Hot Springs

Chapter 9

On the first morning. Earl took the group of young policemen out to the calisthenics field in the center of a city of deserted barracks miles inside the wire fence of the Red River Army Depot. The Texas sun beat down mercilessly. They were all in shorts and gym shoes. He ran them. And ran them. And ran them. Nobody dropped out. But nobody could keep up with him either. He sang them Marine cadences to keep them in step.

There were twelve of them, young men of good repute and skills. In his long travels in the gardens of the law, D. A. had made the acquaintanceship of many a police chief. He had, upon getting this commission, called a batch of them, asked for outstanding young policemen who looked forward to great careers and might want to volunteer for temporary duty in a unit that would specialize in the most scientifically up-to-date raiding skills as led by an old FBI legend. The state of Arkansas would pay; the departments would simply hold jobs open until the volunteers returned from their duties with a snootful of new experience, which they could in turn teach their colleagues, thus enriching everybody. D. A.'s reputation guaranteed the turnout.

The boys varied in age from twenty to twenty-six, unformed youths with blank faces and hair that tumbled into their eyes. Several looked a lot like that Mickey Rooney fellow Earl had seen in Hot Springs but they lacked Mickey's worldliness. They were earnest kids, like so many young Marines he'd seen live and die.

After six miles, he let them cool in the field, wiping the sweat from their brows, wringing out their shirts, breathing heavily to overcome their oxygen deficit. He himself was barely breathing hard.

"You boys done all right," he said, and paused, "for civilians."

They groaned.

But then came the next ploy. He knew he had to take their fears, their doubts, their sense of individuality away from them and make them some kind of a team fast. It had taken twelve hard weeks at Parris Island in 1930, though during the war they reduced it to six. But there was a trick he'd picked up, and damn near every platoon he'd served in or led had the same thing running, so he thought it would work here.

He named them.

"You," he said, "which one is you?"

He had the gift of looming. His eyes looked hard into you and he seemed to expand, somehow, until he filled the horizon. This young man shrank from him, from his intensity, his masculinity, his sergeantness.

"Ah, Short, sir. Walter R," said the boy, dark-haired and intense, but otherwise unmarked by the world at twenty.

"Short, I'll bet you one thing. I bet you been called 'Shorty' your whole life. Ain't that the truth?"

"Yes sir."

"And I bet you hated it."

"Yes sir."

"Hmmmm. " Earl made a show of scrunching up his eyes as if he were thinking of something.

"You been to France, Short?"

"No sir."

"Well, from now on and just because I say so, your name is 'Frenchy.' Frenchy Short. How's that suit you?"

"Uh, well―"

"Good. Glad you like it. All right, ever damn body, y'all say 'HI FRENCHY' real loud."

"HI FRENCHY" came the roar.

"You're now a Frenchy, Short. Got that?"

And he moved to the next one, a tall, gangly kid with a towhead and freckles, whose body looked a little long for him.

"You?"

"Henderson, sir. C. D. Henderson, Tulsa, Oklahoma."

"See, you're already a problem, Henderson. Our boss, his name is D. A. So we can't have too many initials or we'll get 'em all tangled up. What's the C stand for?"

"Carl."

"Carl? Don't like that a bit."

"Don't much like it myself, sir."

"Hmmm. Tell you what. Let's tag an O on the end of it. But not an S. That would make you a Carlo. Not a Carlos, but a Carlo. Carlo Henderson. Do you like it?"

"Well, I―"

"Boys, say Hello to Carlo."

"HELLO CARLO!"

In that way, he named them all, and acquired a Slim who was chunky, a Stretch who was short, a Nick who cut himself shaving, a Terry who read Terry and the Pirates> a smallish Bear, a largish Peanut, a phlegmatic Sparky. Running short on inspiration, he concluded the ceremony with a Jimmy to be called James and a Billy Bob to be called Bob Billy and finally a Jefferson to be called not Jeff but Eff.

"So everything you was, it don't exist no more. What exists is who you are now and what you have to do and how Mr. D. A. Parker himself, the heroic federal agent who shot it out with Baby Face Nelson and put the Barker Gang in the ground, will train you. You are very lucky to learn from a great man. There ain't many legends around no more and he is the authentic thing. You meet him tomorrow and you will grow from his wisdom. Any questions?"

There were probably lots of questions, but nobody had the guts to ask them.

For a legend, D. A. cut a strange figure when at last he revealed himself to the men, this time at one of the old post's far-flung shooting ranges. If they expected someone as taut and tough as jut-jawed, bull-necked, rumble-voiced Earl, what they got was a largish old man in a lumpy suit, beaten-to-hell boots and a fedora that looked as if it had been pulled by a tractor through the fields of Oklahoma, who seemed to do a lot of spitting.

It was after the morning run and the boys had changed back into the outfits they'd wear on the street―that is, into suits and ties, and damn the heat.

The old man didn't give any orders at all and didn't mean to command by force but by wisdom. His first move was to invite the boys to sit. Then he noted that it was hot, and since it was hot he suggested they take their coats off.

When the coats came off, he walked among them, and looked at their sidearms, mainly modern Smith or Colt revolvers in.38 Special, worn in shoulder holsters, as befits a plainclothesman. One of them even had an old Bisley in.44–40.

"That's a powerful piece of work, young man."

"Yes sir. My grandfather wore it when he was sheriff of Chickasaw County before the Great War."

"I see. Well, it loads a mite slow for our purposes. Don't get me wrong. A Colt single-action's a fine gun. So's a Smith double. But this here's 1946 and it's modern times. So we're going to learn how to get ready for modern times."

"Yes sir," said the boy. "That is why I came here."

"Good boy. Now, I suppose y'all are good shots. Why, I'd bet all of you shot expert on qualification. Let's see how many did. Hands up."

Twelve hands came up, unwavering with the confidence of the young and sure.

"All of them. See that, Earl? They're all experts "

Earl, standing to one side with his arms folded and his face glowering in the best sergeant's stare, nodded.

"Yes sir. Been known to use a Smith myself," D. A. said. He threw back his coat and revealed what it had not hidden that effectively: his own Smith.38/44 Heavy Duty, with white stag grips, worn on an elaborately carved Mexican holster off a second belt beneath his trousers belt.

"Yes sir, a fine gun. Now tell me, who can do this?"

He reached in his pocket, pulled out a silver dollar. He turned and lofted the coin into the air. It rose, seemed to pause, then fell. His hand a blur, the old man drew and fired in a motion so swift and sudden it seemed to have no place in time. The ping from the coin, and the speed with which it jerked out of its fall and sailed thirty feet further out signified a hit.

"You" he pointed to the youngest of the boys. "Can you go get that for die old man?"

"Yes sir," said the boy, the one Earl had nicknamed Frenchy yesterday.

Short retrieved the piece.

"Hold her up," said D. A.

The young officer held up the coin, which was distended ever so slightly by the power of the.38 slug punching through its center. The Texas sunlight showed through it.

The boys murmured in appreciation.

"See," said D. A., "y'all think that was pretty neat, huh? Truth is, it's a miss. Because I hit dead center. Usually when I do that trick for the kids, I like to hit closer to the edge, so when they wear it on a thong around the neck, it'll hang straighter. How many of you could do such a thing?"

No hands came up.

"Mr. Earl, you think you could?" asked the old man.

Earl was a very good shot, but he knew that was beyond his skills.

"No sir," he said.

"In fact," said D. A., "there ain't but four or five men in the world who could do that regularly. A Texas Ranger or two. An old buddy of mine named Ed McGivern, a trick shooter. Maybe a pistolero in Idaho named Elmer Keith. See, what I got, what them boys I named got, you don't got. That is, a special gift. A trick of the brain, that lets me solve deflection problems and coordinate the answer between my hand and eye in a split second. That's all. It's just a gift."

He turned to them.

"I show it to you because I want you to see it, and forget about it. I'm a lucky man. I'm a very lucky man. You ain't. You're ordinary. You can't do that. Nobody in the FBI could do that. So what I mean to teach you is how an ordinary man can survive a gunfight, not how a man like me can. You've seen fast and fancy shooting; now forget it.

Fast and fancy don't get it done: sure and right gets it done. And take them revolvers back to your lockers and lock them up. You won't be using them no more and you won't be shooting with one hand and you won't be trusting your reflexes. This here is the tool of our trade."

He took off his coat, and showed the.45 auto he had hanging under his left armpit in its elaborate leather harness.

"We use the.45 auto. We carry it cocked and locked. We draw with one hand, clasp the other hand to the gun and grip hard, we concentrate on the sights, we lock our elbows until we're nothing but triangles. We got a triangle of arms between ourself and the gun and a triangle of legs between ourself and the ground. The triangle is nature's only stable form. We're crouching a little because that's what our body wants to do when we get scared. We aren't relying on the ability of our mind to do fancy calculations under extreme pressure and we ain't counting on our fingers to do fancy maneuvers when all's they want to do is clutch up. Every goddamn thing we do is sure and simple and plain. Our motions are simple and pure. Most of all: front sight, front sight, front sight. That's the drill. If you see the front sight you'll win and survive, if you don't, you'll die.

"Did I hear a laugh? Do I hear snickers? Sure I do. A man shoots with one hand, you're telling me. All the bull's-eye and police shooting games are set up for one hand. Them old cowboys used one hand and in the movies the stars all use one hand. You don't want to use two hands, 'cause that's how a girl shoots. You're a big strong he-man. You don't need two hands.

"Well, that there's the kind of thinking that gets you killed."

He withdrew another silver dollar from his pocket, turned and lofted it high. The automatic was a blur as it locked into a triangle at the end of both his arms and from the blur there sprang the flash-bang of report; the coin was hit and blasted three times as far back as the previous dollar. Again, Short retrieved it. He held it up. It was no souvenir. It was mangled beyond recognition.

"You see, boys. You can do it just as fast two-handed as one."

They worked with standard Army.45s without ammunition for the first day. Draw―from a Lawrence steer hide fast-draw holster on the belt right at the point of the hip― aim, dry-fire. Then cock, relock and reholster. That was D. A.'s system, the.45 carried cocked and locked, so that when you drew it, your thumb flew to the safety as the gun came up on target, and smushed it down even as the other hand locked around the grip and you bent to it, lowering your head and raising the gun until you saw the tiny nub of front sight and the blur of the black silhouette before you.

Snap!

"You gotta do it right slow before you can do it right fast," he would say. "Ready now, again, ready, DRAW… AIM… FIRE."

A dozen clicks rose against the North Texas wind.

"Now, again," said the old man. "And think about that trigger pull. Control. Straight back. That trigger stroke has got to be smooth, regular and perfect."

On and on it went, until fingers began to get bloody. Even Earl pulled his share of draws and snaps, aware that he among them all could not complain, could not stop. But there were so many troubling things about it.

Finally a hand went up.

"Sir, are you sure about this? I could draw and shoot much faster with my Official Police. I don't like losing my Official Police."

"Any other questions?"

There was silence, but then one hand came up. Then another. And a third.

"The sights are so much tinier than my Smith. I can't pick them up."

"I heard automatics jammed much more than wheelies. It makes me nervous."

"I think I'd feel better carrying at the half-cock, and thumb-cocking as I drew, like I did with my old single-action."

Mumbles came and went.

And even Earl had his doubts. He didn't like walking about with a pistol on safe. To shoot he had to hit that little bitty safety, and under pressure, that might be tough. He didn't like the idea of pointing a gun at somebody set on killing him and getting nothing out of the effort.

"Earl, how 'bout you?"

"Mr. D. A., you're the boss."

"See, men, that's Earl. That's a good Marine to the last, supporting his old man no matter how crazy. But Earl, if I wasn't the boss, what would you say? Come on, now, Earl, tell these boys the truth."

"Well, sir," said Earl, "under those circumstances I'd say I'se a bit worried about carrying that automatic with the safety on. You got to hit that safety to shoot fast and I know in the islands, we many times had to shoot fast or die. No guns in battle are carried with the safeties on. There may not be time to get them off."

"A very good point, Earl. They're all very good points. Which is why today we make the change. You have to understand what don't work as. compared to what do work. Let's head back to die indoors."

The unit trooped back to the explosives disassembly building, which had been appropriated as a classroom. There, against one wall, was a shipping box of cardboard, maybe two feet by two feet, swaddled in tape and labels. Earl looked at the label and saw that it was from something called Griffin & Howe, in New York, and searched his memory for some familiarity with the place, but came up with no answer, though the words had a tone he knew from somewhere.

"Coupla you boys, load this up to the table," commanded D. A. and two of the officers did so, by their effort proving that the box contained a considerable amount of steel.

"Earl, would you please open the box for me."

Earl took out his Case pocketknife and sawed his way through the cardboard and staples and tape. When he got it open, he saw that it contained a nest of smaller boxes from Colt's, of Hartford, Connecticut, each about eight inches by six inches, and beside the Colt's logo, it said National Match Government Model.

"Now, I worked for Colt's for a number of years, so I got a deal on these guns. Then I had 'em shipped to Griffin & Howe, a custom gunsmithy in New York. Earl, take one out, please, and show it around."

Earl pulled one box out, pried the lid off it. Inside, a Colt government model gleamed blackly at him, but he saw immediately that the cardboard of the box was slightly mutilated in one spot, where it meant to hold the pistol snugly, as if something larger than spec had been pushing at the box. He pulled the pistol out.

"See what you got?" D. A. asked. "You tell 'em, Earl."

"The sights are much bigger," Earl noted right away. Indeed, the target pistol's adjustable sights had been replaced with a bigger fixed version, a big flat piece with a cut milled squarely into the center; at the front end, instead of that little nubby thing, there was a big, square, wide blade.

"Oversized rear, Patridge front sights. What else, Earl?"

Earl gripped the pistol and his hand slid up tight to nest it deep and his thumb naturally went to the thumb-safety, which had been enlarged into a neat little shelf with the soldered addition of a plate. His whole thumbprint rested squarely on it. No way he was going to miss that thing.

"Now dry-fire it," the old man said.

Obediently, Earl pointed in a safe direction, thumbed back the hammer, pressed the safety up for on. When he plunged it down with his thumb, the thumb met just two ounces or so of resistance, then snapped downward with a positive break. Earl pulled the trigger, which broke at a clean four pounds, without creep or wobble.

"That is a fighting handgun," said the old man. "The best there is. Completely safe to carry cocked and locked. Its ramp polished and smoothed so that it will feed like a kitten licking milk. A trigger job to make it crisp to shoot. A fast, seven-round reload in two seconds or less. A big ass.45, the most man-stoppingest cartridge there is, unless you want to carry a.357 Magnum, which would take you two years to master, if that fast. And finally, the shortest, surest trigger stroke in the world. Gents, that's the gun you'll carry, it's the gun you'll shoot, it's the gun you'll live with. It's the gun you'll clean twice a day. It's the gun that'll win your fights for you if you treat it well. I should tell you it was all thought out by a genius. Not me, not by a long shot. But that's what the Baby Face did to his.45s. He was a killer and some say even crazy, but he had more pure smarts about guns of any man since old John Browning himself."

Draw, aim and fire.

Draw, aim and fire.

Two hands, the safety coming off from the thumb's plunge as the second hand came to embrace the first in its grip, the rise of the front sight to the target.

"You don't got to line it up," said the old man. "What you're looking for is a quick index. You have to know that the gun is in line; you don't got to take the time to place the front sight directly between the blades erf the rear sights. You got to flash-index on the front sight. You see that front sight come on target and you shoot."

Draw, aim and fire.

Draw, aim and fire.

Earl was surprised how well it worked, once you got the hang of it. It helped that his hands were so fast and strong to begin with, and that he'd fired so many shots in anger and so shots in practice meant nothing. But clearly, he had some degree of exceptional talent: the pistol came out sure, it came up and BANG it went off, almost always leaving a hole in the center of the target.

"Forget the head, forget the heart," counseled the old man. "Aim where he's fattest, and shoot till he goes down. Center hit. Clip him dead center. If he don't go down, if he's still coming, shoot him through the pelvis and break his hipbone. That'll anchor him. Some of these bigger boys take a basketful of shooting before they go down. That's why you have to shoot fast and straight and a lot. Usually, the man who shoots the most walks away."

D. A. watched with eyes so shrewd and narrow they missed nothing. This boy, that boy, this boy again, that one again: little flaws in technique, a tendency to flinch, a lack of concentration, a finger placed inconsistently on the trigger, a need to jerk, or, worst of all, an inability to do the boring work of repetition that alone would beat these ideas into the minds. But D. A. was patient, and kind, and never nasty.

"Short, you are very good, very fast, I must say," he said to the young Pennsylvanian, who, to be sure, was the best of the youngsters, a very quick study.

Short was fast too. Not as fast as Earl or the old man― in time, the old man believed nobody would be faster than Earl―but fast. He got it right the first time and kept it right.

Henderson, from Oklahoma, was a bit more awkward. Tall and blond, with arms too long and hands too big, he was all elbows and excess motion. He didn't have the gift for it that Short and some of the others did. But Lord, he worked. He got up early to practice dry-firing and he stayed up late practicing dry-firing.

''You are a worker, son," said D. A.

"Yes sir," said Henderson. "That's what my people taught me." He drew against phantom felons until his fingers were bloody.

"Now this," said Earl, a few days later, "this is the real McCoy."

He held in his hands the.45 caliber Thompson Ml 928 submachine gun, with its finned barrel, its Cutts compensator, its vertical fore grip, its finely machined Lyman adjustable sight.

Five other such guns lay on the table, sleek and oily.

"Mr. D. A. got a deal with the Maine State Police, which is why these guns all say Maine State Police. This will be our primary entry weapon, not merely for its firepower, but more than anything for its psychological effect. You find yourself on the other side of a gun like this, the thought goes, you don't wanna fight no more. Didn't work with the Japs but it should work with these here Hot Springs hillbillies."

The men looked at the weapon, which he held aloft.

"It's a recoil-powered, open-bolt full automatic weapon. That open-bolt business is important, because it means it can only be fired with the bolt back. You forget to cock it, you are S. O. L. If it don't have a magazine in it, it can't fire, unless you have done stuck a cartridge with your fingers up in the chamber, then cocked it, and I ain't never heard of no man doing that but it's my theory that if there's a way to screw up, some recruit will find it, no matter how well hidden. Don't never put a shell into the chamber because everybody will think it's empty and that's how training accidents happen. You'll have plenty of chance to bleed up in Hot Springs, no need to do it here.

"Now, this evening, I'll teach you how to break it down, how to clean it, how to reassemble it. You will clean it and reassemble it each time you fire it, and the reason for that is the same as the one I gave you earlier: you want to treat it well so it will treat you well. Now, how many men know how to shoot this gun?"

A few hands went up, mainly from the older men who'd joined the unit from State Police agencies.

But so did Frenchy's.

"Frenchy Short, do tell. Well, young man, you come on up here. Where'd you learn to shoot the tommy?"

Frenchy came up.

"My mother knew the police chief of our town. She arranged for me to shoot all the guns for my fifteenth birthday."

"A birthday present. Damn, ain't that something. Come on, Frenchy, show the boys."

So Frenchy went to the firing line, inserted a stick magazine and leaned into the gun.

The Colt Police Silhouette target loomed twenty-five yards downrange, the shape of a man with his wrist planted on his hip.

"Get ready, boys!" Earl said and Frenchy found a good position, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Then he remembered the actuator up top, drew it back with an oily slide of lubricated metal, reacquired the shooting position, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

"Shit!" he said.

"Safety," said Earl.

Frenchy fiddled, eventually turned some lever.

Again he brought the gun to his shoulder.

One shot rang out. The magazine fell to the ground.

"Shit!"

"Now, see, Frenchy here thought he already knew. He didn't wait to learn. He already knew and he wanted to show off. You don't show off at this work, 'cause it'll get you killed. Got that? This is about teamwork, not hey-look-at-me. Also"―he winked at Frenchy-r-"when you load the mag, you gotta slap the bottom to make sure the mag lock has clicked in. Sometimes it don't lock up all the way but the spring tension holds the mag in place, and you think it's time to bebop. But it don't bebop, it only bops, once. Frenchy didn't know that, the mag kicked loose. So what does he now say to Baby Face Nelson who is walking toward him with a sawed-off? Slap that mag hard, hear it lock in."

Earl locked the magazine in, gave it a stiff smack with his palm, then drew back the actuator, then spun and shouldered it.

"Plug your ears, boys, but open your eyes. I'm using tracers so's you can watch the flight of the bullets."

He leaned into the gun with a perfect FBI firing position and fired half a magazine and even though his left wrist was stiff with ancient pain, he gripped the fore grip tightly, pulling it in. That was the whole key to the thing. The gun shuddered, the bolt cycled, the empties flew in a spray, the gun muzzle stayed flat though blossoming with blast and flash and spirals of gas, the racket was awesome as the bullets sped off so fast-fast-fast it seemed like one continuous roar. It was so bright that no flash could be seen but the chemical traces in the tail end of the bullets still igniting, trailing for a split second the incandescence of the round's trajectory. It was there and not-there at once, the illusion of illumination in the form of a line of simple whiteness, almost electrical, straighter than any rule could draw; the line traced from the muzzle to the target without a waver to it. Twenty-five yards downrange Earl's gun gnawed a raggedy hole in the center of the silhouette.

"Great, huh? Well, guess what, that's all wrong. Never fire more than three-round bursts. In the movies they wail away like that, but that's because right behind the camera they got a bohunk with a case of.45 blanks ready to scoot out and reload when the camera's off and the star's taking his Camel break. You will carry all your ammo, and you don't want to use it up for nothing, and unless you are a genius, every goddamn shot after the third is going into the trees. I happen to be a genius. Maybe Frenchy is too. But no other birds here appear to be. This is how we do it."

He turned again, brought the gun into play and tapped out three short three-round bursts. Each burst scored the head of the target, each leaked its flicker of flame. By the end, there was no head, only shredded tatters of cardboard.

They worked with Thompsons in the afternoon and the.45s in the morning for several days. They worked hard, and some got the swing of it faster than others, but by the end, each of them was edging toward some kind of proficiency. The tracers, an old FBI training trick, made it easier for a buddy to read the trajectory of the rounds and advise you when the muzzle roamed, throwing bullets to no particular destination. But Earl warned them only to use the tracers in training, never in battle, because first of all they were a dead giveaway to your position and secondly the trace was incendiary and if fired into dry wood buildings or sage or other undergrowth or dead leaves or whatever, would light up a fire. No problem on an island like Iwo, but not good in a city like Hot Springs, where most of the casinos were old wooden structures.

On the fifth day, Earl introduced them to the BAR.

"Now this here gun is a real Jap-killer. It fires big.30 government cartridges at about twenty-three hundred feet per second and they will tear up anything they hit. If you got a boy behind soft cover, this will punch through and get him. Against cars or light trucks, this here thing is The Answer. Twenty-round clips, effective range out to one thousand yards, gas-operated, man-portable, but no lightweight. About sixteen pounds. They usually come with bipods for support, but the first thing that happens is the bipod is junked. These guns already got their bipods junked. Each squad in the Marines or the infantry had one of these guns; they were the base of fire, set up to cover all squad maneuvers and offer long-range suppressive fire.

"We will use these guns sparingly. They will fire through three walls and kill someone across the street going to the bathroom. But you should know them, anyhow, in case we come up against some real desperadoes, who are hunkered in good and solid and want to shoot it out to the last man. That's when the BAR comes into play. It ain't a John Wayne gun. You don't spray with it like you see in the movies. It's got too much power for that."

But the boys found it much easier to shoot than the Thompsons, for the reason that it was heavier, and its weight absorbed the recoil better and because the longer.30 governments were much easier to load in the magazines than the stubby.45s for the Thompson. They'd shoot it at the hundred-yard range, and quickly became proficient at clustering five-round bursts center mass on the silhouettes.

Half days were spent on weapons they'd be least likely to use, the Winchester 97 shotguns and the M-l carbines. And then they took Sunday off, and most went into Texarkana for a movie or some other form of relaxation while Earl and D. A. plotted the schedule. Everybody knew what was coming next.

The fun part.

Chapter 10

Owney never held his meetings at the same place twice. It was a habit from the old days. You didn't want to fall into a pattern, because a pattern would get you killed. If you have a Mad Dog Coll hunting you, you learn the elementary lessons of evasion, and you never forget them.

Thus most of the higher-ranking Grumleys, the bigger casino managers, the head bookmakers, the wire manager, his lawyer, F. Garry Hurst, the men who ran the men who ran the numbers runners, and so forth and so on, were used to being banged all over town when Owney convened them.

They never knew when the call would come and what travel it would demand. So today's mandate was usual in the sense that it was no more unusual than any other mandate. He called the meeting for the bathhouse called the Fordyce, on Central, which had been temporarily closed for the occasion.

They sat naked, swaddled in sheets, under an ornate glass roof. It was somehow like sitting in flowers. It was daytime, as befit business. Sunlight streamed through the window above, incandescent and weirdly lit by the hyacinth-tinted glass. Each had bathed in the 141-degree water until each had felt like a raisin. Then each had been subjected to a needle-pointed shower that ripped open their pores. Now they sat in a steam room, looking like Roman senators in togas, except that the vapors swept this way and that. Outside, Grumleys patrolled to make certain no interlopers or accidental eavesdroppers were in the vicinity. A couple of Grumley gals even moved into the women's bath area, so as to make sure no ladies lurked there.

The meeting was businesslike, though the Owney on display here was not the cosmopolitan Owney the host, anxious to put on a display of savoir faire for an important out-of-towner, complete to a version of a British accent derived more from an actor than from actual memory. In the privacy of his own sanctum, where his power was absolute and his prestige unchallenged, Owney devolved to the tones of the East Side of Manhattan, where he had been nurtured from the age of thirteen through the age of forty-three.

"Nothin'," he said again, chewing on an unlit cigar, another Havana. "You got fuckm' nothing"

"Not a dang thing," said Flem Grumley, the senior Grumley since Pap Crumley's clap had kicked in a month ago, declaring that seasoned operative hors de combat. Flem, hardened in the bootlegging wars of the '20s, spoke a brew of Arkansas diction so dense it took years of concentration to master its intricacies. "We's run the town up, we's run it down. These damned old boys done slipped the noose. Damnedest goddamn-dangdest thang."

Owney chewed this over a bit, shredding his cigar even further.

"Only," said Flem, "only a bit later cousin Slidell, that being Will's boy Slidell, not Jud's nor Bob's, nor―"

"Yeah, yeah," said Owney, to halt the list of Slidell Grumley fathers.

"Uh, yes sir, that Slidell, he done checked back at the Best out Ouachita. Seems a feller rented two cabins fer a week. Older feller, sad-like. A younger feller jined him, tough-like, so it goes."

"There were two of them, then?" Owney remarked.

"Wal, sir, maybe. Manager says them boys stopped showing up midweek. Never came back. Will's Slidell got the key, checked out each cabin. Wasn't nary much-like. Extry underwear, toothbrushes and powder, a Little Rock newspaper. No guns or nothing. Them boys travel light, even if they's the ones, even if they's wasn't."

"I don't fuckm' like this shit one bit" Owney said aloud. "If they was nobodies, they fucking wouldn't have thought it to be a big deal. They mighta left town, but not before checking out. These guys, they knew I'd be looking for them. That fuckin' cowboy who hit Siegel, he knew me. He looked at me and said"―and here he lapsed into a passably convincing imitation of the rumbly vessel that was Earl's sulfur-scorched voice―"'How 'bout it, Mr. Maddox, you or any of your boys want a taste'? He fucking knew me. How's he know me? I don't know him. How the fuck he know me?"

Owney gazed off into the vapors as if fascinated by this new problem. That guy had the best hands he'd ever seen.

"That fucking guy, he could hit. I managed a boxer for a few years. Big lug couldn't hit shit. But I know the fight game, and that boy was a hitter!"

"Could they be New York guys? Or Chicago guys?"

"They could be Chicago guys," Owney said. "Bugsy was a New York guy and he sure as shit din't know them. I'd a heard if they was New York. Man, he hit that yid hard!"

"Cops?" someone thought to ask.

"Did you check the cops?" Owney asked Flem Grumley.

"Did, yes sir. Chief says it warn't none of his boys. He ain't hired no new boys. He even called a friend he has in the little Rock FBI and it ain't no federal thing. No revenooers or nothing like that. Believe me, I know revenooers and these damn boys weren't revenooers. No revenooer ever could hit like that."

"Could they work for the new prosecuting attorney?" somebody asked. "We don't got any sources into what Becker is ninning."

Flem had an answer: "That boy is so scared since Rufus throwed that dead dog on his lawn he ain't been seen in town! He don't hardly even go to his office!"

There was much laughter.

And that was pretty much it: the rest was old business―a new Chinese laundry near Oaklawn was behind in his payments and would have to be instructed to keep up-to-date; the Jax brewery in New Orleans had delivered too much beer but a Grumley had convinced the driver of the truck not to report it; the wheel at the Horseshoe was running wobbly and cutting into the joint odds, though it could be repaired―but thought had to be put into replacing it; the betting season at Hialeah was just getting started and Owney ought to consider putting a new man or two into the Central Book as the wire would run very hot when Hialeah was up and steaming.

But after the meeting was over, the manager of the Golden Sim, a house near the Oaklawn Racetrack, pulled Owney over.

"I heard something, Owney."

"And what's that, Jock?"

"Ah, maybe it's nothing, but you should know anyhow."

"So, spill."

"My brother-in-law runs a craps game in an after-hour joint for Mickey Cohen in L. A. He used to work on that gambling boat they had beyond the twelve-mile-limit."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, and times are tough since they closed that ship. But Mickey told my brother-in-law that good things are set up."

Owney listened intently. Mickey Cohen was Bugsy's right-hand man.

"What's he mean?"

"He says there'd be jobs for all the old guys, the real pro table crews."

"So? Is Bugsy going to try and get the ship thing going again?"

"No, Owney. It's bigger than that. Evidently, he's bought a big chunk of desert over the Nevada state line. Gambling's legal in Nevada. Nobody goes there, but it's legal."

"I still don't―"

"He's thinking big. He's going to build a place. A big place. He's got some New York money bankrolling it. It's supposed to be secret. But he's going to build a gambling city in the desert. He's going to build a Hot Springs in the desert. Me, I think it's shit. Who's going to go to a fucking desert to gamble?"

But Owney immediately understood the nature of Bugsy's visit, and saw the threat to his own future. That was Bugsy's game, then. There could only be one Hot Springs. It would be here in Arkansas, where it belonged; or it would be in Nevada, in the fucking desert, where yid punk Bugsy wanted it.

It wouldn't be in two places.

Someone was going to have to die.

Chapter 11

D. A. had worked it out very carefully in his mind. He broke the team down into two-man fire teams, and put three of them into each squad, one designated the front-entry team and the other the rear-entry team.

Now it was time to do it, with unloaded weapons but all other gear as it would be, including the heavy vests that everybody hated.

Of course the young Carlo Henderson found himself united with the even younger Frenchy Short, who was full of opinions too important to be kept to himself, which was one reason nobody else would come near Frenchy.

"See," he said, "I would use the shotguns and the carbines. This isn't the '20s. The Thompsons were developed for trench warfare. For spraying. You spray a room, you got―"

"You wasn't ever instructed to spray nothing," said the stolid Carlo. "Mr. Earl told us: three-shot bursts."

"Yeah, well, some of these hicks from the sticks, they'll go nuts if somebody starts shooting at 'em. They'll spray anything that moves. They'll turn one of these casinos into a Swiss cheese house."

"You'd best just do what you're told."

"Ah," said Frenchy. "You're one of them. You probably love all this shit. You probably love that big Mr. Earl throwing his weight around like he's some kind of God or John Wayne or something."

"He seems okay. I heard he was a big war hero."

"Yeah, what'd it get him? Pretend sergeant in Hot Springs, Arkansas, busting down casino doors. Shit. He couldn't do better off a big medal than that?"

"What're you even here for if all this is so much crap?"

"Ah―"

"Well?"

"You won't tell anybody?"

"Of course not. You're my buddy. I have to cover for you."

"I got kicked out of Princeton. Boy, was my old man red-assed! He's a big-deal judge, so he got me a job in the police department. What I really want to do is get to the FBI. But not without a college degree, no sir. But if I do well as a cop―"

"Why'd you get kicked out?"

"It's a long story," said Frenchy, and his eyes grew hard and tough with a zealot's fire. "It was another crap deal, believe me. I got blamed for something I absolutely did not do! Anyhow, if I can get into the FBI, I can maybe then get into the OSS. You know what that is?"

"The what?"

"The what! Henderson, you're even dumber than you look. It's the Office of Strategic Services. The spies. Man, I would be so good at that! You work in foreign countries and I have a gift for languages and accents. These guys all believe I'm from some Passel O'Toads, Georgia! Anyhow, in OSS you pull shit all the time. In the war they blew up trains and assassinated Nazi generals and cut wires and eavesdropped on diplomats. My uncle did it."

"Well," said Henderson, "you'd best forget about all that and just focus on what we're going to be doing in a few minutes."

"Okay, but I get the Thompson, okay?"

"I thought you didn't like the Thompson."

"I didn't say I didn't like it. I said it was wrong for this kind of work. But I get to carry the Thompson."

"Fine. I'll go first."

"No, I'll go first. Come on, I'm much faster than you, I shoot better than you, I'm quick, I'm smart, I'm―"

"You can't both go first and carry the Thompson. That's agin the rules."

"The rules!" cursed Frenchy, as if he'd run up against this one before. "The goddamned rules! Well, fuck the rules!"

The address was Building 3-3-2, in a sea of deserted barracks that spilled across the hardscrabble Texas plain. It looked no different than any other barracks, just a decaying tan building, its paint peeling, its wood drying out, a few of its shingles flapping in the ever-present wind.

That was the target. The twelve officers took up positions in a barracks three doors down, made a preliminary recon, studied their objective, and drew up plans. Stretch, the oldest at twenty-six, a Highway Patrolman from Oregon, was nominally in charge, and he was steady and wise, and knew the wisdom in keeping it simple. It seemed so easy, if only everybody would listen and cooperate.

But almost immediately Frenchy began to undercut him. Frenchy knew belter. Frenchy figured it out. Frenchy, charming, loquacious, willful, kept saying, "I'm the best shot, I ought to go first. Really, why not let the best shot go first?"

"Short, can you give somebody else a turn?"

"I'm just saying, the best way is to utilize your best people up front. I'm a very good shot. Nobody has shot as well as I have. Isn't that right? Correct me if I'm wrong. So I ought to be the first-entry guy."

He had very little shame, and no quit in him at all. Finally, to shut him up and get on with the planning, Stretch gave Frenchy the okay to be first man on the rear-entry team, with his partner.

That said, other assignments handed out, and the men suited up, sliding on the heavy armored plates over their suit coats, then donning their fedoras. They got into three cars―two old Highway Patrol Fords, painted all black, and a DeSoto that had once belonged to the State Liquor Control Board―and drove through the deserted streets of the barracks city until they came at 3-3-2 from different angles.

"All teams," said Stretch, into his walkie-talkie and consulting his watch, "deploy now!"

The cars halted. The men rushed out. Immediately one fell down, jamming his Thompson muzzle into the Texas loam, filling its compensator with muck. Another, as he ran to the door, banged his knee severely on the swinging steel of the vest, which was really more a sandwich board of heavy metal; he went down, painfully out of action.

But Frenchy, in the lead from the rear car, made it to the door first and fastest. He carried the tommy gun. Carlo, less graceful and more ungainly in his armor, struggled behind.

Frenchy kicked the door.

It didn't budge.

"Shit!" he said.

"Goddammit, you're supposed to wait for me!" Carlo said, arriving, followed by the last four men on the team.

"The fucking door is jammed."

Frenchy kicked it again. It didn't move.

"We ought to―"

But Frenchy couldn't wait. He threw off his heavy armor, smashed in a window, climbed into the frame and dove through it, rolling in the darkness. He stood up.

"Prosecuting Attorney's Office," he screamed. "This is a raid! Hands up!"

"Wait for me, goddammit," huffed poor Henderson, still on the other side of the door.

Frenchy heard them banging. It never occurred to him to unlock it. He did not wait for anybody. He headed down a hall in what was surprising darkness, feeling liberated in the absence of the twenty pounds of armor. The hall led to a wider room, and he raced in, pointing his empty tommy gun at menacing forms which proved to be old desks and tables and chairs. At once the room filled with smoke. The smoke billowed and unfurled, completely disorienting him. He coughed, ran further into the room, all alone, and stepped into a wider space, where the smoke was thinner. All around him things seemed to crash. Before him, he saw shapes. Without thinking about it, he dropped to one knee, put the tommy gun sights on them, and pulled the trigger. The gun's bolt flew forward with a powerful whack.

He recocked, knowing in reality he'd just mowed a few people down, and suddenly a figure appeared before him.

WHACK! he fired again, and a second later noted the surprised face of Carlo Henderson, whom he had just killed. He lurched to the left to a stairwell, kicked it open and raced up it.

"Short!"

He turned. Earl stood behind him, 45 leveled straight at his face for a perfect head shot, and snapped the trigger.

Then Earl said, "Congratulations, Short. You killed three of your own team members, you killed your partner, and you got yourself killed too. Just think of what you could have done if you'd have gotten to the second floor!"

D. A. gathered the young men in the dirt road out front of 3-3-2, invited the fellows to shed the body armor, stack the guns, take off the hats and coats and loosen the ties and light 'em up if they had 'em. It was blazing hot and most of the men had sweated through their clothes. They were a pretty sad-looking bunch: dampened and dejected.

"Now fellows," he said, "I'd be lying if I told you you did a good job. Frankly a bagful of coons locked in a cellar with ten pounds of raw meat might have behaved better. Basically what I saw was a series of mistakes compounding mistakes. I don't know what happened to your communications. Front-entry team at least hung together; too bad you got wiped out by the rear-entry team. Now, as I told you, the deal is simultaneous entrance. That's the trick. You have to be coming from two directions at once with overwhelming force. They have to understand that there is no possibility of victory and that resistance is futile.

"I will admit that we threw you some ringers. Mr. Earl popped a smoke grenade just to confuse the issue. I would say it confused you plenty. Would anyone disagree with me? The back door was locked. Did anybody think to look above the doorjamb? That's where the key was. Instead, at that point, rear-entry team just fell apart. Did rear-entry team walkie-talkie front-entry team? Nah. I was monitoring the radios upstairs. You were out of contact, and when you're out of contact, all kinds of hob can play. Finally, fellows, you can't let yourself get too excited. We had an unfortunate experience where one team member became separated, and got extremely aggressive with his weapon. He was supposed to be in support, but he rushed ahead, brought fire on die other team, then shot his partner, then rushed up a stairwell without securing the zone behind him and got shot by Mr. Earl. Fellows, you have to stay calm. If you let your emotions get the best of you, you become dangerous to your team members. This is about teamwork, fellows, remember. Teamwork, communications, good shooting skills, controlled aggression, sound tactics. That's the core of the art. You got anything. Earl?"

"Only this. I learned this one the hard way. The fight is going to be what it wants to be. You got to be ready to go with it, follow it where it goes, and deal with it. Remember: Always cheat, always win."

Fire and movement.

It was the most necessary training and the most dangerous.

"I saved this for last," said D. A., "because you have to work on your gun-handling skills and your self-discipline before you can even think about such a thing. This is the one where if you screw up, you kill a buddy or a bystander."

The course, as D. A. designed it, was set up in a tempo office building that administered the ranges back when the depot was turning out men for war. Now it was scheduled for destruction when the government's budget would allow it. It could be shot up to everybody's content and all walls but the front one were declared shootable. That gave the men a 270-degree shooting arc.

"You move through in two-man teams, just like on a real raid. The man on the right takes the targets on the right. The man on the left the targets on the left. Short, controlled bursts. Remember, trust your buddy. And, for God's sake, stay together!"

That was Earl. He would walk behind each team as they ran the course, as a safety measure.

The guys waited their turns as each two-man team ran the course. Inside the house, they could hear the quick stutters of the tommy guns and the bark of the.45s as each team popped its targets. One by one the teams emerged intact, joyous, and Earl would call up another team.

Finally, it was Frenchy and Carlo's turn.

"Okay, guys, you just take her easy. Short, you listening today?"

"Yes sir."

"Good. Okay, who's on the big gun?"

The two hadn't discussed this. They looked at each other.

"Henderson, you're bigger. You run the big gun. Short, you're a damned good pistol man. You work your.45. Remember, controlled speed, make sure of your targets, keep relating to your partner. Know where he is at all times, and nobody has to get hurt."

"Gotcha," said Frenchy.

The two young officers locked and loaded their weapons under Earl's supervision, then bent and got into the heavy armored vests.

"All right," he said, "muzzles level, we're shoulder to shoulder, we're not rushing, we're all eyes looking for targets. You shoot the black targets. You don't shoot the targets with white Xs on them. That would be civilians. Henderson, remember, three-shot bursts on that thing, dead center. You, Short, you're responsible for the left-hand sector. Henderson, you take the right. Don't hold the gun too tightly. Okay, fellas, I'm right here for you. All set?"

Both youngsters nodded.

"Let's do her good," said Earl.

Frenchy kicked the door, which yielded quickly. They entered, walked in tandem down a long corridor. At a certain point Earl flicked on a wall switch and two targets stood before them. Frenchy, his pistol out, was fast-fast-fast, putting two shots into the chest of his. A split second later Henderson's three-shot burst tore the heart out of the target on the right.

"Good, good," said Earl. "Now keep moving, don't bunch up, don't stop to admire yourself, keep your eyes moving."

They came to a corner. Frenchy jumped across the hall, his gun locked in the triangle of his arms and supported by the triangle of his legs as he hunted for targets. Carlo came next, dropping into a good kneeling shooting position. Two targets were before them, and Earl felt the boys tense as they raised their weapons, but then relax; the targets were Xed.

"Clear," sang Frenchy.

"Clear," came the answer.

"Good decision," said Earl. "Keep it up."

They moved on to a stairwell.

"Remember the last time?" Earl asked.

That was a hint. Frenchy jumped into the stairwell, covering the back zone, while Carlo fell to the far wall, orienting his Thompson up the stairs. Both saw their targets immediately. Frenchy's.45 rang twice as he pumped two shots into the silhouette from two feet away and Carlo fired a seven-or eight-shot burst, ripping up two silhouettes at the top of the stairs.

"Clear."

"Clear."

The gun smoke heaved and drifted in the smallish space. A litter of spent shells lay underfoot.

"Good work," said Earl.

Frenchy quickly dropped his magazine, inserted another.

"Great, Short. Nobody else has reloaded and some of 'em have run dry upstairs. Good thinking, son."

Frenchy actually smiled.

The team crept up the stairs.

They did another explosive turn as they emerged from the stairwell to confront yet another empty hallway. Down it lurked a series of doors.

"Got to clear them rooms," said Earl.

One by one, the team moved into the rooms. It was tense, close work: they'd kick in a door, scan the room, and find targets that could be shot or targets that couldn't. The gunfire was rapid and accurate, and neither of them made a mistake. No innocents were shot, no bad guys survived.

Finally, there was one room left, the last one.

The two gave each other a look. Frenchy nodded, took a deep breath and kicked the door open, spilling into the room to find targets on the left. One step behind plunged Carlo, who saw three silhouettes behind a table and raised the tommy, found the front sight and pulled the―

Frenchy had a moment of confusion when he felt he should not be moving, but an immense feeling of freedom and speed hit him. It was his armored vest; the strap had popped and the vest slipped sideways, the sudden shift of its weight taking his control from him. The second strap then broke, and the vest fell in two separate pieces to the floor, but Frenchy was too far gone and felt himself sprawling forward as his feet scrabbled for leverage, but instead slipped further on empty cartridge cases.

It was all so unreal. Time almost stopped. The noise of the Thompson became huge and blocked out all other things. He smelled gun smoke, felt heat, even as he fell. He lurched toward the flash and had an instant of horror as he knew, knew absolutely that he would die, for he would in the next instant fall before the path of the bullets and Carlo would not expect him and that would be that.

Shit! he thought, as he plunged toward his death in the stream of.45s.

Yet somehow he hit the ground untouched, stars shot off in his head, and then someone heavy fell upon him and there were muffled grunts.

"Jesus Christ!" Carlo was saying.

"Y'all okay?" asked Earl.

Earl was among them in the tangle on the floor. He disengaged and got up. "Y'all okay? You fine?"

"Gosh darn it!" said Carlo.

"Short, you hit?"

"Ah, no, I―What happened?"

"I almost killed you is what happened," said Carlo, his voice aquiver with trembling. "You fell into my line of fire, I couldn't stop, I―"

"It's okay, it's okay," said Earl. "Just get ahold of yourselves."

"What the heck happened to you? Why were you way out there?"

"The vest broke and I fell forward and my feet slipped on some shells."

"You are a lucky little son of a gun, Short. Mr. Earl, he grabbed the gun maybe a tenth of a second before it would have cut you up. He went through me and he grabbed the gun!"

"Jesus," said Frenchy. A wave of fear hit him.

"Okay, you fellows all right?" said Earl.

"Jesus," said Frenchy again, and vomited.

"Well, see, that's what a close shave'll do to you. Come on now, you're both okay, let's get up and get out of here."

"You saved my―"

"Yeah, yeah, and I saved myself three weeks of paperwork too. Come on, boys, let's get our asses in gear. No need to get crazy about this. Only, Short: next time, check the straps. Do a maintenance check each time you go on a raid. Got that?"

"I never―"

"It's the 'never' that gets you killed, Short."

But then he winked, and Frenchy felt a little better.

There was no officers' club for Earl and D. A. to go to that night, and since neither man drank anymore, it was perhaps a good thing. But D. A. invited Earl out to dinner, and so they found a bar-b-que joint in Texarkana, near the railway station, and set to have some ribs and fries, and many a cold Coke.

The food was good, the place was dark and coolish, and somebody put some Negro jump blues on the Rockola, and that thing was banging out a bebopping rhythm that took both their minds away from where they were. Afterward, the two men smoked and finished a last Coke, but Earl knew enough to know he was being prepared for something. And he had a surprise of his own he'd been planning to lay on D. A. sooner or later, and this looked to be as good a time as any.

"Well, Earl, you've done a fine job. I'm sure you're the best sergeant the Marine Corps ever turned out. You got them whipped into some kind of shape right fast."

"Well, sir," said Earl, "the boys are coming along all right. Wish we had another two months to train 'em. But they're solid, obedient young men, they work hard, they listen and maybe they'll do okay."

"Who worries you?"

"Oh, that Short kid, of course. Something in that one I just don't trust. He wants to do so well he may make a bad judgment somewhere along the line. I will say, he learns fast and he's a good pistol hand. But you never can tell about boys until the lead starts flying."

"I agree with you about Short. Only Yankee in the bunch and he sounds more Southern than any man born down upon the Swanee River."

"I noticed that too. Don't know where it comes from. Any South in him?"

"Not a lick. He told me he had a gift for soaking up dialects. Maybe he don't even notice that he's doing it."

"Maybe. I never saw nothing like it in fifteen years in the Marines."

"Anyhow, I'm asking you because I got some news."

"Figured you did."

"Mr. Becker is getting very restless. He's under a lot of pressure with anonymous phone threats and such-like and townspeople wondering when the hell he's going to do something other than go to his office and close the door without talking to nobody. And his wife is followed by Grumley boys everywhere she goes. We got to deal with that. We got to move, and soon. Are we ready?"

"Well, you're never ready. But we are ready on one condition."

"I think I know what this is, Earl," said the old man gravely.

"So did my wife. She said it was my nature."

"She knows you, Earl. And I know you too, even though I first laid eyes on you three weeks or so ago. You're the goddamned hero. How you made it through that war I'll never know."

"Anyhow, I have to go. The boys have made a connection to me, and they'll be frightened if I ain't there."

"They'll get over it."

"Mr. Parker, I have to be there. You know it and I know it. They need a steady hand, and you've got too much to do setting the raids up with Becker and then dealing with the police and the press afterward."

"Earl, if you get hit, I'd never forgive myself."

"And if one of those kids got hit while I'se sitting somewhere sucking on a Coca-Cola, I'd never forgive myself."

"Earl, you are a hard man to be the boss of, I will say that."

"I know what's right. Plus, no goddamn hillbilly with a shotgun is going to get the best of me."

"Earl, never underestimate your enemy. You should know that from the war. Owney Maddox was called 'Killer' back in New York. According to the New York District Attorney's Office, he killed over twenty men in his time. Once this shit starts happening, he's going to bring in some mobsters who've pulled triggers before. Don't kid yourself, Earl. These will be tough boys. Get ready for em.

"Then you'll let me go?"

"Shit, Earl, you have to go. That is as clear to me as the nose on my face. But I want you to go home and talk to your wife first. Hear me? You tell her like a man. So she knows. And you tell her you love her and that things will be okay. And you listen to that pup in her belly. Look, here's twenty-five bucks, you take her out to a nice dinner at Fort Smith's finest restaurant."

"Ain't no fine restaurants in Fort Smith."

"Then hire a cook."

"Yes sir."

"And you meet us Tuesday in Hot Springs."

"Tuesday?"

"Here it is, Earl. Our first warrant. We hit the Horseshoe at 10:00 P. M. Tuesday night. We're going to start the ball rolling with a big one."

Chapter 12

He got back late Friday night; the vets village was quiet and it took him some time to find his own hut. The low, corrugated shapes had such a sameness to them that most of the women had tried to pretty them up with flower beds and bushes, maybe a trellis or something silly like that. But they were still essentially tubes half buried in the earth, passing as housing. Eventually, he got himself oriented―fellow could wander for hours in the sameness of the place, all the little streets just like all the other little streets―and found 5th Street, where he lived in No. 17. He knocked and there was no answer. She must be sleeping. He opened the door because nobody bothered to lock up.

He heard her in what passed for the bedroom; it was really just a jerry-built wall that didn't reach the arched tin roof. She breathed steadily, deeply, as if for two. He didn't want to startle her, so he stayed out of that room and instead remained in the large one.

He moved one small lamp so that the bulb would not shine into the bedroom, and turned it on, looking about as he undressed. It was a fairly squalid experience. The furniture was all used, the tin walls overcurving as if boring in, to crush the life out of all possibility here. She'd worked hard to cheer the place up inside as well as out, to disguise its essential governmentness, by painting and hanging pictures and curtains and what-not. But the effort was doomed, overwhelmed by the odor of the aluminum that encapsulated them and the feel of the give in the wooden slats that made up the floor.

The plumbing was primitive, the stove and icebox small, the place drafty. It was no place to bring up a kid.

He went to the kitchen―rather to the corner where the kitchen appliances were located―and opened the icebox, hoping to find some milk or something or maybe another Coca-Cola. But she had not known he was coming and there was nothing. But then a rogue impulse fired off and he opened a certain cabinet and there indeed, as he remembered, was a half-full bottle of Boone County bourbon.

It took a lot of Earl not to drink it. He was not in the mood to say no to bourbon, because the long pull up the western edge of Arkansas on 71 essentially took him through home ground. The road, two lanes of wandering macadam, crawled through Polk County, where his daddy had been the sheriff and a big, important man. Near midnight, the drive took Earl through Blue Eye, the county seat, nestled in the trackless Ouachitas. He hadn't seen it in years. The main street ran west of the train tracks, lined with little buildings. He'd had no impulse to detour to see what had been his father's office and was still the county sheriff's office; nor had he had an impulse to detour out Arkansas 8 to Board Camp, where the farm that he had inherited as the last surviving Swagger lay fallow. He had faced it once, when he was immediately out of the Corps, and that had been enough.

Ghosts seemed to scamper through the night. Was it Halloween? No, the ghosts were memories, some happy, some sad, really just bright pictures in his mind of this day and that in his boyhood, of parades and hikes and hunting trips―his father was an ardent, excellent hunter and one wall of the house was alive with his trophies―and all the things that filled a boy's life in the 1920s in rural America. But he always sensed his father's giganticism, his father's weight and bulk and gravity, the fear that other men paid in homage to Charles Swagger, sheriff of Polk County.

He tried not to think of his father, but he could no more forbid his mind from doing that than he could forbid it from ordering his lungs to breathe. A great father-heaviness came over him, and he could see a spell of brooding setting in, where his father would be the only thing in his mind and would still, all these years later, have the capacity to dominate everything.

His father was a sharp-dressed man, always in black suits and white linen shirts from the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. His black string ties were always perfect and he labored over them each morning to get them so. Daddy's face was grave and lined and brooked no disobedience. He knew right from wrong as the Baptist Bible stated it. He carried a Colt Peacemaker on his right side, a leather truncheon in his back pocket and he rattled with keys and other important objects when he walked. He carried a Jesus gun also, a.32 rimfire Smith & Wesson stuffed up his left cuff and held there by a sleeve garter. It had saved his life in 1923 in a shoot-out with desperadoes; he'd killed all three of them and been a great hero.

Charles Swagger also had the capacity to loom. It was in part his size but more his rigidity. He stood for things, stood straight and tall for them, and represented in a certain way America. To defy him was to defy America and he was quick to deal with disobedience. People loved him or feared him, but no matter what, they acknowledged him. He was a powerful man who ruled his small kingdom efficiently. He knew all the doctors and ministers and lawyers; of course he knew the mayor and the county board, and the prominent property owners. He knew all of them and they all knew him and could trust him. He kept the peace everywhere except in his own home, and from his own aggressions.

Charles didn't drink every night, just every third night. He was a bourbon drinker, and he drank for one reason, which was to feel himself the man he knew everybody thought him to be and to banish the fears that must have cut at him. Thus, drunk, he became even mightier and more heroic and more unbending. His righteousness in all things grew to be a force of nature. His doubts vanished and his happy confidence soared. He retold the story of the day and how he had solved all the problems and what he had told the many people who had to be put in their places. But when he looked about and saw how little his family had given a man of his nobility and family lines, it troubled him deeply. He corrected his wife's many mistakes and pointed out that her people were really nothing compared to his. He pointed out the flaws in his sons and sometimes―more often as he got older― he disciplined his eldest with a razor strop or a belt. That boy was such a disappointment. That boy was such a nothing, a nobody. You would think a great man like Charles Swagger would have a great son, but no, he only had poor Earl and his even more pathetic younger brother, Bobby Lee, who still wet the bed. He instructed his eldest in his insignificance, as if the boy were incapable of understanding it himself, though the boy understood it very well.

"He has no talent," Charles would scream at his wife. "He has no talent. He needs to find a trade, but he's too lazy for a trade! He's nothing, and he'll never be anything, and I'll beat the fear of God into him if it's the last thing I ever do."

Thus, alone in his hut, that boy, grown to be a man, felt again the temptation of the bottle. Inside the bottle might be damnation and cowardice, but it was also escape from the looming of the father. It beckoned him mightily. It offered a form of salvation, a music of pleasure, the sense of being blurred and softened, where all things seemed possible. But you always woke up the next morning with the taste of an alley in your mouth and the hazy memory of having said things that shouldn't be said or having heard things that shouldn't be heard.

Earl opened the bottle and poured the bourbon out. He didn't feel any better at all, but at least he had not fallen off the wagon. He went back over to the couch and lay there in the dark, listening to his wife breathe for two, and eventually he fell off to his own shallow and troubled sleep.

The next morning she was happy. He was there, it took so little to please her. He listened to her account of the doctor's reports and she asked him to touch her stomach and feel the thing inside move.

"Doctor says he's coming along just fine," said Junie.

"Well, damn," said Earl. ^That's really great."

"Have you picked a name yet?" Junie wanted to know.

No. He hadn't. Hadn't even thought of it. He realized she probably presumed he was as occupied with the baby as she was. But he wasn't. He was pretending he cared.

The thing inside her scared him. He had no feeling for it except fear.

"I don't know/' he said, "maybe we should name him after your father."

"My father was an idiot. And that's when he was sober," she added, and laughed.

"Well, my father was a bastard. And that's when he was sober." And they both laughed.

"You should name him after your brother."

"Hmmm," said Earl. His brother. Why'd she have to bring that up? "Well, maybe," he said. "We have plenty of time to figure it out. Maybe we should start fresh. Pick a movie star's name. Name him Humphrey or John or Cornell or Joseph or something."

"Maybe it'll be a girl," she said. "Then we could name her after your mama."

"Oh," he said, "maybe we just ought to make it a new start. It ain't got nothing to do with the past, sweetie."

Junie was showing now. Her face was plumped up, but still the damndest thing he'd ever seen. She was packing weight on her shoulders and, of course, through the middle.

"Honey, I don't know nothing about names. You name the baby. You're carrying the critter, you get to name it, fair enough?"

"Well, Earl, you should take part too."

"I just don't know," he said, too fiercely. Then he said, "I'm damned sorry. I didn't mean to bark at nothing. You getting the money all right? You okay in that job? You don't have no problems, do you, sweetie? Hell, you know what an ornery old bastard I can be."

She forced a smile, and it seemed to be all forgotten but he knew it wouldn't be.

That night he took her into the dining room at the Ward Hotel on Garrison Street, the nicest place to eat in all of Fort Smith.

He looked very handsome. He wore his suit so well, and he was tanned and polite and seemed happy in some odd way, in no way he had been since the war. It warmed her to see him so happy.

"Well," she said, "it does seem like we've come up in the world. You have a car. We get to go out at a fine place like this."

"That's right," he said. "We're on our way. You know, you could probably rent a place in town. You could get out of that vets village. They're going to be building new housing everywhere."

"Well, it seems so silly. Why move now, then move again when we have to go into Hot Springs? I assume I'm coming to Hot Springs sometime."

"Well, yes, that's the plan, I guess."

But a vagueness came across his face. That was Earl's horror: his distance. Sometimes he was just not there, she thought, as if something came and took his mind from him, and gave it over to memories of the war or something else. Sometimes she felt like she was in the Iliad, married to a Greek warrior, a powerful man but one who'd shed too much blood and come too close to dying too many times, a man somehow leeched by death. There was a phrase for it that she'd heard in her girlhood, and now it came back to her: "Black as the earl of death." Hill people talked that way, and her father, a doctor, sometimes took her on his trips into the Missouri hollows and she heard the way the folks talked: black as the earl of death. That was her Earl, somehow, and somehow, she knew, she had to save him from it.

The waiter came and offered to fetch cocktails. Earl took a Coca-Cola instead, though he encouraged Junie to go ahead, and she ordered something called a mimosa, which turned out to be orange juice with champagne in it.

"Now where'd you hear about that?"

"I read about it in the Redbook magazine."

"It seems very big-city."

"It's from Los Angeles-It's very popular out there. They say California is turning into the land of opportunity now that the war is over."

"Well, maybe we should move out there when all this is over." But the vagueness came to his face again, as if he had some unpleasant association with California.

"I could never leave my mother," she said hastily. "And with the baby coming―"

"I didn't mean it, really. I wouldn't know what to do in Los Angeles. Hell, I hardly know what to do in Hot Springs."

"Oh, Earl."

They ordered roast chicken and roast beef and had an extremely nice dinner. It was wonderful to see him in a civilized place, and to be in such a nice room which was filled with other well-dressed people. The waiters wore tuxedos, a man played the piano, it was all formal and pleasant.

"Now, honey," he finally said.

A shadow crossed her face, a darkening. She knew that tone: it meant something horrible was coming.

'"What is it, Earl? I knew there was something."

"Well, it's just a little something."

"Is it about the job?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Well, so tell me."

"Oh, it's nothing. Mr. Parker though, he thought I should come up here and take you on a nice date and everything. He's a fine man. I hope to introduce you to him sometime, if it works out. He's as fine as any officer I had in the Corps, including Chesty Puller. He cares about the job, but he cares about his people too, and that's very rare."

"Earl? What is it?"

"Well, honey, you remember those raids I said I was never going on? Into the casinos and the book joints? Now these young men we have, they've worked damned hard and they've really become very good in the small amount of time. But two weeks. Hell, it takes two years to become a good Marine. Anyhow, these boys, they.."

He trailed off helplessly, because he couldn't quite find the words.

"They what?"

"Oh, they just don't quite know enough."

"Enough for what?"

"Enough to do it by themselves."

"I don't―"

"So I said to Mr. Parker, I said I should go along. At first. Just to make sure. Just to watch. That's all. I wanted to tell you. I had told you I was just going to train them. Now I'm going with diem. That's all. I wanted to tell you straight up."

She looked at him.

"There'll be guns and shooting? These raids will be violent?"

"Probably not."

She saw this clearly. "No. That is the nature of the work. You are dealing with criminals who are armed and don't want to accept your will. So it is the nature of the experience that there will be violence."

"We know how to handle the violence. If there is any. That is what this training has been about. Plus, we wear heavy bulletproof vests."

She was silent.

Then she said, "But what does that do for me and die child I carry? Suppose you die? Then―"

"I ain't going to die. These are old men with rusty shotguns who―"

"They are gangsters with machine guns. I read the newspapers. I read The Saturday Evening Post. I know what's going on. Suppose you get killed. I'm to raise our child alone? He's never to know his father? And for what? To save a city that's soaked in filth and corruption for a hundred years? Suppose you die. Suppose they win? Suppose it's all for nothing? What am I supposed to say to this boy? Your daddy died to stop fools from throwing their money away on little white cubes? He didn't die to save his country or his family or anything he cared about, but just to stop fools from gambling. And if you close down Hot Springs, the same fools will only go some other place. You can't end sin, Earl. You can only protect yourself and your family from it."

"Yes ma'am. But now I have given my word, and I have boys depending on me. And, the truth is, I am happy. For the first time since the war, I am a happy man. I am doing some good. It ain't much, but it's what I got. I can help them boys."

"Earl, you are such a fool. You are a brave, handsome, noble man, but you are a fool. Thank you, though, for telling me."

"Would you like some dessert?"

"No. I want you to go home and hold me and make love to me, so that if you die I can have a memory of it and when I tell our son about it, I will have a smile on my face."

"Yes ma'am," he said. It was as if he'd just heard the best order he'd ever gotten in his life.

Chapter 13

Hard-boiled eggs (two), dry toast, fresh orange juice. Then he went over accounts for three hours and made a number of phone calls. For lunch he went to Coy's and had a fillet. On a whim, he stopped at Larry's Oyster Bar on Central and had a dozen fresh plump ones from Louisiana, with a couple of cold Jaxes. He went back and took a nice nap. At 3:00 a girl from Maxine's came over and he had his usual good time. At 4:00 he met Judge LeGrand at the club and they got in a quick nine holes. He shot a 52, best of the week. He was catching on to this damned game. At 6:00 he went to the Fordyce and took a bath, a steam session and a rubdown. At 7:00 he had dinner at the Roman Table restaurant with Dr. James, the head of surgery at the hospital, and Mr. Clinton, who owned the Buick agency; both were on the board of the country club, the hospital, and Kiwanis and the Good Fellows. At 9:00 he went to the Southern, caught some of Xavier Cugat's act, which he had seen a dozen times before, checked with his floor managers, his pit bosses and his talent manager to make certain that Mr. Cugat and his boys were being well taken care of. At 11:00 he walked back to the Medical Arts Building, took the elevator up, got into a dressing gown, and had a martini on the patio, while reading that morning's New York Mirror, just delivered from little Rock. That Winchell! What a bastard he could be.

Owney took a moment before bed and stood at the balcony. He had come a long way. He was unusual in his profession in that he had just a sliver of an inner life. He wasn't pure appetite. He knew he existed; he knew he thought.

Today had been such a good day, such a perfect day, yet such a typical day that he took a little pleasure in it all: how hard he had fought, how tough it had been, and how beautifully it had worked out. So many of them died, like the Dutchman, spouting gibberish as the life ebbed out of him, or Mad Dog, splattered with tommy gun fire in a phone booth, or Kid Twist, who went for a swim in midair after volunteering to rat the boys out; or went crazy, like Capone, down there in his mansion in Florida, a complete lunatic by reports, so hopelessly insane on the corrosiveness of his dose that nobody would even bother to visit him. He remembered Capone, the plump sensualist with a Roman emperor's stubby fingers and a phalanx of legionnaires to guard him everywhere, taking the Apollo Suite at the Arlington because it had two entrances, or, as Alphonse would think of it, two exits. A tommy gun legendarily leaned in a corner, in case A1 or a lieutenant had a sudden problem that only a hundred.45s could solve.

"Al, it's safe here. That's the point: it's smooth, it's safe, you can come down here by train and enjoy yourself. A man in your position, Al, he should relax a little."

A1 just regarded him suspiciously, the paranoia beginning to rot his mind, turning his eyes into dark little peepholes. He didn't say much, but he got laid at least three times a day. Al was reputed to have an organ bigger than Dillinger's. Pussy was the only thing he really cared about and pussy, in the end, had destroyed him. He was afraid of the needles so he came to Hot Springs, under the belief the waters could cure him. They couldn't, of course. They could only stay the course of the disease a bit. All his soaking in 141 degrees had earned Scarface but a few extra hours of sanity in the end.

Owney finished his martini, turned to check that his pigeons had been fed, saw that they had, and started in, when he was surprised by Ralph, his Negro manservant.

"Sir. Mr. Grumley is here."

"Flem?"

"No sir. The other Grumley. The one they call Pap. He's out of his sickbed."

This alerted Owney that indeed something was up.

He walked into the foyer of his apartment, to find the ghost-white old Pap Grumley supported by two lesser cousins or sons or something.

"What is it, Pap?" asked Owney.

"A Grumley done been kilt," said the old legger, a flinty bastard who'd fought the law for close to six decades and was said to carry over a dozen bullets in his hide.

"Who? Revenuers?"

"It's worse, Mr. Maddox."

"What do you mean?"

"Your place done been raided."

Owney could make no sense of this. One or two of his places were raided a year, but by appointment only. It usually took a meeting at least a week in advance to set up a raid. The police had to be told which casino or whorehouse to raid and when to do it, the municipal judge had to know not to get that drunk that night so he could parole the arrestees without undue delay, the casino had to be warned so that nobody would be surprised and nothing stupid would happen, the Little Rock newspapers had to be alerted so they could send photographers, and the mayor had to be informed so that he could be properly dressed for those photographs. Usually, it occurred when some politician in Little Rock made a speech in the state-house about vice.

"I don't―"

"They come in hard and fast, with lots of guns and wearing them bulletproof vests. And one of 'em shot a Grumley. It was Jed's boy, Garnet, the slow-wit. He died on the spot. We got him over at the morgue and we was―"

"Who raided?"

"They said they was working for the prosecuting attorney."

"Becker?"

"Yes sir. That Becker, he was there. There's about ten, twelve of 'em, with lots of guns. They come in hard and fast and one of 'em shot Garnet dead when Garnet pulled his shotgun. Mr. Maddox, you got to let us know when there's going to be a raid. What am I supposed to say to Jed and Amy?"

"Where did this happen?"

"At the Horseshoe. Just a hour ago. Then they chopped up all the tables and the wheels with axes and machine-gunned the slots." "What?"

"Yes sir. They turned them machine guns loose on over thirty slots. Shot the hell out of 'em too, they did. Coins all over the goddamned place. Nickels by the bucketful." "They were working for Becker?" "Yes sir. He was there, like I say. But the boss was some big tough-looking stranger. He was a piece of work. He shot Garnet. They say nobody never saw no man's hands move faster. He drew and shot that poor boy dead in about a half a second. Nailed him plug in the tick-tocker. Garnet was gone to the next world before he even begun to topple."

The cowboy! The cowboy was back!

By the time he got there, reporters and photographers were already on the scene. They flooded over to Owney, who was always known for his colorful ways with the language, those little Britishisms that sold papers. There were even some boys from Little Rock in attendance.

But Owney was in no mood for quips. He waved them away, then called a Grumley over.

"Get the film. We don't want to let this out until we know what's happening. And send 'em home. And tell 'em not to write stories until we get it figured out."

"Well, sir," said the Grumley, "there's already a press release out."

He handed it over to Owney.

HOT SPRINGS, August 3, 1946, it was datelined.

Officers from the Garland County Prosecuting Attorney's Office today raided and closed a gambling casino in West Hot Springs, destroying 35 slot machines and much illegal gaming equipment.

The raid, at the Horseshoe, 2345 Ouachita also confiscated nearly $32,000 in illegal gambling revenues.

"This marks the first of our initiatives to rid Hot Springs of illegal gambling," said Prosecuting Attorney Fred C. Becker, who led the raid.

"We mean to put the gangsters and the card sharks on notice," said Mr. Becker. "There's no longer a free lunch in Hot Springs. The laws will be enforced and they will be enforced until gambling and its vices have been driven out of our city."

Operating on a tip that illegal activities were under way…

Owney scoffed as he discarded the sheet: maybe the thirty-foot-high neon sign on the roof of the Horseshoe that said 30 SLOTS―INSTANT PAYOUT! was the tip-off.

"Who the fuck does he think he is?" Owney asked the Grumley, who had no answer.

"Where's my lawyer?" asked Owney and in short order F. Garry Hurst was produced.

"Is this legal?" Owney demanded. "I mean how can they just fuckin' blow down the doors and start blasting?"

"Well, Owney, it appears that it is. Becker is operating on a very tiny technicality. Because Hot Springs Mountain is a government reserve, any illegal activities within the county that are subject to affecting it can be construed to come under injunction. So any federal judge can issue warrants, and they don't necessarily have to be served by federal officers. He can deputize local authorities. Becker's got a federal judge in Malvern in his pocket. There's your problem right there."

"Damn!" said Owney. He knew right away that clipping a federal judge would not be a good idea, just as clipping a prosecuting attorney wouldn't, either. "Can you reach him?"

"He's eighty-two years old and nearly blind. I don't think money, whores or dope would do the trick. Maybe if you snuck up behind him and said boo."

"Shit," said Owney.

"It's a pretty smart con," said Hurst. "I don't see how you can bring legal action against the federal government, and through that technicality Becker is essentially operating as a federal law enforcement officer. He's got the protection of the United States government, even if the United States government has no idea who he is."

"Okay, find out all you can. I have to know what the hell is going on. And I have to know soon."

Owney headed inside, where Jack McGaffery, the Horseshoe's manager, waited for him.

"Mr. Maddox, we never had a chance. They was just on us too fast. Poor Garnet, that boy never hurt a fly, and they blowed him out of his socks like a Jap in a hole."

But Owney was less interested in the fate of Garnet than he was in the fate of the Horseshoe. What he saw was an admirably efficient job of ruination accomplished quickly. The roulette wheels and the craps tables could be replaced quickly enough, although a roulette wheel was a delicate instrument and had to be adjusted precisely. But the slots were the worst part.

Usually, the slots were simply hauled away to a police warehouse, stored a few weeks, then quietly reinstalled. Some of them had dozens of TO BE DESTROYED BY HSPD stickers on their backsides.

But this time, someone had walked along the line of machines and fired three or four tommy gun bullets into each. The heavy.45s had penetrated into the spinning guts of the mechanical bandits and blown them to oblivion. The Watlings looked like dead soldiers in a morgue, their glossy fronts cracked or shattered, their adornments of glass spider-webbed, their stout chests punctured, their freight of coins spewed across the floor. Reels full of lemons and cherries and bananas lay helter-skelter on the floor, along with springs and gears and levers. They were old Wading Rol-a-tops from before the war, though well maintained, gleaming and well bugged and tighter than a spinster's snatch, ever profitable. The Rol-a-tops, though, were the proletarians of the gambling universe. More obscenely, a Pace's Race, the most profitable of the devices, was included in the carnage. It was a brilliantly engineered mock track where tiny silhouettes of horses, encased in mahogany under glass, ran in slots against each other, and by the genius mechanics of the thing, the constantly changing odds whirled around a tote board, the odds themselves playing the horses. Its glass shattered, its elegant wood casing broken, its tin horses bent and mangled, the thing lay on its side, all magic having been beaten out of it.

Owney shook his head sadly.

"We kept people out," said Jack. "All the coins are still there. Them boys didn't get no coins, that's for sure."

"But they got $35,000?"

"Sir, more like $43,800 and odd dollars."

"Shit," said Owney. "And all the records."

"Yes sir. But wasn't airy much in them sheets."

Of course not. Owney wasn't foolish enough to keep sensitive documents in casinos.

"But sir," said Jack. "Here's something I don't understand."

He pointed at the walls. Every ten or twelve feet, someone had whacked a hole with an ax. Owney followed the gouges, which circled the main room of the casino, continued up the stairs to Jack's looted office, and followed a track into both the gals' and the men's rest rooms.

Looking at the destruction in the women's room, he said finally, "Who did this?"

"Well, it was an old guy. There was an old guy who came in after all the ruckus was done. He had a hatchet and he went around chopping holes in the wall while the younger boys chewed up the tables and gunned the slots."

"What'd he look like?"

"like I say, Mr. Maddox, old man. Face like a bag of primes. Big old man. Sad-like. He looked like he seen his kids drownded in a flood. Didn't say much. But he was some sort of boss. Meanwhile, the tough guy supervised the cracking of the tables, and outside, Becker and his clerk handed out them news releases, answered some questions, posed for pictures. Then they all up and went. Nobody made no arrests."

"Hmmmm," said Owney. He had been caught flat-footed, and someone smart somewhere was behind it. That old man chopping at the walls. He was clearly someone who knew what he was doing. He had a sense of the one place Owney was vulnerable. You could raid on places in Hot Springs for years, and as soon as you closed one joint down, another would spring up, sustained by the river of money that was track betting. But the old man was looking for the wiring that would indicate the secret presence of the Central Book, where the phones poured their torrents of racing data, and Owney knew if he found it, he could dry Owney out in a fortnight.

Goddamn the wire! He was trying to get out of that business but he was still tied to it, it was still his lifeline, and he was still vulnerable to its predation.

One thing was for sure: next time he'd be ready.

"Jack, get Pap in here."

When the old man came, Owney went to the point.

"I want 'em all armed now. Nothing goes easy anymore. They'll never have it as soft as they had it tonight. If they want a war, we'll give 'em a goddamned war. They got guns? We'll get bigger guns. Tell the Grumleys, they will get back for what was done to them tonight."

"Wooo-oooooooo-doggies!" yelped the haggard old sinner, and danced a mad little jig there in the ruined casino.

Chapter 14

By three separate cars, the raid team arrived at the courtyard of the Best Tourist Court at around 9:30 P. M. The neon of the Best was spectacular: it washed the night in the fires of cold gas, in odd colors like magenta and fuchsia and rose around each cabin. It looked like a frozen explosion.

In this strange illumination, the men loaded magazines quietly, slipped into their bulletproof vests, checked the safeties, locked back actuators, tried to stay loose and cool and not get too excited. But it was hard.

Across the street they could see the looming shape of the old ice house, and next to it, the Horseshoe itself, somewhat rickety and wooden like most of the casinos built in the 1920s, with its blazing neon sign thirty feet high atop the roof: 30 SLOTS―INSTANT PAYOUT! and the double green neon horseshoes at each end of the sign.

"Hard to miss," said D. A.

"It's not like a secret or nothing," said one of the boys, possibly Eff―for Jefferson―up from the Georgia Highway Patrol. A designated tommy gunner, he was loading.45s into a stick magazine.

Earl was alive in ways he hadn't been alive for a year. He felt his eyeballs extra-sharp, he tasted the flavor of the air, his nerve endings were radar stations reading every rogue movement in the night sky. He walked around, checking, examining, giving this boy or that the odd nod or pat of encouragement.

Becker pulled in, with a clerk. He seemed especially nervous. He walked among the men smiling dryly, but he kept running his tongue over his gray lips. All he could think to say was "Very good, very good, very good."

Finally he approached the two leaders.

"I like it. They look sharp," he said.

"It ought to go okay," said the old man.

"You, Earl, you agree?"

"Mr. Parker's got it laid out real nice, sir," said Earl.

"Okay. When it's clear, you send a boy out. At that moment I'll call HSPD and announce a raid in progress and request backup. Then I'll call the newspaper boys. I did alert the Little Rock boys to have a photog in the area. But that's okay, that's secure. Got it?"

"Yes sir," said D. A., but suddenly Earl didn't like it. Okay, Owney owned the local rags, but how safe were these Little Rock people? He pulled D. A. aside.

"I'm going to go in early," he said.

D. A. looked at him.

"You'll be right in the line of fire for twelve nervous kids."

"Yeah, but in case somebody in there gets a little crazed or has been tipped off, I might be able to cock him good and save a life or two. This'll probably be the only raid we can get away with that."

"I don't like it, Earl," D. A. said. "It's not how we planned it. It could confuse them."

"I'll be all right," said Earl. "It could save some lives."

"It could cost some lives too," said D. A.

"Look at it this way," said Earl. "We'll never get a chance to pull this trick off again. They'll be waiting for it in all the other places. We might as well do it while we can."

D. A. looked at him sharply, seemed about to say something, but then reconsidered; it was true he did not want a killing on the first raid, for he believed that would turn the whole enterprise inevitably toward ruination.

"Wear your vest," he cautioned, but even as he said it, he knew it was impossible: the vests were large and bulky and looked like umpire's chestpads, and everybody hated them. If Earl walked in with a vest on, it would be a dead giveaway.

"You know I can't."

"Yeah, well, take this."

He handed over a well-used police sap, a black leather strap with a pouch at the end where a half pound of buckshot had been secreted.

"Bet you busted some head with this old thing," said Earl with a smile.

"More'n I care to remember."

Earl looked at his Hamilton in the pink light and shadow. It was 9:45. Between the tourist court and the casino, Ouachita Avenue buzzed with cars.

"I'm sending in three teams in the front and two in the back," said D. A. "I'll move the rear teams in first. I'll run them teams around the ice house, and they'll rally in its eaves, on that southwest corner. At 9:59, they'll move single file down to the rear entrance, We have sledges. At ten, they hit the door, just as the three front-entry teams go through the foyer and fan out through the building. Luckily it's a simple building, without a lot of blind spots or tiny rooms."

Earl nodded.

"That's good," he said. "But maybe instead of going around the ice house, you ought to move 'em around the other side of the casino, sir."

D. A. looked at him.

"Why?" he said.

"It's nothing. But the manager's office seems to be upstairs on that same corner. Maybe he's up there, the window's open, and he hears scuffling in die alley, or somebody drops a mag or bangs into a garbage can. Maybe it ticks something off in him, he takes out a gun, he heads downstairs. The rear-entry team runs into him with a gun out on the stairway. Bang, bang, somebody's hurt bad. See what I'm saying, sir? I think you'd do best to run 'em around that other side of the building."

"Earl, is there anything you don't know?"

"What to name my kid. How to balance a checkbook. Which way the wind blows."

"You are a smart bastard. All right."

Earl checked his.45, making sure once again that the safety was still on, and, from the heft, that indeed the piece was stoked with seven cartridges. He touched the three mags he had tucked into his belt on the back side. He touched his sap.

Then he went among the boys.

"Listen up, kids," he said.

They stopped fiddling with their tommy guns and drew around him.

"Slight change in plan. I'm going to go on and be in there. I have a favor to ask. Please do not shoot me. You especially, Short. Got that?"

There was some nervous laughter.

"Okay, I'll be in the main room, at the bar. Mark me. If I move fast, it's because I've seen someone with a gun or a club. I say again and now hear this: Do not shoot old Mr. Earl."

Again, the dry laughter of young men.

"You are broken down into your teams, you have your staging assignments and your route assignments. And remember. The fight's going to be what it wants to be, not what you want it to be. You stay sharp," and he moved away from them and disappeared.

Frenchy was annoyed. The last man on the last team. He was backup on the rear-entry team, the third fire team. That made him sixth man through the door. It did get him a tommy gun, however. He felt it wrapped under his coat as he crossed Ouachita, huge, oily and powerful. He waited for the cars to part, then dashed across, as the others had done, one man at a time, the tommy gun secured up under his suit coat, the heavy armored vest rocking against him as he ran. No car lights shone on him; nobody from the Horseshoe saw him, or could be expected to.

He ran to the Horseshoe's northwest corner, then threaded back alongside the west wall of the casino. Inside he could hear the steady clang of the slots, the calls of the pit bosses and the more generalized hubbub of a reasonably crowded place.

He slid along the edge of the building, ducking the wash of lights that shone from the shuttered windows. His eyes craned the parking lot to his right for movement, but there was none at all. Five men had passed this way before him, and at last he joined them, in a little cluster at the southwest corner of the big, square old building.

"Six in," he said.

"Time check," said Slim, who as the second-most-senior man of the unit was running the rear-entry team. Slim was a heavyset, quiet fellow from Oregon, a State Trooper out there. He was one of three actual gunfight veterans on the team.

"2150," said his number two, Bear.

"Okay, let's hold here," Slim said, trying to control his breathing. "We'll move to the door at 2158."

They hunched, tensing, feeling the sultry weight of the air. It was all going so fast. Getting across the street and reassembling at the rallying point seemed much simpler than it was supposed to be. No screwups at all.

"One last time, let's go over assignments. I'm one; when the door goes, I pile through it first, with my.45, covering the right side of the rear hall, turning right, moving into the main room and covering the right again."

Two, three and four ran through their assignments, droning on about turns to left or right and sectors to cover with pistol or tommy gun.

"I'm five," said Henderson finally. "I go down the hall, past the casino, turn right, take the stairs up to the manager's office, which I cover. Securing that, I work the men's and women's rooms."

"I'm six," said Frenchy. "I grab the blonde, I fuck her fast, then I spray the room with lead, killing everybody, including you guys. Then I light up a smoke and wait for the newspaper boys and my Hollywood contract."

"All right, Frenchy," said Slim. "Cut the shit. This ain't no joke."

"All right, all right," said Frenchy. "I'm six. I support five up the rear stairs with the tommy, covering the left-hand side of the stairwell. I cover him in the manager's office, and then we check the two rest rooms. I hope there's a babe on the pot in the lady's."

"Cornhole," someone muttered.

"Now what's the last thing we heard?" asked Slim. "What should be freshest in our minds?"

There was stupefied silence.

"Damn, you guys already forgot! Mr. Earl is going to be in there. He'll be at the bar. So you guys especially, three and four, you make sure you do not cover him. No accidents. Got that?"

Taking the silence as assent, he then said, "Time check?"

"Uh, 2157."

"Shit, we're late. Okay guys, single file, follow me. You ready with that sledge, Eff?"

"Yes I am."

"Let's move out."

They scooted down the rear of the building and came to rest in the lee of the door. The alley was dark. All was silent.

"On the tommies, safeties off."

Silently, the men found the safeties of their weapons and disengaged them, while three edged around with his sledge, getting ready to give the door a stout whack just above the handle.

Slim looked at his watch. The second had ticked around, until it reached straight up.

"Doit,"he said.

Earl stepped into a well-lighted space. It wasn't nearly as crowded as the Ohio had been that night. A big guy eyed him as he walked through the doorway, clearly a muscle-man or some kind of enforcer, but he was so close to the door he felt the palooka would have no chance to react when the fellows spilled through in a few minutes.

He moved on into the big room, which was simply the majority of the building. It was just a space to house the sucker-swindling machinery, decorated along horse-racing lines, with jerseys and crops and helmets and horsehoes festooning the walls. The lights were bright, the smoke heavy, and the slots were set against the walls where a number of weary pilgrims fed them coins to what appeared to be very little financial gain on their part. In the center of the room a couple of tables offered blackjack, there was a poker game going on but without much energy and a roulette wheel ticked off its reds and blacks as it spun to the amusement of another sparse crowd. But the main action was craps, where the players were louder and more excitable.

"Eighter, eighter, eighter from Decatur."

"No, no, Benny Blue's coming up, here comes the big Reno, I can feel it in my bones."

Perhaps because it was built around dynamic movement, this game seemed to draw the most passion. Its players crowded round, and gave their all to the drama.

"Yoleven, yoleven, yoleven!"

Earl slid to the bar and ordered a beer, which was delivered by a plug-ugly without much sentimentality.

"First one's on the house, long as it ain't the last one."

"Oh, it's going to be a long night, trust me, brother," said Earl, taking a sip of the brew.

He measured the bartender, who looked like a tough cracker and thought he might have to cool him out. When the man's attention was on other customers, Earl snuck a peek down and under the bar, where he saw, among the bottles and napkins, a sawed-off pool cue, and a sawed-off 12-gauge pumpgun. The weapons were hung under the bar right next to the cash register. At 2159, Earl thought he'd mosey down and set up there.

Meanwhile, he scanned the crowd, looking for security types. So far only two: the big guy at the door and the bar-keep. Maybe there was another someplace but he sure didn't see him.

Smoke heaved and drifted in the bright room. He picked up his beer and moved on down to the cash register, until he was parked just above the cached weapons. The hand on the clock on the wall said ten o'clock, straight up.

Three's sledge hit the door, rebounded once. He caught it and being a strong young Georgia vice detective, swung again, to the sound of wood shattering and ripping. A blade of light fell into the alley as the door was blasted from its hinges and fell wretchedly to one side.

The men scrambled in.

There was a sense of craziness to it, as they stumbled over each other and no one could quite get his limbs moving fast enough-Their eyes bugged as the hormones of aggression flooded through their bodies. They rushed along, bringing the guns to bear, looking hungrily for targets to kill.

Slim was shouting "Hands up! Hands up! This is a raid!" and others took up the call, "Raid! Raid! Raid!"

Frenchy had but a glimpse of the first two teams as they fanned out and dispersed into the casino's main room. But he churned along in the wake of Carlo Henderson, his partner, who was strangely animated to grace by all the excitement and moved ahead purposefully, quickly found the right-hand stairwell, and began to assault the stairs, screaming "RaidI Raid! Hands up!"

Frenchy was with him when a man appeared at the top of the stairs. Frenchy knew in a second he'd shoot if Carlo weren't in the way, but he couldn't fire and he sat back waiting for Carlo's shots to ring out. But Carlo didn't shoot.

"Hands up! Get those hands up and you won't get hurt!" he screamed, thrusting his.45 in his two hands before him, aimed straight at the heart of the figure, who threw his hands skyward and went to his knees.

Carlo was next to him like some kind of sudden athlete, spun him, leaned him against the wall, spread him and searched him. A Colt.32 pocket model came out and was tossed down the stairwell.

"You stay put!" Carlo demanded, reached up, gracefully snagged the guy in one half a pair of cuffs, wound him quickly around and clipped the other wrist and sat him down with a thump. He was wearing a white tuxedo and Frenchy bet he'd be the manager.

Perhaps that's why when the two men kicked open the casino manager's office and scanned it quickly for threats, they found nothing.

"Clear!"

"Clear on my side!" replied Frenchy.

Next they did the washrooms. A fairly drunk guy was propped against the urinal; Frenchy gave him a nudge and he fell backward, spraying pee in a wide arc, but the two young policemen, though encumbered in vests and with weapons, were so horrified of the prospect of being splashed, they leapt back and missed the dousing. Frenchy felt a flare of rage, and stepped forward to club the drunk with his tommy gun butt, but Carlo interceded and brought him under control. The drunk lay in his own piss, screaming, "Don't hurt me, don't hurt me!"

"You stay here till we come get you," Carlo screamed. Then he turned to Frenchy. "Come on, goddammit!"

They ducked next into the ladies'. It was clear, except for a closet, which they tried and found locked.

"Smash it?" asked Frenchy.

Carlo pulled really hard. It wouldn't open.

"Yeah," he said. "You smash it open since you want to hit something. I'm going to take that drunk and the guy in the tux downstairs before they run away."

He disappeared.

Frenchy had a weird need to spray the door with the Thompson. Nah, he knew that would be wrong.

Instead, he beat at it until the jamb gave, and pulled it open. Nothing inside except a wash bucket and a mop.

He heard a thump or something coming from outside. He ducked out, searched, saw nothing. He looked into the casino manager's office and it appeared empty.

He thought nothing of it and downstairs he could hear the loud voice of D. A. Parker, "Now, ladies and gendemen, you just stand clear, we are from the Prosecuting Attorney's Office and don't mean no harm to any citizens. You just relax and you'll be able to go home in a bit."

There was a quiet moment when the world seemed to hang suspended. Then it exploded.

Earl sat calmly as the doorway burst open and the first man through swung his.45 like a scythe and neady clipped the security man at the door. Great anticipation, great reaction. Earl watched the hand with the gun invert, then flash outward toward the stunned piece of beefcake, heard the odd, meaty sound as the gun made contact with the face, and watched as the enforcer dropped into a puddle. Other raiders spilled into the room, fanned out, and took over the room.

It was good. He was proud. No one was out of control, no one was gesturing crazily or screaming. They simply asserted command. They were professional, and Stretch, who was doing the shouting, had an authoritative voice untarnished by fear or doubt.

"Hands up! Hands up! Show us hands!"

Hands went up; people froze. Even the croupiers and the pit bosses froze with the sudden, overwhelming display of force.

That is, except for the bartender.

Earl knew his man. The bartender reacted with his guts instead of his brain, and, alone among them, he spun and grabbed reflexively for a weapon under the bar.

Earl probably could have broken his arm with the sap. Instead, he thumped him lightly and perfectly, intercepting the plunging limb and striking it at the nearly fleshless bone along the arm's top.

"Ah!" the bartender groaned, driven to his feet by the agony of the blow that had turned the whole left-hand side of his body numb. He sat back, clasping the bruise to him and in pure animal terror recoiled and tried to go tiny and harmless.

"You be a good boy!" Earl warned.

Earl turned back and saw that the situation was now in complete control. Nobody else moved.

"You okay, Mr. Earl?" asked Slim.

"B'lieve I'm fine," Earl said, taking his badge out of his pocket and pinning it to his lapel.

"You were one inch from catching a tommy gun burst in the guts," one of the raiders said to the bartender, who still groaned at the pain.

Earl leaned around the bar, plucked out the pool cue and threw it across the floor. Then he pulled out the sawed-off pump, pointed it down, and jacked the pump hard, ejecting six twelve-gauge shells. He dumped the empty thing on the bar, its pump locked back to expose the unfilled chamber.

D. A. was there next.

"Now, ladies and gendemen, you just stand clear. We are from the Prosecuting Attorney's Office and don't mean you any harm. You just relax and you'll be able to go on home in a minute."

"Can we keep our winnings?"

"Anything on your person you may keep. Sorry, but anything on the tables will be confiscated by the Prosecuting Attorney's Office."

There was some grumbling, but as the guns came down and the hands came down, everybody seemed to be making the best of it.

In another second Carlo Henderson appeared with a squawking guy in a white tux, hands cuffed behind him.

"Who the hell are you? What the hell is going on? I am Jack McGaffery, manager of the Horseshoe, and Owney Maddox is going to be plenty jacked at this."

"Reckon he will be, sir. Are you aware there are illegal gaming devices on the property?"

"Naw, do tell? Never noticed a thing, there, Sheriff. By God, Owney Maddox will have your ass for this. You ask these folks. He won't―"

"Well, sir," said D. A., "you tell Owney Maddox if he wants to make an appointment with Mr. Becker, to go right ahead. Meanwhile, soon's we get these folks out of here, we're going to destroy the illegal―"

"Destroy! Jesus Christ, man, you must be crazy! Owney will hunt you to your last day on earth!"

"Don't think you get it yet, McGaffery. He ain't hunting us, we're hunting him. We're the new boys in town and by God, he will wish we'd never come. All right, fellows, let's get it done!"

They began to herd the citizens out the front doors, while a few other raiders moved the casino staff to one side. Earl stood watching and noted that Frenchy finally arrived from upstairs with his Thompson gun. He hadn't shot anyone yet; that was good.

"All right," Earl commanded. "Peanut, you bring the cars up close and we'll get the axes out and go to town. Y'all, you just sit down over there, and watch what we do so you can give Owney Maddox a good report. Mr. Becker will be here soon. We'll see if you're gonna be arrested or not. I want―"

Earl had a thought before him which was something like "I want you to pay close attention to what a thorough job we do, because we're going to do a lot more thorough jobs before we're done," which was meant for the casino staff as a note of intimidation for Owney Maddox and the Grumley boys. That way he'd know he had some problems and he'd get serious about them.

But that thought never got out.

Instead, from the corner of his eye, he saw something move that shouldn't move at all. It was a shape, a form, a shadow, and no clear oudine was visible, for it seemed to emerge from the back entrance in a flash of a second. Earl only recognized that it was a human form and that a hard, cold thing that rose at an angle above it was the double barrels of a shotgun.

Earl could not command himself to draw and fire. No man could move that fast from the rational part of his brain. He simply swept aside the coat, drawing the gun, his thumb flying to and pushing off the safety, his other hand clasping the grip and cradling the first hand, his elbows flying and then locking, almost as if he'd willed it rather than done it, and in the next billionth of a second the pistol reported loudly, kicked against his tight double-handed grip and ejected a spent brass shell.

In the close room the noise was tremendous. It bounced off walls and its vibrations sprang dust from rafters and countertops. It unleashed energy from everywhere, as citizens dove for cover, raiders dropped and pivoted, aiming their weapons off the cue from Earl, and even D. A. got his gun out fast and into play. Only Frenchy stood rooted in place, for Earl's bullet had passed within a foot or so of him before it plowed into the center chest of what appeared to be a vacant, doughy-faced young man in an ill-fitting Sunday-go-to-meeting suit.

His eyes locked on Earl's as the shotgun fell from his hand, and implored him for mercy. The request was too late, for it wouldn't have mattered if Earl fired again or not. The young man went down like a sack of spring apples falling off a wagon, hitting the floor with the crack of bones and teeth breaking; his blood began to pump from his heart across the floor in a spreading satin puddle.

Everybody was yelling and diving and moving at once, but Earl knew it was over. He'd seen the front sight on the chest at the moment he'd fired.

"Goddamn, Mr. Earl," somebody said.

"That damn boy!" said McGaffery. "He didn't have the sense of a mule. You didn't have to kill him, though."

"Maybe he ain't dead," said a raider.

"He's dead," said D. A., holstering his automatic. "When Earl shoots, he don't miss. Good shot, Earl. You boys see that? That's how it's done."

Earl himself felt nothing. He'd killed so many times before, and not only yellow men. He'd killed white men in Nicaragua in 1933, with the same kind of gun that Frenchy carried.

But he felt it in his heart right away, the difference: that was war. This was―well, what was it?

"You killed a Grumley," said the bartender, still holding his bruised wrist. "Now you got the Grumleys on you. Them boys don't forget a thing. Not never. The Grumleys will mark you and dog you the rest of your days, mister."

"I been dogged before, mister" was all Earl said; then he turned to the raiders and said, "Okay, let's get going. You got some busting up to do. Come on."

But he didn't like the killing either. It wasn't a good sign, Grumleys or no Grumleys.

Chapter 15

Owney knew the most important thing about his situation was to pretend he had no situation.

Thus, though Hot Springs' insular, gossipy little business, gambling and criminal communities were literally aflame with speculation about the raid, and the Little Rock Courier-Herald and the Democrat had run pieces, it was important for him to suggest that nothing was really amiss. He got up, dressed dapperly―an ascot!―and went for a stroll down Central, saying hello in his best Ronald Colman voice to all those he knew, and he knew many people. He was especially British today, even wearing a Norfolk jacket and flannels, with a dapper tweed hat.

"Cheerio," he said wherever he went. "Be good sports. Keep the old upper lip stiff. Tut tut and ho ho, as we say in Jolly Olde."

He attended a luncheon for the hospital board and dropped in at the Democratic Ladies' Club, where he made a donation of $1,000 toward the clubhouse redecorating project slated for that fall. He met Raymond Clinton, the Buick agency owner, and had a long discussion about the new Buicks. They were beauts! He said he was thinking about retiring his prewar limo. It was time to be modern and American. It was the '40s. The Nazis and the Japs were whipped! We had the atom bomb!

But even as he was going about his public business, he was relaying orders through runners to various of his employees, directing a search, putting pressure on the police, sending out scouting parties, setting up surveillance at Becker's office in City Hall and convening a meeting.

The meeting was scheduled for 5:30 P. M., in the kitchen at the brand-new Signore Giuseppe's Tomato Pie Paradise, where Pap Grumley and several ranking Grumleys, F. Garry Hurst, Jack McGaffery and others showed up as ordered. Everybody gathered just outside the meat locker, where about a thousand sausages hung in bunches and strings. The smell of mozzarella and tomato paste floated through the air.

"No siree, Mr. Maddox," said Pap. "My boys, they been up, they been down. These coyotes have vanished. Don't know where they done gone to ground, but it ain't in no goddamn hotel nor no tourist camp. Maybe they's camping deep in the hills. Shit, my boys couldn't find a thing. We may have to go to the hounds to git on these crackers. Know where I can git me a troop of prize blue ticks if it comes to that. Them dogs could smell out a pea in a pea patch the size of Kansas. One particular pea, that is."

He spat a gob of a fluid so horrifyingly yellowed that even Owney didn't want to think about it. It landed in the sink with a plop.

"You got boys coming in?" Owney, the high baron of New York's East Side, asked in his native diction.

"Yes sir. Got boys from Yell County. The Yell County Grumleys make the Garland County Grumleys look tame. They're so mean they drink piss for breakfast."

Owney turned to Jack McGaffery.

"And you? You made the fuckin' calls I told you?"

"Yes sir. We can get gun boys from Kansas City and St. Paul inside a week if we need 'em. It ain't a question of guns. We can put guns on the street. Hell, there's only a dozen or so of them."

"Yeah, but we gotta find the fuckers first."

He turned to Hurst.

"What do you make of it?"

"Whoever thought this out, thought it out well," said the lawyer. "These boys were well armed and well trained. But more to the point, whoever is planning this thing has thought long and hard about what he is attacking."

"Garry, what the fuck are you tawkin' about?" said Owney.

"Consider. He―whomsoever he may be―has certainly made a careful study of Hot Springs from a sociological point of view. He understands, either empirically or instinctively, that all municipal institutions have been, to some degree or other, penetrated and are controlled by yourself. So he sets up what appears to be a roving unit. It stays nowhere. It has no local ties, no roots, no families. It can't be reported on. It can't be spied on. It can't be betrayed from within. It permits no photographs, its members do not linger or speak to the press, it simply strikes and vanishes. It's brilliant. It's even almost legal."

"Agh!" Owney groaned. "I smell old cop. I smell a cop so old he knows all the tricks. You ain't pulling no flannel over this old putz's eyes."

He looked back at Jack.

"The cowboy was the fast one. The rest were punks. But you said a old man was in command. That's what you said."

"He was. But I only heard the name Earl. 'Earl, that was a great shot,' the old man said to the fast cowboy after he clipped Garnet. But no other names were used. The old one was in charge but the cowboy was like the sarge or something."

"Okay," Owney said. "They will hit us again, the bastards. You can count on it. They are looking for the Central Book, because they know when they get that, they got us. Meanwhile, we will be hunting them. We got people eye-balling Becker. We follow Becker, he'll be in contact with them, and somehow, he'll lead us to them."

"Yes sir," said Flem Grumley, "'ceptin' that Becker never showed at his office this morning, and when we sent some boys by his house, it was empty. He moved his family out. He's gone underground too."

"He'll turn up. He's got speeches to make, he's got interviews to give. He wants to be governor and he wants to ride this thing into that big fuckin' job. He's just another husder. He don't scare me. That goddamn cowboy, he scares me. But I've been hunted before."

"Pray tell, by whom, Owney?" asked Garry.

"Ever hear of Mad Dog Coll?"

"Yes."

"Yeah, well, Mad Dog, he comes gunning for me. He steals my best man, fuckin' Jimmy Lupton, and holds him for ransom. I got to pay fuckin' fifty long to get Jimmy back. He was a pisser and a half, that fuckin' kid. Balls? Balls like fuckin' steel fists. Crazy but gigantic balls. So you know what the lesson is?"

"No sir."

"Bo Weinberg catches him in a phone booth with the chopper. The chopper chops that mick fuck to shit. Don't matter how big his fuckin' balls are. The chopper don't care. So here's the lesson: everybody dies. Every-fiickin'-body dies."

After the meeting, Owney went to his car. He checked his watch to discover that it was five o'clock, 6:00 New York time. He told his driver where to go.

The driver left Signore Giuseppe's, drove down to Central, turned up it, then up Malvern Avenue and drove through the nigger part of town, past the Pythian Hotel and Baths, past cribs and joints and houses, then turned toward U. S. 65, the big little Rock road over by Malvern, but didn't drive much farther. Instead, he stopped at a gas station along the edge of Lake Catherine.

Owney got out, looked about to make certain he was not followed. Then he went into the gas station, a skunky old Texaco that looked little changed since the early 1920s, when it was built. The attendant, an old geezer whose name should have been Zeke or Lum or Jethro nodded, and departed, after hanging out a sign in the window that said CLOSED. Owney checked his watch again, went to the cooler, took out a nickel bottle of Coca-Cola, pried off the cap and drank it down in a gulp. He took out a cigarette, inserted it into his holder, lit it with a Tiffany's lighter that had cost over $200, and took a puff.

The cigarette was half down when the phone rang.

Owney went to it.

"Yeah?"

"I have a person-to-person long-distance call for a Mr. Brown from a Mr. Smith in New York City."

"This is Brown."

"Thank you, sir. I'll make the connection."

"Thanks, honey."

There were some clickings and the rasp of interference, but a voice came on eventually.

"Owney?"

"Yeah. That you, Sid?"

"Yeah."

"So what the fiick, Sid? What the fuck is going on?"

"Owney, I tell ya. Nothing."

"I got a boy busting my balls down here. Some hick exsoldier prosecutor who thinks he's Tom Fuckin' Dewey."

"Not good."

"No, it ain't. But I can take care of it. What I'm worried about is that fucker Bughouse Siegel. Frank and Albert and Mr. Lansky all like the little fuck. Is he behind my trouble down here? Is he trying to muscle me out of the business? It might do him some good."

"Owney, like you said, I asked some questions. What I hear is he is just pissing money away into a big hole in the ground out in some desert. That hot-number babe he's got with him, you know, she ain't too happy. She's been talking to people about what an asshole he is. She has friends. She has a lot of friends and he leaves her alone in Hollywood to go out to the desert and piss some more money into a hole. Only I hear that broad ain't ever alone. She still has the hotsies for Joey Adonis, among others."

"So the Bughouse has that to worry about before he worries about my little action down here?"

"That's what I hear. But Owney, I have to tell you the big guys do like him. They sent him out there. He has their ear. I'd look out for him. He thinks big."

"Yeah, he thinks big, with my thoughts. I gave him his whole idea. He thinks he can fuckin' build a Hot Springs in the desert. There's nothing there but sand. Here, we got nature, we got mountains, we got lakes, we got―"

"Yeah, but in that state, gambling's legal, so you don't get raided. Remember that. That's a big plus."

"We're not supposed to get raided here."

"So you said. Owney, the guys, they always say, That Owney, he runs a smooth town. That's why they like to go there. The baths, some dames, some gambling, no problem, no hassles with the law. That's what they like. As long as you provide that for them, you will have no problems."

"Yeah."

"Owney. Best thing you can do is forget about Bugsy, and keep that town running smooth. That's your insurance policy."

"Yeah," said Owney. "Thanks, Sid."

It was on the way back that he had his big thought.

"Back home, sir?"

"No, no. Take me to the newspaper office. And then call Pap Grumley. Tell him to find Garnet Grumley's mother. Or someone who looks just like her."

Chapter 16

"So tell me what happened up there Henderson," Earl asked Carlo.

"I guess I screwed up. I thought I had it covered. I thought we done a good job."

Earl nodded.

The raiders were headquartered in the pumping station of the Remmel Hydroelectric Dam, which blocked the Ouachita River and had thereby created Lake Catherine, and lay between Magnet and Hot Springs, on Route 65, not far at all from the Texaco station where Owney had gotten his call from New York. The pumping station, which was administered by theTVA and run out of Malvern, not Hot Springs, was a large brick building at the end of three miles of dirt road off U. S. 65; though most of its innards were taken up with turbines turning and producing electricity for Hot Springs, the upper floors had surprising space and provided room for fourteen cots, as well as hot showers and indoor plumbing. It was better than most places Earl had slept during the war. D. A. had thought all this out very carefully.

"Tell me what happened."

"Well sir, we done our best. I am truly ashamed it wasn't good enough. But we got up there fast, we nabbed that bird McGaffery on the steps, there was a goddamned pissing drunk in the men's room, and we run him downstairs too, and we checked all the closets."

"So Garnet Grumley could not have been up there?"

"I don't think so," said Carlo. "But if I missed him, then I missed him."

"He was not up there," said Frenchy. "Mr. Earl, we went all through that place. I even beat the lock off the closet door in the ladies'."

"See," said Earl, "I do not particularly care for having to shoot a boy dead, who was after all only doing his job and as it turned out had forgotten to load his shotgun. Either of you killed anyone?"

Both men shook their head no.

"I swear to you, Mr. Earl, that fellow did not come from up there," said Frenchy. "He must have snuck in from the outside. Or maybe he came up from the cellar."

"Wasn't no cellar," said Carlo. "And we'd have seen him in the alley if he'd been lurking up there. Mr. Swagger, I do believe it was my fault and I am very sorry it happened. It wasn't Frenchy's. I was number one on our fire team, so the job was mine, and I muffed it. If you give me a next time, I will sure try hard to do a better job."

"Jesus, Henderson," said Frenchy. "He wasn't up there. It's not your fault, it's not my fault. It just goddamned happened is all and everybody is lucky it was him that got killed, and not one of us."

Earl pushed something across the table at them.

It was the Hot Springs New Era, the city's afternoon paper.

FARMBOY SLAIN IN COP "RAID"

Locals decry "Nazi" tactics

"He was a good boy," Mom says.

"Christ," said Frenchy. Carlo read:

Raiders from the Prosecuting Attorney's Office shot and killed a local man while invading a local nightclub.

The incident occurred at the Horseshoe Club, on Ouachita Avenue in West Hot Springs, late last night.

Dead was Garnet Grumley, 22, of Hot Springs, shot by a raider as he wandered in from the upstairs bathroom.

"Garnet was a good boy," said his mother, Viola Grumley, of eastern Garland County. "He did all his chores and milked his special cow, Billie. I wonder what he was doing in that downtown club. But I wonder why they had to shoot such a harmless, God-fearing boy."

Fred C. Becker, Garland County Prosecuting Attorney, refused to talk to New Era reporters.

In a news release his office provided, he claimed that officers shot in self-defense while on a raid aimed at local gamblers.

See New Era Editorial,

"Boy, I'll bet that one's rich."

"Oh, it is," said Earl.

The two young men flipped pages.

New Jayhawkers?

In the era preceding the Civil War it was common for night riders to terrorize Arkansans in the name of a just cause, which was more a license to hate. Town burnings, robberies, lynchings and other malicious acts were the order of the day.

History remembers these brigands as Jayhawkers and under that same name it consigns them to evil.

Well, a new plague of Jayhawkers is upon us. Unlike their predecessors they don't ride horses and carry shotguns; no, they ride in modern automobiles and carry machine guns.

And, like their brethren from a century ago, they hide behind a supposedly "just" cause, the elimination of gambling influence and corruption from our beautiful little city. But, as before, this is a clear case of the cure being worse―far worse―than the disease.

"Ouch," said Carlo. "Newspaper morons," said Frenchy. "Well, they do leave out the fact that the late Garnet spent fourteen months in the state penitentiary for assault and that he had a juvenile record that goes back to before the war," said Earl. "And D. A. says that Viola is no more his mama than you are, Short. He's an orphan Grumley, raised at the toe of a boot in the mountains, and pretty much your legger attack dog, and little else. So if a man had to die, better it was him than you or me."

"Yes sir," said Carlo.

"Okay, let me tell you two birds something. You are the youngest, but that don't bother me. You are probably also the smartest I got. I don't hold that smart boys ain't no good in combat, as some old sergeants do. But I do know your smart boy is easily distracted, and naturally doubtful, and has a kind of sense of superiority to all and sundry. So let me tell you, that if you want to stay in this outfit, you put all that aside. You put those smart-boy brains on the shelves and you commit to doing what you're told and doing it well and thoroughly. Elsewise, you're on your way back to where you come from, and you can tell your buddies there you were a bust as a raider."

"Yes sir," said Carlo.

"Now rack up some sleep. We're going again tonight."

Chapter 17

The Derby was filled that night. At one of the booths, the young, leonine Burt Lancaster held court like a gangster king, surrounded by cronies and babes, his teeth so white they filled the air with radiance.

In another, the young genius Orson Welles sat with his beautiful wife, eating immense amounts of food, an actual second dinner, and downing three bottles of champagne. Rita Hayworth just watched him sullenly as he uttered the words that were to become his signature: "More mashed potatoes, please."

Mickey was there, of course, though without his wife. He was with a chorine who had even larger breasts than his wife. He was smoking Luckies and drinking White Russians and looking for producers to shmooze, because he could feel himself, in his dreams at least, slipping ever so slightly.

Bogie was there, with a little nobody named Bill something or other, a Mississippi-born screenwriter who was lost in the rewrites of Ray Chandler's The Big Sleep. Bogie called him "Kid," got him good and drunk, and kept trying to get him to understand that it really didn't matter if anybody figured out who did it.

And Virginia was there, with her swain Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, and Ben's best Hollywood friend, Georgie Raft.

"Will you look at that" said Ben. "Enrol Flynn. Man, he don't look good."

"He's all washed up, I hear," said Georgie, drunkenly. "Warner's may drop him. Look at him."

Errol Flynn was even drunker than Georgie Raft and his once beautiful face had begun to show ruination. It was a mask of beauty turning inexorably into a burlap sack hung on a fencepost.

"Yeah, well, they didn't pick your contract up either, Georgie," said Virginia.

"I bought my way out of my contract," said Georgie. "I gave Jack a check for $10,000 and walked out of his office a free man."

"I heard he would have paid you the ten long to take a hike," said Virginia.

"Can it, Virginia," said Ben.

Raft stared moodily into his drink. For a tough guy, he had an amazingly delicate little face, a nose as perfecdy upturned as any pixie's.

"It ain't been easy on him," consoled his best friend from the old neighborhood, where they'd specialized in heisting apple carts.

"Why don't you beat up a casting director, Ben? That is, if you could find one you could take. Maybe you could make Georgie big again."

"I don't know what's the matter with this bitch," Ben explained to Georgie. "Ever since we got back from the South, she's been acting funny toward me."

He looked at her. But goddamn, she was still the female animal in all her surly glory, tonight with a huge wave of auburn cream for hair, meaty big-gal shoulders and breasts scrunched together to form a black slot in the ample flesh into which a man could tumble and lose his soul forever.

"Yeah," she said, "maybe it has something to do with all the times you fly out to the fucking desert and watch

Del Webb pour Mr. Lansky's money into a big hole in the ground."

Another row was starting.

"Kids, kids, kids," consoled Georgie. "Let's enjoy ourselves. We have a great table at the Brown Derby in a room filled with movie stars. People would kill to get what we have. Let's enjoy. Gar^on, another Scotch, please."

The three friends each retreated briefly to his or her libation, tried to settle down and collect themselves, then returned to conviviality.

"Virginia, it's a big thing I got going. You'll see. The big guys all believe in it. It'll be bigger than Hot Springs."

"Hot Springs is supposed to be in Hot Springs, not in a desert. Owney Maddox is supposed to run Hot Springs. That's the way it's supposed to be, Ben. You ought to know that."

Ben allowed himself a snicker.

"You think Owney's so high and mighty? You think nobody would stand against Owney? Well, let me tell you something, Owney's got some troubles you wouldn't want."

"Owney's okay," said Georgie. "He knew some people and helped me get started out here."

"Owney's finished," said Ben. "He just don't know it yet."

"Owney's a creep but he can take care of himself," Virginia argued, then took another sip of her third screwdriver. She could outdrink any man in Hollywood except for Flynn. "He pretends to be a British snob but he's an East Side gutter rat, just like you two pretty boys."

"Virginia, Owney's got troubles and the big guys know it. I heard about it all the way out here. He's got some crusader raiding his joints and he doesn't know how to get the guy. His grab on that town is shaky and once it slips, you just watch everybody walk away from him. It happened to him in New York, it'll happen to him in Hot Springs. He lost the Cotton Club, he'll lose the Southern. You just watch. He'll end up dead or with nothing, which is the same thing."

"And would you be the guy to take it from him?"

"I don't want nothing in Hot Springs. But I don't want Hot Springs being Our Toztm either. We need a new town, and I mean to build one in the desert. You just watch me, goddammit."

"Ben, the only thing you've built so far is a hole in the ground for somebody else's money."

"Virginia, you are so rude."

"Don't you love me for it, sugar?"

"No, I love you for them tits, that ass, and the thing you do with your mouth. You must be the only white girl in the world who does that thing."

"You'd be surprised, honey."

"Hello, darling. Your bosom is magnificent."

This was from Errol Flynn, an old pal of Virginia's from some weekend or other. Flynn leaned into their booth, his famous handsome face radiating a leer so intense it could melt a vault door.

"Hit the road, you limey puke," said Ben.

"Hi, Georgie," said Errol, ignoring Ben. "Tough luck about Warner's. They'll drop me next."

"I got some deals working. I'll be okay. Errol, how're you doing?"

"Well, there's always vodka."

"Errol," said Virginia, "just don't doodle any more fifteen-year-olds. Jerry Geisler might not get you out of it next time."

"In like Flynn, old girl. Oh, Benjamin, didn't see you there, old fellow. Still looking for buried treasure? There's a very good map to it in Captain Blood."

"You Aussie bastard."

The reference was to one of Ben's more regrettable adventures. With a former lover who billed herself a countess by way of some forgotten marriage to an actual Italian count, he had rented a yacht and gone to an island off the coast in search of pirates' treasure. It had been quite the joke in Los Angeles in the social season of 1941.

"Don't pick on Ben," said Virginia. "He has big plans. He does know where the treasure is buried and it is in a desert, only it ain't on an island."

"Virginia, you bitch."

"Tut tut, old man," said Errol, moving on to another table.

"You shoulda smashed him," said Georgie. "He can be an asshole. You understand, I can't take him on because he still has Jack Warner's ear, and he might talk against me. I might get another shot at Warner's, so I don't want to do nothing now."

"You're dreaming," said Virginia. "You couldn't smack him because you're afraid of him. He's pretty tough, they say. And genius here couldn't smack him because he can't smack anybody without puking all over his clothes."

"Virginia, leave it alone."

"Did he tell you that story, Georgie? He tries to strong-arm this cowboy in Hot Springs and the guy hits him so hard he can't sit up straight for a week and a half. And I had to listen to him all that time, whinin' like a baby."

"I'll fix that guy."

"Yeah, you'll fix him. You and some army. Ben, why don't we go back right now? Fix him this week. Get it out of the way?"

Ben's eyes clouded and his face tightened.

"I got business to take care of first."

"He's spooked by this guy. So he'll hire goons to clip him, because he don't have the guts to do it man on man."

"I will fix that guy," Bugsy swore. "I will fix him after I fix Owney and after I fix Hot Springs. Forget Hot Springs. Its time is over. The future is in the desert, goddammit, and I will lead the way."

Chapter 18

The Belmont lay close to the Oaklawn Racetrack, just south of Hot Springs. If the Horseshoe was your run-of-the-mill joint, with a hundred duplicates on almost any street in town, the Belmont was a step up the food chain. It offered the fancier gamblers a sense of class without quite demanding of them the tuxedoed glamour―with its Xavier Cugats and its Perry Comos―that a place like the Southern Club might. The entertainment tended to be regional, usually a piano combo that played light jazz. It sold cocktails at the bar, not shots, not champagne. Its machines were the sleeker Pace Chrome Comet, which looked as if it could get up and fly, the hottest thing from the year 1939, as its reels spun bells and apples and bananas and oranges this way and that. These machines weren't as tight as the older models, which meant that once or twice a night a line of bells would pop up and a pilgrim would be rewarded with a silver cascade of nickels. The house payoff was a modest 39 percent.

It stood in the same hollow as the now deserted racetrack, under a low piney ridge, and it had been done up in the style of the antebellum South, to resemble a wooden plantation house with fake columns and white trim that a Scarlett O'Hara might have designed. A valet crew parked cars; the overhanging elms gave it hushed and muted elegance.

Rather than enter the gates and move into the parking lot, in plain sight of the valets, D. A. elected to infiltrate from the empty racetrack. The three cars discharged their men on the far side, and there the raiders loaded magazines, checked weapons, put on vests and went over their plans for the last time. Becker was already there, this time with two men on his staff and a clerk-driver.

D. A., Earl and Becker hunched undercover in a racetrack portico, examining a diagram of the Belmont with a flashlight.

"Since this is a bigger, more complicated structure," said D. A., "I'd rather have muscle up front. I'd send ten men through the front door and side door―a six-man team and a four-man team―and I'd bolt that kitchen door and leave two men out back to cover it. That way, you got all your force up front and you get it into play."

"I don't want any shooting," said Becker suddenly. "I don't want anyone else getting hurt."

There was a quiet moment.

Then D. A. said, "Well, sir, then I guess we better gather the boys up and take 'em home. I ain't sending men into a dangerous situation with the idea they can't defend themselves."

"No, no," said Becker. "They can defend themselves. I just want 'em to think before they shoot."

"If they think before they shoot," said Earl, "they may die before they shoot."

"We train 'em to shoot instinctively. They've been trained hard. There won't be no mistakes."

"like the Horseshoe?" Becker said.

"That weren't no mistake, sir," said the old man. "That was a completely justified legal shooting during the commission of a bonded officer's official duty, and we ought to thank the man who done it, for it probably saved some lives."

Becker seemed to vacillate, almost biting his lower lip like a child.

"It just played bad in the papers, that's what I mean. I have more photogs from little Rock here," he finally said. "We need the Little Rock papers behind us. They'll get the state behind us. The Hot Springs papers don't matter. But you can't screw up in front of Little Rock reporters. Okay?"

Both officers nodded, and Earl was thinking: This bird wants everything. He wants us to raid without killing and he doesn't want the action to get out of control. He's worried more about the press than the young men who are going in tonight. You can't control this work like that.

"We'll brief the boys," said D. A.

"Excellent. I'll meet up with the photographers." Becker looked at his watch: it was 9:35 P. M.

"Ten P. M., as usual?"

"We can't set up that fast," said D. A. "Make it 10:30."

"I told the photographers to meet me across the street at 9:45. Dammit, they'll get bored."

"Ten-fifteen then, if we hurry."

"That's good," said Becker. He walked back to his car and his clerk drove him away.

"He's shaky," said Earl. "I don't like that."

"I don't like it neither."

They beckoned the raiders over, and briefly went over the plan.

Earl finally said, "You, Henderson and Short, you'll be the cover team."

He could feel Frenches eagerness seem to melt in the dark.

"Want you to slip up and jimmy the kitchen door with a crowbar or something, so nobody can get out. If somebody does get out, he's wanting to get out bad, so you cuff him and cover him closely. Okay?"

"Yeah," said Henderson.

"Remember, be cool, calm, collected. Y'all been doing good. I'll go in after the entry team, but you be listening to Slim, he's the boss. I'm just along for support."

"Yes sir."

The unit moved around the racetrack single file. They could see the Belmont twinkling through the trees and hear the jazz streaming out of it, almost with a clink of cocktail glasses and the late-night odor of cigarettes to it.

"We'll go through the trees up high, on the ridge; then we'll file down and around the building. The entry team will go around front. There's people out there, so you have to control them right away."

But Earl drew D. A. aside.

"That ridge is a little steep," he whispered. "With these vests and the Thompsons, coming down in the dark could be tricky. Somebody could fall, we could get an accidental discharge. See, I'd keep 'em down here and just slip behind the line of sight from the front here on the right. Rally at the corner. Send the teams around, set up, and move fast, real fast."

D. A. looked at him for just a second, and a peculiar light came into his eyes, invisible in the night.

How does he know? he thought.

But then he saw the wisdom in Earl's counsel.

"Yeah, that's good, Earl."

Earl told the team of the new plan.

"You're on safety now. Team leaders, when you get there at the rallying point, you remember to tell your tommy-gunners to go off safety. If they have to shoot, something better come out when they pull the triggers besides cussing. Got that?"

Whispers came in assent.

"Henderson, you got that crowbar?"

"No sir," said Henderson, "but I do have a length of chain and a padlock."

"Good. You all straight?"

"Yes sir."

"You're also in support. If it gets wild, your job is to come in through the back. Got that?"

"Yes sir."

"Short, you got that?"

No answer.

"Short?

"Yeah, yeah. I'm all set."

"Okay," said Earl. "Let's do it."

Frenchy and Carlo separated from the congregation of raiders. They slithered around the back of the plantation house, keeping low, under the view from the windows. They scuttled alongside the foundation, at last coming to the kitchen door. It was closed already, but the windows on either side were open, and a steamy light and a sense of urgent busde poured out of each. They could hear Negro men talking among themselves.

Henderson slipped forward, looped the chain around the door handle, pulled it tight, looped it against the door-jamb, and clamped the lock shut. It would hold tight enough to prevent an exit, unless somebody really leaned into it.

The two men crept out to the perimeter of trees and set up in a defensive position about thirty yards in back of the house.

"You better give me the Thompson," said Carlo.

"Not a chance," said Frenchy. "You're fine."

"I can't hit anything at this range with a.45."

"Yeah, well, I have the Thompson and I'm keeping it. Get that straight right now. We wouldn't be in shit squad if you hadn't screwed up. So you don't deserve the Thompson."

"I screwed up? You screwed up! You didn't do a last check, or you would have found that hillbilly."

"I did do that last check. He wasn't up there. That's what you should have said to Earl, not this Tm so sorry' crap. If you act guilty, the facts don't matter. You are guilty."

"You should have checked."

"I did check. So here we are, dumped out back so we don't fuck up again."

"Somebody has to do this job."

"Nobody has to do this job. We all should be going in."

Frenchy was really getting steamed. Something about Earl really had him angry. Earl this, Earl that, God Earl, King Earl, Earl the leader of the pack! It was beginning to wear on him.

"What's so special about Earl?" he blurted.

"Earl's a hero and you're lucky to be here to learn from him," was all Carlo could think to say. "Now shut up and pay attention. We should be doing our jobs, not yakking about this stuff like old ladies."

Of course Becker's change in schedule had thrown the whole thing off. They weren't in position until 10:10, and in the darkness it took about four minutes to get organized into the proper squads and fire team, all trying to do it silently while crouching in the bushes under the windows. Fortunately, there was no perimeter security, no patrolling guards, no dogs, for if there had been, surely the whispering, bickering raiders would have been easily spotted.

Finally, with just thirty seconds to go, Earl got them straightened out, and the side-entry squad peeled off to beeline to the side door, which stood unguarded.

Earl looked at his watch.

"Okay," he said, "I'm going to go out and get the valets out of the way."

"You be careful," Slim said.

"You be careful," Earl said. "You're going in. I'm just going to roust some teenagers."

Earl stood, slipped out of his vest, which again would blow his cover, and rounded the corner.

He walked up the walk where three kids about eighteen or so lounged smoking under a neon sign that announced VALET. They wore absurd costumes that he could tell from their posture they despised.

"Hi, fellas," he said.

The boys looked up, caught short. Where the hell did this bird come from? But he was so chipper and bodacious the way he strode manfully up the flagstones to them.

"Uh―" the oldest began.

"See, fellas, I'm from the Prosecuting Attorney's Office." He pulled open his suit coat to show the badge pinned over his left breast. "Now we have something just about to happen here, and I don't want none of you boys getting hurt, so why not just step aside a bit, and turn and face the wall, maybe rest your hands up agin it."

"Are we under arrest?"

"Not unless you robbed a bank. Robbed any banks?"

"No sir."

"Ain't that swell."

"I better call Mr. Swenson," said one of the boys, reaching for a phone mounted on the wall.

Earl's fast hands beat him to the destination. He grabbed the phone, and with a snap popped the cord that ran to the receiver. "I don't think that would be a good idea," he said merrily. "Mr. Swenson's going to find out we're here soon enough, believe me."

Using the authority of his body language, he herded them along the front of the casino until they were a good twenty yards from their positions.

"You wouldn't have no guns, would you?"

"No sir," came a reply.

"'Cause I don't want to have to hurt nobody. You just rest up agin the building for a few minutes while this thing happens and everything will be just fine."

Earl turned a bit, and gave a whisde and watched as the raid began.

"There's the signal. Safeties off. Let's do it," said Slim.

He led his five men around the corner of the building to the front door. The door was open and a security officer, talking to a woman just inside the entrance, looked up in surprise. Terry, Slim's number-two man, clubbed him with the compensator on the end of his Thompson muzzle, opening a vicious wound in the side of his face, and he went down. The woman screamed but the raiders rushed past her like McNamara's band and began to fan out into the casino, their guns much in evidence, their fedoras low over their eyes, their square vests like sandwich boards across their bodies.

"Hands up! Hands up! This is a raidI"

The side-door team hit its entry point with the same velocity and urgency. The doors didn't need sledges but merely stout kicks. The men poured in and fanned out on the other side of the room. A team raced upstairs, clearing rooms, finding only gamblers and staff members, but no resistance.

It was over in seconds.

"Y'all go home now," Earl said to the valets. "This place is closed. You find other jobs tomorrow, hear?"

Earl walked in, his badge pinned to his lapel, and seconds later D. A. pulled up in a car.

It had gone exactly as planned: the overwhelming show of force, the speed of deployment, the cleverness of the raiders as they separated gamblers from workers, the pure professionalism of it.

"Clear upstairs," came the call.

"Clear in the kitchen," came another call.

"Now ladies and gendemen," said D. A., "this here's a raid on an illegal gambling facility by the Prosecuting Attorney's Office. You will be checked and released if there are no outstanding warrants on you. You may keep any winnings you have on your person. We'll have you out of here in no time, if you cooperate with us. And my advice is: if you like to gamble, try Havana, Cuba, because that's where you're going to have to go."

Mr. Swenson, the manager of the place, was brought between two raiders, cursing and spitting. A rotund man, with slicked-back hair and a summer tuxedo, he wore a red carnation in his lapel. Earl plucked it out and inserted it into his mouth, shutting him up.

"When we want to talk to you" he said, "we will tell you. Otherwise you suck on that flower like a lollipop and watch us tear this joint up so you can tell Owney Maddox he's finished in this town."

Then they heard the machine gun fire.

"There they go," said Carlo.

But from the rear, behind the trees thirty yards out, the two young officers saw nothing. They heard glass breaking, doors being shattered and other signals of men moving aggressively against an objective. It was over very quickly.

"That's it?" said Frenchy.

"I guess," said Carlo.

"Well, let's get in there."

But Carlo wasn't sure. He realized now he had no clear post-raid instructions.

"I think we ought to hang here till we're released."

"Come on, it's over. You can tell it's over. I don't want to miss the party."

"There's going to be plenty of party. Let's just sit here a bit longer."

"Shit, sit here in the dark, while everybody else is having a great time? Come on, this is stupid. Who died and left you in charge? That's where we're needed, not sitting out here like a couple of Boy Scouts."

Carlo let it simmer. Rather than argue with his partner, he just hunkered yet more solidly against the weight of the tree, saying nothing, moving not a muscle or a twitch, signifying the conversation was over.

"Look," said Frenchy, "we were put out here to cover this back entrance. Nobody's coming out this back entrance. So we're just wasting our time."

Finally, it seemed he was right. There was no more bustle from the kitchen and no evidence of movement or escape from the door.

"All right," Carlo finally said, "let's go."

They got up.

"Put that safety on," said Carlo. "I don't want you roaming around with a live gun."

"Safety's already on," said Frenchy, though of course it wasn't, nor did he have any intention of putting it on, not till the party was over.

The two young men walked to the kitchen door, feeling the bulk of the would-be plantation house loom over them. Carlo bent, unlocked the padlock, coiled the chain, and opened the door, stepping in.

Frenchy followed him and―

Whoa, there.

He caught a peripheral movement from his left, spun, and saw a second figure leap silently from the window, collect himself, join his partner and start to head off.

Frenchy dashed at them, intercepting them halfway to the trees.

"Hold it!" he screamed. "Hands up!"

He braced them from thirty feet with the Thompson, his finger dangerously caressing its trigger, which strained ever so gently against the pad of his fingertip.

But neither man seemed particularly challenged by the heavy gun aimed at him.

"Hey, hey, watch it, kid, them things is dangerous."

The other laughed.

"He's more gun than man, I'd say." They separated slightly.

"Don't move!" barked Frenchy.

"We're not moving? Are we moving? I don't see us moving. Do you see us moving?"

"I'm not moving," said the other. "If a lawman tells me not to move, I'm not moving, no sir."

"Hands! Show me hands!"

But neither man raised his hands.

They were two tough-looking customers in suits with hats drawn down across their eyes, mid-to late thirties, both handsome in a rough way. They were utterly calm. The one on the right was even smiling a little bit. The signals they were putting out utterly confounded him.

"Look, kid, why don't you put that gun down and go inside before somebody gets hurt," said one. "You don't want to do nothing stupid now, do you? Something that you'd regret your whole life? I mean hell, this is just a penny-ante gambling bust that ain't supposed to happen and it's all going to be straightened out in―"

Frenchy fired. The gun shuddered, heaved, flashed, spit smoke and flung a line of empties off to the right, pounding against his shoulder. Three-round burst? No siree bob. He hosed them, blowing them backward like tenpins split by a bowler's strike, and they tumbled to the earth in a tangle of floating dust and gun smoke.

"I don't do stupid things, asshole," he said.

Then he fired another burst, to make sure they stayed down.

Carlo, halfway through the kitchen, got there first. He found Frenchy standing thirty-odd feet from the bodies, screaming hysterically.

"Asshole! Assholes! You fucking pricks!

A tendril of smoke curled out of the compensator of the tommy and a litter of brass shells lay at his feet. The stench of gun smoke filled the air.

"What happened?"

"Fuckin' guys made a move. I got 'em. Goddamn, did I get 'em. Got 'em both, goddammit!"

"You okay?"

Clearly he wasn't. His eyes were as wide as lamps and his face was drawn into a mask of near-hysteria. He sucked at the air mightily. He seemed to stagger, then dropped to one knee.

"What the hell happened?" yelled Earl, arriving in a second.

Frenchy was silent.

"He nabbed these two guys making a getaway. He braced them, they drew and he dropped them. Looks like he clipped them both."

Earl walked over to the bodies as D. A. arrived. Two other raiders showed up, and then Becker, alone.

"What the hell is going on, for God's sake? I have two Little Rock photographers and two reporters out front, and they want to know what the hell happened."

"The officer dropped two runaways," said D. A. "They drew on him? Isn't that right, son?"

But Frenchy was silent.

Earl kneeled, put a hand out to each throat to feel for a pulse, but purely as an obligation. Each pulse was still. The two men lay on their backs. Frenchy had shot very well. Dust and smoke still floated in the air, and the blood continued to ooze from a network of wounds, absorbed by the material of the suits, so that each man was queerly damp, a sponge for excess blood. One's eyes were open blankly. The other's face was in repose. A hat was trapped under one head but the other hat lay a few feet away. The wounds were mostly in the torso and gut; both faces were unmarked.

"They drew on you, right?" asked D. A.

Frenchy was silent.

Earl heard the question and did the next bit of very dirty work. He pulled the sodden suit coats away from the bodies and checked for weapons. No shoulder holsters, no hip holsters, no guns jammed in belts, no guns in pockets, no guns in ankle holsters, no guns in suit pockets.

Earl rolled one over slightly, and gingerly withdrew a wallet. It contained what looked to be about $2,000 in cash and a driver's license in the name of William P. Allgood, from Tulsa, Oklahoma. A business card identified Mr. Allgood as an oil equipment leasing agent.

"Shit," said Earl, turning to the next body. That was a Phillip Hensler, also of Hdsa, a salesman for Phillips Oil.

He walked back.

"They wasn't armed," he said.

"Shit," said D. A.

"Oh, Christ," said Becker. "He killed two unarmed men? Jesus Christ, and I've got reporters here? Oh, Jesus Christ, you said they were trained, this wouldn't happen! Oh, Christ!"

"It's worse. One's a goddamn oil salesman, one leases drilling equipment. Both from Tulsa."

"Oh, shit," said D. A.

By this time, the Hot Springs police had arrived, and out in the lot, the gumballs flashed red in the night. A heavyset detective came around the corner with two uniforms.

"Mr. Becker? What the hell is going on?"

"One of my investigators shot two fleeing men," said Becker. "Naturally, we'll want a full investigation."

"Shit," said the cop.

"Y'all get on out of here until we're done," said Earl.

"Hey, buddy, I'm Captain Gilmartin and I―"

"I don't give a fuck who you are," said Earl, ramming his chest square against the fat man's gut, "I got six tommy guns that say you get the fuck off my operation till I let you on it, and if you don't like that, then there's some woods over there and whyn't you and I go discuss this a little further?" He fixed his mankiller's glare against the cop and watched the man melt and fall back.

"Take it easy, Earl," said D. A. "The police can control the crowd and look at the bodies when we're gone."

Earl nodded.

But someone else came up to the mute Becker, one of his assistants.

"Fred, the press guys are really getting difficult. I can't hardly contain 'em. They want to come back here and see what we bagged."

"Shit," said Becker. Then he turned to D. A.

"So you tell me what to do. You promised me this wouldn't happen. Now we got a situation where we've killed two innocent men. Unarmed men."

"Well, we don't know nothing about 'em yet," D. A. said.

Earl was so disgusted with Becker's panic that he turned and walked away, over to where Frenchy knelt in the grass with Henderson more or less holding him. He knelt too.

"You saw them make a move?" he asked.

"He ain't talked yet," said Henderson.

"Short. Short! Look at me! Snap out of it, goddammit. You saw them make a move?"

"I swear to Christ they did," Frenchy said, swallowing.

"They ain't armed."

"I know they were going to try something. I saw his hand move."

"Why would his hand move? It had nothing to move toward."

"I― I―"

"Did you panic, Short? Did you just squeeze down on 'em because you was scared?"

"No sir. They made a move."

"Son, I want to help you. Ain't nobody here going to do it. That Becker, he'll throw you to the wolves if it makes him the youngest governor in the state of Arkansas."

"I― I know they moved. They were trying something."

"Is there any evidence? Did they say anything? I mean, give us something to work with. Why did you fire?"

"I don't know."

"Did you see anything, Henderson?" Carlo swallowed. He decided not to mention Frenchy's cursing the dead bodies, his state of lost anger.

"He was just standing there with the smoking gun. They were dead. That's all." "Shit," said Earl.

But someone was standing over him. Peanut, the biggest man in the unit, a former detective from Adanta, loomed over them. "Whaddaya want, Peanut?"

"Well sir," said Peanut, "I may be wrong, but I don't think I am." "What?"

"Them boys. The boys Short bushwhacked." "Yeah?"

"I looked 'em over real careful." "They're a couple of salesmen from Tulsa." "No sir. B'lieve one's Tommy Malloy, out of Kansas City, and the other's Walter Budowsky, called Wally Bud. Bank robbers." "Bank robbers?"

"Malloy's number one on the FBI's most wanted list. Wally Bud is only number seven. But that's who it is, killed deader'n stumps over there."

"Jesus Christ," said Frenchy. "I'm a hero!"

Chapter 19

Cleveland was on the phone. Owney didn't want to take it and you never could be too sure about the security of the phones, even if Mel Parsons, who ran Bell Telephone in Hot Springs, maintained that no one could eavesdrop without his knowledge.

Still, Owney knew he had to take the call.

He had a martini, and a Cubano. He sat in his office in the Southern. One of the chorus girls kneaded the back of his neck with long, soothing fingers. Jack McGaffery and Merle Swenson―neither with a club to manage―sat earnestly on the davenport. F. Garry Hurst smoked a cigar and looked out the window. Pap and Flem Grumley were also in attendance, though as muscle slightly exiled to a further circle.

"Hello, Owney Maddox here."

"Cut the English shit, Owney. I ain't one of your stooges."

"Victor? Victor, is that you?"

"You know it is, Owney. What the hell is going on down there? My people tell me some cops knocked off Tommy Malloy and Wally Bud. I'm supposed to tell Mr. Fabrizzio that? Mr. Fabrizzio liked Tommy very much. He knew his dad back in the '20s when his dad legged rum across Superior for him."

"It's nothing. I got some pricks who―"

"Owney, Jesus Christ, this is serious shit. There are people unhappy all over the goddamn place. Tommy was down there because you said he'd be all right. Send your boys down, you said; I rim the town, the town welcomes visitors. What the fuck, now I got two dead guys?"

"I'm having some trouble with a local fuckin' prosecutor, It ain't a big thing."

"Oh, yeah? It was pretty fucking big to Tommy Malloy. He's fucking dead, if I recall."

"I got some kind of rogue cop unit. These guys, they're like another mob: they just open fire and to hell with anything else. It's like the Mad Dog is runnin' them. I will take care of it. Mr. Fabrizzio and his associates have nothing to worry about. It's safe for Cleveland, it's safe for Chicago, it's safe for New York. Ask Ben Siegel, he was just down here. He saw the town. Ask him."

"Owney, it was Bugsy called Mr. Fabrizzio. That's why I'm on the phone right now."

"That kike fuck," said Owney.

Now it was official. Bugsy was talking against him. That was tantamount to a declaration of war, for it meant that Bugsy was lobbying for permission from the commission to move against him. Whatever was going on with goddamned Becker, it was helping Bugsy no end.

"Look, Vic, we go way back. You know me to be a man of my word. I'm fuckin' dealing with this. I will take care of it. A week, maybe two, that's all, then we're back exactly doing what we've been doing since '32."

"Bugsy says, once he gets his joint up and running, that's the kind of shit would never happen. He guarantees it. Gambling's legal out there."

"Yeah, but it's a fucking desert. It's full of scorpions and lizards and snakes. Great fan. I can see what you'd be telling Mr. Fabrizzio after a snake bit him onna ass!"

"Well, you got a point there, Owney. Just get it taken care of. And this is advice from a friend. Imagine what your enemies are saying."

Owney hung up, only to get a new call. It was from the lobby, saying that Mayor Leo O'Donovan and Judge LeGrand were here, they had to see him.

"Send them up."

This was troubling. By time-honored fiat, meetings with Hot Springs officials were conducted on the sly, never in observable public spots, particularly a casino. This meant that the two men, who more or less administered the town under his benevolent guidance, were seriously spooked.

He turned to the girl, whose face was pretty but vacant.

"Honey, you go now. You come visit Owney later tonight."

She smiled a bright, fake smile, so intense that he thought he might already have had her. Maybe he had. He couldn't remember.

In any case, as she ducked out, the two town officials ducked in, and didn't even notice Pap and Flem Grumley, who under normal circumstances they would have avoided like a disease. After all, the Grumleys were a disease.

Owney offered them a drink, a cigar, and an earnest demeanor.

"Owney," said Leo O'Donovan, His Honor, a watery-eyed old hack who liked to parade around the town in his cabriolet behind horses named Bourbon and Water, "I'll come to the point. People are unsettled with this kind of violence. Suddenly, the town is turning into Chicago in the '20s."

"I'm working like hell to locate these characters! What do you think I been doing, Leo, sitting on my hands? You think it's fuckin' good for me when two boys get clipped on my own fuckin' territory? Next thing, we won't be getting the Xavier Cugats and the Perry Comos and the Dinah Shores down here, and then we're screwed."

"Jeez, Owney," said Leo, dumbfounded. "I thought you were British."

Under the intense pressure of his situation, he had slipped and let his New York persona show in front of people not in the inner circle.

"Well," he said, somewhat archly, "when one finds oneself in a gangster movie, one must act the gangster, no? No, Garry?"

F. Garry Hurst said, "Absolutely, old toff. Mr. Maddox sometimes pretends to be an East Side gangster for the amusement of his staff."

Pap chimed in with, "He's a proper English gent, the finest in these here parts, Mr. Mayor."

The mayor looked at Pap as if he'd just been addressed by a large hunk of dogshit, sniffed and turned back to Owney.

"You have to do something, Owney. The town is coming to a stop."

"Oh, I hardly think that's quite the case, Leo. The girls are still doing their mattress-backed duties, the alcohol is still flowing, the horse wire still thrums with electric information, the fools still bet the horses, the wheel and the dice, Xavier continues to wow them, and Dinah is scheduled for next week. I've just replaced my old Watlings here at the Southern with brand-new Mills Black Cherries, the very latest thing. Fresh from the factory in Chicago, seventy-five of them, the most beautiful machine you've ever seen. I've got the best room in the country. So you see, we really haven't been affected a bit. We've lost two houses out of eighty-five, and less than $100,000, plus around sixty-five slots. It's nothing. It's a trice, a trifle, a gossamer butterfly wing."

The two officials were hardly consoled.

"Owney," said Judge LeGrand, "the mayor is onto something. Like FDR said, the main thing we have to fear is fear its own black-assed self. If people lose their confidence in the town, Hot Springs goes away. It disappears. It turns into Malvern or Russellville or some other bleak little nowhere burg. Like many cities of fabled corruption, it is sustained merely by the illusion of vice and pleasure, which is to say, the illusion of security that such human weaknesses ain't only tolerated, they are encouraged. If that image is damaged, it all goes away."

The judge spoke a harsh truth.

Publicly Owney could only say, "I swear to you both, we will work on this issue."

Privately a million thoughts poured through his head.

"What I'm saying," the judge continued, "is that this problem had better be dealt with quickly. I think for our business interests, what we need is a show of force, a stand, a victory."

"Judge, old man, your sagacity is unmatched. And I say in a response hardly as eloquent but equally as heartfelt: I will take care of this. As I said, we are working on it. For your part, I expect the following: business as usual. The same payments in the same pickups. You enforce discipline with yours so I do not have to enforce it with mine. That is clear?"

"It is," said Leo. "We'll do our part."

"We are all taking the right steps," said Owney, to signify that the meeting was over.

The two men left.

"Any bright guys got any bright ideas?" he asked. "Or do I have to fire you mutts and bring in some heavy fuckin' hitters from Cleveland or Detroit or KC?"

"Now, sir," said Pap, "ain't no damned call to be talking to a Grumley like that. You know us Grumleys go to the goddamn wall fer you every damn time you need us, Mr. Maddox. That's God's honest truth."

He hitched up his pants, stiff with indignity, and launched a gob of something blackish toward the spittoon, which it rattled perfecdy.

"Telephones," said Hem.

"What?" said Owney.

"Goddamn telephones. If'n them boys is hiding in secret, and if we follow Mr. Becker but don't never see him leavin' town, and he's there every goddamned time, he's got to be reaching them boys by telephone. You know the boss of the phone company. So whyn't we tap into his lines, and listen to his calls. That way we get to know where they gonna be striking next. And we'd dadgum be waiting for 'em. Radio intelligence, like. We done it to the Krauts in Italy, toward the end of the war. Intercepted their messages, sure as shit."

"You know, Owney, that's very good," said F. Garry. "That's quite good, actually. I'm sure Mel Parsons could provide technical guidance. After all, he's an investor too, isn't he?"

"Yes, he is. Goddamn, that is good. Pap, you raised a fuckin' genius."

"I knowed about what happened in Italy in '45," said Flem proudly. "That's whar they court-martialed me."

"They court-martialed you?"

"Yes sir. The second time. Now, the third time they…"

It was D. A.'s idea but it was Earl who figured out how to make it work.

He called Carlo Henderson the next morning.

"Henderson," he said, "how'd you like to go on a little trip?"

"Uh. Well, sir―"

"No big deal. Just a little lookie-see party."

"Sure."

"You got a straw hat?"

"Here?"

"Yeah?"

"No sir."

"How 'bout some overalls, a denim shirt, some clodhopper boots?"

"Mr. Earl, I'm from Tulsa, not the sticks. I went to college. I'm not a farmer."

"Well, son, that's fine, because guess what's in this bag?"

He handed over a paper sack, much crumpled, weighing in at around five pounds.

"Uh.. overalls, a denim shirt, some clodhopper boots and a straw hat?"

"exactly. Now I want you all dressed up like Clyde the Farmer. I'm going to have one of these federal dam workers drive you downtown. Here's what I want. You just mosey around the block City Hall is on, where Mr. Becker's office is. And the blocks a couple each way."

"Yes?"

"Here's what you're looking for. A phone company truck and man. Parked somewhere in that vicinity, working probably on a pole, but maybe under the street or at some kind of junction box. Now the thing is, you can't let him see you watching him. But if you see him, you watch him close, see, because I think you'll see he ain't really working. He's actually playing at work. But he's got earphones and a rig set up to the pole knobs or some such, don't know what it'd be. But he's really listening. He'd be all dialed into calls coming out of Mr. Becker's office."

"But we don't get calls from Mr. Becker's office."

They got pouches delivered by a fake postman, with the information for that night's raid encoded, a system put together by D. A. with the express intention to avoid a wiretap.

"That's right. We don't. You know it and I know it. Mr. Becker knows it and we both know D. A. Parker knows it, because he thought it up. But they don't know it. We could let him tap his butt off, but Mr. D. A. came up with an idea to turn their little game against them. This one could turn into some real damn fun and I don't know about you, Henderson, but goddammit, I could use me some fun."

Chapter 20

GANGSTERS SLAIN IN HOT SPRINGS read the headline in the Little Rock Arkansas Democrat two days after the raid.

Prosecuting Attorney's Raiders Send Two "Most Wanted" to County Morgue

Hot Springs―Officers from the Prosecuting Attorney's Office shot and killed two highly dangerous wanted men in a nighttime raid on an illegal gambling establishment here tonight.

The shootings occurred at the Belmont Club, on Oakland Boulevard in South Hot Springs, at approximately 10:30 P. M.

Dead were Thomas "Tommy" Malloy, 34, of Cleveland, Ohio, a bank robber who was listed as No. 1 on the FBI's most wanted list, and Walter "Wally Bud" Budowsky, 31, also of Cleveland. Budowsky was No. 7 on the list.

Both men were pronounced dead at the site.

Malloy, a career criminal since his teens, was wanted on several charges of armed robbery, including the July 5, 1945, robbery of a Dayton, Ohio, bank and trust that left two officers dead and two more wounded. That crime catapulted him to No. 1 on the FBI's list, but he is wanted in connection with at least 12 other charges, including a kidnapping, two counts of assault with attempt to kill and several more counts of fleeing across interstate lines to avoid prosecution.

Budowsky is also suspected of taking part in the Dayton job, as well as several other crimes. Both men served time in the Ohio State Penitentiary.

The editorial was even better.

Becker: A Man of His Word It seems that when Garland County Prosecuting Attorney Fred C. Becker gives his word, that word is as good as gold.

Elected in a controversial election just last month, Becker has moved aggressively against organized crime interests in Arkansas' shameful bordello town 35 miles to the south, raiding two casinos in the past week. Long a haven for gamblers, gunmen and ladies of the night. Hot Springs is becoming downright dangerous for such folk, owing to Becker's crusade.

At the same time, it's becoming a place of pride for citizens who obey the law, worship God and go to church on Sunday.

Becker is to be commended for his efforts and maybe Arkansas would do well to think about hitching its wagon to his star in the 1948 gubernatorial race. If he can clean up Hot Springs, a Herculean labor if ever there was one, then who knows how far he can go?

This was a good day for Becker. The Arkansas Democrat was the only paper with a reputation outside the state; it could get him noticed nationally. Who cared what die Garland county rags screeched about or their demands for indictments against the raiders; they had no circulation outside the county, no influence on party politics, no reach to the state's bosses, no connections to the national press.

Already that seemed to be happening. He was onto something. The winds of change were in the air; the tired old men who'd rim the country while the boys were off fighting had to step aside now, and whoever saw that first and seized that opportunity would go the furthest. If he became governor in 1948, he would be the youngest governor in the history of Arkansas, one of the youngest governors in the United States. The sky was the limit; who knew where that could take him, particularly if the radio networks began picking up on it.

Already Life was sending a man down, and that meant Time would follow and probably Time's imitator, Newsweek. Those magazines were read in Washington, where it really counted. Maybe… Senator Becker. Maybe… even bigger.

So after his morning news conference―a love celebration, really, in which the little Rock boys pulled rank on the snippier Hot Springs bumpkins and asked flattering, Softball questions―he went back to his office to luxuriate in his success. As a matter of fact, he wasn't an aggressive prosecutor so much as an ambitious politician. There were a number of routine matters before him―moves to prosecute traffic offenders, county statute violators, petty criminals in the Negro section―but all of them could wait.

Instead, he loaded up the bowl of his English briarwood with a fine mild Moroccan tobacco, lit it up, and enjoyed the sweetness and the density of the smoke and the pure pleasure: he concentrated on enjoying the moment, and more than a few minutes passed in this state of high bliss before a knock came at the door.

It was Willis O'Doyle, his number-one clerk, who had ambitions of accompanying his chief as far as his chief could go. O'Doyle had a communique from D. A., an out-of-schedule communication unusual in and of itself.

It said, when decoded, "Please call us at 2:00 P. M. tomorrow and order us to raid Mary Jane's, in the Negro section out Malvern Avenue. This will pay very big dividends."

Hmmm, he thought. What the hell is this about?

Earl came to them that very morning.

"All right, fellas," he said. "You want to gather 'round?"

The raiders, sleeping on cots, spent lazy days when they weren't actually scheduled to hit some place. Earl had plans to keep them in shape with various dry-fire exercises but it seemed so poindess because there was so little room in the pump-house station and they couldn't work outside, because of fear of discovery. So he let them sleep, stay clean, clean their weapons and otherwise occupy themselves until the word came on the target that night.

This was his first urgent gathering since they'd swung into operation.

"We have an opportunity," he said. "In the service, the CO'd just give the order and I'd draw up a plan and that would be that. But this ain't the service, and it's your butts on the line, so I figure you ought to have some say-so in what we do next. Fair enough?"

The men nodded or murmured assent, even the still-sleepy Frenchy Short, now something of a hero for his victory over the two gangsters.

"Y'all know what radio intelligence is?"

"Fred Allen?" somebody said.

"No. Gangbusters!

There was some laughter.

"Not quite," said Earl. "It's what you can do when you break the other guy's code. Or it's what you can do when you know the other guy's broken your code, only he don't know you know. Well, we now got us a chance to play a little radio game, 'cept that it's a telephone game.

"Mr. D. A. knows all the tricks, and he figured Owney's boys would be trying like hell to find us. He figured they'd even try and tap Mr. Becker's phone lines. That's why we don't use telephone lines. Well, goddamned if Carlo Henderson didn't go downtown yesterday dressed like a farmer, and goddamn if he didn't find a telephone crew set up at a junction box where all die prosecuting attorney's lines are shunted through te the big Bell office. So they are listening. Here's a coupla things we could do.

"First, we could just mark it, and make certain we never gave up nothing on the phone. See, that would keep them guessing, and it would cause them to spread out their resources, because mind my words, what they want to do is ambush us.

"Now here's another thing we could do: we could pass out phony information. We could say, See, we're going to Joe's Club. So they'd set up to get us at Joe's Club, only we'd hit Bill's Club. That way we'd be sure to have a raid without no problems. We could probably do that two, three times. Then they'd catch on, and that game'd be over.

"But there's one last thing we could do. We could pass out the information that we were going to hit Joe's Club. So you can bet they would load up at Joe's Club. They'd love to hit us and hurt us and kill some of us. They'd love to humiliate Mr. Becker and send us home in shame. But here's the wrinkle. We know that they know. So instead of them hitting us, we lure them in, and then we hit them. They think they got us marked, all the time we're marking them. We counterambush and we smoke 'em good. See? Their best shot is blasted, the power and the prestige of Owney Maddox and his hillbilly gunmen is made to look pathetic. We found a place on Malvern that'd work right fine. Called Mary Jane's."

"Hell," said Bob Billy, one of the most aggressive raiders, a Highway Patrolman from Mississippi, "I say we go and kick some fellers upside the head."

Cheers and laughter and agreement rose.

Earl let it die down.

"Okay," he said. "That's fine and good, but understand where you're going. You're going into the fire. Sometimes you can't control what happens in there. Blood will be shed, blood in this room. Know that going in. If it's more than you bargained for, it's okay. But I want a vote, and I want it secret, so nobody feels pressure. I want it written down. A simple no or yes. Because we can't make this work if we don't believe in it."

It was unanimous.

Chapter 21

"He's finished," said the Countess.

"But suppose he isn't?" Ben said.

"He's finished. I know he's finished."

"But suppose he isn't? He's a tricky bastard, slippery and smart. He gets out of it somehow. And he hears I been talking against him. And he gets to thinking about it. And he hears about the desert and the building I'm doing and the plans I got. And he reads the writing on the wall. He knows that even though I'm in a different state two fucking thousand miles away, he and I are at cross purposes."

"Don't get paranoid, darling."

"What's paranoid?"

"The idea that everyone is out to get you."

"Everyone is out to get me."

"But not yet. Because you are smarter and quicker and you see these things so much sooner."

They lounged by the pool of the Beverly Hills Country Club, beside a diamond of emerald-blue water patrolled by the legends of the movie business, their wives, their children, their managers, their assistants, their bodyguards. The Countess wore a white latex suit a la Esther Williams; her legs were tan, her bust was full, her toenails were red.

Bugsy wore a tight red suit that showed off his extremely athletic body, his ripply muscles, his big hands, his larger-than-life penis. He too was tan, and his hair gleamed with oil, the sun picking it up and glinting off it fabulously. He looked like a movie star, he wore movie star sunglasses and he sipped a movie star's drink, a pina colada, from a tall glass.

Virginia was on one of her trips back east, to visit certain aging relatives or so it was said. He actually wasn't too clear on where she was, but it helped to have her gone, as she could be a pain in the ass. She'd been really annoying of late.

The Countess, by contrast, was a more comforting person. Her name was Dorothy Dendice Taylor DiFassio, the last moniker making her an authentic countess, though the count had long since been abandoned. She was one of Ben's earliest Southern California lovers and she had connections to Italy through her title, and the two of them had some crazed adventures together.

"That is why I need a backup plan and I need it now."

"You'll come up with something."

"I have to be ready. He's now involved with this goddamn crusader. Everybody's talking about it. He got two Cleveland boys clipped on him and right now his name is mud in every syndicate spot in the country. He is so weak now he can hardly keep it going. But I know him. He'll come up with something, he'll get out of it, you'll see."

"You give him too much credit, darling. Look, there's a cute one!"

She pointed at a pool boy. These creatures came from all over America to become movie stars. Most failed but some actually got as far as pool boy. They modeled their bodies and their blond locks around the club, hoping to catch a producer's eye. The one she noticed, though, was beefier than most and not blond at all, but rather dark-haired.

"You, boy," she called.

"Christ, Dorothy," said Bugsy, "are you going to fuck him right here?"

"Possibly. But it would hurt my chances for a table at El Morocco. Boy, come here."

The lad obliged.

"What's your name?" she asked.

"Roy, ma'am," he responded.

"Roy, eh? How wonderful. Roy, I think I'd like a whiskey sour with a lemon twist. Do you think you can remember that?"

"Yes ma'am."

He lumbered off.

"That one's going to be a big star someday," she said. "He's got a certain je ne sats quoi."

"I'll say," Bugsy said. "The way he was staring at my dick shows what a future he's got in this fruit town!"

"Ben, you are so crude. I don't think he's homo."

"The handsome ones are all homo. Anyhow, back to my problems."

"Oh, that's right, darling," said Dorothy, "I forgot. Yours are the real problems. The rest of us are simply bedeviled by petty annoyances."

"Well, Dorothy, I do not think Roy the Pool Boy is going to pull out a chopper and clip you right here. I am at risk and I've got to deal with this problem."

"Do you want him killed?"

"Ah―difficult. I'd have to get permission. It'd have to go through channels. And everything's so spread out these days. It used to be a few blocks of Brooklyn, now it's everywhere, from coast to coast. Getting things okayed can be tough and time-consuming."

"So what you really want is him eliminated, but not necessarily killed."

"That would be right, yeah. If I could get him sent up for five years or so, he'd have nothing when he got out."

"Hmmm. What are his weaknesses? His vanities?"

Ben thought hard. He remembered the beautifiil art deco apartment overlooking the city, the phony English accent, the liveried staff, the sense of elegance.

"He wants to be a British gendeman. He wants to be cultivated. He wants to be like the real Gary Cooper, not the real Cary Grant. He likes furniture, art, food. He wants to be a king. He's tryin' to be bigger than who he is. He's tryin' to forget where he came from and what made him."

"I see," said the Countess. "Quite common, actually. And exactly why I treasure you so dearly: you are what you are to the maximum. There's no hypocrisy in you. Not a lick of it."

"I guess that's a compliment."

"It is. Oh, hello, what's this?"

It was Roy the tall Pool Boy. He held a whiskey sour on a silver platter and he offered it to madame.

She opened her alligator purse and removed a $50 bill.

"For you, darling," she said.

"Thank you, ma'am," he said, bowing a little so that he could get a better look at Bugsy's dick stuffed in his tight bathing suit.

Then he went away.

"A look like that could get him killed in a lotta places on the East Side," said Ben.

"And he is what he is," she said. "Anyway, art? Art? You said art? He collects art."

"Yes."

"Hmmmm," she said. "You know, collecting is a disease. And even the most rational and intelligent of men can lose their way when they see something they must have. This should be looked into, darling. This has possibilities."

Chapter 22

"Guns?" asked Owney. "Yes sir," said Pap. "Not just the six-shootin' guns we carry during the day. Guns." "Traceable? I wouldn't―"

"No sir. 'Bout fifteen or sixteen years ago, when it was a time of road bandits and generalized desperado work, it was Grumleys what rim houses of safety in the mountains. We had boys from all over. I'se a younger man then, and we Grumleys, we took 'em in, and fed 'em and mended 'em. The laws knew to stay far from where the Grumleys had their places in the mountains. So I seen them all, sir, that I did. Why, sir, was as close to him then as I am to you now. Johnny, such a handsome boy. Reminded me of a feller from the movies. Lord Jesus, he was a handsome boy. Beaming, you might say. Filled the room. A laugher, a fine jester. And just as polite and respectful to our Grumley womenfolk as a fine Mississippi gendeman, he was, he was indeed. Oh, it was a sad day when that boy went down."

"Johnny?"

"Johnny Dillinger. The most famous man in America. And that other smiler, the one from the Cookson Hills acrost the line in the territory? He rusticated some time out with the Grumleys too. The newspapers called him Pretty Boy, but I never heard no one call him but Charlie, and even Charles most ofttimes. Charlie was a good 'un, too. Big-handed boy. Big strong farm hands, Charlie had. Charlie was one of the best natural shots I ever seen. He could shoot the Thompson sub gun one-handed, and I mean really smart and fine-like. Would take the stock off. Shoot it one-handed, like a pistol. And Ma. Ma and her boys comes through a time or two. Knew Clyde Barrow and that Bonnie Parker gal too. They was just li'l of kids. Scrawny as the day was long. Like kitty cats, them two, rolling on the floor. Never could figger on why the laws had to shoot them so many times. Seen the car they was driving. It was put on display up in Little Rock. Took the Grumleys to show 'em what the laws could do if they'd the chance. Them laws, they must have put a thousand bullets into that car, till it looked like a goddamned piece of cheese."

"And you got guns? Enough for this job?"

"Enough for any job, sir. Your Thompson sub guns, five of 'em. Drums. And, sir, we have something else."

"Ah," said Owney, fascinated as always by the old reprobate's unlikely language, part Elizabethan border reiver's, part hillbilly's. They sat in the office of a warehouse near the tracks, where Owney's empire received its supplies and from which point it made its distributions; Owney had declared it to be his headquarters for this operation. Grumleys in overalls with the hangdog look of mean boys about to go off to do some killing work hung around.

"What might that be, Pap?"

"Why, sir, it be what they call a Maxim gun. The Devil's Paintbrush. It's from the First Great War. The Germans used it. It's got belt after belt of bullets, and we've never used it. My father, Fletcher, got it in a deal with a Mexican feller who come to Hot Springs in 1919 for to buy some women to take back to Tijuana. Wanted white gals. Thought he'd make a fortune for his generalissimo. Well, we got this gendeman's Maxim gun, but he never got any white gals. Wouldn't sell no white gal to a Mexican."

A Maxim gun! Now that was some power.

"We'll set it up on the second floor," Pap explained. "When them boys come to call, we'll let them come in and up the stairs. Then my cousin Lem's boy Nathan will open up with the Maxim. Nathan is the hardest Grumley. He served fifteen years of a life sentence, and prison taught him savage ways. Nathan is the best Grumley killer. Onct, he shot a clown. Never figgered out why. I ast him once. He didn't say nothing. I guess he just don't like clowns. He's a Murfreesboro Grumley, and they grow Grumleys hard down there."

"I thought it was the Yell County Grumleys that were so hard."

"Yell County Grumleys are hard, naturally. But you take a naturally hard Grumley and you toughen him up ki a bad joint, and what you got is something to make your blood curdle. That Mr. Becker would beshat his drawers if he but knew what awaited."

"It's a shame he won't be along. We hear he arrives afterward, always."

"He won't arrive afterward this time. There won't be no afterward," said Pap. "They'll only be blood on the floor and silence."

"That I believe," said Owney, looking at the dance of black madness in the old man's glittering eyes.

"Mr. Maddox," said Flem Grumley, arriving from some mission. "We just heard. My cousin Newt has it from the phone tap at Hobson and Third. They're going to hit Mary Jane's tonight."

"Mary Jane's?" said Owney, unfamiliar with the place.

"It's in Niggertown."

"It's going to be hot in Niggertown tonight," said Pap. "Oooooooo-eeeee, it's going to be hot. We'll even boil us a cat for luck!"

It was a time of waiting. Earl thought it was like the night before when the big transports wallowed off an island, and you could hear the naval guns pounding all through the night, but in the hold, the boys were in their hammocks, all weapons checked, all blades oiled, all ammo stashed, all gear tight and ready, and they just lay there, smoking most of them, some of them writing letters. There'd always be a few boys shooting craps in the latrines, loudly, to drum away the fears, but for most of the boys it was just a time to wait quietly and pray that God would be watching over them and not assisting Mickey Rooney with his racetrack betting the next day.

In the pumping house, the slow grind of the valves almost sounded like the transport's engines, low and thrumming, and taking you ever onward to whatever lay ahead. It was late in the afternoon. These boys were dressed and ready. The guns were cleaned and loaded, the magazines all full, the surplus walkie-talkies checked out and okayed, the vests lined up and brushed clean. The men were showered and dressed and looked sharp in their suits. They sat on their cots, smoking, talking quietly. One or two read the newspaper or an odd novel.

Earl walked over to Frenchy, who stood by himself in front of a mirror, trying to get a tie tied just right. He could tell from the extravagant energy the kid was investing into the process that it was a way of concentrating on the meaningless, like oversharpening a bayonet or some such. Kids always found something to occupy their minds before, if they had to.

"Short? You okay?"

"Huh?" Short's eyes flew to him, slightly spooked.

"You okay?"

"Fine. I'm fine, Mr. Earl."

"You upset?"

"Upset?"

"About dumping them two bohunks. First time you draw live blood it can spook a fellow. Happened to me in Nicaragua in '32. Took a while to get used to it."

"Oh, that?" said Short. "Those guys? No, see, here's what I was thinking. Wouldn't it be better if I was interviewed by Life magazine? I hear they're coming down here. Or maybe it was the Post. Or even Look. But anyway, me and Mr. Becker. He's the legal hero, I'm the cop hero. We're a team, him and me. I think that would be so much better. See, that way the public would have someone to respect and admire. Me."

Earl gritted his teeth hard.

At 8:20 Earl stopped at a Greek's, got a hamburger and a cup of coffee and read the papers. More about Jayhawkers and who they'd kill next. When would indictments be delivered or did Becker's control over the grand jury give his raiders carte blanche to rob and kill whoever they wanted? Who were these Jayhawkers? How come they never met the press or issued statements? How come the good citizens of Hot Springs didn't know who they were or have any explanation of how they worked?

After eating, he got back in his vehicle and began a long slow turn out Malvern, past the Pythian Hotel and Mary Jane's, and then went onward for another several blocks, just in case.

At Mary Jane's he saw nothing, no commotion or anything. It was just another beer joint/whorehouse with some slots in the bar, like a hundred other Hot Springs places. There was no sense that tonight would be any different than any other night: a few girls sat lisdessly in the upstairs windows, but there wasn't enough street traffic yet for them to start their yelling. The downstairs of the place didn't seem very full of men, though later on, of course, it would be different. White boys wouldn't head on down to Niggertown for a piece of chocolate until they were well drunk and had got their courage up. Black men were probably still working their jobs, cleaning out the toilets in the big hotels or running the dirty towels to the big washing machines in the bathhouses or rounding up the garbage.

But Earl got a good glimpse of the place. It was a brick building standing alone on the street, with shabby buildings nearby but not abutting it. Possibly it had once been a store of some sort, before the black people had moved into this part of town and took it over. It had a big front window, shaded, and above there were a bunch of windows that looked down on Malvern. Earl liked the bricks; he'd worry about a wooden building because heavy bullets like those from a BAR would sail clean through and do who knew what damage further down the block.

Earl made three more circuits on his grand trek, making sure he wasn't followed, making sure that nothing was out of order, that no cops had set up. So far it looked like ago.

At 9:20 he dropped a nickel into a downtown phone box and called D. A., who had a network of snitches he'd been working.

"Are we all set?" D. A. asked.

"Yes sir. The boys are ready. I haven't made radio contact with them yet, but that'll happen soon. Any news?"

"One of my snitches told me that around noon, a truck pulled up behind Mary Jane's, and a bunch of white men got out and husded in."

"They're loading up. They've bitten."

"He said there were eight of them, in overalls. Earl, eight's a bit. They could cause some serious wreckage."

"Yes sir. I think we can still get it done. I don't want to postpone at this point. We have the jump on them."

"All right, Earl. I trust your judgment on this one. I haven't told Becker yet. He's going to be pissed."

"Yes sir. But this was a good plan and it's going to work and the boys wanted to push it. I still think it's going to be a great night for our side."

"Well, Earl, God bless us. Remember, wear your vest. I'll go to Becker at exactly 10:00 P. M. when you hit, and have him order up medical backup and the police to set up a perimeter."

"Yes sir."

Earl hung up.

He drove around a bit, wondering when the streets would fill up. But strangely they never did. A few white men seemed to mosey around the area but that density of the black throngs that was such a fervid feature of Malvern Avenue, that sense of whores and workingmen and jive joints and housewives and kids, of them all in it together, riding the same ship toward the same far destiny, that was gone.

Finally, at 9:40 he pulled up a few blocks away, parked and went into a small grocery. A few old black men lounged near the cash register where the proprietor sat.

"Howdy," Earl said. "Looking for a place called Mary Jane's. Y'all know where that is? Heard a fella could have hisself a good old time there."

The men looked at one another, then over to the proprietor, the wisest among them clearly, who at last spoke.

"Suh, I'd take my business out of town tonight. There's a strange feelin' in the air. The wimmens been talkin' 'bout it all afternoon. Git your babies in, they been sayin'. There's gonna be bad-ass troubles over there at Mary Jane's tonight. Gun trouble, the worst kind of trouble there is."

Earl nodded.

"Sir, I think you're speaking the truth."

"You look like a cop, suh," said the old grocer.

"Grandpop, I am," said Earl, "and y'all have picked up on something. Make sure your children are in because it's going to be a loud one, I guarantee you."

"Y'all going to kill any Negroes?"

"Don't aim to, Grandpop. This one's between the white boys."

There was no Mary Jane and there never had been. No one could remember why the place was called by her name. Its owner was a tall, yellow-skinned black man named Memphis Dogood. Memphis had two long razor cuts on the left side of his face, one of which began on his forehead, opened a hairless gap in his eyebrow, skipped his recessed eye and picked up again, running down his cheek. The other crossed it about an inch above the jawline. One―the long one―was delivered by a gal named Emma Mae in New Orleans in 1933. He couldn't remember how he got the other scar, or which came first.

In Mary Jane's, Memphis made the decisions. He rented the slots, ancient, tarnished machines from before the First War, a couple of old Mills Upright Perfections, a Dewey Floor Wheel or two and even one rattly old Fey Liberty Bell, from the Boss―a Grumley cousin named Willis Burr, far beneath even Pap's notice―and bought his liquor as well from the Boss. He paid 48 percent of everything to the Boss. He skimmed a little, but every time the Boss looked at him with squeezed eyes and jiggled the spit in the pouch of his mouth, mixing it with tobaccy juice for a nice hard splat, as if he were puzzling over the figures, it scared Memphis so he swore he'd never do it no more. But he always did.

Memphis ran a fair joint. The gals might act up but usually Marie-Claire, the octoroon, took care of them. She was his main gal, and she packed a wallop in her left fist. His customers were also usually all right. Some of the younger bloods might act up now and then, on booze or reefer, and he'd once had to thump a boy with a sap so hard the boy never woke up and had to be laid out by the tracks. The police come by to ask questions, but nothing never came of it. Now and then, a white boy or usually two or four white boys, usually drunk, would show up, on the hunt for some colored pussy, because you wasn't no man till you dipped your pen in ink. They were well treated, for it was always known that if you hurt a white boy there'd be all kinds of hell to pay.

On that day, Memphis Dogood fully expected no surprises. He was vaguely aware that something of a political nature was happening in town but those things usually ran their course on the other side of the line. He had no opinions about vice or gambling or prostitution, except that he hated reformers and knew a few who'd preach all day, work up a sweat, then come on down for some relaxation with his gals, so he knew them to be hypocrites. Even a white minister once came down, and he ended up with two gals, and did each of 'em right fine, or so they claimed.

Memphis, at any rate, was sitting in the small back room behind the bar, with a pimp's.25 lying on the table, counting up money from the night before. He also had a sap and a pearl-handled switchknife out. It was the slow season. Might have to let a gal go. Why didn't the Boss cut down from 48 percent to 38 during the slow season when the ponies weren't running? But the Boss never would and only a fool would mention it to him. It was a good way to turn up missing. It was said that the floor of Lake Catherine was full of Negro men who'd asked the Boss a question the Boss didn't like.

The door in the back room opened loudly and he heard the labor of men struggling with weight. He knew somehow from the way they breathed that they were white men.

Was it some batch of Holy Rollers, or maybe Klan boys, drunk and looking for a fight?

He picked up his sap and walked back there, but was met halfway by two men with suitcases. Behind he could see two more struggling with a bunch of canvas-wrapped pieces, and behind that two more. All were wearing overalls and had low mountaineer's hats pulled over their eyes. All wore gunbelts loaded up with cartridges and heavy revolvers, man-killing revolvers. They had nearly fleshless faces and gristly semibeards and had a look he knew and feared: of tough, mean, violent crackers, the sort who thought no Negro was human and made up lynch mobs or whatever, and who fought all them terrible battles against the Union in the great war and were still proud that they had stood for slavery and that the bastard Lincoln hadn't made it out of 1865 alive.

He knew them immediately to be Grumleys, but of a more violent breed than the Grumleys who controlled the Negro section of town.

"Say there," he said, swallowing, "just what is it y'all boys think it is that you're doing?"

"Tell you what, nigger," said the first, "you just go on about your business and don't pay us no nevermind, and you'll do just fine. You hear me, nigger?"

"Yas suh," said Memphis, who, though he acknowledged the might of the white man as a natural condition of the universe beyond the reach of change, did not like being treated so arrogantly in his own place, particularly when he paid the Boss 48 percent every Tuesday, regular as rain.

"See, I don't explain nothing to no nigger. You got that, boy? We are here because we are here and that's all the goddamned hell you got to know. You got that?"

"Yes suh."

"We be upstairs. But I don't want you going nowheres, you know what I am telling you? I and my cousins, we are here until we are done, and I don't want nobody knowing we are here and I don't want no nigger making any business about it, do you understand?"

"I do, suh."

A stronger voice bellowed, "Jape, you stop jawing with that nigger and hep us get this goddamned thang upstairs. Have the boy hep too."

"You pitch a hand, now, nigger," said Jape, ordering Memphis to assist with the labor. He went quickly over, as directed, and found himself given a large wooden crate, with rope handles. He lifted it―ugh, sixty, seventy pounds, extremely heavy for its size!―feeling the subde shift of something dense but also loose in some way, like a liquid, only heavier. He could read a bit, and he saw something stamped on it, first of all a black eagle, its wings outstretched, its head crowned and then words that he didn't understand: MG!08, it said, and next to that, in a strange, foreign-looking kind of print, 7.92 X 57 MM MASCHINE-KARABINER INFANTERIE PATRONEN.

At 9:45 Earl made a last drive down Malvern for a look-see at Mary Jane's. Again, it was surprisingly empty. A single white man sat at a table to the right, in overalls, with a low-slung hat down over his eyes and a half-full whiskey bottle on the table before him. His fiery glare seemed to drive most people away.

Above, a few gals hung out the sporting house's windows, but they were lisdess, almost pallid. Earl recognized fear of the paralyzing variety; he'd seen enough of it.

He pulled around the block for a look down the alley. It was deserted. He turned off his headlamps and drove slowly down the alley, pulling up about a hundred feet short of the rear entrance to Mary Jane's, and with binoculars studied the rear of the building.

It was a brick rear with a door that would have to be blown, but no windows overlooked it, so there was no worry of enfilade fire. There was no sign of life along the cobblestones of the alleyway, which shone not from rain but from the liquidation of the moisture in the air against the still warmish bricks. As the night cooled, the slickness would disappear.

Earl picked up his walkie-talkie, snapped it on, and pressed the send button.

"Cars one, two and three, are you there for commo check?"

There was some crackly gibberish, but then cutting through the squawks came the reply.

"Earl, this is car one, we are set."

"Earl, same for car two."

"Earl, I ditto for car three."

"Car one, there's a white boy sitting at a table to the immediate right of the entranceway in the bar. Do you read?"

"Roger."

"'Less I miss my guess, there's your first Grumley boy. So when the initial entry team goes up the way to the door, I want you to leave one man behind at the car with a Thompson and I want that boy zeroed. If he rises from the table with a weapon, he has to go down. Got that?"

"Roger on that, Earl."

"Be careful. Short burst. You ought to be able to bust him with three. Don't let the gun get away from you."

"It won't happen."

"You other two units, you are set. This whole damned thing turns on how fast you git through that back door."

"Yes sir. We are ready."

"Okay, you fellas, you do yourselves proud now, y'hear?"

"Yes sir."

Earl felt like a cigarette. He glanced at his watch. It was 9:57. He flicked a Lucky out, lit it up, took a deep breath and felt good about the thing. What could be done had been done. It was clear there would be some surprises for the Grumley boys.

He slipped out the door of his car, letting it stay ajar, and headed back to the trunk. He popped it. Inside lay his vest and a 1918 Al Browning Automatic Rifle.

Fuck the vest. He was way down here where there was no shooting. He didn't need the vest.

He took the Browning, slid a twenty-round mag into the well, snapped it in and threw the bolt to seat a round. Then he pulled out a bandolier with ten more magazines for the gun and withdrew four magazines, which he put in his suit coat pockets, two in each for balance. He threw the bandolier back inside and closed the trunk gently.

But he could not help thinking: What is wrong? What have I forgotten? Am I in the right place? How soon will medical aid arrive? Will this work?

But then it settled down to one thing: What is wrong?

The call came from upstairs. It was Nathan Grumley, behind the big German gun, which was mounted on its sled mount just at the head of the stairs, with its belts of ammo all flowing into it.

"Jape, you see anything?"

"Not a goddamned thing 'cept these here fat niggers," Jape called back. He sat alone at a table in the bar. Around him, the slots were unused. The place was practically empty but three boys had bumbled in and he had directed that they stand nonchalantly at the bar. If they didn't want to, he suggested they have a talk with his uncle, at which point he pulled back his jacket which lay crumpled on the chair next to him and revealed the muzzle of his tommy gun. All complied, though one wet up his pants when he saw the gun.

By a clock on the wall Jape could see that it was virtually 10:00. He took another sip on the bourbon, warmed by its strength, finding courage in it. He was a little nervous. The cut-face nigger was behind the bar, looking spooked as shit. Good thing he'd gone behind the bar and cleaned out the baseball bat, the sawed-off Greener and the old Civil War saber like his grandpap might well have carried.

Then, precisely at ten, a car pulled up, its lights off. Jape reached over and slid the Thompson out from under the coat, shucking the coat to the floor. The gun came over until he held it just under the table, ever so slightly scutding his chair back. He could see some confusion out by the car, but it was dark and he wasn't sure what to do.

"You niggers stay where you is!" he commanded. "Nathan, I think they're here, goddammit."

The sound of the big bolt on the German gun being cranked was Nathan's response.

"We gonna jambalaya some boys!" Jape crooned to the terrified black men.

"I don't want to die," came a gal's voice from upstairs, high-pitched and warbly. "Please, sirs, don't you be hurtin' me."

"Shut up, 'ho," came the response.

The raid team broke from the car and headed toward Mary Jane's.

Jape's fingers flew toward the safety of the gun, and pushed it off. By Jesus, he was ready.

Everything was lovely. Two State Police were bodyguards and there were a lot of guns in the room, carried by veterans who'd waded ashore at Anzio and Normandy and suchlike, so at last Fred Becker felt safe and among friends. He was able to put aside that gnawing tension that was his closest companion through all this mess.

He was meeting with his group of reformers, all men like himself, at Coy's Steakhouse, on a hill just beneath Hot Springs Mountain on the east side of the city. Three national correspondents and a photographer from Life were in the room too.

But the circumstances were only nominally political. The young men were here to celebrate Fred's success and what it would mean for them all, as they foresaw their own co-option of the levers of power in the Democratic party in the next election, and their eventual takeover of the city on a thrust of righteous indignation. For Fred and his raiders had given the town hope and loosened the grip of the old power brokers. One could feel it in the air, the sudden burgeoning spring of optimism, the sense that if people only stood up things didn't have to stay as they always did, locked in the hard old patterns of corruption and vice and violence.

All the wives were there. It was a grand evening. It was as if the war had been won, or at least the light at the end of the tunnel glimpsed. Toasts were made, glasses raised, people almost broke into song. It was one of those rare nights of pure bliss.

Then a shadow fell across the table. He looked up to see the long, sad face of D. A. Parker.

"Mr. Becker?"

"Yes?"

"I think you'd best come with me. The boys are working tonight and you're going to be needed down there."

"What? You said―"

"You remember I asked you to make that call yesterday concerning a place on Malvern Avenue. We used that to set up an opportunity that looked very promising," said D. A., hoping to cut off the tirade that accompanied Becker's instruction in any raid plans that masked the prosecuting attorney's deep ambivalence about the use of force and his own physical fear, which was immense.

Fred rose.

"Folks," he said, "honey," acknowledging his wife, "I've got to run. There's work to be done and―"

At that moment came the sound of gunfire. Machine-gun fire. It rattled through the night, a liquefied rip familiar to each man who'd served in a war zone. It could be no other sound. If you've heard it once you know it forever.

Fred's face went bloodless.

"Sounds like the boys are doing fine," said D. A.

Chapter 23

What is wrong?

He didn't know. But some weird vibration of distress hummed in his ear. Something somehow was wrong.

Two cars, lights dimmed, pulled down the alley, passing him, coming to rest at the rear of Mary Jane's. Silently, the doors sprang open, and eight members of the rear-entry team got out, cumbersome in their vests with their awkward weapons. Without noise they assembled into a stick as Slim led them to the door, a shotgun out before him and aimed at the knob. Except for a scuffle of feet and the breathing of the men, muted but still insistent, it was quiet.

What is wrong?

Then he knew.

They would know we'd also come in the rear because that's our signature. We go in multiple entrances simultaneously. We swarm in: that's D. A.'s best trick. Therefore, knowing that, they will have to ambush us from the rear.

But how?

There's no room to fire from the building at men this close and there's no sign of men moving in on them. The alley had been entirely deserted this whole time: only Japanese Marines could hide so silently.

Then Earl knew where they'd be.

They'd be down the block. He recalled a truck parked there, on a cross street, a good two hundred feet ahead, and he instantly diverted his gaze down the alley, trying to see through the dark.

Suddenly from the front, the sound of guns firing angrily, long bursts chewing the night apart, bullets blowing into wood and glass.

Then Earl saw movement in the dark. He couldn't make it out clearly: just a sense of movement as one darker shade of blackness moved twenty-five feet and planted itself directly across the alley exit to a cross street half a block down.

He waited, forcing his concentration against the subdy differing shades of blackness.

He thought he saw something squirm and believed it to be a tarpaulin being pulled back to reveal men hunched over the lip of the truck bed, as if settling in to aim.

Earl fired: the BAR chopped through its first magazine in less than two seconds, and far off he saw over the jarring sights the flashes and puffs as his bullets jacked into something metallic, possibly a truck, lifting dust and sparks from it. He slapped a new magazine in fast, and fired another long burst into it, holding the rounds into it, watching them strike and skip off. A shot, then a second, came from the truck bed, and then somehow a gas tank went, lighting up the night in a roiling orange spume and in its concussive force lifting the truck ever so slightly and setting it down. A man in flames with a Thompson gun ran from it, dropped the gun and fell to the alleyway.

Earl looked back to Mary Jane's to see the last of the rear-entry team race into the place.

The car pulled up out front.

They were so tense their breaths came in dry spurts, like rasps scraping over a washbucket.

"Okay," said Stretch, just barely in command, "you know the drill. Let's go. Peanut, you're on the big gun."

"Gotcha," said Peanut, sliding down behind the fender of the car, raising his Thompson as he fingered off the safety, and checked with the same finger to make certain the fire selector was ratcheted toward full auto. His front sight bobbed and weaved but then stabilized and came to rest on the man slouching at the table in the barroom.

The three remaining men, their loads in their hands, charged up the walk to the storefront. It wasn't far, maybe twenty-five feet. They kicked open the door and screamed "Raid! Raid! Get your hands up!

Jape saw the door open, goddamn! and was so excited he thought he'd piss up his pants. He kicked the table away to brace the Thompson against his hip, feeling his hand curve over the huge hundred-round drum to grab the fore grip and hold it tight.

"Raid! RaidJ" came the shouts, and as he raised the weapon he had the consciousness of glass or something breaking and it was as if he were being mauled by a lion who leaped at him from nowhere, and from that sensation there came the sensation of drowning, sinking, falling, all of it toward fatigue and ultimately sleep in darkness.

The three at the door were not aware that behind them Peanut had fired, bringing down the barroom gunman with one perfecdy placed burst. They were themselves unarmed, except for handguns still holstered. What they carried, two apiece, were buckets half filled with screws, stones, pieces of broken glass and scrap wood, and quickly, each lobbed his burden, one then the other, into the bar to the stairway, where the buckets hit, and emptied their contents in a rattle of things scraping and clanking and falling and crashing. It was no substitute for the sound of human feet in a normal world, but in the superheated one of house combat―gunshots now came from behind too, for some odd reason―it was enough to confuse the gunner upstairs, who now fired.

Nathan, the prison-hardened Murfreesboro Grumley behind the weapon, simply kept the butterfly trigger depressed. The gun, mounted on a securely heavy sled tripod, fired for about two minutes, and it poured down such a hail of 8-mm fire that the floor which absorbed it shattered, while broken flooring nails flipped through the air, amid the clouds of other debris that flew. The gun was so terrifying that D. A.'s plan simply fell apart.

The front-entry team retreated hastily to its car and took up cowering positions. The rear-entry team, all eight men including Frenchy and Carlo, collected in a choke point just out of the beaten zone, unable to think, talk, signal or otherwise function intelligently in the rawness and the hugeness of the sound. Courage was beyond the question; it was meaningless in the face of such a volume of fire, and the men looked at each other bug-eyed and confused. They needed a leader and he didn't get there for another thirty seconds, though without his vest and with a BAR.

"Get back1" Earl screamed, for he knew that the gunner would soon see he was firing at nothing and would swing fire.

They scuttled backward, and in the next second, the gunner de-ratcheted his gun from the sled tripod, swung it radically to the right and sent another eight hundred rounds through the wall into the hallway where until that second the men had been.

The gunfire atomized the thin plaster and wood wall that separated the stairwell from the hallway. Dust and chips flew; the air filled with poisonous brew.

Earl waited now until he heard a clink.

That meant a belt had rim out and he heard crankings and clankings as Nathan attempted to speed-change to a new belt. But instead of racing out, Earl merely scrunched along the now blasted hallway, raised his BAR along the same axis the bullets had just traveled, and fired an entire magazine upward through the shattered wall of Mary Jane's.

He rammed another magazine in, fired it in a flash. Then he slithered around the stairwell and looked upward. He could see nothing in the floating smoke and plaster and wood powder.

An odd noise came to his ears. He tried to identify it but his ears rang so from all the firing that it took a second or two. Then he had it: it was a steady drip.. drip… drip.

Earl looked and saw―blood. It coagulated on the top of the stairway, paused, then dripped down, drop by drop by heavy drop, until a tide overtook the individual drops and began to drain off the top of the stairs in a jagged track.

"Hey, up there," he called. "This don't have to go on. Ain't no lawmen hurt yet nor no citizens. Y'all throw your guns down and come on out."

He thought he heard the scurrying of men, a hushed argument.

As he crouched there, the blood rolled down the steps with more force, and to his left and right raiders came to flank him, setting up good shooting positions.

The silence wore on, but then they heard what sounded like shuffling.

"Get ready," whispered Earl.

They could track the shuffling down the hallway until at last a figure emerged. It was a Negro girl, about twenty, in a slip and a pair of high-heeled shoes. Her face was swollen, her eyes red and huge. She clutched herself with her arms. Her lips trembled. She seemed shaky on her heels.

"You be careful, missy," Earl said. "You come on down and you'll be all right. We don't mean to hurt you or your friends none."

"Sir, I―"

The bullets hit her in the back, blowing her sideways against the wall; she jackknifed, her eyes rolling up, then fell forward off the top stair. She rolled down the stairway, arms and legs flung this way and that, her head bobbing loosely. Earl grabbed her, and held her close, getting her blood all over him. He felt her struggle to rise, watched her eyelashes flutter as if to make a last claim on life, and then she died in his arms. He was holding her hand so tightly he thought he'd break her fingers.

"Hey, you lawmen," came a low Grumley voice. "You come on up and git more of that. We got lots of it up here fer you too. And we got four more nigger gals up here and they ain't gittin' out alive, 'less you go and get our truck."

"Your truck is blown all to shit," Earl called back. "I lit it up my own self and whoever was aboard is burnt crispy. You hurt any more of them gals and I will personally see that you leave here in a pine box. You come out or you'll toast in hell tomorrow morning, that I swear."

He turned to the closest man to him, who happened to be Frenchy.

"You know where my car is?"

"Yes sir," said Frenchy.

Earl took Frenchy's Thompson and spare magazines, unscrewing the stock bolt as he spoke.

"You head on back there and open the trunk and git me some more of them BAR magazines. I'm clean out. You bring 'em to me, 'cause I may need 'em."

"Can I have my gun?" said Frenchy nervously.

"Go on, git the goddamn magazines!" said Earl, pushing him rudely back down the hallway.

He had the bolt out and tossed the stock away. He turned to Stretch.

"I'm going to head up for a lookie see. Y'all stay here."

"Earl, you ain't got no goddamn vest."

"I can't move with the goddamn vest. You hold here but you wait on my signal. You got that?"

"Earl, we ought to wait till―"

"You do what I tell you!" Earl said, his dark, mad eyes boring into the boy, who turned away under the assault.

Bitterly, Frenchy ran by other crouching raiders out into the alley. Twice he was stopped by men who wanted to know what was going on, but he ran onward.

He got to the alley and saw that each end was now blocked by police cars, whose red lights flashed into the night. A light came on him and he pulled his vest aside to show the badge on his chest, and ran ahead, getting to EarPs car.

He opened the trunk, and found a boxful of BAR mags, all loaded.

Suddenly two policemen and some kind of plainclothes detective were there by him.

"What the hell is going on, bud?" asked the detective.

"We may need backup. They have four Negro girls held hostage upstairs. We killed a batch but there's more."

"Hell, we ain't going in there. Sounds like a goddamned war."

"You go to Becker!" Frenchy said hotiy. "He'll tell you to come up and support us."

"I ain't getting no men shot up over nigger whores, bud. You goddamned Jayhawkers started this one, you finish her up. I don't work for no Fred Becker."

"Where is Becker?"

"He's up front posing for photographers and I got a feeling he's pretty goddamned upset over this goddamned battle thing y'all got going in Mary Jane's."

"Yeah, well, fuck you and the mule you rode in on, Zeke," said Frenchy, and then turned and ran with the mags.

He was halfway there when he heard the sound of tommy guns.

Earl slithered ever so slowly up the staircase, climbing over the debris of screws and what-not. When he reached the halfway point he could see over the edge into the hallway. Spread out and gazing resolutely at the heaven he'd never enter lay a mean-looking old Grumley boy, his eyes black and blank as diamonds. He lay in his own blood and a litter of hundreds of shells. Another boy lay a few feet away, his hands clenched around his belly, which blossomed blood.

Earl pointed the Thompson at him.

"You best show me your hands or I will finish you right here," he said.

"I am so gutshot I am going nowheres, so you go ahead and finish me, you law town bastard," said the man, who turned out to be but a boy of twenty, though his face was clenched in pure adult hatred.

"Lay there then and bleed," said Earl. "It don't make no matter to me."

He slipped up another step, saw that the feed lid on the big German machine gun was still up, meaning it could no longer be fired. He slipped a bit farther forward, grabbed the snakelike curl of ammo belt that lay beneath the gun, and gave it a yank. He held it, then yelled, "Watch out, coming down," and flicked it downward. He signaled with his fingers: three, then he pointed to his handgun.

Obediently, three raiders―Slim, as senior man, Terry and Carlo, who were next in the stick―yielded their Thompsons to others and slid up the steps until they were just below him.

"They must be down at the other end in one of them rooms, but they got them gals. If you have to shoot you use your pistols and you aim carefully, you got that? You shoot at Grumleys, not at motion. They may push the gals out first. Shoot their legs, their pelvises and wait for the girls to break free. Then you go for chest or head. Got that?"

"Earl, they got machine guns!"

"Y'all do what I tell you or I'll get three more birds and you can go wait in the cars."

"Yes sir."

"I'm going acrost the hall. You cover me, you got that?"

"Yes sir."

"You make sure you got your goddamn vests on."

"Yes sir."

"Okay. On the count of three. Ready. Three!"

Earl jumped across the hall, almost slipped in Grumley fluid and empty shell casings, but made it. Just as he ducked into a room, a man at the end of the hall stuck his head out with a tommy gun and blasted a lengthy burst at him, but immediately the three raiders returned fire, driving him back.

"I think I got him," said one.

"I don't know," said another.

Earl, meanwhile, looked around the room. Squashed into the corner and holding on dearly to each other, two more Negro gals cried softly.

"Y'all be quiet now," said Earl. "We're going to get you out, okay?"

One of them nodded.

Earl peeked around the corner and saw nothing. He nodded over to Slim and held out two fingers, cranked his thumb back to indicate he was sending the women over.

Slim nodded.

"Okay," he said, "y'all get over here and get ready to run. I'm going to fire a little bit. They won't be shooting. You just jump over to the stairs and go on down and somebody will take care of you. Don't you pay no mind to the shooting I'm going to do. You got that?"

Both nodded.

Earl stepped out into the hall, and fired half a magazine into the ceiling at the rear of the corridor, watching the bullets tear into the plaster. The two girls dipped across, where they were grabbed by Carlo, who ushered them downstairs.

Frenchy returned to the hallway adjacent to the stairwell, breathing hard. He could see that the action had moved upstairs. He bent over and retrieved Earl's BAR, took one of the magazines, and implanted it. Then he cranked the bolt back.

The thing was heavy, and as he had his pockets jammed with other loaded magazines, he felt quite a burden as he rose. He walked around to where other raiders crouched at the foot of the stairs. He could see three others up there.

"I got Earl's gun reloaded," he said.

"Well, he seems kind of busy just now," said Elf.

"Well, hell, he sent me to get ammo for that gun and so he must need it."

Eff and the others just looked at him.

"Look out," he commanded. "I'm taking it up to him."

Frenchy pushed his way by them and began to edge his way up the steps.

Earl watched the room at the end of the hallway. He heard a motion, like a squirming or shifting, and the next thing he knew a man laid out with a shotgun and fired. He felt the sting of pellet, but fired too, finishing off the magazine. The bullets whacked chunks of plaster off the wall and the Grumley boy slumped and fell amid a white cascade of shattered masonry.

Frenchy started when the gunfire suddenly erupted. At that moment also his foot found a puddle of Grumley blood that had coagulated on the fourth step. Before he knew what was happening, he slid downward, struggled for purchase and fell hard. He clenched as he fell and was aware that he squeezed off a five-or six-shot burst of automatic rifle fire. Men ducked and fell to avoid the shots, and the gun pivoted in his descent, still pumping, and sent a load of bullets through the window, blowing it out in the process.

But then he was down, hard, his ass suddenly hot with pain from the fall.

"Jesus Christ, Short! What the hell are you doing?"

"I fell, goddammit. Is anybody hurt?"

"You are a lucky son of a bitch," someone said. "You didn't clip nobody down here but you're going to have to pay for a new window."

"Fuck it," said Frenchy. He pushed the mag release button so that the half-empty mag fell out, and replaced it with one from his coat pocket. Then he picked himself up, climbed the rest of the way, and bullied his way between the raiders at the top.

"Earl," he shouted, "I have the BAR."

Earl looked at him, shook his head. But then he nodded, and gestured for the boy to come across.

He stepped into the hallway, and fired, issuing suppressing fire that again chewed into the masonry far at the end of the hall.

When Frenchy made it safely across, he pulled him back and took the BAR. Frenchy reached for the Thompson, but Earl threw it across the room onto the bed.

"You leave it be. Stick near me, and when I drop a magazine, you hand me a new one. You got that?"

"Yes sir," said Frenchy.

But Earl was already leaning out the hallway.

"Slim," he said, "y'all be ready over there. I'm going to work my way down the hall. You weave behind me, clear the rooms. I think they's empty. When I get into the room next to the one they're in, I'm going to shoot through the walls. This.30 caliber should kick right through. I'll shoot high but I'll scare the shit out of 'em. They'll a-come running out, and you boys be ready, you got that?"

"Yes sir," said Slim.

"You ready, kid?" he asked Frenchy.

Frenchy gulped.

Earl stepped out, the BAR locked in the assault position, its butt clamped under his arm, its long muzzle pointing down the hail. Like his caddie Frenchy cowered behind, two mags in one hand, one in the other, others stuffed into his suit coat. It seemed almost comic―the man with the vest cowering behind the man without one―but nobody laughed.

As second in the stick, Carlo let Slim dash forward into the first room, duck in and shout "Clear!"

It was his turn. As Earl moved forward, hunched and urgent, and passed the next doorway, he jumped toward it. Ooof! He stumbled, caught himself, and looked down to discover a Grumley toppled over in a pool of his own blood, his fingers latticed around a belly wound that still pulsated. But Carlo could tell in a second he was dead, and flew on.

He kicked open the door, scanned quickly over the sights of the.45 which he had locked before him at the end of his two tightened arms. He pivoted, finding the room empty, checked behind the door, then dashed to a closet, finding only frilly women's clothes.

"Clear!" he yelled.

"Clear!" came another call, as a third raider worked a room behind Earl's staunch advance.

Finally, there was only the one room left, the last room on the right. A dead Grumley lay on this floor too, though Carlo wasn't sure when he'd been hit. He couldn't remember many details of the past three or four minutes.

He crouched in a doorway, on his left knee, his pistol fixed on the last entryway, his wrists braced against the wall. Slim was above him in the same position, only standing, and down the hallway, two or three other raiders had taken up positions in doorways.

Earl yelled to the surviving Grumleys.

"We got y'all covered. You come on out and you won't get hurt."

"Fuck you, lawman," yelled a Grumley from inside."You come in this room, we're gonna start blasting these here nigger gals and we'll all go to hell for breakfast."

"Don't hurt them gals. They ain't done nothing to you."

"No man tells a Grumley what to do, you bastard. Who the hell you think you are! This is our town, it ain't yours. You get out of here or by God there'll be blood in rivers spilt. No Grumley goes down easy, you hear me?"

But Earl wasn't listening. Instead he'd slipped into the room next door, oriented his automatic rifle to the common wall with the room where the last Grumley boys crouched with their hostages. He stitched a burst across the wall, about seven feet high. The old wood and plasterboard vaporized under the buzzsaw of.30 caliber bullets. The magazine was done in two seconds. Dust floated heavily in the air.

"Another," he yelled, and Frenchy placed the mag in his hand. He jammed it in and fired it off in another single roaring blast.

Dust blew and floated everywhere, like fog.

Screams came from inside the room.

Suddenly the door blew open and a Negro gal sprawled out, thrown out by two Grumleys to draw fire. But she didn't, for the raiders stayed unexcited and reasonable, and in fact after falling to her knees, she got up and ran down the hallway, screaming "Don't shoot me, oh please, sirs, don't shoot me."

Earl fired another magazine, and it was enough.

They all broke from the room, Grumleys in rage and fleeing prostitutes in panic, figures in the foggy dust only readable by body postures.

In the fog, only gun flashes leapt out. Carlo fired at what had to be a man and brought him down as two or three of the gals ran clear. Above him, Slim found a target and fired, and his man fell backward, his finger jacking the trigger of a Thompson, which whittled a nasty gash in the ceiling. Two more black girls fled by, and a last Grumley came out of the room with a shotgun and three raiders shot him simultaneously and he fell down atop still a third.

Dust heaved. From somewhere women howled. Gunsmoke filled the air.

Earl clicked in a new magazine and slid to the side of the last door, then stepped in.

A last Grumley huddled in the corner, behind the large yellow mass of a woman in a dressing gown who screamed and blubbered but could not escape his iron grip. He had a big revolver jammed into her throat.

"I'll kill this sow!" he screamed. "Throw down your guns or by God I'll kill this―"

But as he spoke, Earl flicked the BAR selector switch to semi-auto, brought the rifle to his shoulder like a marksman and shot him where what little of his head could be seen, just above the left ear, not a killing shot, but the rifle bullet had such velocity it spun him around to the wall. The big woman pulled away and fell to the floor and began to crawl, and before the Grumley could get his gun back into play, Slim and Carlo hammered him several times.

It was finally quiet at Mary Jane's.

"Jesus Christ," said Slim.

"Man," said Carlo. "I never saw nothing like that."

"Everybody okay?" asked Earl.

"Mr. Earl, you're bleeding."

"I picked up some pellet somewhere in there. It ain't a goddamn thing. The boys all right? Frenchy, you okay?"

"Yes sir," Frenchy said heavily.

They quickly checked to discover no casualties.

They moved back into the hallway and looked at what they had wrought. Dead Grumleys lay along the hallway, which itself was a corridor of ruin, as so many shots had torn through wood and plasterboard, and the air remained heavy with gunsmoke and floating dust and grit. Empty cartridges in the hundreds littered the floor. The blood had pooled here and there.

"There, boys," Earl said, "y'all take a good look. That is the world you have entered. Now I want you to form a detail and pick up all the weapons. If them Hot Springs detectives get ahold of the Thompsons, they'll just go back to the bad boys and we'll have to take 'em all over again. If that goddamn machine gun is too heavy to carry, Slim, you find someone who knows about such things and strip the toggle bolt. If nothing else, I want that bolt sunk deep in Lake Catherine, so we don't have to worry about it no more. If you can't find no one, you come to me."

"What if the cops―"

"The cops ain't gonna stand agin you tonight. Nobody's going to stand agin you tonight."

As the men spread out to retrieve the fallen guns, another raider came down the hall to Earl.

"Mr. Parker's downstairs, Earl. He wants to see you."

"Yeah, yeah," said Earl. "I'll get there in a moment. I don't hear no ambulances. It's clear now. Tell 'em to get some ambulances in here in case any of these gals are shot up. I think we saved most of 'em."

They could hear a woman wailing loudly downstairs.

"Mr. Earl, you should know: there's a problem."

"What would that be, son?"

"Some women got shot."

"We lost one, by my count. Them Grumley boys shot her."

"No sir. Not here. Down the block at the Pythian Hotel. Two Negro gals sitting in the parlor. Somehow a burst came through the window and kilt 'em both. The Negro peoples are down there all het up, and the cops may have a riot. Mr. Becker is goddamned upset and there's all these reporters here."

Chapter 24

The facts were tragic. Mrs. Alva Thomas, forty-seven, of New Albany, Georgia, and Miss Lavern Sevier Carmichael, twenty-three, of New Iberia, Louisiana, had been sitting in the lobby of the Pythian Hotel and Baths when the gunfire down the street had erupted. While most sensible people got down on their stomachs at the sound, the two ladies, in deep religious concentration, declined to do so. God's attention was elsewhere. Each was hit but once. The.30-caliber-model-of-1906 bullets had flown a long way and not lost but a mite of their power when they struck the two women fatally.

The Reverend Tyrone Blandings, of the leading Negro church in Hot Springs, requested a meeting with Mr. Becker. There he was formally apologized to, and told the county would pay for the shipping and funeral expenses of the two bodies, but that the enforcement of the law must be absolute and sometimes in these confrontations between the sinners and the sinless, unaccountable accidents happened. It was God's will. He must have a plan.

Meanwhile, Mayor O'Donovan empaneled a group of elder Hot Springs citizens to investigate the out-of-control Jayhawkers who turned the city into a war zone. If it had been within the purview of his powers, he informed the newspapers, he would have called a grand jury and issued indictments, but unfortunately it was only the prosecuting attorney who had the legal power to convene such an assembly.

The outstanding warrants on seven of the nine Murfreesboro Grumleys were never acknowledged in the Hot Springs newspapers, though the bigger little Rock papers made certain this evidence reached the public up front.

The dead were listed, all of them Grumleys or Grumley cousins: Nathan Grumley, forty-two; Wayne Grumley, Jr. twenty-one; Jasper "Jape" Grumley, twenty-three; Bowman Peck, twenty-seven; Alvin Grumley, twenty-eight; Jeter Dodge, thirty-two; Duane Grumley, thirty-two; Buddy "Junior" Mims, thirty-three; Dewey Grumley, thirty-seven; Felton Parr, thirty-nine; and one unidentified body, burned beyond all recognition, presumably that of R. K. Pindell, age unknown, gone missing. Of the eleven, Nathan was clearly the most violent, as he had spent twelve years in the penitentiary on a case of second-degree murder and was suspected of a variety of other crimes, including rape, child molestation and dozens of counts of armed robbery as well as being widely suspected of killing a clown. He was also a known contract killer for Jefferson Davis Grumley, known as the "Boss of Pike County," and brother to Elmer "Pap" Grumley, once known as the "Boss of Garland County," though now thought to be retired.

But each of the other Grumleys or Grumley cousins had at least one and some as many as five outstanding warrants lodged against their names, for crimes that went anywhere from breaking and entering to suspicion of murder. So those Murfreesboro Grumleys, most people acknowledged, were not innocents.

The next evening, Mr. Becker gave a speech before the Better Business Bureau of Hot Springs in the Banquet Room of the Arlington Hotel. Giving speeches was a gift of his, as he had that rare ability to project concern and empathy and at the same time heroic will. He bit his lip when he discussed his dilemma in sending his men in against so dangerous a foe as gamblers and wanted men armed with machine guns, but then in the end decided it was worth it, for the law had to be served no matter the cost. The law was what separates us from the apes, after all. And unlike some men, he felt the weight of the deaths of Negroes as heavily as he felt the deaths of white folks; he was sorry that such a thing had occurred, but he assured his listeners it was unavoidable, as part of his commitment to reform. The gambling and corruption that had marked Hot Springs for a century had to be stopped and he would stop it, no matter what it cost him. Most of the men in the room believed that he himself had led the raid, as he frequently referred to "his boys" and the risks they had taken for Hot Springs and for America. He knew the way ahead was tough but he knew it was the right way.

They gave him a standing ovation.

As for the raiders, early the next morning they were informed that Mr. Becker had decided the best thing for them to do would be to go on vacation for a bit. All their weapons were to be secured and they were to drive back to their training headquarters at the Red River Army Depot, and from there commence a week off.

But of course there were two private chats to be gotten out of the way. One took place between Earl and Frenchy and, surprisingly enough, was initiated by Frenchy, in the ramshackle room that served as Earl's operations center in the pumping building.

"I wanted to apologize," he said early. "I fucked up."

"How's that?" said Earl.

"With those two Negro women. I fired those shots. I was racing up the steps, I tripped on a shell, I'd just loaded the BAR. I felt it firing. I―"

"You was in a battle zone, why wouldn't you have had your finger on the trigger? At any time a Grumley might have jumped out at you with a gun."

"I'm still sorry. If only―"

"Don't waste no time on ifonlys. You can run it through your head a thousand times and if this thing or that thing is different, it all turns out different. But maybe it turns out worse, not better, don't forget that possibility."

"Yes sir," said Frenchy.

"Good," said Earl.

"Thank God," said Frenchy, "that they were only Negroes."

Earl said nothing. But then he thought a second, as Frenchy returned to the bunk area, and said, "Just hold on."

"Yes sir."

"I wish you hadn't said that."

"Mr. Earl? I guess I meant, think of the problems we'd have if they'd have been white. That's what I meant."

"No, that ain't what you meant. I know what you meant. You meant, hey, they was only niggers."

Frenchy said nothing, but he seemed to squirm with discomfort. Then he replied, "They were only Negroes. I would never say nigger because my parents told me it was uncouth, but still, they were only Negroes. And the truth is, some of the boys are wondering why we went to so much trouble and risked so much to save some black prostitutes."

"Okay, you listen here, Short, and you listen good. Third day on Tarawa, third day after that long walk in through the cold water, I got plugged by a Jap sniper. I like to bled out but two boys from the Ammunition Company that we used as litter bearers, they crawled out and got me. Lots of fire going on. Japs everygoddamnwhere, you hear me? They drug me in, they dumped me on their litter and they carried my bleeding ass back to the aid station. Didn't say a word. Negro boys. I'm dead but for them two, and a few hours later one of 'em hisself was drug in, and they laid him next to me, and he died. I watched him die. Damned if his blood weren't the same goddamned color as mine. Bright red, when it come out, then turning sort of blackish. So don't you tell me they're any goddamned different."

He didn't realize by the end he was screaming, but as Frenchy shrank back further and further it became clearer and clearer and he looked up to see everybody else around him staring, all the guys.

"So any other bird got a complaint?"

There was silence.

"You are good, brave boys. You are as good as any Marines. But underneath, your blood is the same color as any Negro's, so when a Negro dies it's a real hard death. Anybody have any goddamned problem with that?"

"No sir," came a comment.

"Then get your asses back to packing up. We have to move back to Texas before we can take some time off."

If Earl seemed to have a particularly brutal edge to his voice, they were all unaware of a reason. But perhaps it had to do with a previous discussion Earl had just concluded with D. A., which developed along different lines.

"Earl," D. A. said, "this smells of so many kinds of bad I don't know where to start."

"Start at the top, finish at the bottom," said Earl.

"The kid who killed them two gals? Becker wants him dumped. He wants his ass gone. He says it's the smart move. It'll quieten the Negroes, it'll show we're responsive to community pressures and that we've got hearts and consciences."

"If that boy goes, I go," said Earl intractably.

"Earl, I―"

"If that boy goes, I go. No other way."

"Earl, Becker and some of his people are beginning to think we are out of control."

"I can't fight no other way, Mr. Parker. Fighting's too goddamned tough as it is to do it while being second-guessed by folks who've never done a lick of it and don't have no stomach for it nohow."

"Earl, in truth, you made some faulty decisions."

"I know I did. But it ain't on the boys, it's on me. If mistakes were made, I made 'em. You'd best fire me, Mr. Parker, and leave them boys alone."

The old man just shook his head.

"Damn," he said, "you are a stubborn man. You don't have some kind of craziness in your head that makes you want to die, to be with your pals in the Pacific? They say that's common. Is that what's going on with you? Is that why you didn't wear the vest?"

"I didn't wear the vest because I had to move fast. The vests ain't no good when you move fast. They're heavy, they're cumbersome, they eat up your energy real fast, and they only stop shotgun and pistol. They wouldn't have stopped that big German machine gun a lick."

"But you keep jumping into the guns."

"It's the only way I know."

"You are a hard piece of work, Earl. But I keep having to say the same goddamned things. You have to wear the damned vest. That's how I want it done. You were to command from outside, not inside. This isn't the Marine Corps. You are a law officer, sworn true, and your job is to follow the instructions of your superior, which is me. Earl, I will not steer you wrong. Don't you trust me?"

"I do trust you. You are a fair and decent man. I have not a doubt about that one."

"But you don't trust Becker."

"Not a goddamned bit."

"He wanted me to fire you too, Earl. I told him if you went, I went. Now you tell me if that Short goes, you go. This don't sound like it's working."

"It's the only way I know, Mr. Parker."

"Call me D. A., goddammit, Earl. Okay, Short gets one more chance, you get one more chance."

And what he didn't say was that he had only one more chance.

"Now I want you to go home. The boys go home for a week, you go home for a week. And get those goddamned pellets plucked out of your hide, so you won't be so disagreeable, do you understand? And see your wife. The poor woman is probably very upset with you."

Chapter 25

They got back to the Red River Army Depot, were paid in cash the money owed them, and left early the next morning for Texarkana and from there to all points for a week of pleasure. Some went home, some, whose homes were too far, headed down to the Texas beaches, but a day away by train, some headed for that lush and Frenchy town, New Orleans.

All, that is, but two of them.

Carlo Henderson was tapped by D. A. late that morning, as most of the others had left. He was in no hurry because he was going to catch a late bus out of Texarkana for Tulsa, where he planned to visit his widowed mother. But that was not to be.

"Yes sir?"

"Henderson, Mr. Earl tells me you're doing very well. You've got a lot to be proud of."

Carlo lit up with a smile. Earl, of course, was a God to him, brave and fair but not a man given to much eloquence in his praise.

"I am just trying to do my duty," he allowed.

"That's important, isn't it?"

"Important?"

"Duty, son."

"Yes sir," said the boy. "Yes sir, it is."

"Good, I thought you'd say that," said the old FBI agent. "Now let me ask you this: what do you think of Mr. Earl?"

Carlo was taken aback. He felt his jaw flop open, big enough for flies to fill, and then he swallowed, gulped and blurted out, "He's a hero."

"That he is," agreed the old man. "That he is. You've heard these rumors that Earl won a medal, a big medal, in the Pacific? Well, they're true. Earl was a great Marine out there. Earl killed a lot of the Yamoto race. So any young man who gits to study and learn and benefit from Earl's bravery and leadership ability, he's a lucky young man indeed, wouldn't you say?"

"Yes sir," said Carlo, for he felt that way exactly.

"But you should know something, Henderson," D. A. continued. "Earl's was the very toughest of wars. Five invasions. Wounds. Lots of men lost on hell's far and barren beaches. You get my drift?"

Carlo did not.

"It takes something from a man, all that. You can't go through it and come out the same. It wears a man down and exhausts him. It blunts him. Now, son," continued the old man, "I am a mite worried about something. See if you follow me. You ever hear of this thing called combat fatigue?"

"Yes sir," said Carlo. "Section 8. Cuckoo. You can't do your job no more, even though you ain't been hit. So off you go to the nuthouse."

"Them jitters, they don't always make it so you want to go to hospital. Sometimes they make it so you just want to die and git it over with. It's part of combat fatigue. It's called a death wish. You hear me? Death wish."

The concept sounded somehow familiar to Carlo, but he wasn't sure from where. And he wondered where in hell this was going.

"See, here's what can happen," D. A. explained. "A fellow can be so tired he don't want to go on. But he's got too much guts―they call it internal structure, the doctors do, I have looked it up―to quit. So he decides to kill himself doing his duty. He takes wild chances. He behaves with incredible bravado. But he's really just trying to git hisself killed. Strange it is, but they say it happens."

"Is that what's going on with Mr. Earl?" Carlo asked.

"I don't know, son. What do you think?"

"I don't know neither, sir. He seems all right, I guess."

"Yes, he does. But dammit, I have told him three times on raids to wear the damned vest and he will not do it. I have told him his job is to stay outside and coordinate, over the walkie-talkies. But again, he's got to be right up front where the guns are. And that last stunt. Why, he walked down that hallway in plain sight, daring them boys to shoot him. What a fool thing to do. He could have laid back and with that BAR just opened fire and finished their hash off."

"He was afraid of hurting them colored girls."

"Never heard of such a thing in all my days."

"Yes sir."

Now that he thought about it, Carlo had to admit it did seem peculiar.

"So anyway," said D. A., "I am mighty worried about Earl. I do not want to be a party to his self-destruction. I picked him, I offered him this job in good faith and I expected him to do it in good faith, and not try and get himself killed. Do you understand?"

"I think so, sir."

"Now, there's one other thing as well."

The boy just stared his way.

"You know I respect and appreciate Earl as much as any man on the team?"

"Yes sir."

"And you know I think he's a true American hero, of the type there ain't many like anymore. Mr. Purvis, he was one. Audie Murphy, now there's another. William O. Darby, he was another. But Earl's quite a man, that's what I think."

"I do too, sir," said the boy.

"So I ask myself a question so hard I can hardly put it in words. Which is: Why did he lie?"

"Sir?"

"Why did he lie? Earl told a lie. A flat, cold, indisputable lie and it's got me all bothered, bothered as much as his crazy need to get hisself kilt. I tried to dismiss it but I couldn't. There seemed no point to it, none at all, not even a little one."

"He lied?"

"He did."

"It don't sound like him."

"Not a bit. But he did."

"On what topic?"

"The topic was Hot Springs."

"Hot Springs?"

"I asked him dead-on. Earl, have you ever been in Hot Springs? No sir, he said. 'My Baptist daddy said Hot Springs was fire and damnation. He'd beat our hides off if ever we went to Hot Springs.'That's what he said."

"But you think he has?"

"Shoot, son, it's a pitcherfiil more than that! At least three times I have planned a certain way, based on my reconnoitering and my experience. And in each damn case, he has at the last second said, Now wait a minute, wouldn't it be better if… And each goddamn time his way was better. Better by far."

"Well, I―"

"Better because he knew the terrain or the site of the buildings. The last time was the best. He's in the alley watching the rear-entry team, holding it all together on the radio. But suddenly he gets this feeling the team will be ambushed from behind. So he's looking down the alley when they move a truck with gunmen in it down toward Malvern, with an enfilade on the rear to Mary Jane's, How's he know to look there? It's dark as sin, but he knows where to look? How?"

"Ah. Well, I guess―"

"Guess nothing! I asked him straight up and he told me he was just lucky he was looking in the right direction. Bullshit! I swear to you, he goddamned knew there was just the slightest incline down that little street, called Guilford, toward Malvern. He knew a truck could roll down, no engine involved, just by releasing the emergency brake, and git into shooting position. So that's exactly where he looked and by God when he saw them boys sliding into position he was ready. He emptied two BAR mags into that truck and up she went like the Fourth of July and three more of Pap Grumley's cousins went to hell. He knew."

The old man seemed astounded, turning this bit of information over and over in his mind. It fascinated him.

"All right," he said, "here's what I want. You take this week and you turn all your detective skill loose on Earl. Earl's background. Earl's past. Who is Earl? Why's he working the way he is? What's going on in his head? What do his ex-Marine pals say? What's his folks say? What's his family doctor say? How was he in Hot Springs? When was he in Hot Springs? Why was he in Hot Springs? What's going on? And you report to me. So I can decide."

"Decide?"

"Decide whether or not to fire Earl. I will not be party to his suicide. It's more than I care to carry around on my shoulders. I will not have him using me to git hisself kilt. Do you understand?"

"I am not a psychologist, sir. I can't make that call."

"Well, dammit, I can't make it neither, not without some help. If I fire Earl, the whole goddamned shebang falls apart, that I know. And I got that bastard Becker to answer to. But if I send him ahead and he gets killed, I got my own self to answer to. Both of them are stern taskmasters."

"Yes sir."

"This is a hard job. Maybe the hardest of all. Harder than walking down that hallway in all that dust and smoke with Grumleys with tommy guns at the other end."

The boy's face knitted in confusion, but then he saw that the old man had all but made up his mind that he would fire Earl. That is, unless he could be talked out of it, on the strength of something that he, Carl Donald Henderson, could dig out. And that was what he was good at, digging, ferreting, going through files, making calls, taking notes, comparing fingerprints, alibis, accounts and stories. So in that sense he could help Earl, he and he alone, and the heaviness of the task that had just been offered him filled him with solemnity.

"I will look into it, sir."

"Good. Here's a file on what I have. It'll git you started. There's people to talk to."

"Yes sir. Where am I going, sir?"

"You'd start in his hometown. It's called Blue Eye, out in Polk County."

At the bus station, Carlo used up all his change calling his mother long distance and telling her he would not be coming in after all, he had another assignment.

Then he went to the Greyhound window, and bought a ticket for Blue Eye, on the 4:30 bus that drove up Route 71 through Fort Smith to Fayetteville, and then he bought some popcorn and a root beer and sat for the longest time, watching the slow crawl of the clock hands, reading a John P. Marquand novel that he couldn't keep track of, and trying not to think about the mysteries of Earl Swagger. The file sat unopened on his lap. He could not bring himself to look at it somehow, any more than he could bring himself to take off his Colt.45, secreted in the fast-draw holster behind his right hip. He was just too used to it.

They called the bus at 4:15 and, ever obedient and respectful of the rules, he was one of the first to board. He sat halfway back, on the right, for it was said that the ride was smoothest there.

And then he saw Frenchy Short.

Yes, it was Frenchy all right, though not in his usual blue serge suit, but dressed far more casually, in denim jeans, a khaki shirt and a straw cowboy's hat, with a carpetbag full of clothes under tow. Was it Frenchy? Yes, it was Frenchy! He almost left his seat to yell a greeting, but then he looked at Frenchy and saw that he too was in line to board a bus.

Then his bus pulled out and Frenchy was gone.

But later, that night, when he got to Blue Eye, he had to ask the driver, "You know that bus that was in the dock next to us at Texarkana?"

The driver just looked at him.

"You know that one? I didn't get a look at it, but where was it headed?"

"That'd be the little Rock bus," the driver said.

"Oh, the Little Rock bus."

"Yes sir," said the driver. "It heads straight on up 30 through Hope, on up to little Rock."

"It just goes to little Rock?" asked Carlo.

"Yep. Well, that's where she finishes. She stops at Hope and Malvern and all them towns. Then she veers over 270 and toward Hot Springs. That's the Hot Springs bus. Most folks take it to Hot Springs, for the track and the gambling. Hot Springs, that's a damned old hot town, you'd best believe it, son."

Chapter 26

The aspirin worked well enough on through De Queen but the throbbing began just beyond. He took some more but it didn't seem to help. Particularly, there was a pellet lodged between the layers of muscle on the inside of his left biceps and when it rubbed a certain way it sent a jack of pain through the whole left side of his body, once so bad he had to pull off Route 71 and let it pass. It made him thirsty for a powerful drink of bourbon.

He couldn't stop in Blue Eye because he knew too many folks and too many folks knew him. The next towns up the road offered no promise, small, dying places like Boles and Y City, mere widenings in the road, too small to have a doctor.

Finally, he came to Waldron, in Scott County, a town large enough to support such a thing. Waldron lay in a flatlands between the mountains, essentially a farm town, and it had grown prosperous on the rich loam of Scott. It was large enough to support a Negro district, a servant population to provide comfort to the wealthy white families in the area. Earl drove through it looking for a certain thing and at last found it: Dr. Julius James Peterson, OB-GYN, as the sign said. He parked around back and slunk up the back steps like a man on the run. It was near nine o'clock, but a light shone from within the frame house.

He knocked and after a bit the door opened, though a chain kept it from flying fully wide.

"Yes?" the man said, and there was fear in his voice, as there would be in the voice of any Negro man answering a nighttime knock and finding a large white male on the other side.

"Sir, I need some medical help."

"Fm a baby doctor. I deliver babies. I can't help you. You could go on to Camp Chaffee. There's a dispensary there that's always open if it's an emergency. They wouldn't turn you down. There's a small hospital for white folks in Peverville too, if you want to go that way. I can't let you in here."

"I can't go to them places. I'm by myself. This ain't no raid or night rider thing. I'm a police officer."

Earl got out his wallet and showed both the badge and the identification card, officially stamped with the seal of the great state of Arkansas.

"I can't help you, sir. You are a white person and I am a Negro. That's a chasm that can't be bridged. There are people around here who would do my family great harm if I practiced medicine on a white person. That's just the way it is."

"I guess I ain't like them others. Doc, I need help. I got some pellet riding under my skin, hurts like hell, makes me want a drink bad, and if I start drinking again, I lose everything. I have cash money, no need to make no records. Nobody seen me. I will be quietly gone when you are done. I'm asking a mighty favor, and wouldn't if I didn't have to."

"You say you are not an oudaw?"

"No sir, I am not."

"Are you armed?"

"I am. I'll lock the guns in the trunk of the car."

"Go do that. After I remove the pellet you can't stay here."

"Don't mean to."

"Then disarm and come in."

Earl did as he said he would, then slipped in the door. The doctor took him to a shabbily appointed but very clean examining room. Earl took his shirt off and sat on an examination table that had stirrups of some sort at the end. He didn't like the look of them stirrups.

"I count six in all," he said. "The one in my arm, for some reason it hurts the most."

The doctor, a mild-enough-looking black man of lighter, yellowish complexion and hair that was almost red, looked at the mesh of scars on his body.

"The war?"

"Yes sir. The Pacific."

"Then you know pain and won't go into shock. This will hurt. I don't have anesthetics here."

"Okay. It don't matter. I can get through anything if there's a promise of better on t'other side."

The doctor washed, sterilized a long, sharply pointed probe and began to dig. The first three pellets came out easily enough, though not without pain. The doctor disinfected each wound with alcohol, a flaming sensation if ever there was one, then bandaged each with a gauze patch and a strip of adhesive. The fourth and fifth were deeper and even more painful. But the last one, in the arm, was a bastard. It wouldn't come and it seemed the more the man dug, the further into the muscle it slipped. But Earl didn't move or scream; he closed his eyes, tried to disassociate himself from his hurting, and thought of other places, better times, and his teeth ground together as if they meant to crush each other to dental powder, and then he heard a clink as the last pellet was deposited in a dish.

"You're not from around here?" said the doctor. "No white man would let a black one inflict so much pain on him without the word 'nigger' being spoken at least ten times."

"Funny, never crossed my mind. I grew up in Polk County"

"No, I'd say you grew up in the South Pacific and became more than a man, you became a human being."

"Don't know about that, sir."

"I won't ask you how you got these wounds. I doubt it was a hunting accident. It's not bird season. And I heard tell of a great battle in Hot Springs, but I know you not to be a Grumley sort. So if you carry the badge of the law, I assume you're a good man. I know you're a lucky one: No. 7 birdshot doesn't play so gende in most cases."

"Been lucky my whole life. What do I owe you?"

"Nothing. It's not a problem. You continue with the aspirin, have another doctor look at it the day after tomorrow. Possibly, he will prescribe penicillin, to fight an infection. But you must go now."

"Sir, I have a hundred dollars. I'm guessing you don't charge poor women who come to you much if anything at all. You ain't no rich doctor, I can tell. So you take this hundred, and it's for them."

"That's a lot of money."

"Hard earned too, by God, but I want you to have it."

He pressed the money on Dr. Peterson, shook his hand, dressed and slipped out the back, in the dark, as he had come.

"Well, ain't we a sight?" he said with a laugh. "You're all swoll up and I am full of holes."

"Earl," she said, "that is not funny a bit."

"No ma'am. I don't suppose it is."

Chastened, he took another sip on his Coca-Cola and then a bite of his hot dog. Under his shirt, his wounds still occasionally stung, particularly the arm, where the doc had dug so deep. They sat at a picnic table in a park in Fort Smith that overlooked the Arkansas River, a meadowy place that rolled down to the water, where the pines sprouted up. There, the black waters rushed thunderously along; there must have been a big rainstorm up north.

But there were no storms here. It was a hot, bright Sunday in August, a year after they dropped the big ones on the Japs, and people frolicked in the shadow of an old courthouse, famous in an earlier century for its public hangings. Adults pushed their babies along the walkways in elaborate strollers; young servicemen from Camp Chaffee spooned with their townie belles. Even Negroes were welcome; it was an afternoon on the Grand Jette, Fort Smith style, complete to points of light in the bright air, and in the green of the pines, and if there weren't monkeys on leashes there were spaniels on them. Everybody was eating Eskimo Pies or hot dogs and thinking about the future and no one looked to the southwest, for in that quadrant of the scene lay the vets' cemetery, newly expanded, hills of rolling white markers that gleamed in the sun so freshly planted were they. One of the state's other war heroes rested there, William O. Darby, the young Ranger major who'd fought the Germans in Italy so hard and then gotten killed by a piece of metal the size of a dime from an artillery shell late in the spring of 1945 while he stood on a hill as an observer. Earl didn't want to go anywhere near that.

"You were in that ruckus all the papers wrote up," she said.

"I was there, yes."

"And that's why you have bandages all over your body."

"I caught some pellet, that's all. It ain't no big thing. Hurt myself shaving worse most mornings."

"Earl, they say that was the most violent gunfight in the history of the state. Fourteen people died."

"Eleven of 'em was bad-boy Grumleys, as low a form as has existed, whose passing is of no note whatsoever. They didn't have to die. They could have surrendered to the law, easy as pie."

"It wasn't their nature."

"No ma'am, guess it wasn't."

He looked at her. Her face had broadened considerably, and her shoulders, legs and arms thickened up a bit. But still and all: a beautiful woman, an angel, full and fair and blond and decent, the very best of America. She licked at her Eskimo Pie, with that special grace that seemed hers alone. She was the only human being on the planet who could eat an Eskimo Pie in the full blaze of afternoon and not spill a drop of it.

Under her breasts, the child seemed eager to come into this world, so forcefully did it thrust itself out and away from its mother. She had worn a red maternity blouse to hide it, but the subterfuge was poindess: that was a lot of baby in there.

aI am so frightened, Earl, that you are going to die for nothing and I will be alone with this child," she said, the last of the ice cream pie gone.

"If it happens, you will get a nice big chunk of insurance money from the state. It'll get the two of you a fine start in a new life. Maybe you'll meet up with a fellow who's around more than I am. And that money is more than my mama got when my old man got hisself bushwhacked back in '42. She got a gold watch, a hundred dollar burial fee, and commenced to drink herself to death in a year. I know you'll do better."

He took another sip on the Coca-Cola. The river wound blackly through the trees, but between here and there, boys threw a ball or sailed planes, girls cradled dolls, moms and dads held hands.

"I am so sorry," he finally said. "I know you didn't sign on for this thing. But I am in it now, and I don't know how to get out of it."

"You could just quit and go back to the sawmill."

"You know I couldn't do that."

"No. You have no quit in you, that's for sure."

"I think I could go to Mr. Parker and see about getting a loan against the money they'll be paying me before this thing is finished. Maybe there's a credit union or something. Also, there's some veterans' rights I got coming I ain't looked into yet. That way I could move you out of that damned Quonset hut in the village and into a nice little place much closer. Say in the towns outside of Little Rock. I'd see you much more often."

"Earl, it seems so ridiculous with the farm."

He sat a long moment, looking again down and across the meadowy grass to the river. Then he said, "I wasn't trying to hide that place from you. It wasn't no secret. I just never got around to telling you about it."

"I wasn't prying. A letter came from the Polk County tax assessors bureau, which had been forwarded by the Marine Corps. It was stamped Open Immediately. I opened it. You owed back taxes on two hundred acres out in Polk, out Route 8. It was past due: $127.50, plus a three dollar penalty. I sent them a check. Then I got to thinking about it and so last week, before all this gun-battle business, I had Mary Blanton drive me out there. We spent the day on the farm."

"It's a nice place, I recollect," he said. "The old man had it up and running pretty tight at one point."

"It's a wonderful place, Earl. The house needs work, mainly paint, but there's a big garden. I counted four bedrooms. The kitchen hasn't been touched in years. It could use some work too. But Earl, there's land. There's farmland which could be leased out, there's a creek, there's a stand of timber where you could hunt and raise your children. There's meadowland and a corral and a fine barn. Earl, honey, we could be so happy out there. And we own it. We already own it. We could move in tomorrow. I don't have to stay in a sewer pipe and take the bus to work. I could teach in Polk County. When the baby comes, he or she'd have a wonderful place to grow up.

"The week I left the Marine Corps," he said, "when I was driving up to Fort Smith for you, last December? I stopped there and spent some time."

"You don't want to go there, do you, Earl? I can tell from your voice."

"I almost burned it to the ground. That would have felt good. I'd love to see that place go up in flames. It's.."

He trailed off.

"It's what, Earl?"

"There's a lot of hurting in that place. It's haunted. You see a pretty little farm and I see the place where my brother died. He hung himself in 1940.1 hardly knew the boy. I sure didn't do him no good. His big old brother didn't do a pie's worth of good for him. like everybody else, I let him down. Nobody did him no good. Nobody stood up for him. In the basement of that house my old man used to beat me and so I suppose he beat Bobby Lee too."

"It wouldn't have to be like that. We'd paint it white, I'd get the garden up and running, you could lease out die fields like your daddy did, it could be a good house, a happy house. It could be a house full of children."

Earl finished his hot dog.

"I don't know. I just ain't sure I could face that place. Let me think her over."

"Earl, I know you have a melancholy in you over your childhood. But you have to think of your child's childhood. Do you want him born into a Quonset hut on a military base? Or on a big, beautiful farm on the most beautiful land in the state?"

"That is not an easy question," he said.

"No, it is not."

"I'd sell the goddamned place if I could. But land is so cheap now, and it's so far out, I'd never find a buyer. When's that goddamned postwar boom going to hit Polk County? Anyhow, I'll think some."

"You'll think hard on it?"

"Yes ma'am."

"All right, Earl. I know you'll work it out. I know you'll do the right thing. You always do."

For the next few days, Earl was perfect. There was never a harder-working, more cheerful man, a better husband. He repainted the inside of the Quonset hut apartment a bright yellow, a day's worth of back breaking labor, but worth it, for the lighter color cheered the place up. He loaded the old sofa up on the roof of his government Dodge and took it to a dump, then went over to the Sears, Roebuck in Fort Smith and bought a new sofa for her, a pretty thing in green stripes. That made the rooms even brighter.

He redug the garden, weeded it, trimmed the hedges. He took her out to dinner, twice. They went for walks. He listened to the baby move and the two of them tried to think up names for it. She wrote long lists and he laughed at Adrian and Phillip, he thought Thomas and Andrew were okay, he liked Timothy and Jeffrey. The problem was, except for Adrian, each of the names had a boy somewhere attached to it, a Marine who'd died or been maimed and was carried out by stretcher bearers screaming for his mama.

But Earl tried not to let any of that show on his face. He tried so hard to be the kind of man he thought she deserved, the kind of man he thought he wasn't. He never told her about the way his father would sneak up on him and whisper something fierce and hurtful in his ear, then steal away, to leave nothing but sunlight and trees blowing in the breeze.

Finally, he drove her to the doctor's office and sat out front during the exam and then the doctor brought him in and spoke to him while she dressed. Earl had seen lots of docs, and this one was no different from any in an aid station, a field hospital or a hospital ship: a grave official type man, with a blur of mustache and eyes that were somehow lighdess.

"Mr. Swagger, first of all, the baby and your wife are both doing fine. The health of both seems well within the parameters of what we'd qualify as a normal, healthy term. The baby should be right on time. I'd say first week in October."

"Yes sir, great. That's great news."

"Now I did want to say something to you. There's no cause to be alarmed just yet, but I have noted that die baby is situated a certain way in your wife's uterus. Not abnormal by any means, but at the same time not exactly where we'd expect it to be."

"Yes sir," said Earl gravely. "Does Junie know this?"

"No, she doesn't. I'd prefer her not to know. It would cause anxiety, quite possibly undue. It may not be anything to get alarmed at."

"But it means something. What does it mean, sir?"

"There can be complications. Usually of no consequence. But what happens sometimes in this case is that the child arrives in the wrong presentation. That is, instead of breeching face up, it breeches face down. Then it gets tricky. I want you prepared."

Earl nodded.

"It says in the paperwork you're a state employee. An engineer, a crew foreman?"

"No sir. I work as an investigator for a prosecuting attorney in another county."

"I see. Law enforcement. Is it demanding?"

"Sometimes."

"You were in the war, weren't you?"

"Yes sir. The Pacific."

"Well, then, you've seen some emergency medical situations I'd guess."

"A few, yes sir. I was wounded a few times."

"Good. Then you know what can happen."

"Are you telling me there's a chance my wife could die?"

"A very small one."

"Jesus," he said. "For a damned baby."

"The baby is very important to her, as it would be to any woman. That's part of being a woman, and that's part of what's so wonderful about women. And that's part of the reason I'd prefer her not to know. Sometimes we men have to make the serious decisions."

"Yes sir."

"So what I am saying is that if the complications are grave, I may have to make a choice. I may only be able to save one, the child or the mother. I am assuming the mother would be your choice."

"Ain't no two ways about it. We didn't plan this kid, I ain't settled in this job yet, the timing was all off. And I don't feel much for it. Don't know why, I just don't."

"Many men who came back from a hard war feel the same way. I've heard those words a hundred times. I think it'll change when you hold your child, but to many men who've been in combat, the idea of bringing a new child into a somewhat profane world seems poindess."

Earl thought: You just said a mouthful, Doc.

"Anyhow, here's what's most important. You must be around when the child is bom. I don't know what sort of arrangement you and your wife have, with your work so far away, but you absolutely have to be here in case a decision is needed. Do you understand?"

"Sir, I've made my decision."

"Yes, but if the baby comes late at night or when I'm not on call, I might not be here. Any of a dozen things could happen. It's quite common for the delivery to be assisted by the staff resident. That would be a younger doctor, possibly not willing to make the decision that you just made. He might not have the sand to intervene and you could lose them both. So you need to be here. You may have to fight for your wife's life. You may even have to fight your wife for it."

Earl nodded.

"But I can see something on your face," the doctor said.

"Yes sir. The job Fm in, sometimes it gets very complicated and I can't get back. I just don't want to let nobody down."

"Well, Mr. Swagger, you'll just have to decide what's more important to you. You don't want someone else making that decision, do you? No, Mr. Swagger, please, please, try and be here."

"Yes sir," said Earl, feebly, knowing it might not happen that way. "I'll do my best."

Chapter 27

Pap Grumley danced a dance of grief and shame. It was a strange mountain dance that somehow connected with people who worshipped the Lord with poisonous snakes or through the speaking of tongues, practices which were part of Grumley life in one way or other.

He was dressed for mourning, all in black, black frock coat, black pants, his black boots, a black hat that could hold twenty gallons, pulled low over his eyes. Eleven coffins filled with Grumleys had been lowered into the ground and words were said over them. All the Grumleys and assorted clans were there, including Pecks, Dodges, Grundys and Pindells. The women and the men were grim in their mourning clothes, their taut mountain faces bleak and severe, their blue eyes gray with pain, their demeanor dignified and stoic, yet hurting massively.

A Grumley preacher said the Lord's words, about how He must have wanted Grumleys in heaven for a peculiar hard job, so He sent for a whole lot of them, to stand by His right hand and help Him spread die Word. But the words he said were not nearly as eloquent as the dance Pap danced.

The spirit moved in him. He tramped in the dust, back and forth, he shivered, he shook, he stamped. The music was unheard by men's ears but came from a part of all the Grumley soul, old mountain music, the whining of a fiddle played by a drunk who'd watched his children die one by one of the pox, and had felt the cold creeping in late at night when blankets were thin and a fiftieth or a sixtieth day of feeding on taters and nothing but had just been finished, with a fifty-first or a sixty-first in view for tomorrow. It was a dance of ancient Scotch-Irish pain and within it lay a racial memory of life on a bleak border and the piping of grief and the wailing of banshees late in the cold night, where a man had to survive on his own for the government belonged to one king or another; it was reiver's music, or plunderer's music, the scream of rural grief, of a way of thinking no city person who didn't fear the harsh Presbyterian God but who had not also run 'shine against the mandates of the Devil City in far-off eastern America, the demon city lodged between Maryland and Virginia, where godless men passed laws meant to take the people's and the Grumleys' freedom and convert it to secret wealth for the casde people, could but feel.

"That man bound to 'splode, look to me," said Memphis Dogood. "He is a hurting old boy."

"He may indeed, old fellow. These Grumley chaps take things like this quite seriously," said Owney.

Owney and Memphis sat in the back of Owney's bulletproof Cadillac, which had wound down the miles between the Medical Arts Building and this far Grumley compound in a trackless forest just north of Mountain Pine.

Had the Grumleys known a Negro man was one witness to the privacy of their ceremony it is altogether possible they would have hanged him or tarred him, for the Book is explicit in its denunciation of the sons of Ham, and they took the Book at its literal truth. That was what was so Grumley about them. But Owney wanted Memphis to behold the festival of grief that attended the burial of the eleven Grumley dead on the theory that it might get Memphis more talkative than he had heretofore been.

So the two of them watched from leather seats in the back of the V-16―Memphis had never seen such a fine car―as the Grumleys, en masse, and Pap, in particular, mourned.

Pap stamped and the dust rose. Pap twitched and the dust rose. Pap did three this way then three that and the dust rose. He danced amid a fog of dust, the dust coating his boots and trousers into a dusky gray. His face too was gray, set hard, his eyes blank or distant. He folded his arms and gripped his elbows and danced and danced the afternoon away. His back was straight, his neck was stiff, his hips never moved. God commanded his legs alone, and had no use for the rest of him, and so deadened what was left until it reached a form of statuary.

"That boy could dance all night," said Memphis.

"And into the morrow," said Owney. "Now Memphis, you are possibly wondering why I brought you out here."

"Am I in trouble, Mr. Maddox? Weren't nothin' I could do, 'splained it to the bossman. Didn't say nothin' to nobody. Them revenooer boys, they knowed you had yo' Grumleys spread all over my place. And they was loaded up for bear. Next thing old Memphis know, the Big War done broke out. Ripped up my place right good."

"I need more. I need the kind of detail a clever man can provide, a shrewd man, who's fooled by nothing in this world. That would certainly be you. A man doesn't last in the brothel profession unless he's a keen judge of character. So you would notice things others might not. Tell me, Memphis, about them. About him."

"You mean they bossman?"

"Yes."

"Suh,1 don't mean you no disrespect, but if Grumleys all you got to go agin that boy, then, suh, you be in a peck o' hurt. You be in a tub o' hurt."

"Describe him, please."

"Uh, he mean serious bidness." He scanned his memory for helpful images. "Nigguhs talk about Bumpy in Harlem."

Bumpy Johnson. Owney knew Bumpy well. Bumpy used to sit with his own gunman at a back table in the Cotton Club and even the toughest white mobsters avoided him directly. Yes, he saw the comparison, for Bumpy's every motion and dark, hooded eyes said: If you mess with me, I will kill you.

"Bumpy in Harlem. Yes, I knew him."

"He had that. Whatever Bump had, this boy had it too. Nigguhs can pick that up. A nigguh hafta figger out right quick if a man mean what he say. And this here fella, he surely did. His own dyin' don't mean shit. Don't mean shit."

"We call him the cowboy," said Owney.

"My galTrina? She say he worked it upstairs so no nigguh gals git shot. All them bullets flyin', he worried about 'hos gittin' shot. Ain't that nuthin'? Ain't no white man like that down here. Hear tell they got some like that up North, but ain't no white man like that down here."

"What do you mean, Memphis?"

"He wouldn't shoot no gals. He shot over they heads. So they don't kill no nigguh gals."

Now this was a new detail that hadn't emerged in Owney's investigations.

The cowboy had something for Negroes? What on earth does that mean?

"And my main gal, Marie-Claire? She say, that ol' Grumley holdin' a gun agin her throat, sayin' he shoot her. Now, suh, you know any white po-lices in America just laugh and say, 'Go'n and shoot that nigguh gall9 Be laughin' all about it! But this here fella, he lif his rifle, aim careful, and hit that las' Grumley right upside the haid. So Marie-Claire twist away, and them other fellas, they hammer that las' Grumley. Ain't no white cop do that, and nobody know that better than Memphis Do-good, I'm tellin' you right, suh. I gots the scars to prove it."

"You are probably right," said Owney; he knew that in that situation in every city in America the policemen would have simply fired away, killing both the felon and his hostage and therefore accomplishing two objectives: saving themselves any danger, and providing a highly amusing few seconds.

The cowboy loves the Negro people for some reason.

Interesting.

"Well, you've been very helpful, Memphis."

"Thank you, suh," said Memphis Dogood.

"Unfortunately, I can't drive you home."

"Suh?"

"Yes. Can't be seen with you. You know, appearances, all that. Those fellows over there, they'll take care of you."

"Mr. Maddox, them's Grumley boys and―"

"Nothing to worry about, old man. You have my guarantee."

He smiled. The door was opened, and Owney's driver leaned in, put his large hand on Memphis's shoulder, and directed him outward.

Some Grumley boys, young ones, watched, then began to mosey over to Memphis.

Chapter 28

Among the many things his colleagues did not know about Walter F. (formerly "Shorty" and now "Frenchy") Short was the following: he was wealthy.

Not rich, not a millionaire, not a playboy, a polo player or a "movie producer," but still he had a private income that would keep him perpetually comfortable to indulge his pathologies, as derived from old family investments in Canadian timber, American pharmaceuticals and railroads and a large interest in a Philadelphia manufacturing company that made, of all things, the little brass ringlets that served as belt notches in the web gear GIs had used in defeating the Axis in the recent war.

So when Frenchy arrived in Hot Springs in overalls, a threadbare khaki shirt, a beat-up coat and a low-slung fedora, a.45 on his belt behind his right hip, his first move would have surprised everyone. It was to go to his apartment.

He kept it in the New Waverly Hotel, and slunk through the lobby, largely unnoticed. He showered, beating off the road dust of the bumpy bus ride. Then he toweled off, and took a nap until later in the evening. Arising, he went to his closet and picked out a nice Brooks Brothers whipcord suit, light for summer, a pair of Weejun loafers, a blue shirt and a red-and-black-striped regimental tie. Under a crisp panama hat, he went out and about the town, a perfecdy dressed sporting man whom no one could possibly associate with the grim young posse of Jayhawkers who had so alarmingly shot the town up over the past several weeks.

At first he did what any young man would do in such circumstances. He gambled a little, he had a nice meal, a few drinks, and then he went to one of the finer establishments at the far end of Central, traveling past the Ohio, the Southern, the Arlington and so many other monuments to Hot Springs' principal obsessions, and got himself laid up one side and down another.

That accomplished, he taxied back to the New Waverly and slept for two straight days.

On the third day he made a trip to a surplus store, and made a number of surprising purchases. That afternoon and night, he pleasured and partied again. He made no phone calls, because he had no friends and his family was not particularly interested in where he was or what he was doing, not after the trouble he had caused it; they just wanted him far out of Pennsylvania, for the rest of his life.

On the fourth day, he slept late again, took a light meal in the New Waverly dining room, then repaired to his room. There he opened the paper sack he'd brought from the surplus store the day before, removed his new ensemble and put it on: a new pair of black gym shoes, a black Norwegian sweater and a pair of rugged blue denim work pants. He also had a light tool kit in a brown valise. He slipped out the back of the hotel, and negotiated his way through alleys and lanes and byways, as if he had secredy studied the town's layout on maps (he had) until at last only a fence separated him from his destination.

Someone once said, in discussing the OSS, that aristocrats make the best second-story men and Frenchy was about to prove the wisdom of this judgment. He climbed the fence and moved swiftly to the building, a four-story brick affair. A skeleton crew managed the switchboards, but that bullpen was on the first floor, just off the main entrance. The upper floors were, all dark.

Frenchy found a foothold that was a brass hose oudet, and from there made a good athletic move up to a window ledge, used the strength in his wrists and forearms to haul himself up to the roofline of the first-floor rear portico, gave a mighty oof. and pulled himself finally to the roof of the portico. He lay there, breathing heavily, imagining himself pulling such a stunt against the German embassy in Lisbon in search of codes or secret agent identities, just like his uncle had done.

But there were no SS men with machine pistols guarding the Hot Springs Bell Telephone office in late August of 1946. They had, as a species, largely vanished from the earth. The only potential opposition for Frenchy was a night watchman who never left his post on the first floor. Why should he? Who on earth would even conceive of breaking into a phone company? What would a thief be after―nickels from the pay phones?

Frenchy was fully prepared with shims and picks to crack the building; after all, at Choate he had famously liberated a biology exam for the first-formers, and made himself a legend among the populace while going blithely unpunished. At Princeton, he had tried the same trick with a physics exam, and gotten caught and expelled (the first time), but getting caught was a function of being ratted out by a bluenose prick who didn't believe in such things.

But―hello, what's this?―instead of having to use his treasury of deviant devices, he found the second-story man's best friend, the unlocked window. In a trice, he was in.

He discovered himself in a darkened office and snapped on his flashlight. He learned instantly that this was the foyer of the personnel office, of no use to him whatsoever. He stepped carefully into the hallway, then taped the door lock so that it wouldn't lock behind him, then left another tiny mark of tape high on the door so he could remember which one it was for his escape plan, and then began to patrol.

He walked down darkened corridors, checking out door titles, BOOKKEEPING, BILL PAYMENT, DIRECTORY PREPARATION. REPAIR ASSIGNMENTS. SALES. And SO On and so forth, all the little fiefdoms so necessary for the care and maintenance of a modern monopoly. At last, on the silent third floor, he discovered what he thought he needed: ENGINEERING.

He used a shim to pop the lock, slid adroidy in, and again taped the lock behind him. He sent his flashlight beam bouncing around the room. Only banality was revealed: a number of drafting boards, a number of messy desks, some cheesy, cheery Bell Telephone morale posters on the institutional green walls, the glass cubicle of a supervisor, and finally and most important a horizontal filing cabinet, that is, a wall-length chest of thin, wide drawers, each marked by geographic grid references.

Shit, he said.

Time to get to work, he thought.

Many of his former friends and his family thought that Frenchy was lazy. exactly the opposite was true; he was capable of very hard work, relendess and focused. His oddity of mind, however, was that it never occurred to him to simply do what was required of him; rather he would invest three times more energy and six times more discipline in figuring out how not to do it. He was addicted to shortcuts, quick fixes, alternative routes, cutting corners, doing things his own way, no matter what, no matter how much the cost. "Does not follow directions," his kindergarten teacher had written and no keener insight into his personality was ever revealed. It had made for quite a colorful first twenty years on the planet―his was one of those rare, bright but naturally deviated minds. He was cunning, practical, nerveless, self-promoting, rather brave and completely self-possessed at all times, or nearly all times.

So now he applied himself with a concentration that would have astonished his many detractors, who had never been allowed a glimpse of the real Frenchy and who had nicknamed him Shorty. He began at the beginning, and studiously invested close to four hours in running over the diagrams in the drawers which he correcdy assumed to be wiring diagrams.

His thinking on this problem was original and far in advance of D. A.'s or Earl's and a prime example of how well, when focused, he could work things out. He reasoned that Owney Maddox's empire was only secondarily an empire of force, violence, debt collection and municipal subversion; primarily, it was an empire of the telephone. Everybody knew this: die racing data had to pour in from the tracks of America, there to be distributed instantaneously to all the minor duchies of the empire, the dozens of nondescript books around town in the back of Greek coffee joints, drugstores, haberdasheries or what have you. The legendary but mysterious Central Book was therefore, as all agreed, the linchpin to the operation. They could only really bring Owney down by taking it out, drying up the info and therefore starving him out in a short while. Earl and D. A. especially knew this.

But Frenchy determined the next step, which is that the Central Book could only be accomplished with phone company collusion. Somewhere, somehow, someone in this building had made secret arrangements for wires to be laid into an otherwise bland building in Hot Springs, and those wires had to be routed somehow so they wouldn't pass through the switchboard that unified the town. A stranger couldn't call an operator and say, "Honey, get me Central Book!" Therefore, somewhere in this building had to be an answer.

He now industriously examined wiring diagrams. He quickly learned that a symbol, a little black diamond, indicated the presence of a phone junction, and suspected that the Central Book would have an unusual concentration of black diamonds. So his eyes searched the schematics for clusters of black diamonds. But the problem wasn't that there weren't any, but that there were too many. It seemed every page had a cluster and sometimes more than one, and often enough he recognized them from the addresses―one, for example, was the Army and Navy Hospital, which made sense, because wounded boys still lingering from the war's effects would be in constant telephone contact with family and loved ones. So what he had to do was hunt for a cluster of black diamonds that had no justification.

This sounds like boring work, and for most it would be. For Frenchy it was pure bliss. It enabled him to forget who he was, what his demons commanded him to do, his paranoia, his fears, his considerable accumulation of resentments, the perpetual nervousness his bravado only partially concealed. He worked swiftiy and with great intensity and thoroughness, pausing now and then to write down the address of a diamond cluster he couldn't identify.

On and on he worked, until it was growing light in the eastern sky. He looked at his watch. It was 6:00 A. M., and soon the day shift would come along. He still had five drawers to search, and not enough time to do so.

He determined to come back the next night, and the next too, if need be. Quickly he closed the drawer he was working on, looked to see if he'd left traces of his presence, and noted nothing and stood to rise.

But then he said: what the hell.

He plucked open one of the drawers yet unexamined, and pulled at a pile of diagrams, as if in a blur or a dream. He didn't even look hard at them, but simply let them flutter through his peripheral vision. He saw that somebody had spilled some ink. They'd made a mistake. He passed onward.

But then he thought: there haven't been any other mistakes.

He rifled back, found the page, and Jesus H. Christ Mother Mary of God, there was a concentration of phone lines so intense it looked like a Rorschach ink blot. In it, he saw his future.

He noted the address, and said to himself: Of course!

Chapter 29

"No," said Ben, "no, that one has splatters. It didn't have splatters. No splatters."

"What did it have, darling? You have to help me, you cute little booboo," said the Countess.

"You two birds," said Virginia, "you actually think this shit is fun! My feet hurt. We been walking for ten years."

"Virginia, I told you not to wear them really high heels."

"But she looks gorgeous, darling," said the Countess. "She's more edible than any of these paintings, and I love the shade of her pretty pink toenails."

"Dorothy, you're the one they should call Bugsy. You're as screwy as they come."

The threesome stood in the modern wing of the Los Angeles County Museum before a bewildering display of the very latest in decadent art. The painting immediately before them looked like Hiroshima in a paint factory, an explosion of pigment flung demonically across a canvas until every square inch of it absorbed some of the fury of the blast.

"That guy has problems," observed Bugsy.

"He's a bastard. A Spanish prick who collaborated with the Nazis and beats all his women. But he's the most famous artist in the world. He gets a lot of pussy."

Ben leaned forward to read the name.

"Never heard of him," he said. "He ought to take drawing lessons "

"You never heard of him! You never heard of nothing didn't have a dame or a ten-spot attached," said Virginia, bored. Dammit! The spaghetti strap of her right shoe kept slipping off her foot and coming to nesde in the groove of her little toe. There, it rubbed that poor painted soldier raw. She kept having to bend over to readjust it. She did so one more time, and heard boyfriend Ben say to his best friend Dorothy the Countess from directly behind her, "Now that's art!"

"You dirty-minded Jew-boy," she said. "Ben, you are so low. You come to look at pictures and you end up doing close-ups on my ass!"

"He's just a boy," said the Countess. "Virginia, what can you expect? That's why we love him so."

"Yeah, Dorothy, but you don't have to uck-fay him no more. I still do."

The Countess laughed. Her raffish friends filled her with glee. They were certainly more amusing than the dullards she'd grown up with in Dutchess County.

"Anyhow, dear: no splatters?"

"None. Not a one. I'm telling you, it looked like Newark with a tree."

"Newark?"

"I been to that town," said Virginia. "It's New York without Broadway. It's just the Bronx forever. Wops and guns. I wouldn't go back on a bet."

"Newark meaning? What was its quality of Newarkness?"

"Square, dark, dirty, crowded, brown. I don't know why I thought of Newark."

"Oh, it's so obvious. In that little rat brain of yours, darling, New York is still glamorous and adventurous. But if you subtract the neon and the glamour, you're left with nothing but masses of grimy buildings. Voila: Newark."

"I wish I could remember the fucking name. He told me the name. It just went right out of my head. Virginia, you remember the name? Oh, no, that's right, you were rubbing your tits against Alan Ladd."

"I don't think he noticed. He'd never get me a part in a picture. His wifey wouldn't let him."

"Our attentions are wandering again, are they not?" said Dorothy. "Let us recommit them to the object at hand."

"It may not matter, anyhow," said Bugsy. "He's smack in the middle of a fucking war down there. Eleven of his boys got blown out of their boots in some nigger cathouse thing. Everybody's talking he's going down."

"That cowboy may get him," said Virginia. "Dorothy, did our hero ever tell you how he straightened this cowboy out at the train station in Hot Springs? Guy lights my cigarette, so Benny pulls his tough-guy act on him. But the cowboy ain't buying it. So Ben gives him a poke. Only it don't land, and the cowboy hits Ben so hard it almost makes him bald. Ben cry-babied for a month and a half and I notice he ain't been back to Hot Springs. He ain't going back until somebody takes care of the cowboy."

"Virginia, he hits me harder every time you tell that story/' said Ben. "It's her favorite story. She's been telling it all over town. I got New York guys calling me and asking me if I settled up with the cowboy, for Christ's sakes."

"But you haven't. See, Dorothy, he really does fear the cowboy."

"He knew how to throw a punch, I'll tell you that," said Bugsy, remembering the hammerblow to his midsection. "But I'll tell you what else. When I finally get a line on his ass, he will be―hey, hey! There it is! It was like that," he said excitedly. "Virginia, wasn't that it?"

He pointed to a dense, enigmatic work, darkish and lacquered.

Dorothy didn't have to examine the label. She knew a Braque anywhere.

Chapter 30

Earl's daddy? they said. Earl's daddy was a great man.

It wasn't like it was now, they said. Back then the law meant something and the law meant Earl's daddy, Charles.

Things are wild now, but they wasn't when Earl's daddy was around. Earl's daddy kept the law. Nobody done busted the law when Earl's daddy was around.

Earl's daddy was a great man.

Even if Earl won a big medal killing Japs, he wasn't the man his daddy was. Now that man was a great man.

I don't know nobody who'd stand against Earl's daddy.

You know. Earl's daddy was a big hero in the Great War. He killed a mess of Germans.

It was nearly unanimous. In Blue Eye, Arkansas, the one-horse town that was the seat of Polk County, the station stop for western Arkansas on the Kansas City, Texas & Gulf run to New Orleans, and a place where the weary traveler could get a cold Coca-Cola off of Route 71, Earl's daddy still cast a big and a bold shadow. You could ask about Earl in a grocery store and in a barbershop or at the police station and what you heard about wasn't Earl at all, but Earl's daddy. He was such a great man, it was said, that his own sons were overwhelmed by him. One ran away and t'other kilt hisself at fifteen. That was a sad, sad day, but Earl's daddy kept going, because he was a man who did his duty and knowed what his duty was. Hell, in the '20s, he killed three bank robbers. And many's the big-city boy or the uppity nigger who thought he could put one over on Earl's daddy and ended up with a knot on his head the size of a pie plate, for Earl's daddy brooked no nonsense, had fast hands, the lawman's will and a leather birdshot sap that seemed never far from his right hand.

Carlo went to the cemetery. There was the big monument that read CHARLES F. SWAGGER, CAPT. AEF 1918 SHERIFF 1920, 1891–1942 and "Duty Above All" in marble bas relief on a pedestal atop which stood the sculpture of a patriotic American eagle, its wings unfurled to the sky, its talons taut and gripping. The wife was nowhere to be found, nor was the younger son.

"Now that one," said a Negro caretaker who noticed the young man, "that one, he was a stern fellow. He didn't take no guff, no sir. He put the fear of God in every-damn-body."

"He was a great man, I hear," said Carlo.

The old man laughed, showing few teeth and pink gums. "Oh, he surely was," he said, "a very damn great man!" He toddled off, chording.

Carl went to the newspaper office, and looked up in the bound volumes the story of the tragic day of Charles's death. Wasn't much. Evidently old Charles had been coming back from his monthly Baptist prayer weekend at Caddo Gap, driving through Mount Ida late, and he saw the door open behind Ferrell Turner's liquors. He parked his car and got out his flashlight and went to investigate, even if he was in Montgomery County and not Polk. He was close to Polk, just a few miles, he saw what could have been a crime and he went to investigate.

One shot was fired by a burglar and down the old hero went. Probably some damned kids with a stolen gun and some hooch, looking for more hooch before they went off to war. Simple, stupid, tragic; they found him the next day and buried him two days later. It was a shame Earl's daddy had to die so pitifully. Both his boys was gone then, his wife was a drunkard and nobody from the family showed up when that great man was put to rest, but most of the rest of the county was there, great men and small, rich men and poor, man, woman and child, for in some way Earl's daddy had affected them all.

Carlo spoke to the new sheriff, a veteran named Beaumont Piney who'd been training for North Africa when Earl's daddy had gotten killed, and to the mayor and to other politicians, deputies and municipal employees and never got much beyond the recognition of Charles's greatness. But finally, on the third day, and a poindess interview with the county attorney, he heard a voice on his way out coming from down the hall.

"Goddammit, Betty, right here, I said 'Fifteenth,' but you just typed 15-h without no damn r/You have to type the goddamn thing over. Can't you be more careful, goddammit!"

The woman sniveled and wept and then the screamer stopped screaming and Carlo heard, "I'm sorry, it ain't nothing, I got to watch my damn temper, please, Betty, I didn't mean nothing, it don't matter."

And the secretary said, "But Mr. Vincent, my name is Ruth, not Betty. And I've worked here three whole weeks."

"Oh," said the man. "My last secretary was named Betty."

"No sir," Ruth said, "she was named Phyllis. Don't make a difference, though. Both Betty and Phyllis quit."

"Now don't you quit, Ruth. I don't mean no harm. I just yell too damn much. Here, now, I have an idea. Why don't you take this afternoon off?"

"Well, sir―"

"No, no, I insist. I yelled, you got upset, you got to take a nice afternoon off."

There was some shuffling, but in a second a woman came out, her hat on, her eyes reddened and swollen, and a formidably large, sheltering bear of a man led her out as if he were taking his infirm mother to see the doctor.

The couple walked by Carlo without noticing, and as they went, Carlo finally saw the name on the door of the now empty office: SAMUEL C. VINCENT, ASSISTANT PROSECUTING ATTORNEY.

He walked in and waited in the outer office and waiting room.

In a minute or so, the large man returned, his eyes black with intensity. His hair was a thatch that had never seen a comb and grew in every direction and he wore frameless specs that blew his dark eyes up like camera lenses. He was fleshy, not soft but large and strong. His suit fit like it'd been bought off the rack by someone who knew nothing about suits and it was covered with flecks of burnt ash.

"Who the hell are you, sonny?" he demanded, fixing the young man with a glare.

"Sir, my name is C. D. Henderson. I'm an investigator with the Garland County Prosecuting Attorney's Office," he said. He got out his badge and offered it to the man, whose eyes flashed that way, then back to his face, where they lit square and angrily.

"What the hell problems they got in Garland County bring 'em over here to Polk? Your Fred Becker has enough fun gittin' his picture in the paper all the damn time, what's he need over here? He going to start raiding in Polk now? B'lieve the colored folk rim some illegal bingo in their church on Saturday night. That'd be a good raid. Hell, he'd get lots of ink out of that one!"

Carlo let the squall blow past, tried to look as bland as possible.

"Sir," he said, "this isn't anything about that. Mr. Becker don't even know I'm here. I'm here at the request of my supervisor, Mr. D. A. Parker."

"Parker! The old gunfighter! Yeah, he's the kind of boy you'd want if you'd be going to bang down doors and shoot places up! You don't look like no gunfighter to me, son. Do you shave yet?"

"Onct a week, sir."

"You was probably in the war, though. You was probably a general in the war?"

"No sir. Spent two months in Florida in the Air Corps, till they realized I didn't see colors too well. That's why I'm a policeman."

"Well, come on in, but let me warn you, I hope you ain't no fool, because I am not the sort who can stay civil in the presence of fools. You're not a fool, are you?"

"Hope not, sir."

"Good."

The assistant prosecuting attorney led him into the office, which was not merely a mess but already half afog with pipe smoke. A deer head hung off the wall, but possibly it had died of asphyxiation, not a rifle bullet. In one corner well-thumbed legal volumes lay behind a glass case. The rest was documents, case folders, police reports, everywhere. Literally: everywhere.

"Let me tell you it ain't easy running a county when your prosecutor is a political hack like ours," said Mr. Vincent. "May have to run for the goddamn job myself one of these damned days. Now, sit down, tell me what you're investigating and why you came all the way out to the West." He began to fiddle with a pipe, clearly feeling the room wasn't smoky enough.

"Well, sir, I'm looking into the background of a man bom and raised here in Polk County. You may know him."

"Earl. You'd be the johnny asking about Earl. Thought so." He got the pipe fired up, and belched a smokestack's worth of gassy unpleasantness into the air, which hung and seethed. The young man's eyes immediately began to water.

"Let me tell you something, sonny. If Earl's involved in that ruckus over in Hot Springs, it'd be a damned shame. Not after what Earl gone through. I'd hate to see Earl die to make Fred C. Becker the youngest governor in the nation. That would be as pure a crime as any Owney Maddox ever perpetrated. Is he on that raid team?"

"Sir, that is confidential information. No one knows who is on that raid team."

The older man fulminated a little. "No finer man was ever born in these here parts than Earl. He went off to war and won the Medal of Honor. Did you know that?"

"I knew he won a big medal."

"He did. He fought all over the Pacific. He's as foursquare as they come. If you're investigating him, you'd better have a goddamned good reason, or I'll throw you out of my office on your bony young ass myself."

"Sir, he ain't be investigated for no crime. No sir."

"What, then?"

"Well sir, as Mr. Parker explained it to me there's something called a 'death wish.'"

"A what?"

"A death wish. Some men for some reason, they want to die."

"Craziest goddamn thing I ever heard of."

Carlo nodded. Then he said, "But I see from them diplomas you went to Princeton University, out east. Hear that's a pretty good school. Did me some reading on what Dr. Freud said about death wishes. I'd bet you'd have run across it too, in your time educating."

Sam Vincent stared hard at the young man.

"Say, I'll bet you think you don't miss a trick, do you?"

"Miss 'em all the time, sir. But I'd bet a dollar against a cup of coffee that someone who went to Princeton and Yale Law School and wants to be elected a prosecuting attorney himself real soon-like, I'd bet he knows more about a death wish than most."

"Well, all right then. I have heard of such a thing. I will say Earl has a melancholy streak to him. Would that be a death wish? Don't know. I do know his daddy encouraged discipline and obedience with both his boys, and wouldn't brook no messy feelings or nothing. They were raised to do the job and see it through, and Earl certainly proved out. But they were both boys for holding things in and maybe that's what D. A. Parker sees as sadness unto death in Earl."

"Yes sir."

"Do you know Earl?"

"Yes sir."

"What do you think of Earl?"

"I―I think he's the bravest man ever lived," said Carlo. "I seen him do some things no man should have the grit to pull." He thought of Earl advancing through the dust with the BAR, daring the Grumleys to come out and shoot at him, letting his people get behind cover in the doorways. He thought of Earl taking that shot on a Grumley to save the Negro gal's life.

"Nobody wants nothing bad to happen to Earl," said Sam.

"Yes sir."

"Is that all?"

"Well. One of the things Mr. Parker wanted me to look into is this: Was Earl ever in Hot Springs? It seems he knows it damned well."

"Never. Never, never, never. Old Baptist Charles thought Hot Springs was hell and blasphemy. He'd have beat the hide off his boy if he'd have caught him in that sewer."

"I see."

"Earl has a gift for terrain. All the Swaggers do. They have natural feelings for land, they're fine hunters and trackers and they have an uncommon gift for shooting. They are born men of the gun. Charles Swagger was a wonderful hunter, got a buck every damned year. Tracked the county up and down, and always came home with game. A wonderful shot. The finest natural shot I ever saw, and I've hunted with some fine shots. Don't know where it comes from, but all them boys could shoot. Earl's daddy was a hero in a war too, and he shot it out with three desperadoes in a Main Street bank in the '20s, and sent them to hell in pine boxes. So if Earl seems to know things, it's just his gift, that's all."

"I see. Let me ask about one last thing. Earl's brother. He had a brother, named Bobby Lee. He hung himself, I believe, back in 1940. You probably hadn't gone off to fight in 1940. Maybe you were here for that."

Sam Vincent's eyes scrunched up and even behind the glasses, Carlo could make out something there.

"What you want to dig all that up for? Poor Bobby Lee. It ain't got nothing to do with anything. That's long over and done."

"I see."

"Hell, Earl was somewhere in the Marines then. It don't mean much."

"You knew Earl?"

"I knowed 'em both. Earl was two years ahead of me at high school and Bobby Lee was ten younger. I was the prosecutor that handled Bobby Lee's death. I was there when they cut him down. I wrote the report. You want to see it?"

"I suppose."

"Betty!" Sam called.

"Her name is Ruth and you gave her the day off."

"Goddamn her. Don't think she'll work out neither. You wait here."

The older man left and Carl sat there, suffocating, as the fog in the air wore him down. He felt a headache beginning and he heard Sam banging drawers and cursing mightily.

Finally, Sam came back.

"There, there it is."

He handed over the file, and Carlo read what was inside. It turned out to be straightforward enough: on October 5, 1940, the fire department was called by Mrs. Swagger and a truck got out to the place fast. The firemen found her crying in the bam at the feet of her son, who had hanged himself with a rope from a crossbeam. Sam arrived and directed that the body be taken down. The sheriff was located and he arrived from a far patrol and took over. Sam made the necessary interviews as brief as possible and supervised as the boy's body was taken to the morgue. The boy was buried without ceremony a day later and the sheriff never talked about it again. The county judge ruled death by suicide.

"No autopsy?" Carlo asked.

"What?" said Sam.

"Didn't y'all do an autopsy?"

"Son, it was open and shut."

"Well sir, I learned my policing in Tulsa under a chief detective inspector named O'Neill and if I'd have closed on a suicide without an autopsy, he'd have―"

"Henderson, you're like all the kids today. You think every damn thing is a crime. It's my job to represent the state in these tragic instances and believe me there wasn't nothing in that circumstance worth an autopsy. I wasn't no greenhorn neither. I'd been assistant prosecuting attorney since 1935. I'd seen a lifetime's worth of squalor and misery and pain and lost life. So I made a judgment."

"But it was irregular?"

"You are a persistent son of a bitch, ain't you?"

"I take great pride in my investigative work, sir. I believe I have a calling at it."

"Okay. You believe in law and order?"

"Of course I do. More than anything."

"Now you listen to me. Law and order. Law and order, you understand? That's a easy one. But let me ask you. Do you believe in law or order? That one ain't so easy."

Carlo drew a blank. He wished he were smarter and could play ball with this sly dog.

"Seems to me they are the same," he finally allowed.

"Maybe mostly. But maybe not. And if you've got to choose, what do you choose?"

"I don't see how there can be one 'thout the other."

"Sometimes you got to give up on law to save order. Sometimes order is more important than law. By that I mean, sometimes you learn something that might hurt order. It might hurt the way people think on things. They have to trust the man with the badge. He's got to be a paragon, a moral certainty to them. If he has weaknesses, and those weaknesses become public knowledge, well, my God, who knows where it might lead. To doubt, then chaos, then anarchy. The edifice is only as strong as its weakest buttress. So sometimes you make a call: you don't deal with something. You let it pass, you shave a corner, you do this, you do that. Because the idea of the lawman as a man of honor and virtue and courage and decency is much more important than that lawman himself. You understand?"

Carlo did, of course. He now knew what the old bastard was getting at. He himself knew cops who were drunks or cheats or liars or cowards. But if you made a moral cause of it, and by that cause held the larger issue of the police up to ridicule, you only weakened the structure that supported the community or, even larger, the nation. So a police officer or a prosecutor had to use a certain discretion: there was a time to act, and a time to look away, and that was the heart of it.

"You've been a great help, Mr. Vincent," Carlo said, rising. "I can see the people in this county are well represented."

"Don't be in no hurry, Henderson. You ain't done learning for today. You and me, we got a place to go. You want to learn a thing or two? Then by God so you will. Get your hat and let's go."

The police station was in the same City Hall building but without direct hallway access, for arcane architectural reasons. It was actually outside, so they walked around the corner through small-town America to its entrance. At least half a dozen people said, "Howdy, Mr. Sam," and tipped a hat, and Sam tipped his in return. The trees were in full leaf, so the sun wasn't so hot and a cool wind blew across them.

"Stop and look," Sam said as they stood atop the stairs that led to the station. "What do you see?"

"A small town. Pretty little place."

"Where and how most people live, right?"

"Yes sir."

"It's all stable and clean and everything's right in the world, isn't it?"

"Yes sir."

"It's order. And that's what you and I, we work to defend, right?"

"Right."

"We defend the good folks from the bad. From the monsters, right?"

"Yes sir."

"We defend order. But what happens, Henderson, when you got yourself a situation where the good folk is the monster?"

Carlo said nothing.

"Then you got yourself a fine kettle of fish, that's what you got," said Sam. "And you and I, son, we got to clean it up. It's really the most important thing we do. You see what I'm driving at?"

"Yes sir."

They walked in, past the duty sergeant's desk with a wave, back into the day room and the detective squad room―more waves―then past the lockup and the little alcove where there was a vending machine for Coca-Cola and another one for candy bars, down a dim corridor, until finally they reached a room marked EVIDENCE.

Sam had the key. Inside, he found a light, and Carlo saw what was merely a storeroom, boxes and boxes on shelves, the detritus of old crimes and forgotten betrayals. A few guns, shotguns mostly, rusting away to nothingness on the dark shelves. The shelves were labeled by year and Sam knew exactly where he was going.

They went further into the room, to the year marked 1940 on the shelving. Sam pointed to a box on a high board marked SWAGGER, BOBBY LEE. Carlo had to strain to his tiptoes to get it down, though it was light, being composed of little beyond documents and manila envelopes.

Immediately Carlo saw that the documents were mere photo duplicates of the one he'd already read. But the older man grabbed an envelope, opened it, looked at it, and then handed it over.

"Take a gander," he said, "and learn a thing or two."

And Carlo beheld the horror.

Chapter 31

"Them two," said Vince Morella, who managed the Southern.

"Yes, I see."

"Shall I send some boys over?"

"No. Not at all. Send over a bottle of champagne. Very good stuff. The best, in fact."

It was between sets in the grillroom at the Southern, beneath the cavernous horse book and casino upstairs. This week's act: Abbott and Costello.

"You sure, Owney?"

"Very."

"Yes sir."

Vince called his bartender over and whispered instructions. Shortly thereafter, at the bar where two men stood drinking club sodas, the barkeep approached with a bucket full of ice and a green bottle.

"Fellows," he said, "this is your lucky day."

"We already ordered drinks," said the older man.

"You didn't order no alcoholic drinks. So the owner wants everybody happy and he sent this over, his compliments. Enjoy."

He worked some magic and with a pop the bottle was pried open, its cork caught in a white linen towel. He poured some frothy bubbly into two iced glasses.

"Bottoms up," he said.

The younger of the men, with tight, ferocious eyes, picked up the glass and poured it back into the bucket.

"I drink what I like," he said.

It was the cowboy and his older partner. Owney recognized them now clearly from the train station, where the cowboy had smashed Ben Siegel. They reeked of aggression as they sat at the bar, especially the cowboy. Strong of frame, erect, his bull neck tense, his dark, short hair bristly. Darkness visible: he had a look of darkness, dark eyes, dark features, a gunman's look.

A space had cleared away around him. Though elsewhere in the room, elegant men in dinner jackets ate dinner with their begowned wives and mistresses, here at the bar it was quiet and tense. The bartender swallowed, smiled pathetically and said, "I don't think Mr. Maddox is going to like that."

"I don't give a shit," said the cowboy, "what Mr. Maddox likes or what he don't like."

The bartender slipped away, reported to Vince, who in turn reported to Owney.

"They's asking for it," said Flem Grumley. "We should give it to 'em."

"Yes, yes, let's shoot up the most beautiful and expensive spot between St. Louis and New Orleans. And while we're at it, let's shoot up my roomful of brand-new Black Cherries, clanking away upstairs and paying the house back 34 percent and buying you and yours clothes, food, cars and your children's medicine. How clever."

He fixed Flem with a glare; Flem melted in confusion.

"They want something, else they wouldn't be here, eh, old man? Let's see what it is."

He inserted a Nat Sherman into his onyx cigarette holder, lit it off a silver Dunhill and stood.

"You boys stay here. I don't need any beef around."

"Yes sir," said Flem, speaking for the phalanx of Grumleys who surrounded Owney ever since the Mary Jane's shoot-out.

He walked over.

"Well, fellows," he said, sitting down at the bar, but facing elegantly outward, "isn't this a little brazen, even for you? I mean, my chaps could polish your apples in about seven seconds flat, eh what?"

Neither of his antagonists said a thing for a bit. But then the cowboy spoke.

"You try something fresh and tomorrow they'll bury ten more Grumleys. And you too, friend. And you won't care whether we made it out or not."

As he spoke, he pivoted slightly to face Owney, and his coat fell open, revealing a.45 in a shoulder holster. The thickness of his belt suggested it supported another.45.

Owney looked him over. He had a little Mad Dog to him, with the glaring eyes and the total absence of fear, regret, doubt or hesitation. But he also had a command to him. He was used to people doing what he said.

"Who are you? Still playing mysterious? We'll find out soon enough. You won't remain anonymous much longer. Somebody'll talk. Somebody always does.'

"You'll be finished by that time. You can read our names in the fishwrap at the penitentiary in Tucker."

"I won't serve time at Tucker. Or Sing Sing. Or anywhere. That's what lawyers are for, old man. They can get a chap out of anything. Now, really, what do you want? Are you measuring this place for a raid? Yes, do come, guns blazing, and kill a doctor or a judge or a politician. That'll do Becker no end of good."

"listen here, Maddox," said the old man. "We come to talk straight out. You can't scare us, you can't bluff us, you can't stop us. We mean to keep coming at you. The more you squawk, the more killing there's going to be. Why don't you just cash in and get out now. You've got your millions. Move off to Mexico or Switzerland or out to Nevada or someplace."

"Well spoken, old fellow. He's got a bit of the philosopher to him, doesn't he? But you see the analysis is faulty: this isn't about money. We all know that. It's about some other thing. It's about who's the boss."

"We don't care much about that," said the cowboy. "We just mean to rim you out of town or bring you down. Them's the only two possibilities."

"A third: you could die."

"It ain't likely," said Earl. "'Less you get some real bad boys."

"A fourth," said Owney. "For the old fellow, a nice retirement contribution. A nice nest egg. Well invested, he could live grandly. As for the cowboy here, he comes to work for me. I've heard the reports. You're a good gunman. They say as good as Johnny Spanish, maybe better. You come work for me."

"I bet you even think that's possible," said the cowboy. "See, here's the thing. You're a bully. You like to push people around. I don't like that, not even a little. In fact, it gets my blood all steamed."

It was amazing, and truly rare. Here was a man who seemed literally fearless. His own death had no meaning to him. Owney could read his essential nihilism in the blackness radiating from his eyes. He had Vincent the Mad Dog's contempt for life and willingness to risk his own anytime for any stake in any fight in any street or alley. Memphis Dogood was right: he didn't fear death. And that made him very dangerous indeed.

"Do you really think you can scare me?" said Owney. "I've fought on the street with guns and knives. I've shot it out with other gangs in the most brutal city on earth. When you've had a crazy black Irish boyo named Mad Dog out for your blood, and you're alive and he's dead, let me tell you, you've done something. And Mad Dog's only one."

"Yakkity-yak's cheap. We talk lead."

"You listen to me, cowboy. Oh, hello Judge LeGrand"―he waved his champagne glass in salute to the politician and issued a wondrous smile at the judge and Mayor O'Donovan, who accompanied him―"and you listen intently. The day after the next raid, a bomb will go off. In the Negro town. It'll kill twenty or thirty Negroes. Everybody will think some night riders did it, or some fellows in hoods. The investigation will be, I think one can safely predict, feckless. But you and I, friend, we'll know: you killed those Negroes. And you'll kill more and more. So I'm afraid you'll have to be the one who leaves town. Or turn the streets red with Negro blood and think about that for the rest of your life, old man. Enjoy your champagne. Cheers."

He rose and walked away.

Chapter 32

"Why are you showing me these?" said the doctor, his face pained.

"Well, sir," said Carlo, "I went to the library and I looked up medical journals. I spent three days. Shoot, a lot of it I couldn't even understand. But you wrote a paper published in 1937 called 'Certain Patterns in Excessive Discipline in Situ Domestico.' I read it. You seemed to be talking about a similar thing."

"It's the same/' said the doctor, who was head of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Oklahoma, in Norman, in whose office Carlo now sat.

The doctor―his name was David Sanders and he was in his forties, balding, with wire-frame glasses―looked squarely at Carlo.

"That paper didn't do me a bit of good, except that it got me laughed at. A man has a right to beat his children, everybody says so. Spare the rod, spoil the child. To suggest that a child has a right not to be beaten, well, that's radical. I even got some letters accusing me of being a communist."

"Sorry to hear that"

"So I gave it up. It was infinitely depressing and nobody wanted to hear about it. So I gave it up."

Carlo said, "I see you won a Silver Star. It's up there on your wall. So you can't be a coward."

It was, next to degrees and other professional awards, books and photos of fat, smiley babies.

"That was a war. It was different."

"Still, if anybody can help me, maybe you can."

"You want a lot. Officer Henderson." Sanders sighed and looked at the photographs.

There were eight of them. The boy, naked on a morgue slab, from various angles. The rope burn was livid, and his neck was elongated, strangely wrong, clear testament to asphyxiation by hanging. But that was only part of it.

"The welts," said Carlo.

"Yes. This boy has been beaten, many times, with a heavy strap or belt. There's second-degree scar tissue all over his back, buttocks and upper thighs. He's been beaten beyond all sense or reason. Almost daily, certainly weekly, and nobody cared or intervened."

"Was he tortured? Them spots on his chest. Look like cigarette bums to me."

"Oh, I think to his oppressor, the beatings were satisfying enough. The cigarette burns were almost certainly self-inflicted. When I was looking into these matters, I saw a lot of it."

"I don't get it. Why would he do that to himself? Why would he want more pain?"

"The victim comes to believe that somehow it's his fault. He's the problem. He's no good. He's too weak, stupid, pitiful. If only he were gone, it would be all right. So he finds himself guilty and sentences himself to more torture. He finds small, cruel, barely bearable rituals for inflicting the punishment upon himself. He is blaming himself for the crime, not the person who is beating him. It's a fairly predictable pathology. I gather from the elongation of the neck he finally ended it?"

"Yes sir," said Carlo. "This was all back in 1940."

The doctor turned one of the photos over, where the date had been stamped: OCTOBER 4, 1940, POLK COUNTY

PROSECUTING ATTORNEY'S OFFICE.

"Well, at least the pain stopped."

"Do most of them commit suicide?"

"It's not uncommon, from my preliminary survey. But the rest? Well, go to any prison and ask the right questions and you'll find out. You raise a child in great pain, he comes to believe pain is a normal condition of the universe. He feels it is his right to inflict it. From what little research I did, I saw what looked to be a frightening pattern: that our most violent criminals were beaten savagely as children. They simply were passing the lessons of their childhood on to the rest of the world."

"Who would do that to a boy?"

"Oh, it's usually the father. I see a father who secredy hates himself, who almost certainly has a drinking problem, who quite possibly works in a violent world, who was almost certainly savagely beaten himself. He considers it his right to express his rage at the world for disappointing him in the flesh of his son. But he's really expressing his rage at himself for knowing that he's not the man the world thinks he is, and he's feeling the strain of maintaining the facade. I don't know. I only know he'd be pitiful if he weren't so dangerous."

"Suppose he was a policeman?"

"Again, I'm just speculating. But he'd be a man used to force. He'd believe in force. His job was to use force."

"This one used it a lot. Not just on his sons. The people in his town consider him a damned paragon, a hero."

"Again, not surprising. Almost banal. Who knows why, really. That's the difference between public and private personalities. We consider that what goes on at home, in the privacy of that casde, to be nobody's business."

"Suppose this boy had an older brother. Would he have been beaten too?"

"I don't know. But I don't think this kind of behavior pattern just starts up suddenly, out of nothing. It's ancient, almost omnipresent. My guess is, he'd have been beaten too."

"That boy―the older brother. He left home at sixteen, went and joined the Marines, and never went home again. What would he feel?"

"Mr. Henderson, I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I have no X-ray vision. This is all speculation."

"No sir. But ain't nobody know this business like you."

"Well, I'd say, this older brother would feel grief and rage and deep survivor's guilt. You'd expect him to be emotionally crippled in some respect. You'd expect him to have an unhealthy view of the universe―he'd believe that at any moment the world was about to shatter and some huge malevolent force would break in and whip him savagely. That would be difficult to live with. He could easily become a monster."

"Could he become a hero? An insane hero who took amazing risks?"

"Well, I hadn't thought of that. But I can see how the war would be the perfect vessel for his rage; it would give him complete freedom. And when he was in battle, he wouldn't be haunted by his past. So other men would be frightened, but he'd be so preoccupied, he'd actually feel very good because his memories were effectively blocked for once. Was he in the war?"

"He won the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima."

"Very impressive. What happened to the fadier?"

"He was a law officer who got himself killed. I guess he was a little too used to whacking people in the head, and he whacked one boy who had a gun."

"Sometimes there is justice."

"I never thought I'd say it about a dead police officer, but, yes, sometimes there is justice."

Chapter 33

"It's there."

"How do you know?"

"I went, I saw."

"How do you know?"

"If you look at it from the outside, you'll see that there's four windows across the back. But if you go where they have the slots and the gambling stuff, you can only see three windows. There's a kind of dead space to the rear. It has to be there."

"You're sure?"

Frenchy, back a day early, sat alone with Earl and D. A., just returned from Hot Springs. It was early on a sunny afternoon; outside it was Texas, and nothing but. The temperature was hotter than hell, the atmosphere drier than a desert, and all the wood seemed about to crack from sheer cussedness. The wailing wind picked up a screen of yellow dust and threw it along in front of it. But the three men, sweaty but still in suits and ties, sat in the Assembly Room and talked it all out.

"Yeah, that's it. Plus, if you go out and follow the phone wires, you'll see that there's an unusual number of poles outside in the alley. Where there should be just one pole, there's two, for all the lines. I know. I checked. It's there. It's at the Ohio Club. It makes sense. It's downtown, he can walk to work, he can keep an eye on it, it's close to everything, it's so heavily used that no one would think you could hide a phone room in it. We never would have found it."

"You found it," Earl said.

"Well, I found it, yeah. But I'm a genius. I have a very sly mind. Everybody says so."

The boy smiled unsurely as if he wasn't quite sure that this was going as expected. D. A. Parker and Earl looked at him with hard, level eyes.

"Maybe he's right," said D. A. "We should check it out."

"It's the Ohio Club. The Central Book, I'm telling you. Not in the casino but on the same second floor, in the back. It's obvious. I found it."

He smiled in the way a man who thinks he's really winning some points smiles.

"We'll go up there tomorrow and check it out," D. A. said.

"Yeah," said Earl.

"We can close this thing down early next week," said Frenchy. "We take that place out, Owney's licked. You said so yourself. That's the key. What can he do? He has no other place set up and all the horse books die. They die in a matter of days. So what's he do, spend his money to keep the town operating? Or bail out? We all know he'll bail. He's got to."

He summed it up admirably.

"There's a problem," said Earl.

"What's that, Earl?" asked D. A. "If he's got it, he's right. And Owney won't be detonating no bombs in Niggertown because once it gets out the phone room's closed down, all his boughten judges and cops are going away from him 'cause they know he won't git enough money to pay them off."

"No, that's not the problem." He looked hard at Frenchy. "Now, you got anything to add?"

"What do you mean?"

"You sniffed this out on your own? All by your lonesome?"

"Yes sir."

Earl looked hard again at the boy.

"You lying to me? Short, are you lying?You could get us all messed up if you're lying."

"Hey," said Frenchy fearlessly, "I know that. No, I'm not lying."

"Earl, what?"

"Goddamn you. Short!" Earl bellowed.

Frenchy recoiled, stung.

"Earl, what―"

"There ain't no windows at all atop the Ohio Club. And there ain't no extra phone poles out back."

"Ah, well―"

"Earl, how do you know?"

"I know. I know, goddammit! I notice stuff like that, and by God, I know that!"

"Ahh, well, maybe, uh―" Frenchy bumbled.

"Short, I'm going to ask you one more goddamn time. Where'd you find this shit out? Where? Are you just making it up?"

"Ah. Well, actually, uh―"

For the first time in his life, Frenchy Short wasn't sure what to say. He had a gift for improvisation under stress, that he knew; it had saved him getting cooked a number of times, though alas, a few times it hadn't. But he was also utterly confused, because this great treasure was the home run that would make him a hero, he was sure, and erase completely the ambiguity of the killing of the two mobsters and the awkwardness of the accidental slaying of the two Negro women. It meant he was the star, the best boy, the success.

"Short, you better tell us," said D. A.

"It just makes sense."

"Actually, it don't make no sense at all."

"ShortI Goddammit, you tell me!" Earl shouted.

"Okay, okay. What difference does it make?"

"It makes a difference, Short," said D. A.

"I broke in."

"You broke in? To the Ohio Club?"

"No. The phone company."

Frenchy explained his thinking, his night mission, his burglary, his discovery.

"Jesus Christ," said D. A. "Do you know what could have happened to us if you got nabbed by the cops?"

"I wasn't going to get nabbed. It's Hot Springs, Arkansas, for God's sakes, not the U. S. Mint."

"Shit," said D. A.

"What difference does it make? I got it, didn't I? Without a problem. No sweat. And it's right, dammit. It's the breakthrough we needed. Who has to know? Nobody has to know. It doesn't matter. I didn't burglarize anything. I didn't steal anything. I just looked through some drawers, that's all. Hell, those drawings might even be in the public domain, for all I know."

"I don't know what difference it makes, but we got to tell Mr. Becker. He will have to know."

"But it's good information. It is good, isn't it, Mr. Earl? I mean, it's good combat intelligence."

"It is, Short."

"What will happen to me?"

"I don't know."

"Can't you just say you got an anonymous tip?"

"No. Not anymore. Becker wants more control from now on. I can't order up the raids myself. He has to check off. I have to run this by him. We have to see what he says, all right?"

"Look," argued Frenchy, "now that we know what it is, it's just a matter of time until we can find something to support it. Once we find that out, we go to Becker and say that that's the primary evidence. Then we have our cause, we take the joint out, and we're all heroes and we go home happy. It's easy."

"You are a clever little bastard," said Earl.

"I ain't getting into no big lying situation. I will have to rim this by Becker. It's his call. If it were my call, who knows, but it's his call, he's the one who has to answer for it, he's the one signing the checks. It may be different now after all that shooting last time out. We just got back from a trip to Hot Springs, looking exactly for this information. But goddammit, Earl, you and I'll git back up there tonight and talk to him. Short, you stay here. Don't you tell nobody. You hear? Nobody! Got that?"

"Yes sir," said Frenchy. "But I'm telling you, this can be the big one."

Frenchy spent the day in Texarkana. A movie called O. S. S. with Alan Ladd had just come out, and he sat through it twice, though he knew it was phony. It couldn't have been like that in the war. The girl was some new actress he'd never seen, and who wasn't that beautiful, and everyone smoked. But they didn't have the class the OSS people had, Frenchy was sure; his uncle had class, a savoir faire, a mysterious intimation that life was more fun if you cultivated an ironic disposition and could hold your liquor.

When he got back, it was around 6:00. Three of the men had returned already, Bear, Eff and Billy Bob, called Bob Billy for silly reasons, and the four had a kind of hearty how-ya-doin' escapade there, exchanging stories. The three had gone to New Orleans and had a really fine time. When the conversation got around to Frenchy, he got very vague. He just said he'd had a damned good time too.

Then a car pulled in, and it was Earl and Mr. D. A. They welcomed the men back, chatted poindessly for a while, and finally left. Earl nodded at Frenchy and he joined the two in the office.

They sat. It was darkening, and the old man turned on a lamp that filled the dreary little room with yellow light. Outside a bit ofTexas wind moaned.

Finally the old man looked up.

"Here, I got this for you," he said. It was a letter, on the official stationery of the Garland County Prosecuting Attorney's Office. "Mr. Earl had to work like hell to get this. He swore Fred Becker up one side and down the other, and said he'd walk if Sid didn't cough up a letter."

"A letter?" said Frenchy.

"A letter of recommendation. You deserve it," said the old man.

Frenchy looked over at Earl, who just sat there, darkness shading his eyes.

To Whom It May Concern:

Walter F. Short was in the employ of this office as an investigator and warrant-serving officer between July 28 and September 12, 1946. During this time, he performed his duties with exemplary courage and professional commitment. He exhibited a great deal of enterprise in the accomplishment of all tasks given him. He has a great future in law enforcement.

Fred C. Becker Prosecuting Attorney Garland County, Arkansas

"It ain't bad," said D. A., "considering at one point this afternoon he wanted to indict you and send you to jail for breaking and entering." "I don't understand it." "You been fired, son," said Earl at last. "I've been fired?"

"Mr. Becker says he's got to allay community fears about us being out-of-control gunmen. He has to tell people that he's taken command of the team, and that the 'bad apples' have been let go. You got the nod as the bad apple. As I say, he wanted to make a public example of you. Earl here got him to see what a bad idea that was."

Frenchy just stared off into space. "I found the Central Book," he finally said. "Doesn't that count for anything?"

"It counts for not going to prison and walking out of here with a nice letter that'll git you a job anywhere you want. Meanwhile Earl and I have to find some way to justify the raid. We got to do it all legal-like. That's Mr. Becker's order."

"It's not fair," said Frenchy. "No, it's not."

"It's just politics," said Frenchy. "Yes, it is."

"You can't let him do this."

"I can't stop him from doing this/' said the old man. "I can't stop him from doing anything. He says the governor is leaning on him from above and he's got people in the community leaning on him from below."

Frenchy turned to Earl. "You supported this?"

Earl looked him in the eye.

"Sometimes you get a bad officer above you. It ain't supposed to happen, but it's in the cards. So you got to go along until you get an opportunity to make things right. You got to hold the unit together, you got to put up with the shit, you got to keep running the patrols. You got to take some losses. You're the loss, Short."

"Jesus," said Frenchy. "All these guys, from Podunk City and Hick Town U. S. A., and Toad Pond, Oklahoma, and I'm the one that gets canned. Jesus Christ, I fought for you guys. I killed for you guys. It's just not right. Can I at least see Becker?"

"Bad decision," said Earl. "He don't like face-to-face things. Figures, I'd say. Anyhow, he don't like that kind of pressure and he could still indict you for B and E, or maybe even if he wanted to for shooting them two boys out back of that casino. Do yourself a favor. Learn from this, get the hell out of town, and go on with the rest of your life. You're young and smart. You won't have no trouble."

"But I―"

"Yeah, I know. But the key thing here is, don't let it get to you. Take it from me, son. Just start over fresh, and don't let this thing haunt you. Me and Mr. D. A., we're sorry. But it's an outfit thing, a politics thing. Learn from this: it's the way the world works."

Chapter 34

Pap Grumley's death, of the commingled impact of grief and clap, pretty much finished the Grumleys as a possibility, as far as Owney was concerned. He would keep the Grumleys around to service his empire, to receive and make his payoffs, to lubricate the machine, to bust the odd debtor and the like, but he knew that without Pap's stalwart leadership and heart, the Grumleys were done as a fighting force. Flem would stay as his factotum, but Flem would never be the man Pap was. Flem wasn't a wartime leader, not by a long shot.

So Owney finally made the decision that he'd been toying with all these weeks. He went to his gas station near Lake Catherine and placed his long-distance call to Sid in New York. He spoke to Sid, told him what was required. Sid did the legwork, made the connections, set up the proper channels and finally Owney reached the party he needed to reach. This was a Mr. A, who himself was speaking from a pay phone to avoid the possibility of federal wiretaps.

"Thank you so much for talking with me, Mr. A. I hate to bother you."

"It's nothing. Talk to me, Owney. Tell me what I can do to help you," said Mr. A.

"I got a problem. I got cops like you never saw. These fuckers, they come inta one a my joints with machine guns and shot the shit out of the place. They killed eleven boys of mine. Chicago, the fat Sicilian, that Valentine's Day thing, it wasn't nothing like this. Down here, it's the South, there are no laws."

"Owney, the boys are talking. You know how it is when the boys talk."

"And that shmata Ben Siegel is talking too. Right? I know he is. It's how a yentzer like that operates."

"Owney, no need to run down the other fellow. Ben is out in L. A., doing his job. You leave Ben out of this."

"Yes, Mr. A," said Owney, slightly stung.

"Owney, you have to take care of this. You ran a tidy little place down there and everybody was happy. People went down there for vacation and they were happy. They played the horses, the wheel, the slots, they met some girls, they laughed at Abbott and Costello, they heard Dinah Shore, it was very nice. Now you got bullets flying and people dying everywhere. You can't do business in a climate like that, you can't have no fun. Things don't grow like we all think they should."

"I agree with you totally, Mr. A. Growth. Stability is the fertilizer of growth, which is the destiny of prosperity. What I have here is a franchise on the future. This is what will be, you'll see. Except for these crazy cops."

"Very good, Owney. You still understand, I see. Now, you want we should send some fellas? I could dispatch some very good Jersey people."

"Nah. Not hitters. Hitters ain't got no stomach for this. Hitters take guys out to the marshes and clip 'em with a.32 in the back of the head. It ain't like that down here. It's a fuckin' war. Plus, hitters'd stand out like fuckin' sore thumbs."

"So what do you need?"

"I need soldiers. I mean real hard-ass fucking soldiers, been in some scrapes, shot it out with the fucking cops ain't afraid of nothing. like the scary shit, when the lead flies. There are some boys like that."

"Sounds like you want Marines."

"Nah. What I want is armed robbers. I want the best armed robbery crew. They'd be the boys who could run a thing for me. They could plan and wait and spring a trap and shoot the shit out of it. They'd have the discipline, the long-term, wait-through-the-night guts. Okay. You know who I want, Mr. A. I want Johnny Spanish and his crew. They worked for me before. They worked for me in '40."

"Johnny's retired, Owney."

"Johnny owes me. He hit a big fucking score in '40. Biggest caper of his career. I set that job up for him."

"Whyn't you just call him? I could find the number."

"Mr. A, coming from you, it would be better. He's black Irish. You know, I come from England. The Irish, they got a thing about the English."

"Just 'cause you tried to starve them to death."

"Hey, I didn't starve nobody. All the time I have these problems with the Irish. That goddamned Vincent the Mad Dog, another black Irish, want to bust my balls. God, was I glad when he got his ass blown to shit."

"All right, Owney. I can make a call. I can ask a favor. But you know, Johnny and his people don't work cheap. Johnny goes first-class. He deserves first-class."

This, of course, was Owney's problem with Johnny. Johnny and his crew―that would be Jack "Ding-Dong" Bell, Red Brown, Vince "the Hat" de Palmo and Herman Kreutzer―took 60 percent of the take, leaving 40 for the local setup guy. This was unprecedented: in all other similar transactions, the armed contract robbers only got 50 percent. But they were the best, if a little aged by now. So if Johnny came down here for a bit of business and there was no up-front promise of a take, Johnny would need a cash down payment and a big backside splash.

"It has to be Johnny," said Owney.

"It's done. He'll be there before the week is over."

"You got to hurry, Mr. A. These guys are one strike from taking over down here."

"Owney, Owney, Owney. Johnny will take care of it all. You can trust Johnny. We'll look out for you, Owney. You can trust your friends."

Chapter 35

Junior Turner, the sheriff of Montgomery County, looked at Carlo Henderson with a grimace of the purest dripping scorn. Junior was a big man in his thirties, with a face that looked like old possum hides hung on a nail in a barn somewhere. His fat belly exploded beyond the perimeters of his belt and there were stains of a disagreeable nature on his khaki shirt. He wore a big Smith & Wesson Heavy Duty.38/.44 in a fancy belt, the only fancy thing about him. Then he turned and launched a majestic gob of Brown Mule from his lips. It took off with a disgusting slurping sound, seemed to elongate as it followed the parabola of its arc, a yellowish tracer bullet glistening with mucus, tobacco curds and spit, until it struck dead center into the spittoon with a coppery clang, rocking the vessel on its axis.

"This here's a small town, my friend. We don't much cotton to outsiders stirring up our business."

Mount Ida, a smear on the roadside consisting of a bar, a general store, a Texaco station and a sheriff's office, stood in the trackless Ouachitas, encapsulated almost totally in a wall of green pine forest, about halfway between Blue Eye and the more cosmopolitan pleasures of Hot Springs. It united the two by a sliver of road called 270, mostly dirt, occasionally macadam, all of it lost and lonely through the high dense trees.

"Sir, I am on official business," said Carlo.

"You say. The official bidness of Garland is bidness. So why'n hell's a little old boy like you rutting around in a crime done happened in our county four years back? It was open and shut. If you read the papers, you know ever goddamned thing."

"I am just following up a loose end."

"Now what loose end would that be, son?" asked Junior, casting a yellow-eyed glance around to his two deputies, who guffawed at the sheriff's rude humor.

"I am not at liberty to say, sir," said Carlo, feeling the hostility in the room.

"Well, son, I ain't at liberty to just open my files to any joe what comes passing this way," the sheriff said. "So mebbe you'd best think 'bout moving on down the road."

"Sir, I―"

But he saw that it was useless. Whatever grudge this man had against Garland County and its representatives, it was formidable and unbridgeable. He knew he was out of luck here. He rose and―

"So you tell the Grumleys if they want to check out Montgomery, they can just go on straight to hell," the sheriff said.

"I'm sorry?"

"You tell the Grumley clan Junior Turner of Montgomery says they should go suck the devil's own black goat's milk. I said―"

"You think I'm working for the Grumleys? You think I'm a Grumley?"

"He got that Grumley look," said one of the deputies, evidently called L. T. "Sort of narrow-eyed, towheaded with a yellow thatch all cut down. Them eyes blue, long of jaw, a rangy, stretchy boy."

"I think I smell a damned Grumley stink on him," said the other deputy. "Though I 'low, Grumleys most usually travel in packs."

"It ain't common to see a Grumley on his lonesome," said Sheriff Turner.

"I killed a Grumley," Carlo said.

"You what?"

"A couple, actually. It was hard to tell. Lots of dust flying around, lots of smoke. Mary Jane's, it was. I see they're now calling it the greatest gunfight in Arkansas history. I fired a lot, I know I hit at least two, and they went down."

"You kilt a Grumley?"

"I know you heard about that raid. That was us. That was me. That's what this is all about. The Grumleys. Putting them out of business for good. Driving 'em back into the hills where they can have sex with their cousins and sisters and be no bother to good folk anymore."

"L. T., you hear that? He kilt a Grumley," said the sheriff.

"He must be one of them boys working for that new young Becker feller," said the deputy.

"I figgered he worked for Owney and Mayor O'Donovan and that Judge LeGrand and the gambling boys, like all the Grumleys these days. That ain't so?"

"I almost got my butt shot off fighting gamblers with machine guns," said Carlo. "Grumleys all. A Peck and a Dodge too, I believe."

"Grumley cousins," said L. T. "Just as hell-black low-down mean too. Maybe meaner."

"Damnation! Damnation in the high grass! Damnation in July! He's okay! He's goddamned okay," said the sheriff, launching another naval shell of yellowish gunk toward the spittoon, where it banged dead bull's-eye, a rattle that reached the rafters.

"Sheriff's brother was a state liquor agent," said L. T "That'd be my Uncle Rollo. In '37, some ole boys set his car aflame. He was in it at the time. Burned up like a fritter that fell into the stove hole."

"No man should die the way my brother did," said the sheriff. "Since then, it's been a war 'tween the Turner and the Grumley clan. Which is why ain't no Grumley in Montgomery County."

"I think he's okay, Junior."

"By God, I say, he is okay. He's more'n okay. He's goddamned fine, is what he be. Son, what's it you want?"

Did Carlo want recollections? The boys provided them. The files, the photos, the physical evidence. It was his for the asking. Did he want to examine the crime scene? Off they went.

In a few hours of cooperation, Carlo learned what was to be learned, which, as Junior said up front, wasn't much. In the crime scene photos, Charles Swagger lay face forward in his automobile, his head cupped against the wheel, his one arm dangling, fingers languid, pointed downward. A black puddle of blood lay on the floor of the Model T, coagulated at his feet. His old six-gun, a Colt's Army from 1904, was in the dust, one of its rounds discharged. Marks in the dust indicated no kind of scuffle. The back door to the warehouse behind Ferrell Turner's liquor store had been pried open, though nothing taken. There really wasn't much to go on, but the final conclusion reached by the Mount Ida detective, one James Fields, seemed to sum it up as well as anything.

"It appears the decedent saw or heard something as he drove through town late. He pulled around back, put his spotlight on the door, and saw some movement. He got out, drew his gun, called, then started forward. He was shot, returned fire once (probably into the air or ground, as no bullet hole was found), then returned to his car as if to drive to the hospital or a doctor's, but passed out. The recovered bullet was a.32 caliber, lodged in his heart. A manhunt and exhaustive search for clues unearthed nothing; the case remains open, though until this officer returns from wartime service it will go on the inactive list."

It was dated January 20, 1943, the day before Jimmy Fields went off to the war he never returned from.

"Ferrell found him the next morning, early," recalled L. T. "Just lying there, like in the photo."

"Nobody heard the shots?"

"No sir. But that don't mean nothing. Sound is tricky this deep in the woods. Ferrell slept about three hundred feet away in his general store but he was a drinking man. He could have slept through anything. Jimmy done a good job. He worked that case hard. If there'd a been anything to find, he'd have found it."

They went to the crime scene, only a couple of hundred feet from the office. There, Carlo stood in the dust behind the liquor store and saw that the warehouse was really more of a shed, secured with a single padlock, which itself could easily be pried loose.

"What's he keep in there?"

"The beer, mostly. It's cool and once a day a truck delivers the ice. It's the only place 'round here that sells cold beer."

"I suppose I could talk to Ferrell."

"Sure, but Ferrell didn't see nothing. But I know you want to be thorough. So, yeah, let's go talk to Ferrell."

That talk was short; Ferrell did know nothing. He'd gone out back early in the morning to open up for the ice delivery and the milk truck and been surprised to find Charles Swagger's old Ford there, old Charles Swagger dead in it. He'd heard no shots.

Carlo asked modem, scientific questions that couldn't be answered by any living man, about bloodstains and trails and fingerprints and footprints and whether there was dust of the kind that was from the ground here found on Charles's boots. Ferrell had no idee; he just called the polices and the boys all come over and Jimmy Fields done took over. The only answers to those questions died with Jimmy in the hedgerow country.

He asked as he had asked everybody: Did you all know Charles?

Charles was a great man, they said. We seen him every damn month on his way to prayer meeting at Caddo Gap.

As the afternoon wore on, poor Carlo began to see his time was wasted and whatever he learned really was of no importance in regard to his original mission, which had nothing whatsoever to do with Charles Swagger, his angers, his violence, his fury, his death, but with Earl Swagger, his melancholy, his courage, his baffling behavior, his possible he about being in Hot Springs before. It almost made him dizzy. He felt he'd wandered into a madhouse and didn't belong, was learning things best forgotten, that meant nothing except obscure pain in years back, not worth recalling.

At nightfall, he went to say his farewells to Sheriff Junior Turner and thank him for his cooperation. After all, in the end, Junior had done all right by him, once the original misunderstanding was cleared up. But Junior had other ideas. Did he want to come up to the house and eat dinner with all the Turners? Er, no, not really, but Carlo now saw no polite way out of it, and Junior and his boys seemed really to want his company, a rare enough occurrence in his life. So in the end, he meekly said yes, and was husded off.

And what a dinner. Whatever the Ttirners did, they ate well. Squirrel stew in a black pool of bubbly gravy, like a tar pit, collard greens, turnips, scrapple, great slabs of bacon all moist with fat, taters by the long ton, in every configuration known to man, chicken-fried steak, big and gnarly and soaked in yet a different variation on the theme of gravy, com on the cob or shelled and mushed, a mountain of grits slathered in a snowcap of butter, hot apple dumpling, more coffee, hot, black and strong, the attention of flirty little Turner girls, somebody's female brood of cousins or nieces or something (never too clear on exactly who these girls were) and, after dark, com likker and good storytelling.

It was night. Mosquitoes buzzed around but the Turner boys, all loquacious, were sitting about on the porch, smoking pipes or vile cigars imported from far-off, glamorous Saint Louie, in various postures of lassitude and inebriation. In the piney Ouachitas, crickets yammered and small furry things screeched when they died. Up above, the stars pinwheeled this way and that.

The subject was set by the day's events and it turned out to be the man who was both god and devil to them, who but Charles Swagger, former sheriff of Polk County, a man who walked high and mighty and treated such as them as the scum of the earth.

"He was a proud man," an unidentified Turner said, from the gray darkness of the porch, in a melancholy of recollection, "that you could read on him. But you know what the Book sayeth

The dark chorus supported this point.

"Yes sir."

"You do, you do."

"That'd be the truth, that would."

"That's what she says. You listen, young feller. Luke's a preacher, he know the Book."

"The Book sayeth, pride goeth before the fall."

"And you know what?" said Junior Turner. "After the fall, it hangeth around too!"

Everybody laughed, including slightly overwhelmed and slightly overstuffed Carlo.

"You saw him often?" he asked, amazed that Charles was so big to them, for after all, this wasn't his county, and his office was forty miles of bad road to the west.

"Ever damn weekend in four," said a Turner. "He'd go on over to that Baptist prayer camp. He been a good Baptist. He been Baptist to the gills. He'd come on through in that old Model T of his, with the big star on it, and he'd stop at Ferrell's store, and have hisself a cold Coca-Cola. You'd see him watching and keeping track."

"He was great at keeping track."

"He stand there in that black suit and he's all glowery-like, you know. Big feller. Big hands, big face, big old arms. Strong as a goddamned blacksmith. Wore the badge of the law. Brooked no nonsense from no man. You'd as soon poke a stick at a bear as you'd rile up Charles Swagger."

"He must have been a worshipful man."

"Well sir" said a Turner, "you could say that. He'd be headed on toward Caddo Gap. He'd be going to worship a cribful. That Baptist prayer retreat camp, that'd be at that Caddo Gap."

"Yes, that would, and the old man, that's where he'd head, to do his own kind of worshipfulness."

And they busted out laughing.

The Turners howled into the night! It was like the drunken deities of a fallen Olympus snarfing out a bushel basket of giggles and guffaws at the latest vanity of their pitiful progeny, that tribe of hairy-assed scufflers and hustlers known as mankind.

"Oh, he was a prayerful man," somebody said.

"He worshipped all right."

"Pass that jug, Cleveland."

"She's a coming, Baxter."

"I still don't―" started Carlo.

Junior Turner delivered the news: "He did worship. He worshipped at the altar of titty and cooze! He drank the sacred elixir of hooch. He tested God's will and mercy by betting it all on the throw of them little old cubes with the dots! What a great man he was."

"That old boy, he was a inspiration to us all."

Carlo was suddenly confused.

"I don't―"

"He didn't go to no prayer meeting at Caddo Gap. No siree, not a goddamn bit of it. He'd come through here and make a big play of how holy he was, and tell ever damn body about the prayer retreat, then he'd roll on out of town, up Route 27 toward Caddo Gap. But goddamn, then he'd cut through the woods on some old logging road and git back on 27 out near to Hurricane Grove and head on his way to where he's really going. Hot Springs, the Devil's Playpen. One day a month, Charles gathered up a hundred or so dollars from the niggers and white trash he'd beat over the head, told his old wife he's going to talk to Jesus, came through here, then cut over to Hot Springs, where he whored and drank and gambled, same as any man. So high and mighty!"

"Jesus," said Carlo.

"He was a man of sin. Vast sin. He had the clap, he had ten girlfriends in ten different cribs. He never went to the quality places, where he'd might like to chance recognition. Nah, he went to low places, in the Niggertown or up Central beyond the Arlington. He's a reg'lar, all right."

"How do you know?"

"Ask Baxter. Baxter knows."

"I ain't a sinner no more," said Baxter, in the darkness. "The Lord done showed me a path. But in them earlier years, I done some helling. I knowed him 'cause I pumped gas for him so much as a youngster when he stopped for his Coca-Cola. I seen him onct, twicet and then ever damn place, ever damn time. He didn't have no badge on then. He wore a gal on each arm, and the smile of a happy goddamned man. Sometimes the cards smiled, sometimes they didn't, but he kept coming back. He had the best life, I reckon. He was a God-fearing man of civil authority twenty-nine days a month and on the thirtieth day he's a goddamned hellion who got his old pecker in ever kind of hole there was to be had in Hot Springs. Great man! Great man, my black asshole!"

"This is the truth?"

"This is God's honest truth," said Junior Turner. "We all knew it. Not nobody back in his hometown did, but we sure did. So when he got hisself kilt, we figgered it was gambling debts or woman trouble. Whoever done it did a good job of covering it up. But goddamn, he paid the devil his due, that I'll say."

"You didn't investigate?"

"Well, son, I was in combat engineer school at Fort Belvoir, in Virginia that day. My deputies was in―where was you, L. T.?"

"Getting ready for the Aleutians."

"Hell, everybody was some damn place or other. Only Jimmy really was here and by God he'd tried like hell to get in, till finally the standards dropped in '43 and they took him. Jimmy didn't see no percentage in turning the light on Charles Swagger's hunger for flesh and gitting himself involved in what goes on in Hot Springs. Hot Springs, that's a evil town. If Charles went to Hot Springs for pleasure, he knew there'd be a price to pay, and by God, he ended up paying it."

"I see."

"If you want to know who killed him, I'll tell you how to do it."

"Okay," said Carlo.

Junior leaned forward.

"You look for a silver-plated Smith & Wesson.32 bicycle gun. Little thang, 32 rimfire, couldn't weigh more'n ten, twelve ounces. Charles called it his Jesus gun, and he kept it secured up his left sleeve by a sleeve garter. He carried the Colt, a Winchester '95 carbine in.30 government in the car, just like the Texas Rangers love so deeply, but that little gun was his ace in the hole. That was the gun he kilt Travis Warren's little brother Billy with in 19 and 23, during the Blue Eye bank robbery. He shot Travis dead with the Colt, and his cousin Chandler too, but old Billy hit him with a 12-gauge from behind, and knocked him down and bloody with buck. Billy walked up, kicked the Colt across the floor and leaned over to put the shotgun under Charles's chin for a killing shot, and Charles pulled that li'l silver thang and shot that boy slick as a whisde 'tween the eyes. Anyhows, whoever kilt that old man in 1942, he stole that gun. Everyone who knew a thing about Charles knew it was missing. The Colt was there on the ground, you seen it. But the Jesus gun was missing."

Carlo knew it was a bad idea, but he couldn't help from asking.

"Why do they call it a Jesus gun?"

" 'Cause when he pulls it on you, you are going to meet Jesus. Billy sure did, at the age of only sixteen."

"Wonder if Billy likes heaven?"

"Bet he do. Plenty of cooze in heaven! All them angel gals in them little gowns. They don't wear no underpants at all."

"Now don't you go talking that way 'bout heaven," warned Baxter. "It could have consequences. There are always consequences. That's the lesson in tonight's sermon."

Eventually, most of the Turners gave up the ghost and retreated to farmhouses or cabins. It suddenly occurred to Carlo that he had no place to stay, he was too drunk to drive and could see no way clear to a happy solution to his problem. But once again Junior Turner came through, and dragged him upstairs to an unused bedroom, where he was told to get his load off and stay the night, Mama Turner would have grits and bacon and hot black coffee in the kitchen beginning at 6:00 and running through 9:00.

Carlo stripped, blew out the candle, pulled a gigantic comforter over his scrawny bones, and his head hit the pillow. He had a brief fantasy about the farmer's daughters, since there'd been so many pretty Turner girls fluttering this way and that, but no knock came to his door, and as a graduate of a Baptist college he wouldn't have known what to do if one did. And then the room whirled about his head one more dizzying time and he was out.

His dreams tossed in his mind, though. Strange stuff, the product of too much white lightning and too much gravy mingled into a combustible fluid. He could make head or tails of none of it, though it disturbed him plenty and once or twice pulled him from sleep. He'd awaken, wonder where the hell he was, then remember, lie back and sail off again to a turbulent snoozeland.

But the third time he awoke, he knew it was for good. He was sweaty and shaking. Was he sick? Was he going to get the heaves or the runs? But his body was fine; it was his heart that was rocketing along at a hundred miles per hour.

He felt a presence in the room. Not a Turner cousin, comely and sweet, but something far worse: a haunt, a ghost, a horror. He reached out as if to touch something, but his fingers clawed at nothingness. The thing was in his head, whatever it could be. What was it rattling about in his subconscious, trying to find a way to poke a hole into his conscious, trying to get itself felt, noticed, paid attention to? Whatever, it was unsettling. He rose, went to the window, saw the Turner yard, bone-gray in the radiant gibbous moonlight, a swing hanging from a tree, a bench close by, where loving daddies could watch their baby sons play, and guard them and look after them, as his had done for him, as most had done for theirs. It was a scene of such domestic bliss and becalmed gentility it soothed him, but the luminous grayness of it suggested a photo negative, something somehow in reverse, and he saw another daddy, Charles the Tyrant, with his immense reservoir of hidden violence, his hatred, his disappointment, his vanity, his egoism, his self-doubt, and he saw him beating a boy child in that ghostly light.

"You ain't no damned good!" he heard the old man scream. "What is wrong with you, boy! You fail at everything! You are such a goddamned disappointment!"

Whack! the strap across the legs, whack! die strap across the back, whack! the strap across the buttocks, the thumbs grinding bone bruises into the boy's arms as the larger man pinioned him in endless, suffocating rage.

What happens to such boys? What becomes of them? They become so full of hatred themselves they lash out at the world. They become monsters hell-bent on punishing a world that did nothing to protect them. Or they become so full of pain they don't care if they live or die and off they rush into the machine guns. Or they hang themselves at fifteen, for there is no hope on earth left.

Then at last he saw it.

He tried to push it away but it made such perfect sense now, it unified all the elements, it explained everything now.

How did Earl know so much about Hot Springs?

Because he'd been there.

Why couldn't he tell anyone?

Because he'd been there secredy, tracking someone, setting a trap for someone.

That man was his father.

Earl couldn't be frightened by his father, for by '42 he was a strong Marine sergeant with a couple of boxing tides to his name, and combat in Nicaragua and all over China, not the scrawny, frightened sixteen-year-old who'd fled home in 1930 to escape the father's rages.

But Earl had some last business with his father. He saw how Earl's mind would work. Earl was going to the Pacific and he would probably die. His division had orders to Guadalcanal by that time. He had no expectation of surviving the great crusade in the Pacific, for after Guadalcanal there were another hundred islands, with twisted names, letters in combinations never seen before, an archipelago of violence beckoning, promising nothing but extinction. But he had a powerful debt to pay back to the man who'd beaten him, and worse, the man who'd beaten his younger brother, without Earl there to stop it.

And Earl would know about the Jesus gun, and his father's trick of wearing it in his sleeve, secured by a garter.

In his mind's eye, Carlo saw what he hoped had not happened but whose logic was absolute and powerful: Earl, AWOL from the Corps, tracking his own daddy through the bawdy houses and flesh parlors of Hot Springs in January of 1942, and then at last facing him, facing the monster.

Had Earl been the man who killed his daddy?

It terrified Carlo, more than anything in his life ever had, but he knew he had to find the truth.

Chapter 36

It was always about money with Johnny. Johnny expected to be paid very well, very well indeed, and he also insisted on charging Owney a tax for being English. He called it his Potato Famine bonus: $20,000, over and above the agreed-to sum, just because… just because all them laddies and lasses had starved in the bogs of County Mayo a hundred years ago.

"Old man," protested Owney, "my people were selling fish and sweeping streets in the slums of the West End at the time. Doubt if they had a ha'penny between them. It was the lord highs what ruined the potato crop and set your people to dying in the river glens."

"Ah," said Johnny, all a-twinkle with blarney, "if you English shopkeeps had the nerve to overthrow them wig-wearing nancy boys and gone and made a proper revolution, mine'd not had to flee to the slums of New York and peck out a new life. We'd all be living in the castle now."

We are living in the castle now, boyo, Owney thought, but didn't express it. You couldn't argue with Johnny, and so the deal was done and Ralph brought Johnny another mint julep. He and Owney sat on Owney's terrace above the rumble of Central late in the afternoon. The cars churned down the broad avenue, the pigeons cooed lovingly.

"I see the mountain's still a fair eyeful," said Johnny, looking out beyond the Arlington to North Mountain, which rose in pine-crusted glory across the way, all twenty-one of its springs still blasting out the steamy mineral water, as they had since time immemorial.

"The town has changed in six war years, eh, Johnny?" said Owney.

"In 1940, she was still a Depression town. Now she's modem. Now she's a beaut. She still lights up the night sky, I'll be betting."

"That she does."

"Now, tell me about these boyos who are plaguing you. They sound like the Black and Tans you Brits sent up to raid on us in the '20s."

"You would know, Johnny," said Owney.

"I would indeed. I was in County Mayo and the pubs of west Dublin running with me brothers with the Lewis guns and the Thompsons, hunting and being hunted in them alleyways. I do hate the Black and Tans. Sure but they made the people suffer. They burned, they pillaged, they tortured. Night riders, anonymous, hard to get at, highly secretive, well armed. Sounds about the same, does it not?"

ccWell, almost," said Owney. "These boys don't torture. They don't bum. They sure pillage, though. They've cost me close to a hundred grand in lost revenues in two months."

Actually, it was closer to three hundred grand, but Owney knew if he gave the correct number, Johnny would make a lightning calculation and up the agreed-on cost appreciably. That was Johnny; he held all the cards and he loved it.

Johnny's raven hair was brilliantined back and his olive complexion radiated ruddy good health. He was fit, vigorous, handsome as the bloody devil himself, at forty-seven years old. He wore a double-breasted bespoke suit in gray flannel, and bespoke shoes as well. When he smiled, the sky lit up in the pure glowing radiance of it. Everybody loved Johnny. It was hard not to love Johnny. He'd fought in the Great War, the Troubles in Ireland, where he'd learned his dark skills, and since 1925 had worked his violent magic on these shores. Men wanted to drink with him, women to sleep with him. What an odd glitch it was that a man so gifted by God had this one little thing: he liked money that others had earned, in large piles, and if someone or something got in his way, he had not the slightest qualm about touching the trigger of his Thompson and eliminating them with a squirt of death. It never occurred to him to feel remorse. His mind wasn't built that way. He had killed thirty-nine men, most of them officers of the law or bank or plant security, or German soldiers or British troopies but occasionally the bullets flew beyond targets and struck the innocent. It didn't matter to him, not one little bit.

"So tell me, Owney, tell me about these dark lads, and we'll get to getting you your money's worth."

Owney explained details of the shoot-out at Mary Jane's, confessing puzzlement at the victory of the men with the lesser guns over the men with the greater guns.

"See, your problem was your ambush site," said Johnny. "The Maxim's a fine gun, as all hearties found out in the Great War, but she's got to have a wide field of fire and has to be laid just right. Shooting down some stairs don't do a fella no good at all; it minimizes what you've got going for you. I can see you've never planned an ambush against trained men, eh, Owney? Nor had that border reiver scum from the mountains."

"I guess not."

"Your hero fellow kept his cool and understood that the ballistics of his weapon allowed him to shoot through wood. He waited till the belt clinked dry, then he enfiladed the stairwell. From that point you were doomed. As Herman will tell you when he gets here, properly deployed, pound for pound there's not a better gun about than a Browning Automatic Rifle."

"So what are we going to do? I'm running out of time. I've threatened to bomb Niggertown to keep them from raiding, but only the cowboy cares about the niggers. Sooner or later, that threat will lose its meaning and even he will have to go ahead. And if they get the Central Book, the money dries up fast, and I am in a world of trouble."

"That would be the checkmate move, then?"

"Yeah, and we could do everything right and on the last day, they could hit that joint and we'd be fucked. So we have to act fast."

Johnny's face fell into a density of concentration. He thought out loud.

"The chances of bumbling into them in another raid are remote. The chances of jumping them in their home ground are also remote. Plus, difficult to handle. No, we've got to find a prize so sweet they'll not be able to resist. We've got to lay a trap so deep they won't ever suspect. We've got to find something that makes them unbearably agitated."

"And what would that be?"

Johnny said, "This Becker. You say he likes to get his picture in the paper?"

"He does."

"Then it's got to be something with splash. Something with style. Something that would get the New York Herald Tribune out here and Life magazine."

"Yes."

"So much glory that Becker will not be able to turn it down."

Owney thought hard. He didn't have a clue.

Johnny looked at him with impatience.

"Come on, goddammit. Use that thinker you got up there. You're like the Brit generals during the war, you can only think about moving straight ahead."

"I just don't―"

But Ralph was suddenly there, hovering.

"Ralph?"

"Mr. Maddox, Vince Morella is here."

"Christ!" said Owney. "What the hell. It can't wait?"

"He's very insistent."

"Jesus Christ!" He turned to Johnny. "Wait a second. These Arkansas boys, they can't get nothing straight."

He rose, went into the living room where Vince Morella stood, holding hat in hand nervously.

'"What the fuck, Vince. I'm inna middle of an important meeting."

"Sorry, sorry, sorry, Mr. Maddox, but I think you'd want to hear this right away."

"So?"

"I get to the club this morning, go into my office, and there's a guy sitting there. He's already in. He says he wants to meet with you."

"Jesus Fucking Christ, I told you―"

"You don't get it. He's one of them."

Owney's eyes narrowed suspiciously.

"He's―"

"He went on all the raids, knows who they are, where they're quartered, how they operate, what they'll do next, how they communicate. He'll give it all to you!"

Owney's eyes narrowed. Now this he finally understood.

"For money, eh. Somebody always sings for the moolah."

"Not for money. That's why he had to see you. For something only you can give him. He's a college kid. His name is Frenchy Short."