapon as merely another pistol, and so he didn’t bother with the guidance of the left hand on the front grip, much less sights or hold or breath, but merely by vice-like strength of those long fingers, that thick wrist, that articulated forearm, put the gun where whatever autistic worm that lived deep in the ancient part of his brain instructed, and his wasn’t the first shot, it was the first six shots, and when Les’s finger closed on the trigger, it could but jack three useless rounds off, one of which clipped off half an inch of Charles’s ear, a wound Charles did not even notice.

Meanwhile, Charles’s Thompson delivered its cargo in less than two-tenths of a second, six reports un-separated by pause or click, sending the 230-grain missives into the night in consecrations of radiance and spark and spinning flecks of flaming powder, which yielded to yet more pyrotechnics. The T for “Training” on the drum also meant T for “Tracer,” designed to demonstrate to rookie agents the power of the Thompson. It now demonstrated that power to Les. Six red-tipped Frankford Arsenal M1 .45 slugs streaked across time and space as if such trivial human conceits didn’t exist, each leaking a plumb-line contrail of sheer incandescence that bleached the black from the darkling plain as they reached and sank into and through the middle parts of Lester J. Gillis, then, still at killing velocity, vanished into the Illinois prairie at unpredictable angles.

Darkness returned to the planet a splinter of a second later, but the bullets had done their work, arriving in a three-inch cluster, blowing out viscera, vein, and artery, coil of intestines, bits of liver and spleen and spine, gobbets of muscle, ligament, and gristle, opening a hundred roaring Mississippis of blood that no force on earth could dam.

First shim of ice on the pond, the snap of dry leaves whirling in the air on a whisper of breeze.

Les stepped back, felt his weapon disappear from his grip, tried to compensate for his sudden blast of vertigo, lost his footing, and sat down hard in the grass. He touched the wound and was amazed at the blood flow, and how quickly wet his hand became.

He looked up to the lawman, who stood ready to fire again.

“You killed me,” he said in disbelief.

“I believe I have,” said Swagger.

66

“I don’t get it,” said Nick. “That’s not the Baby Face story. Or, rather, it’s the Baby Face story but with a new ending.”

Swagger didn’t say anything.

“Did he make this up to sell books, I wonder,” said Nick. “It’s more dramatic, it’s more movie-like, it’s better, certainly, as story.”

Swagger and Memphis looked at Rawley Grumley, who returned their stares evenly. No tremble in that boy.

“Grumley, the standard story about Nelson is that—”

“I know what it is,” said Rawley. “I read the history books.”

“So why would he make this up? Or is this the truth and the official story is the fable? ‘When the facts conflict with the legend, print the legend.’”

Nobody said a thing for a bit. Blue sky, the odd spectacle of three men sitting around a ruined picnic table, a fourth man, hands bound, sitting halfway in a hole, a coffin, a pile of gun-shaped objects shrouded in tightly wrapped canvas, and a Honda Recon sitting parked, all in the lee of the remains of a cottage.

“If it’s true, Charles should be a hero. Every schoolboy should want to be Charles.”

“How about you, sniper? You got anything to say. He’s your blood.”

“I don’t know.”

“Let me just check something,” said Nick. He took out his iPhone. “Let’s see if I can get anything out here or just— Well, well, hello, Internet. Okay, let’s check on the moon. Easily done now, not so easily done in 1973 or ’4 when Chase was writing at the age of eighty in his great-granddaughter’s basement in Sausalito. Come on, Google, where are you, you bastard?”

Google arrived, and Nick carefully ordered it to look for “Condition of Moon, Central Time Zone, November 27, 1934.”

One-point-eleven seconds passed, and Google loaded the iPhone’s small screen with possibilities, and Nick, like every other Google user since the beginning of Google, chose the first entry, to find that some insane person with way too much time on his hands had indeed put together a moon phase website indexed to all the years of the calendar.

“Well?” said Swagger.

“Okay. The moon was full. It didn’t reach apogee till eleven thirty-four, which means that at six, or whenever this action took place, it was indeed low. It would have been red, because its light was passing through more atmosphere.”

“All right,” said Swagger, “it seems real. But, like Nick, I don’t know why this isn’t the story we all know, why the papers weren’t all over it, why it’s hidden or something. I don’t get it.”

“Maybe the old man killer had something up his sleeve,” said Rawley.

67

Charles stood above the man he’d shot, who sat clumsily in the grass, his shirt rapidly loading with dark blood, whose face still showed disbelief and stupor, his open, slack fingers useless.

“Now I’m going to give you something you didn’t give nobody. You sure didn’t give it to Sam or Ed. They checked out alone.”

The man looked at him. His brain still half worked, and Charles knew he was comprehending. He blinked, maybe tried to speak but only swallowed, then coughed some blood sputum.

“You get to die in the arms of your wife with your best friend standing by.”

He turned to Helen and J.P., who were out of the car now and bearing witness to Les’s death.

“Dump the guns and get him out of here. You can take him to the hospital, if you want, but it won’t do no good. I’ve seen that wound before. All those holes. It’s always fatal. He’s got an hour or so left before he pumps dry.”

“Thank you,” said Helen. “You are a decent man.”

She ran to Les.

“Oh, baby, baby,” she said, holding him, unfazed by the copious blood that soaked his midsection, “we’ll get you out of here, we’ll take care of you. It’ll be all right, you’ll be fine.”

He’ll be fine in hell, Charles thought.

He stood by as Helen and J.P. lifted the bleeding man and took him to the car, out of which J.P. had already pulled the Monitor, a batch of magazines and cartridge boxes.

“And one more thing. Helen, you come here now.”

Helen turned from her comforting and came to Charles. She was a pretty gal, no doubt about it. Why do they give themselves away on such trash? It was one of the great mysteries of life.

“You listen to me, now,” he said. “This didn’t happen. I never ran you off the road, there was no gunfight, it wasn’t my bullets that hit him. Sam Cowley put six slugs into him in Barrington and he bled to death on account of that. There was no Swagger, nothing in a field, in a hick town, a hundred miles from anywhere, no moon, no wind, no grass blowing. That’s the story you tell in exchange for giving him the sort of death he don’t otherwise deserve. If I hear different from either of you, I will come visit and you won’t like that a bit.”

They looked at him, not comprehending.

“Just do what I say. You will be caught, you will be questioned, give ’em some cock-and-bull about safe houses in Wilmette. It don’t matter, they won’t care. Just set your mind to it. You’re doing it for him, think of it that way.”

“I don’t understand,” said Helen.

“You don’t have to. Now, get out of here. Take Lester to the cemetery he so richly deserves.”

“We’ll put him in St. Peter’s in Niles Center. He likes it.”

68

“So where does the story he chickened out come from?” asked Nick. “I don’t see any—”

But then he halted.

Bob broke his silence.

“He couldn’t save Sam. That would dog him the rest of his life. Maybe it destroyed him. But he was able to save Sam’s reputation, his memory, his heroism, in the story that Sam killed Baby Face. Along with Ed Hollis. To do that, he had to take himself out of the story. He had to erase himself from history and from the FBI. We’ll never know how he did it, but the ‘running away’ lie was part of it. He had to do what Baby Face couldn’t do. He had to kill himself.”

69

Charles watched the Hudson pull out with its cargo of dying gangster. Where it went, what they did with the body, all that meant nothing at all to him. It would take care of itself.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his handkerchief and applied it to the wound on his ear. The linen came away saturated with red. He went back to the wound, cleaned it as best he could, satisfied himself that he’d lost the top half inch, and that it would scab over for a month or so, but that it wouldn’t kill him. He’d stop and get some disinfectant for it.

He went to the guns, which lay in the grass. The Monitor was heavy, but not so heavy that he couldn’t also take up the Thompson by its front grip. He got the load to the Pontiac, opened the trunk, and laid the weapons next to Sam’s Thompson and Ed’s Model 11. He went back, picked up the various .45s and magazines that had spilled out of a getaway bag, the bag itself, and took it all to the trunk too. One item was an envelope, which held a crisp, new thousand-dollar bill. He threw that in the trunk too. Then, standing there, he peeled off his topcoat and his suit coat, unsnapped and unbuttoned his floral-carved shoulder rig with its automatic. He looked at it, a man who trusted a gun, and the gun protected him and did its duty for him. Can’t ask more of a gun. You did good, bud, he thought, and laid it on the pile. He closed the lid, got his coats on fast — it was cold, the moon was higher now, full and bone white, the wind still whistled through the grass.

After his labor, he awarded himself a cigarette. One last thing remained.

He went to the car, started, backed, turned, cranked the wheel, and returned to Willow Road. He followed it, over a bridge, to an intersection with one Happ Road, a turn to the right, a turn to the left, a transit over some tracks, and he found himself in the tiny village of Northfield. A turn past the town hall took him to a gabled, shingled house that was called Happ’s Liquors and Bar & Grill. It had a phone booth outside, near the entrance.

He went to it, dropped in his nickel.

“Number, please?”

He gave it, then fed in another dime for the downtown call.

“Jessup, Herald-Examiner.”

“You recognize my voice?”

“Jesus Christ, where are you? You heard? Baby Face killed two—”

“Baby Face is dead,” said Swagger. “Here’s your scoop, as I promised. He was shot by Sam Cowley of the Justice Department, who put a .45 into his guts with a Tommy gun. He bled out. They dumped him at St. Peter’s Cemetery, in Niles Center. You show up there tomorrow at nine a.m. and you’ll find him somewhere, on the ground. Do you hear me?”

“Niles Center, St. Peter’s.”

“You call the Division, got that? And this has nothing to do with me.”

“You killed Baby Face?”

“Sam Cowley killed Baby Face. That’s the story you’re telling, and you got it first. It ain’t got nothing to do with me. You never heard of me, you never got this call.”

“I—”

He hung up, pulled another nickel.

“Randolph 6226.”

“That’s another dime, please.”

The dime tinkled as the phone swallowed it.

“Justice Department.” It was Elaine, still on.

“Elaine, it’s Swagger.”

“Sheriff, thank God! They’ve been looking for you. They’ll be so glad.”

“Who’s running things?”

“Inspector Clegg.”

“Elaine, you’re the best. You did so much for me, and, believe me, I do appreciate it.”

“Sheriff, I—”

“Can you put Clegg on?”

“Just a second.”

But it was four seconds.

“Clegg.”

“It’s Swagger.”

“Jesus Christ, man, where are you? Do you know what’s happened? Nelson jumped Sam and Ed Hollis in Barrington. He killed ’em both and stole their car. I’ve got all the men out looking for Baby Face. I need you, dammit, Swagger. The men need you. Get in here!”

“No sir,” said Charles.

“What? Where are you?”

“I’m in a bar, drinking. And getting drunker.”

“Swagger, what is—”

“I was at Barrington. I saw Sam’s guts shot out, and Ed’s head with a hole above the eye. No thank you. Not me. I come through enough already with the war, with the fights I been in. I ain’t ending up in some field, bled out, while the small-town cops stand around clucking.”

“Charles, you’ve been drinking. It’s understandable. Go home, go to bed, sleep late, and come in ready to go tomorrow. We need you. The men need you. They look up to you for leadership and steadiness. They don’t have to know about tonight.”

“By tomorrow morning, I hope to be well south of St. Louis. You tell them what you want, a crack-up, a breakdown, a chicken dance, I don’t care. I ain’t gonna end up like Ed or Sam. That’s for suckers. They’re only dead because some fat Nancy J. Swish in Washington, who wanted to poke Purvis’s pretty ass, wants to get more money in the budget. That ain’t worth dying for, not a bit of it. I’m done. I’m headed out.”

“Swagger, Jesus Christ, you cannot say… That is so… Swagger, if you do this, I will wipe the slate clean of you. You will be expunged from the record and nobody will mention your name again. You will be shunned, banned, despised. You will be cast into outer darkness. You will be—”

Charles hung up.

He climbed the steps, went to the counter, and bought a pint of Pikesville Rye.

The guy at the counter took his money, but said, “Say, bud, you okay? That ear needs tending.”

“It’s fine,” said Charles. “It don’t hurt a bit.”

Then he went outside, got in his car, opened the bottle, took a swig, and pulled out for the long drive ahead.

70

The steam worked its way in through his pores, seemed somehow to drain all the toxins and regrets from his soul and urged him to relax. He had much to contemplate with pleasure.

They were working meatpacking. Take over the union, threaten a strike, the big boys paid to keep the men on the line, and it was more incoming cash, bushels of it. Nobody could stop them, nobody could risk standing against the Italians. And this was happening everywhere! Right now, the thing against Swift, the biggest, was proceeding as planned. Swift had seen the others roll over and knew that resistance was pointless. Mr. Nitto would be pleased, as would the New York people.

He stretched his legs. Vapors occluded his vision, isolating him in a world of fiery fog. He breathed in, feeling the purifying rush of the superheated moisture as it rode the currents into his lungs. A man could fall asleep coddled by such total pleasure.

They had found Baby Face Nelson’s body in some graveyard in Niles Center. He was the last of the big ones on the list, which meant that enterprise could be concluded. It was another triumph. The only loose end was the sheriff, who had gone chicken — who’d have thunk? — and disappeared, but sooner or later he’d turn up. That would have to be dealt with, but it wasn’t a big thing. After all, the guy was a hick.

He felt like a Roman emperor. It was hard not to, given the wealth, the power, the prestige, the future that lay ahead. His towel was like a toga, and he best rode the world like a colossus. A long way from Palermo, that was for sure.

The door opened and D’Abruzzio saw the attendant through the vapors, bringing him a replacement for his iced tea. That was Jackie, good at his trade, knowing exactly what a big-time customer needed in terms of tending.

He mopped his brow with his towel and smiled at Jackie, who leaned toward him in the fog. Except it wasn’t Jackie, it was a well-dressed man, sweating profusely, in a suit and tie.

The man smiled back at him, and D’Abruzzio was struck by how handsome he was — a matinee idol? — and how familiar. Had he seen him on-screen?

Then he realized he’d seen him in the papers. It was John Paul Chase, Nelson’s gofer, who’d gotten away from Barrington unscathed.

Phil wondered if he wanted a touch but instead saw the muzzle of a .38 snub two inches from his nose.

“Baby Face Nelson says hello,” said Chase, and shot him through the eye.

71

The Grumley had their prize rewrapped, their weapons retrieved, their StingRay gizmo stowed in backpack. They were headed back to skip tracing, strip bars, and hitting Negroes in the head and face — their life, in other words.

“You’re not going to shoot up a Piggly Wiggly or a bowling alley with that old Colt rifle, are you?” Swagger asked.

“No sir,” said Braxton, Rawley having retreated into silence again, “it goes on an outward-bound flight to some collector in Uzbekistan, or maybe Colombia, paid for in cash money, most of which will be in our wallets by six p.m. You understand, we can’t disclose the name of our client.”

“You don’t have to,” said Nick. “I made a phone call. If Mr. Kaye thinks he’s out of the soup, he’s got another think coming. I’d stay clear of him after you cash out because a whole lot of federal heat is about to light up his sorry little life. He’s going to learn no Russian mobster can fuck him up as badly as a nasty virgin spinster GS-20 from the IRS.”

“We’re just the help,” said Braxton. “Don’t know nothing, didn’t do nothing. It pays to be stupid sometimes.”

“Don’t it just?” said Bob. “And here’s a little something to bring a smile to his face. It’s the last time he’ll smile in the next thirty years.”

He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a compensator in a wadding of material, and tossed it to Rawley, who caught it deftly.

“You just screw it on, right at the muzzle. Completes the outfit,” he said.

“Thankin’ you kindly,” said Braxton, and the two were off.

Now Bob and Nick drove in silence. The Ouachitas were soft green humps thirty miles distant in the rearview. Meanwhile, the remaining weapons were in the trunk and would be delivered to the FBI field office in Little Rock, there to be shipped to D.C. for the collection.

The tires hummed against the pavement, the radio was off, roadside retail slipped by on either side of the road, and it seemed a little numb. The manuscript lay in the backseat.

To nail it shut, Nick had called a friend at the Bureau, and an intern had run a check on Chicago unsolveds from 1934. Indeed, as Chase had claimed, on November 29, a Mob guy named Philip J. D’Abruzzio had been shot to death in a steam bath on the West Side. A Tony Accardo—“Joe Batters,” by trade name — took his place, eventually becoming the head of the Chicago outfit in the ’fifties.

Helen served a year for harboring — really, for being Mrs. Baby Face Nelson — then lived out her life in Chicago, raising her kids. She never gave any interviews or wrote any accounts. She loved Les hard and full until the end. Purvis quit the Bureau in 1935. Clegg became an assistant director.

“But what about Charles?” asked Nick. “How did it end for him? I don’t think you ever told me.”

“In 1942, he was found behind a general store in Mount Ida, halfway between Hot Springs and Blue Eye, bled out from a small-caliber bullet,” Bob explained. “They say he’d been at one of those prayer meetings at Caddo Gap. We never found out why he turned so religious.”

“I hope it helped him,” said Nick.

“I do too,” said Bob. “Anyhow, they think he saw something, stopped to investigate, and caught a .32 in the chest.”

“Such a shame.”

“I don’t buy that last one for a second. Rumors put him tight with Hot Springs people, particularly since the big train robbery in 1940. That was almost the same day his youngest son, Bobbie Lee, hung himself in the barn. So Charles lost everyone he tried to save, Sam and Ed and his youngest son. He’d already lost his oldest son, my father, Earl. I think by ’42, he had become so dissolute that he was unreliable, and the Mob had to get rid of him. If my father knew, he never said, and any knowledge died with him in 1955. But Charles was a drunk by 1942, so he made it easy on his killers.”

“It’s such a shame,” said Nick. “And they went unpunished.”

“Not sure on that one. My father Earl came back from the war in 1946 and somehow he got involved in an anti-Mob campaign in Hot Springs. It was a lot bloodier than the history books say. I have a feeling my father closed out some overdue accounts. He was that kind of man.”

“Good for him. Are you going to write that book about Charles? He deserves it. Nobody braver, nobody tougher, nobody better. I don’t know how you could sit on it. The man who shot Baby Face Nelson, he was the bravest of them all,” said Nick. “It would get the old bastard his due. Finally.”

“Charles Swagger never cared about ‘due,’” said Bob. Then he added, “He was naturally reticent, as if he was hiding some deeper secret. So, no, I don’t think so. In fact, I know exactly what I’m going to do.”

He pulled over, into the lot of a convenience store. Grabbing up the manuscript, he went into the place and came out with a cheap butane lighter.

He walked to a barrel trash receptacle in the parking lot and dumped the pages in. Bending over, he put the lighter beneath the rim to shield it from the light wind. He flicked it to life and pulled some of the pages out, put the flame to them, and stepped back.

In a minute, the manuscript, dry and crackled like old skin, was consumed in a rampage of incandescence, a white, pure burn without tremor or waver. It looked like a welder’s torch.

“He didn’t want it known, and we’ll leave it as he wished. The record will stand. Sam Cowley killed Baby Face Nelson at the cost of his own life. He was a hero, along with Ed Hollis. Charles Swagger never existed except as the drunken, corrupt sheriff of a no’count small town in West Arkansas.”

“Talk about a death wish,” said Nick.

“He had some problems. But when it counted, he stood there and did what had to be done and took the consequences. What did Grumley call it? Hillbilly honor.”

The ashes rose, whirled about in the funnel of heat, and were gone on the wind.