Hot Springs

Chapter 53

Earl drove west, leaving Hot Springs in the rearview mirror. The road ran through forest, though ahead he could see the sun setting. The police convoy followed him to the Garland County line, and stopped there as he passed into Montgomery toward places beyond.

He told himself he was all right. Really, he told himself, he was swell. He was alive. His child would be bom shordy. He had survived another war, an unwinnable one, as it turned out, but there was no changing things and there was nothing back there for him but probable death and guaranteed shame and humiliation.

I am not a goddamned avenging angel.

It is not up to me to avenge the dead.

I am not here to punish the evil.

I cannot go back to that town, one man alone, and take on a mob of professional gunmen, gangsters and crooked politicians.

My life is before me. I commemorate my dead by going on and having a good life.

He instructed himself in all these lessons hard as he was able, searching for a kind of numbness that would permit him to go on.

He tried to tell himself his wife and child needed him, this was over and finished.

But the road, darkening quickly, kept taking him back.

And maybe it was the hard truth he'd told the boy about his father.

He couldn't keep his mind in the present. His mind kept changing gears and he remembered that other night in 1942, his father dead in the seat next to him, much later, much darker at night, driving this same road toward Mount Ida, his mind racing, trying to figure out what to do, how to do it, feeling both cheated and relieved, wanting nothing now except to get over this thing, dump the old bastard and get back to the United States Marine Corps.

Then, as now, Mount Ida finally slid into sight, after such a long time, but then it was quiet; now it was much earlier and Turner's general store and liquor store were still open for business and some old boys stood or sat out on the porch before the old buildings.

Earl realized he had a thirst, and pulled off the road.

He walked up to the porch and heard the boys talking.

"Howdy," he said.

"Howdy, there, mister," came a reply.

"Got a Coca-Cola inside? A nice cold one? Got a long drive ahead."

"Yes sir. You go on in, and Ike'll git you a Coke."

"Thanks," he said.

"My pleasure, sir," said the man.

Earl walked in, found an old store with sagging shelves but well stocked, probably the only store this deep in the Ouachita forest, and folks from all around must have come here. He went to a red Coke machine, opened it up, and reached for a nickel. He didn't have one. He had only quarters.

He went up to the counter, asked a boy there for change, got it, went on back to the machine, and got his Coke. He was walking out and to his car when he heard one of the boys on the porch saying, "They say this'll make Fred Becker the governor."

"I thought that boy's all finished," said another. "But he beat 'em. He beat them Grumleys fair and square."

It took a second for this to register. At first Earl had the impression it was another Fred Becker they were talking about and that it was another batch of Grumleys, but then he realized that couldn't be the truth.

"'Scuse me," he said, "don't mean to butt in. But what's all that about Fred Becker and the Grumleys?"

"You from Hot Springs, sir?"

"Well, I done some work there. That's all finished and I'm heading on to Fort Smith."

"Hell, there's been a war there," said the man. "Fred Becker led a bunch of fellers against the gangsters in Hot Springs."

"B'lieve I heard something about that, yes sir," said Earl.

"Well," said the fellow, "today, he wrapped it up. Done arrested the gangster king himself, Owney Maddox, the big boss of Hot Springs."

"Arrested him?"

"That Fred done it by himself. Say, there's a fellow with some sand to him. They say he shot it out with the Grumleys at Mary Jane's and today he walked up big as life and arrested Owney Maddox."

"On what?"

"You must not have been listening to your radio. No sir, it's all over the radio. They're saying Fred's going to be the next damn governor. He got Owney Maddox on the charge of an art theft, for some kind of painting, and they searched Owney's apartment and they found some payroll slips from Alcoa, so they think Owney done masterminded that job. It's all falling apart on Owney Maddox. He' 's in jail and he's going to stay there and all them damn Grumleys he got working for him are squirreled good."

"Art theft?" said Earl.

"Some old picture he had. It was stolen, and Fred digged it out, and called the feds and made the arrest. Don't that beat all? It's just like with Al Capone. He's a bad man, but everybody's scared to go agin him, so they finally get him on tax evasion. So they get that Owney on art theft!"

"Ah," said Earl, as if he'd just learned something new.

"You okay, mister?"

"I'm fine," he said.

"'Cause you just look like a haunt walked through you."

"Nah, I'm fine," said Earl. He turned and went to his car.

He climbed in, but couldn't find the strength to turn the key. The Coke suddenly didn't interest him at all.

Fred Becker, hero? Fred Becker, the next governor? Hey, isn't it great about Fred Becker, how he got Owney Maddox?

He sat there, breathing hard.

What about them boys? What about that old man? They believed in their job and they risked their lives for it, and they got cut down in the night and nobody said Jack about it and a few days later it was as if it hadn't happened and nobody remembered a goddamn thing now that Fred Becker was a big hero.

In his head, one bitterness slid into and was absorbed by another. It was just like the war. All the boys go out onto the islands and they fight in battles so horrible it scars a man just to think about it. And they die, and by the time you get back everydamnbody's forgotten all about it and some joker's up front acting like a hero and he had nothing to do with it, not a goddamned thing.

He shook his head. The anger came over him so bad he could hardly stand it. He wanted to fight, to smash something, to howl at the moon, to kill something, to see it bleed and twitch out. It was a killing anger, a hurting anger.

He wanted to go back to Hot Springs and start shooting. But shoot who? They were all gone. Owney was locked up and whoever it was had hit the boys in the train yard, presumably that Johnny Spanish fellow, was off in some gangster hideout.

There was no one to kill. It was the same rage he felt when he went to beat his father and his father was already dying.

Earl got out of the car.

"You didn't drink that Coke up, mister."

"No, I didn't. Feel a need for something else tonight."

"You all right?"

"I am fine, sir."

He walked past them, but this time not into the general store but into the little liquor store next to it. There, in an old frame, was the front page of the Blue Eye newspaper with its story of the death of the great Charles Swagger, sheriff of Polk County, who'd died stopping a burglary over in Montgomery County, at Turner's liquor store, this very place.

"They never caught 'em," said the liquor store clerk, who was actually the same Ike who'd just stepped through a door.

"So I heard," said Earl.

"Hard to figure, that old guy fighting to save my uncle a few dollars' worth of beer."

"He wore the badge," said Earl. "He knew what he'd signed up for. Don't waste no time worrying about him."

"So what's your poison, sir?"

"You got that Boone County bourbon? Ain't had a lick of that in a time."

"You want the pint or the fifth." Earl got out his wallet. He had seven dollars left and nothing else coming in soon. "How much the fifth?" "That'd be three dollar."

"Give me two fifths then. And keep the change, sonny."

Chapter 54

Nobody could believe how well Frenchy shot. Some of them were serious people. Some were ex-paratroopers, many ex-cops or FBI agents, some ex-Marines, all of whom who'd been in it, one way or the other. But Frenchy outshot them all, two-handed to boot.

"Son, who taught you to shoot like that?"

"An old guy, been in a lot of stuff. Worked it out, this system."

"It's not doctrine, but damn, it's so fast and accurate I don't see a point in changing it. Never would have believed it could be so fast, two hands and everything."

"You get used to it. It's rock steady."

"Wish I'd had you along on my team in Market Garden."

"Yeah, well, I was a little young for that."

"You ever in the for-real?"

"I was a cop in the South. I was in some for-real stuff. In it deep."

"Where?"

"Oh, the South."

"Oh, it's that way, is it? Sure, kid. You are a good hand."

"I was taught by the best," Frenchy said.

He was D. A.'s best pupil, really. The gun came from his holster so fast nobody could see it, was clapped by the other hand and outthrust even as his eyes clamped to the front sight and bangbang, he'd slap two holes in the kill zone, rotate to another, bangbang, and on to another, with the seventh round saved for just in case. These.45s had not been worked on like the ones D. A. had tricked up by Griffin & Howe, they were just old sloppy twenty-seventh-hand service Ithacas and Singers and IBMs, with an old Colt thrown in here and there for good measure, but they went pop every time the trigger was jacked and they felt familiar to Frenchy.

It was the shooting week of CIG training class 004, Clandestine Techniques, up on Catoctin Mountain in Maryland, where the old OSS had trained, a place called Camp Ritchie, maybe fifty miles outside of D. C. It still had a lot of World War II feeling to it, with the old LOOSE UPS SINK SHIPS and INVEST IN INVASION BUY WAR BONDS posters turning yellow and tatty, the wooden barracks thick with the odor of men having lived in close quarters, all of it nestled safely behind barbed wire and guarded by Marines.

And of course Frenchy was just as good with anything; he could shoot the Thompson, the BAR and the carbine with extraordinary skill. It just seemed to come naturally to him, and it filled him with confidence, so that when the field problems arose, he seemed always to be the one who solved them fastest, even among men who'd been in combat. Soon he was an acting team leader, and he led after Earl's techniques, giving his boys nicknames (that is, nicknaming men who were ten years older than he was, Harvard and Yale graduates, and combat veterans), teasing them, cajoling them, always putting himself out front and when it came time to work, outworking them. He had a funny tic when he explained things to them: he'd listen, then say, "See, here's the thing," then gently point out the way it should be done.

Finally, toward the end of the course, an instructor drew him aside.

"You've done damned well, Short. You've impressed some people."

"Thanks."

"Now many of these guys will go under embassy cover to various spots around the world where they'll run agents, or recruit locals, or make reports. Some others will stay here, this'll be their only taste of the actual, and they'll be sent to headquarters, where they'll mainly be analysts."

"Both those sound pretty boring to me."

"Yeah, I thought so. You have a cowboy look to you. Are you a cowboy, Tex?"

"No sir."

"But you have a field operator's brain, I can tell. And real good shooting skills. Real good."

"Yes sir."

"You've been mentioned for Plans."

"Plans?" said Frenchy. "That doesn't sound like much fun."

"One thing you have to learn, Short, is that in this business nothing is what it sounds like. Okay?"

"Yes sir."

"Mr. Dulles sees Plans as a kind of action unit."

"like a raid team?"

"Yeah, exactly. It'll be working in military or guerrilla-warfare situations, sometimes behind the lines, running operations. Probably high-contact work. Lots of bang-bang. Lots of sentry-knifing, dog-killing, bomb-planting, border-crossing. That sound like your cup of tea?"

"Does it ever!"

"You have a problem with Army Jump School?"

"No sir."

"You have a problem with a commando tour with the Brits? Good training."

"Sounds good."

"You have a problem with language studies?"

"Ah―I speak French and passable German."

"Think about Chinese, Short. Or Indochinese. Or Greek. Or Korean. Or Russian, if the big one ever comes."

"Yes sir," said Frenchy.

"Good man," said the instructor.

And so Frenchy's course was set. He was to become a specialist in doing the necessary, not out of sentiment but out of hard, rational thought, carefully measured risk, a burglar's guts and a killer's decisiveness. But at this point he envisioned one more moment in his career with the Garland County raid team, a kind of a last thing that he owed himself. It came some months ahead in the week after he graduated from Clandestine Techniques 004 at the head of his class and before he reported to Fort Benning for Jump School. He spent it in Washington, D. C., and for several days he roamed the city, looking for out-of-town newsstands, for copies of the Little Rock Arkansas Gazette or Democrat. He had no luck. But then he went to the Library of Congress and ordered up a batch of backdated NewYork Times and in that way, buried on a back page, learned of the fates of D. A. and the boys. EX-FBI AGENT SLAIN IN ACCIDENTAL GUNFIGHT. He did note that Earl's name was not listed among the dead, nor was Carlo Henderson's, so he assumed that somehow they had survived. It figured. You couldn't kill the cowboy. Maybe Bugsy Siegel would, as Johnny Spanish had predicted, but Owney hadn't been able to, not even with Frenchy's treacherous help.

If you saw him sitting there, in that vast, domed room on Capitol Hill behind the Congress, you would have seen a grave, calm young man, brimming with health and vitality, but already picking up a warrior's kind of melancholy aloofness from the workaday world around him. And at least at that moment―for he had not yet entirely mastered the art of completely stifling his emotions―you might have seen some regret too. Maybe even some sorrow.

Chapter 55

Earl started drinking almost immediately. The bourbon lit like a flare out beyond the wire and fell down his gullet, popping sparks of illumination, floating, drifting, pulling him ever so gently toward where he hoped the numbness was. No such goddamned luck. He drank only to forget, but of course the only thing the bourbon did was make him remember more, so he drank more, which made him remember yet more again.

He wasn't headed west on 270 toward Y City, which would take him over to 71 for the pull up toward Fort Smith and Camp Chaffee, where his wife and unborn child, his new life or whatever, awaited. He couldn't do that, somehow. He was in no state to face them and the emotions that he had controlled so masterfully for four days now seemed dangerously near explosion. He knew he was rocky. He turned south, down 27 out of Mount Ida, to 8, and then west on 8. He knew exactly where he was headed even if he couldn't say it or acknowledge it.

By the time he pulled into Board Camp it was nearly midnight. Wasn't much to be seen at all. It was never even as much as Mount Ida. He drove through the little town and there, a few miles beyond toward the county seat of Blue Eye, off on the right, he saw the old mailbox, SWAGGER it said, same as it always had.

He turned right, sank as the dirt road plunged off the highway, watched his light beams lance out in the darkness until at last they illuminated the house where he grew up, where his family lived, where his father lived, where his brother died. The light beams hit the house.

They illuminated broken windows, knocked-out boards, ragged weeds, a garden gone to ruin, peeling paint, the nothingness of abandonment. After his father died, his mother had simply given up and moved to town. He never saw her again; he was in the hospital after Tarawa when the news came that she had died.

Earl pulled into the barnyard and when his lights crossed that structure, he saw that it too had fallen into total disrepair. It needed paint and was lost in a sea of ragweed and unkempt grass. Daddy would shit if he saw it now. Daddy always kept it so nice. Or rather, Daddy directed that it be kept nice. It had to be perfect, and it was one of Earl's chores to mow the lawn and lord help him if he forgot it, or he didn't do it well enough. The lawn had to be perfect, the garden well cultivated, the whole thing upstanding and pretty, as befits an important man.

Earl turned off the lights. He opened the door. Crickets tweedled in the dark and the soft rush of the wind filled the Arkansas night, with maybe just a hint of fall in the air. The house was big, with four bedrooms up on the second floor. Once it had been the leading house in the eastern half of Polk County, maintained by a lot of good land, but somehow, some Swagger granddad or other back in die last century had gotten out of the farming business before really getting into it and committed to the law enforcement business, because the Swagger men were always hunters, always had a kind of natural instinct for the rifle, and a gift for reading the terrain. No one knew where it came from, but they'd been soldiers and hunters for as long as anyone could remember, just as long as they'd lived in these parts. They were never farmers.

Earl tipped the bottle up and felt the bourbon clog his throat and with a mighty gulp he took down two more harsh swallows. The illumination rounds went off in his guts, lighting the target. It made his eyes water. He stood, wobbling just a little, and faced the big house.

It scared him still. It was a house of fear. You walked sofdy in that house because you didn't want to upset Daddy. Daddy ruled that house as he ruled so much of the known world. Daddy's hugeness was something he could feel even now, his presence, looming and feary and cold and mad, that man who even to this day stalked the corridors of Earl's mind, always whispering to him.

"Goddamn you, Daddy, goddamn your black soul! Come out and fight!" Earl screamed.

But Daddy didn't.

Earl saw that he had finished the bottle. He returned to the car, now glad he'd bought a second one. He found it. He had some trouble with the cap because he was so damned drunk his fingers barely worked, but in a little bit, it came free. By now the bourbon had lost its taste. He swallowed, swallowed some more, and pitched forward. He passed out in the front yard.

Sometime later in the night, Earl awoke, still drunk but shivery in the cold. He was wet; he'd pissed his pants. No, no, it was dew, dampening him through his suit coat. He pulled himself up, shuddered mightily in the cold, seized the bottle and took another couple of pulls. But he didn't pass out. Instead he rose, and in the blurry darkness of his vision made out the car. He wobbled back toward it, unsteadily as hell, and made it all the way, falling only once.

"Goddamn," he cursed to no man, as around him the black world pitched and bobbed, as if he were on some merry-go-round that went up and down just as fast as it went around. He felt like he was going to puke. He flew off in all directions and all six of his hands reached for all six of the handles to the door of the vehicle, and somehow he got it open and plunged into the back seat, and collapsed with a thump as the blackness closed around him again.

He awoke again to a strange sound. His frayed mind stirred from unconsciousness. He seemed covered in grit somehow. Again the sound: loud, close, familiar. Again the grit, spraying downward on him like droplets of water, except it wasn't water it was―

BANG!

Another bullet tore through the window, puncturing neady through, leaving a spackle of fractures, a mercury smear across the glass, erupting with a spray of grit that was pulverized glass which floated out in a cloud, then floated down upon him.

"Don't shoot!" he screamed and in a split second realized what had happened. Somehow Owney's Grumley boys had tracked him down. They had him nailed. They knew where he'd go and that's where he went and they found him passed out in the car and they worried it was a trick so they laid up until the light and when he still didn't stir after a bit they fired rounds through the windows and the windshield.

"Don't shoot!" he screamed again, knowing he was finished. He had no gun. He was aflame with pain, head to toe, from the ravages of alcohol. His mind was all jittery with fear. Goddamn them! They had found him!

Earl hated fear and worked hard at controlling it, at testing himself against it because it scared him so much, but now he had no preparation for it, and it just came and took him and made him its toy. He began to cry. He couldn't be brave. He couldn't fight. He was going to end up like his daddy, shot by killers and left dying and begging for mercy.

"You show us hands!" came the cry, "or goddamn we will finish you good!"

He looked around. Nothing to fight with. Another shot rocked through the window, blowing out a puff of sheared/shredded glass.

"I'll put one in your gut, mister, you come out or by God I will finish you."

Earl kicked the door open and as he rose felt the shredded glass raining off his body like a collection of sand. He blinked in the sunlight, showed his hands, and edged out. There were at least four Grumleys, all with big lever-action rifles, all laid up behind cover, all zeroed on him.

One of the men emerged from cover.

"You armed?"

"No sir."

"Don't trust him, Luke. Them boys is tricky. I can pop him right now."

"You hold it, Jim. Now, mister, I want you to shuck that coat and show me you got nothing or Jim will pop you like a squirrel. Don't you do nothing tricky."

Why didn't they just shoot him and be done with it? Did they want to hang him, beat him, set him afire?

Slowly with one hand, then the other, he peeled off the coat, and showed by his blue shirt and suspenders that he was unarmed. He kept his hands high. Two of the men approached while two others hung back, keeping him well covered. By the way they handled their rifles, Earl could tell they had handled rifles a lot.

"Turn round and up agin that car," commanded the leader.

Earl assumed the position. A hand fished his wallet out while another patted him down.

"What the hell are you doing here?" he was asked.

"I own this place. Been paying taxes on it for years."

"Hell, nobody owns this place, since old lady Swagger done up 'n' died in town. This is Sheriff Charles Swagger's old place, mister."

"And I am Charles Swagger's son, Earl."

"Earl?"

"By God, yes," came another voice, "according to his driver's license, this here's Earl Swagger hisself."

"Jesus Christ, Earl, why'n't you say so? Git them hands down, by God, heard what you done to them Japs in the islands. Earl, it's Luke Petty, I'se two years behind you in high school."

Earl turned. The men had lowered their rifles and gazed at him with reverence, their blue eyes eating him alive. Luke Petty looked slightly familiar, but maybe it was the type: the rawboned Scotch-Irish border reiver whose likeness filled the hills a hundred miles in either direction.

"Luke, I―"

"Goddamn, yes, it's Earl, Earl Swagger, who won the Medal of Honor. Where, Earl, Saipan?"

"Iwo."

"Iwo goddamned Jima. You made the whole damned county proud of you. Pity your daddy and mommy weren't around to know it."

That was another story. Earl left it alone.

"Sorry about the car, Earl. Folks is jumpy and we seen a car in an abandoned place and a man sleeping. Well, you know."

Earl didn't, not really, but before he could say a thing, another man said, "Earl, you look plenty wore out. You okay?"

"Yes, I'm fine. I now and then go on a toot, like the old man―"

"He was a drinking man, yes, I do remember. Onct boxed my ears so hard made 'em ring for a month," one of the other men said fondly.

"Well, I have the same curse. I'm now living up in Fort Smith and I fell off the wagon. Got so drunk I didn't want the wife to see me. So I somehow turned up here. Sorry to rile you."

"Hell, Earl, it ain't nothing. You ought to move on back here. This is your home, this is where you belong."

"Don't know about that, but maybe. I have a child on the way and we will see."

Then he noticed the stars. Each of these boys was a deputy, each wore a gunbelt loaded with cartridges and a powerful revolver, each had the look of a rangy manhunter to him.

"What're you boys out huntin'? You look loaded for grizzly."

"You ain't heard?"

"How could I? Was drunked up like a crazy bastard last night."

"Earl, you best watch that. Can tear a fellow down. Saw my own daddy go sour with the drink. He died too young, and he looked a hundred when he's only forty-two."

"I hear you on that one," said Earl, who hoped he'd never drink again.

"Anyhow, we're hunting gangsters."

"Gangsters?"

"He ain't heard!"

"Damn, he did do some drinking last night."

"You know that Owney Maddox, the big New York gun what run Hot Springs these past twenty years? The one old Fred Becker caught?"

"Heard of him," Earl said.

"Five bastards busted him out of Garland County jail last night late. Shot their way out. Say it was just as bad as that Alcoa train job or that big shoot-out in the train yard. Killed two men. But Owney's fled, he's free, the whole goddamned state's out looking for him."

"Earl, you okay?"

"Yeah," said Earl.

"You look like a ghost touched you on the nose with a cold finger."

Owney. Owney was out.

Chapter 56

It was exactly the kind of operation Johnny Spanish loved. It demanded his higher skills and imagination. It wasn't merely force. On its own, force was tedious.

Labor enforcers, racketeers, small-potatoes strong-arm boys, the common soldiers of crime, they all used force and it never expressed anything except force.

Johnny always looked for something else. He loved the game aspects of it, the cleverness of the planning, the deviousness of the timing, the feint, the confusion, the misinformation, and the final, crushing, implacable boldness. It was all a part of that ineffable je ne sais quoi that made Johnny Johnny.

Thus at 10:30 P. M. at the Garland County jail in the Town Hall and Police Department out Ouachita Avenue toward the western edge of the city, the first indication of mischief was not masked men with machine guns but something entirely unexpected: tomato pies.

The tomato pie was new to the South, though it had gained some foothold in New Jersey and Philadelphia. It was a large, flat disk of unleavened dough with a certain elastic crispiness to it, coated with a heavy tomato sauce and a gruel of mozzarella cheese, all allowed to coagulate in a particularly intense oven experience. It was quite a taste sensation, both bold and chewy, both exotic and accessible, both sweet and tart, both the best of old Italy and new America at once. Four tomato pies, cut into wedges, were delivered gratis to the jail by two robust fellows from Angelino's Italian Bakery and Deli, newly opened and yet to catch on, to the late-night jail guard shift. The boys hadn't ordered any tomato pies―they'd never even heard of tomato pies!―but free food was one of the reasons they'd gotten into law enforcement in the first place. Even those who had no intention of eating that night found themselves powerless in the grip of obsession, when the odors of the sizzling pies began to suffuse the woeful old lockup. Who could deny the power of the tomato pie, and that devilish, all-powerful, mesmerizing smell that beckoned even the strongest of them onward.

This was the key to the plan. Like many jails built in the last century, Garland County's was constructed on the concentric ring-of-steel design, with perimeters of security inside perimeters of security. One could not be breached until the one behind it was secure. Yet all yielded to the power of the tomato pie.

The guards―seven local deputies and warders and a lone FBI representative since the prisoner, No. 453, was on a federal warrant―clustered in the admin office, enjoying slice after slice.

"This stuff is good."

"It's Italian? Jed, you see anything like this in It-ly?"

"All's I seen was bombed-out towns and starvin' kids and dead Krautheads. Didn't see nothing like this."

"Man, this stuff is good."

"Best thing is, they deliver to your doorway and it's piping hot."

"It's 'Mambo Italiano' in cheese and tomato. I love the toastiness. That's what's so good. I like that a lot."

At that point, two more men from Angelino's showed up, with four more pies.

"You guys-a, you love-a this-a one, it's got the pepperoni sausage, very spicy."

"Sausage?" said the guard sergeant.

"Spicy," said the deliveryman, who opened the flat cardboard box, removed a 1911 Colt automatic with a Maxim silencer, and shot the man once. The silencer wasn't all that silent, and everyone in the room knew immediately that a gun had been fired, but it reduced the sound of the percussion enough to dampen it from alerting others in the building. More guns came out, and a large fellow appeared in the doorway with a BAR.

"Get against the wall, morons," screamed the commander of the commandos―that is, Johnny Spanish at his best.

"Jesus, you shot―"

Johnny knew the tricky moment was in the early going where you asserted control or you lost it and it turned to nightmare and massacre. Therefore, according to his lights, he was doing the humane thing when he shot that man too, knocking him down. If he'd been closer he would have clubbed the man with the long cylindrical heft of the silencer, but that was the way the breaks went, and they didn't go well for that particular guard that particular day.

Herman grabbed the biggest of the men and said simply and forcefully, "Keys," and was obediently led to the steel cabinet on the wall, it was opened, and the keys were displayed for his satisfaction.

"Which one, asshole?" he demanded.

The man's trembly fingers flew to a single key, which Herman seized. With Ding-Dong as his escort, he headed into the interior of the jail.

Iron-barred doors flew open quickly enough and, deep in the warren, they came to the cage that contained Owney Maddox. That door too was sprung, and Owney was plucked from ignominy. He threw on his coat and rushed out, passing the parade as Johnny and his boys led the surrendered guards back into the jail to lock them up away from telephones so that he didn't have to shoot the lot of them.

"Good work," Owney cried. And it was. For his legal situation had collapsed and it appeared a murder indictment for the four guards slain in 1940 was in the offing. A gun had been found in his warehouse that had been used in that crime and the FBI test results had just come in. Meanwhile, all his well-placed friends had deserted him, and even lawyer F. Garry Hurst wasn't sanguine about his chances of survival. A life on the lam, even well financed as his would be, would be no picnic but it was infinitely preferable to life in the gray-bar hotel.

Johnny's team quickly completed the herding operation, locking the bulls back with the cons. Then they methodically ripped out all phone lines. Owney was bundled into the back of an actual Hot Springs police car, driven by Vince the Hat de Palmo in an actual Hot Springs police uniform and he disappeared into the night.

Johnny and his boys left in the next several seconds, but not, of course, before they'd finished the pizza.

Vince drove Owney through the night and at a certain point on the outskirts of town, they pulled into a garage. There, the stolen police car was abandoned, and Owney got into the hollowed-out core of a pile of hay bales already loaded on the back of a hay truck, which was to be driven by two trustworthy Negroes in the Grumley employ. The hay pressed in close around him, like a coffin, and the truck backed out and began an unsteady progress through town. It would only be a matter of minutes before sirens announced the discovery of the breakout, but the plan was to get Owney out of the immediate downtown area before roadblocks were set up. They almost made it.

The sirens began to howl just a few minutes into the trip. Yet nobody panicked. The old truck rumbled along and twice was overtaken by roaring police cars. Once it was stopped, cursorily examined, its hay bales probed and pulled slightly apart. Owney lay still and heard the Negro driver answering in his shuffiingest voice to the police officers. But the cops hurried onward when they grew impatient with the molasses-slow drift of the driver's words as he explained to them that the hay was for Mr. Randy in Pine Mountain, from the farm of Mr. Davidson in Arkadelphia, and so they passed on.

They drove through the night, though at about thirty-five miles an hour. Owney knew the city would be in an uproar. A certain code had been broken when the two police officers had been shot, which meant that now the cops would pursue him with all serious purpose, earlier arrangements having been shattered. But it could be no other way. Very shortly he'd be transferred to a sounder federal incarceration and there'd be no escape from that. Whatever, he understood, his Hot Springs days were over; his fortune had already been transferred, and the ownership of his various enterprises passed on, through the good offices of F. Garry Hurst, to other men, though the benefits to him would accrue steadily over the years.

But he did not believe that retirement was at hand. He would leave the country, live somewhere quietly in wealth and health over the next few years, and things would be worked out. He had too much on too many people for it to be elsewise. Somehow, he knew he wasn't done; possibilities still existed. It would be explained that he was abducted, not escaped; the deaths of the policemen would have nothing to do with him; a deal would be worked out somehow, a year or two in a soft prison, then he'd be back in some fashion or other.

He had to survive. He had but one ambition now, and that was to arrange for the elimination of Ben Siegel, who clearly was the agent of his downfall. It couldn't be done quickly, though, or harshly. Ben had friends on the commission and was said to be doing important work for them in the West. He was, for the time being, protected. But that wouldn't last. Owney knew Ben's impetuousness would make him somehow overreach, his greed would cloud his judgment, his hurry would offend, his hunger would irritate. There would be a time now, very shortly, when Ben was vulnerable, and he would be the one to take advantage of it.

In what seemed long hours later, the quality of the ride changed. It signified the change from macadam to dirt road, and the speed grew even slower. The vehicle bumped and swayed through the night and there was no sound of other traffic as it wound its way deeper and deeper toward its destination.

Finally, they arrived.

The hay bales were pulled aside, and Owney rose and stretched.

"Good work, fellows," he said, blinking and stretching, to discover himself on a dirt road in a dense forest, almost silent except for the heavy breathing of the drivers.

"Yas suh," said one of the drivers.

"You take good care of these boys," he said, addressing Rem Grumley, who stood there with a flashlight in a party of several of his boys, all heavily armed.

"I will, Mr. Maddox," promised Flem.

"The others arrive yet?"

"Johnny and Herman. The other two haven't made it in yet. But they will."

"Yes," agreed Owney.

The two drivers restored the hay and left with the truck. Meanwhile, Flem led Owney and Vince through the trees and down a little incline. A body of water lay ahead, glinting in the moonlight and from the lights of buildings across the way. It was Lake Catherine.

They stepped through rushes, and eased their way down a rocky incline toward the water, under the illumination of the flashlights guided by the Grumleys.

In time, they came to a cave into which the water ran and slid into it.

"Hallo, Owney lad," sang Johnny, rising to greet the man whose life he had just saved. "It's just like the last time, except we didn't steal any payroll, we stole you!"

Chapter 57

The deputies had gone, leaving Earl alone with his headache, his shot-out car windows and his bad news. He shook his head.

Owney makes it out; he'll get away, he's got some smart boys in town with him, he'll get his millions of dollars out, and he'll go live in luxury somewhere. He won't pay-The dead boys of the Garland County raid team and their old leader pass into history as fools and the man they died to stop ends up living with a swimming pool in France or Mexico somewhere.

Earl felt the need to drink again. This one really hurt. This one was like a raw piece of glass caught in his throat, cutting every time he breathed.

The sun was bright, his head ached, he felt the shakiness of the hangover, the hunger from not having eaten in twenty-four hours, and the emptiness of no life ahead of him and memories of what was done stuck in his head forever.

He wiped the sweat from his brow, and decided it was time to go on home and try and pick up the pieces. Yet something wouldn't let him leave.

He knew, finally: he had to see the place one more time.

See the goddamned bam.

He'd seen it in November when he was discharged and stopped off here before going on up to Fort Smith and getting married and joining up with the rest of America for the great postwar boom. Hadn't felt much then. Tried to feel something but didn't, but he knew he had to try again.

He walked through the weeds, the wind whipping dust in his face, the sun beating down hot and ugly, a sense of desolation like a fog over the abandoned Swagger homestead, where all the Swagger men had lived and one of them had died.

The barn door was half open. He slipped in. Dust, cobwebs, the smell of rotted hay and rotting wood. An unpainted bam will rot, Daddy had always said. Yes, and if Daddy wasn't here to see that the barn was painted every two years, it would rot away to nothing, which is what it was doing. The stench of mildew and decomposition also filled the close dense air. The wood looked moist in places, as if you could put a foot through it and it would crumble. Odd pieces of agricultural equipment lay about rusting, like slingblades and the lawn mower that Earl had once used, and spades and hoes and forks. A tractor, dusty and rusting, stood mutely by. The stalls were empty, though of course a vague odor of animal shit also lingered in the air.

But Earl went to where he had to go, which was to the rear of the bam, under a crossbeam. That is where Bobby Lee had hanged himself. There was no mark of the rope on the wood, and no sign of the barrel he had stood upon to work his last task, the tying of the knot, good and tight, the looping of the noose, and the final kick to liberate himself from the barrel's support and from the earth's woe.

He had hung there, as the life was crushed out of his throat, believing that he was going to a better place.

Hope you made it, Bobby Lee. I wasn't no good to you at all. You were the first of the all-too-many young men I let down and who paid with it with their lives. There were legions of these beyond Bobby Lee, platoons full of them, from the 'Canal to the railyard in Hot Springs, all of whom had trusted him and there wasn't a damn thing he could do for them except watch them die.

A thought came to Earl. He could find a rope and do the same trick and that would solve a lot of problems for a lot of people, mostly himself. The faces of boys wouldn't always be there, except when he was in a gunfight, to haunt him and sour his sleep, his food, his life.

But Earl was somehow beyond that now. He had a vague memory of shooting himself in the head in a bathroom in Washington, dead drunk, and finding that he'd forgotten to load the chamber, the only time ever in his whole life when he had pulled a trigger and been surprised at what happened.

Bobby Lee hadn't been so lucky. He wanted to leave the world and no secret part of him intervened. He kicked the barrel and he left the world and went to a better world, where no drunken father would take his anger out on him, and beat him and beat him just to express his own rage at what lurked deep in his own mind. October 2, 1940. Earl had been in the Panama Canal Zone at Balboa, on jungle maneuvers, happy in his far-off mock war, his brain consumed with the tactical problems, the discomforts, the need to lead his men, his worry over a captain who seemed a little too fond of the bottle, the―

No, no. Not October 2,1940. That was something else. That was something else. Bobby Lee killed himself two days later, October 4, 1940. Why had he remembered October 2?

Oh, yes. Now he had it: Carlo Henderson had pointed out that the Alcoa payroll job had been October 2. Five men shot and killed four railway guards in the same damned railyard, and got away scot-free with $400,000 that very quickly came back to Owney Maddox, who probably was going to live off it for the rest of his life.

Something nagged at Earl.

Suddenly he wasn't in the dust-choked bam anymore, where his brother died and where the general agenda was rot and ruin, but only in his head.

Daddy must have beaten Bobby Lee really bad on October 3 or October 4. He must have gotten completely drunk and angry and forgotten himself and beat the boy so hard the boy concluded there was a better place to be and it wasn't in this world.

Why October 4?

Well, why not? If it was going to happen, it was going to happen and any one date was as good as another.

Still Earl couldn't put it quite away. It was two days after the most notorious crime of the era. His daddy would have been busy on roadblock duty all that―

Well, what about that?

Why wasn't Daddy parked out on some roadblock? A robbery that big, leaving that many men dead, the roadblocks would have stayed out for a week at least. Yet somehow in all that mess, Daddy has a chance to get liquored up and comes home and finds his second son and cannot help but release his deepest rage and beats on the boy so bad that the boy decides this life ain't worth living no more and that he will stop the hurting.

Could Charles have had something to do with the robbery?

It almost seemed possible. For with Charles's secret life in Hot Springs, he'd certainly have come to the notice of Owney and the Grumleys. His weakness made him vulnerable to blackmail, as did his gambling debts. If they needed him, he'd have been powerless to stop them. He was made to order for the taking, with his rigidity, his pride, his secret shame, his alcoholism.

And maybe it wasn't till afterward he learned that four men had died and he hadn't just helped robbers but killers as well. And he'd been so overcome with disgust and self-loathing for what he'd done, he'd laid on a big drunk. The biggest. And God help his child when he got in that way.

But then Earl had a sudden laugh. Standing there in that rotting bam, breathing the choking dust and smelling the odor of rot and shit and rust, he laughed hard.

What on earth could my daddy have known to help those birds? Charles Swagger knew nothing! What the hell value was he? He knew how to sap a drunk and get the cuffs on. He knew how to fix an uppity Negro with a stare so hard it would melt a safe. He knew how to shoot, as he'd proved in the Great War, and in the bank in Blue Eye in 1923, bur them boys didn't need shooters, that was clear; they knew how to shoot.

Earl turned, and slipped out of the barn. A cloud had come over the sun, so it was cooler now, and the freshness of the air revived him somewhat as he escaped the dense atmosphere. He allowed himself a smile. His father! A conspirator in a train robbery! That stubborn, mule-proud old bastard with his stern Baptist ways and his secret weakness and rancid hypocrisy! What could he offer such men! They'd laugh at him because they didn't fear him and without the power of fear he had no power at all.

Earl walked over to the porch and sat down. He knew he should leave soon. It was time to go. He had to make peace with his failures, to face the future, to go on and―

But: Who was my father?

Who was he? I don't know. He scared me too much to ever ask the question when the man was alive, and his memory hurt too much to ask it when he was dead. But: Who was he?

He turned and looked into the old house. If there was an answer maybe it was in the house that Charles Swagger inherited from Swaggers before and made his own little invincible kingdom.

Earl rose and went to the door. It had been nailed shut. He hesitated, then remembered that he now owned the place and the door only sealed him off from his own legacy. With a stout kick, he blasted the door open, and stepped inside.

Some houses always smell the same. He'd have recognized it anywhere, though now the furniture was gone, as were the pictures off the wall. The smell was somehow more than the accumulated odors of his mother's cooking and the generations of cooking that had come before; it was more than the grief or the melancholy that had haunted this place; it was more than the bodies that had lived here. It was unique and its totality took him backward.

He remembered himself as a boy of about twelve. The house was so big and dark, the furniture all antiques from the century before. If his father was home, the house would tell him: there'd be a tension somehow in the very structure of the universe. Daddy might not be angry that day, might merely be aloof and distant, but the danger of his explosiveness would float through these rooms and corridors like some sort of vapor, volatile and nerve-breaking, awaiting the spark that set it off.

Or maybe Daddy was drinking. He drank mostly on the weekends but sometimes, for unknown reasons, he'd drink at night and the drink loosened his tongue and let his demons spill out. Maybe he'd hit you, maybe he wouldn't, but it wasn't just the hitting; he'd be on you, like some kind of stallion or bull or bull rooster. He had to dominate you. He couldn't let you breathe.

What're you staring at, goddammit, he'd demand.

What's wrong with you, boy. You some kind of girl? You just stare. I'll knock that goddamned stare off your face.

Charles, the boy didn't mean nothing.

In my house, nobody stares at me. This is my house. Y'all live here because I let you. I set the rules. I provide the food, I pay the hands, I keep the law in this county, I set the rules.

Earl walked from room to room. Each was empty in fact but full in his own mind. He remembered everything, exactly: the placement of the sofa, the size and shape of the dining room table, the old brown pictures of Swaggers from an earlier time and place, he remembered them all.

Whoa, partner, he counseled himself. Don't let your hate just fog your mind.

He tried another approach. If you must understand your father, don't think about what made him angry, since everything made him angry. Think about what made him happy.

He tried to remember his father happy. Was his father ever happy? Had his father ever smiled?

He had no memory of such an event, but in time he realized that being occupied, his demons quelled momentarily by mental activity, was as close to happiness as Charles Swagger, sheriff of Polk County, ever got.

So Earl knew where he had to go.

Not into the kitchen or the bedroom or the cellar, and not upstairs where the boys slept, but back through the house to his father's trophy room.

That was his father's sanctum. That's where his father retreated. It was a sacred temple to… well, whatever. Who knew? Who could say?

Earl opened the door. The old woman had left the room pretty much intact when she left after his death. The guns were gone of course, presumably sold off, and the cabinet removed. Earl remembered standing before it as a child; in fact his one or two pleasant memories with his father seemed to revolve around the guns, which stood locked behind glass. The old man had some nice ones: Winchesters mostly, dark and oily, sheathed in gleamy soft wood, a Hi-Wall in.45-120, a whole brace of lever actions, from an 1873 he'd picked up somewhere to a '92 to an 1895 carbine, all in calibers nobody loaded anymore, like.40–72 and.219 Zipper and a beautiful old 1886 in.40–65; Daddy also had a couple of the little self-loaders, in.401. He had three shotguns for geese in the fall, and he had one bolt gun, the '03 Springfield, which he'd turned into a sleek and beautiful sporter. The guns were treated with respect. If Daddy approved―rare, but it happened―you were allowed to touch the guns. But they were gone. So was the desk, the volumes of works on hunting, reloading and ballistics, the liquor cabinet where the ever-filled bottle of magic amber fluid was kept. So was the map of Polk County, where he had painstakingly tracked his kills with coded color pins each year, yellow for deer, red for boar, black for bear, so that in the end, the map was a tapestry of brightly lit little dots, each signifying a good shot. A blank rectangular space stood on the wall, where the map had been taped for all those years and the paint hadn't faded. Now it was just emptiness.

And she had no stomach for removing the trophies themselves. It was as if Charles's powerful medicine still inhabited them, and looking at them on another wall, he saw they were dusty and ratty, beginning to fall apart like old furniture, their ferocity largely theatrical. Earl nevertheless felt the power of his father's presence.

Charles was a hunter. He stalked the mountains and the meadows of Polk and other nearby counties with his Winchesters, and he shot what he saw. He was a very good shot, an excellent game shot, and he learned the habits of the creatures. He was a man who could always support himself in the woods, and he had that Swagger gift, mysterious and unsourced, for understanding the terrain and making the good read, then finishing up with a brilliant shot on the deflection.

Earl remembered; his father took him hunting and taught him to shoot, and taught him to track, taught him patience and stoicism and a bit of crazed courage, the willingness to ignore the body and do what had to be done. And the odd thing was, they were skills that let Earl survive the dark journey that would become his fate. So he did in fact get something from his daddy, a great gift, even if he never realized it at the time.

He looked at the heads on the wall. Bear, boar, three deer, an elk, a cougar, a bobcat, a ram, all bearing either a graceful furl of horn or a mouthful of snaggly teeth. like any trophy hunter, his father took only the best, the oldest animals, who had long since passed their genes along to progeny. The taxidermist was a fellow in Hatfield, and he too had the gift.

The animals seemed to live on that wall. They were frozen in expressions of anger or assault, their lips curled back, their fangs bared, the full animal majesty of their power exploding off their faces. It was all make-believe, of course; Earl had been to the shop and the taxidermist was a bald, fat little cracker who smelled of chemicals and had a shop full of marble eyes sent from 34th Street in New York, intricate replicas of the real thing that gleamed and seemed to stare, but were merely glass.

What does this room tell me?

Who was my father?

Who was this man?

He stared at the trophy animals on the wall, and they stared back at him, relendess, if locked in place, still spoiling for a great fight.

What did my father know?

On the evidence of this room, only the pleasures of the hunt. And the pleasures of the land the hunt was conducted upon.

That's what a hunter knows. A hunter knows the land. A hunter roams the land, and even if he's not hunting that particular day, he's paying attention, storing up information, recording details that someday may come in handy.

That's what my father would know: the Arkansas mountain wilderness, as well as any man before or since.

That was the only place he was ever really happy.

Chapter 58

Owney was nervous. Across the way, there seemed a lot of activity. Searchlights and the pulsing flash of red gumballs cut the night as the cops stopped cars, threw up roadblocks, sent out search teams and dogs on the hunt for him. But the lake was serenely calm. It lay in the dark like a sheet of glass, glinting with illumination from the various points of light on the shore.

"Don't worry," said Johnny. "It'll be like the last time. It'll go without a hitch."

"I ain't worried about the lake" said Owney. "I'm worried about the forest. How can you remember? It was so complicated. It was at night."

"I have a photographic memory," said Johnny. "Certain things I don't forget and you can take that to the bank." He smiled, radiating charm. He held all the cards, and he knew it.

"And then we talk money."

"There's plenty, believe me," Owney assured him.

"That's the problem. I don't believe you. No matter what I ask for you'll cry-baby and try to jew me down. But I know you've got millions."

"I don't have millions," said Owney. "That's a fuckin' myth."

"Oh, I've done some checking," said Johnny. "I have a figure in mind. A very nice figure. After all, we are saving your life. It seems like I should take you for everything, because I'm saving everything."

"Is this a getaway or a kidnapping?"

"Well, actually, it's a wee bit of both," said Johnny. "We won't leave you with nothing."

"No, you wouldn't want to do that," said Owney. "You want me to be your friend after all this is over. I'll get back, somehow, you know I will. I'm Owney Maddox. I ran the Cotton Club. I ran Hot Springs. This is just a little setback. I ain't going into no retirement. I'll be big in the rackets again, you'll fuckin' see."

"Yeah, sure," said Johnny.

"I think I'll move out to California. The opportunities are golden and I got a feeling there's about to be a change in management real soon. A certain party's luck just ran out."

It was almost time.

Johnny checked his watch and went to the mouth of the cave and looked across the lake. Owney followed and sure enough, out of the darkness they saw the white flashing sails of a large craft. That was the core of Johnny's plan. He knew that the law enforcement imagination was somehow drawn to the drama of the high-speed getaway. Thus cops thought of roads mainly, and of airplanes and railways. Crime was modem, fast-paced, built on speed. Who would ever suspect―a sailboat?

It was a beauty, owned by Judge LeGrand, a fifty-footer under two masts and a complexity of sails that pulled it gracefully and silently across the water. The judge entertained on it many times, taking visiting congressmen and dtans of industry out for elegant sails across the diamond-blue water, under the diamond-blue sky, swaddled in the green rolling pine hills of the Ouachitas, where they sipped champagne and ate oysters and laughed the evening away like the important men they were, so that when they lost their hundreds of thousands at Owney's gaming tables, they still went home with wondrous tales of Southern hospitality and sleek nights under starry skies.

The boat drew four feet; she was a trim craft, pure teak and brass, with a crew of four to run her and an auxiliary engine―nobody knew about this, it was her secret―that could propel her through the water in the absence of wind and had the special gift of taking her along narrow passages under mechanical power if necessary, and it would be very necessary.

The boat was too cumbersome to dock, so it simply put up at anchor seventy-five feet out and a dinghy, propelled by two oarsmen, slid toward them.

"All right, you boys, let's get aboard," Johnny commanded as the small craft nudged ashore.

They left the cave, scuttled down the bit of hillside and ducked among the reeds until they reached the prow, which was being held steady at a taut rope's end by a crewman. Owney clambered aboard, shivering ever so slightly as the breeze picked up. The boat's insubstantiality annoyed him―he liked things solid―as he found a seat. He felt it continue to slipside and tremble as the others came aboard. But then, quickly enough, they were off and the progress to the bigger boat was easy.

Hands drew Owney aboard.

"Good evening, Mr. Maddox," said Brick Stevens, the boat's skipper, a hot local available bachelor who secredy (Owney knew) was screwing both the judge's daughter and his wife, "how are you, sir?"

"I'll be much better when I'm sipping a pifia colada in Acapulco," he said.

"It'll just be a couple of days. The judge sends his best wishes."

"The judge better keep sending his money. I own this town, after all."

"I'm sure the judge realizes that, sir."

After Owney, the five gunmen, encumbered with their weapons, clambered aboard.

"All right, boys," said Brick, "let's go down below. Meanwhile, we'll be off."

They stepped uneasily down the teak steps into what was a stateroom, though not much of one, more a state crawlspace. But inside, yes, it was nice, more teak, with a small bar, lots of liquor.

Owney settled down on the sofa. The others took up chairs and whatever.

"I'm going to turn the lanterns down, fellows," said Brick. "It'll be safer that way."

"How long, skipper?"

"Can't be more than four hours. There's enough breeze and I'll go three sheets. I know these waters like the back of my hand. I'll have you where you want to be by twenty-two bells. That's ten o'clock for you landlubbers."

"We're all landlubbers here," said Herman Kreutzer, holding his BAR loosely.

"You will be careful with that?" requested Brick.

"Sure. But if a State Police cruiser tries to board us, you'll be glad I've got it."

"This is an antique, old man. We can't have it shot up."

"Then sail good, skip."

The skipper ducked back upstairs and in just a few minutes the boat began to edge forward in the darkness as its sails caught and harnessed the wind. It was like a train, in that it seemed to take forever to get going, but then, suddenly, had amassed enormous smooth speed, and flashed across the water.

Owney looked out the porthole. He could see a few lights, but wherever they were, the shore was mostly dark. There was no sound except for the snapping of the sail in the wind and the rush of the water being pushed aside by the boat's knifelike prow.

'"We're okay on time?" asked Owney.

Johnny made a show of squinting at his watch, and then a bigger show of making abstract calculations in his head, and finally came up with an answer.

"Absolutely okay."

"Because the longer we hang around, the greater the chance of someone spotting me."

"I know it."

"And you've made the calls, it's all set up, these are reliable people."

"Very reliable. This is the soft way out. It worked before, it'll work again. Think of the last time as a rehearsal. This is the performance. Everything's set. The critics will love it. You'll be a hit on Broadway."

"I don't care about hits on Broadway. I care about hits in Las Vegas."

"It will happen."

"The fuck. Who the fuck he think he is! Braque! I bought that goddamn painting from a legit dealer. How's I supposed to know it was hot?"

"Owney, Owney, Owney," crooned Johnny. "You're home free. You'll have your freedom, your vengeance and your wealth. No man in America is better off than you."

The boat skimmed across the smooth water, and Owney settled down and watched as the lights of Hot Springs passed on the right and then got smaller and dimmer until they died away altogether.

Finally, a far shore grew near, nearer still until it seemed they were out of lake. They were, in fact. They had reached the northernmost point of Lake Hamilton. They were at the mouth of the Ouachita River.

Owney heard the captain giving commands. He cut sail and dropped anchor. It took his well-trained crew only a few minutes to rig for running by motor. Quickly they set up the Johnson outboard on the fantail, and ginned it up. It sounded like a sewing machine. Brick took the helm and guided them into the narrow mouth of the river.

But Brick knew what he was doing. It was said he'd run rum for Joe Kennedy in the old days, making a fortune before moving south and joining the horsey set. He was an adventurer too, and had skippered a PT boat in the war. He got a Jap destroyer, it was said, but maybe it was only a landing craft or a cargo scow. But he knew his art: he took the boat up the narrow strait of the Ouachita River, between darkened shores so close they could almost be touched, past the little river town of Buckville. Hot Springs was far behind, and then, up near Mountain Pine, the river shifted direction, widened, and headed west into the vast Ouachita wilderness. The boat gulled along against the current, and the men finally came on deck. Around them was only darkness and the sense of the forest so close and engulfing it almost had them. But they pressed on to the west, passing into Montgomery County. They were headed west toward escape.

In the vast quiet darkness, Owney began to relax at last. He was going to make it, he finally believed.

Chapter 59

Where was he? She couldn't put it out of her mind. He was in trouble. They had gotten him. He had survived so much, but he had not survived this last thing with the gangsters.

She called long distance to a newspaper in Hot Springs. Were there any incidents, any killings, anything involving a man named Earl Swagger.

The man said, "Lady, ain't you heard? We had a big prison break down here. The whole town's going crazy looking for Owney Maddox. You ought to call the cops, maybe they'd know."

Eventually she got to a lieutenant of detectives who chewed her out for interrupting them in their important work of capturing this escaped criminal, but he finally told her the last anybody had ever seen of that disagreeable individual, Earl Swagger, he was on his way out of the county and if she loved her husband, she'd make it clear to him he was never to return.

That was a night before.

Where had Earl gone?

She tried to settle herself down, but she just sat there, feeling nauseated and frightened in the darkness. There was nobody to help her. That was Earl's duty. Was he involved in the manhunt for this Owney, a gangster? He had told her he was off, he was out of that business, he'd been fired and he was coming home and that's all there was to it. He was coming home to work in the sawmill.

But she thought he was involved in the matter of Owney. The gangsters had finally caught up with him in some way. She thought of him off in the woods, the gangsters having executed him and dumped him in a grave that would go forever unmarked. Such a cruel end for a hero! It would be so unfair.

In her abdomen, her child moved. She felt it kick ever so gently, and that too was strange. Something about the child frightened her, although the doctor kept saying that everything was fine. But it wasn't fine; small signals of danger―her fainting spells, for example―kept arriving as if the child, somehow, were sending her messages, warning her that he needed help already, that there would be difficulties.

She went to the desk, and got out the map of Arkansas. She looked at the highways. Clearly, it was no more than a few hours―maybe four or five at most―from Hot Springs to Camp Chaffee. There was no reason for Earl to be missing.

She couldn't stay put. She rose, nervous, not knowing what to do. It was near dark.

She went next door to Mary Blanton's and knocked.

Mary answered, a cigarette in her hand, and immediately read the distress on Junie's face.

"Junie, what on earth? Honey, you look awful. Is that critter kicking up a storm?"

"It's Earl. He was supposed to be back from Hot Springs last night and I haven't heard a thing."

"He's probably parked in a bar, honey. You give a man a day off and sure as hell, that's where he'll end up. My Phil'd waste his life among the Scotch bottles if I let him."

"No, Mary, it can't be that. He swore to me he was off the stuff forever. He swore."

"Honey, they all say that. Believe me, they do."

"I'm so afraid. I called the police and the newspapers, but they just told me he left late yesterday afternoon."

"Do you want to come in and wait here, honey? You're welcome. I'm just reading the new Cosmopolitan,"

"I'd like to look for him."

"Oh, Junie, that's not wise. The baby's due in two weeks. You never know about these things. You shouldn't be off on some wild-goose chase. And what if Earl calls?"

"But I'll go crazy if I just sit around. I just want to drive down to Waldron and then over to Hot Springs. That'd be the way he'd come, I know. We'll run into him and that'll be that. But I just can't sit there anymore."

"You can't drive alone."

"I know."

"Well, let me get my hat, honey. Looks like the gals are going on a little trip. Wouldn't mind stopping for a beer."

"I'm not supposed to drink, they say."

"Well, honey, there's nothing to stop me from drinking, now, is there?"

"No ma'am," said Junie, already feeling better.

"You just watch real good. You have a Coke, and you watch me drink a beer." She winked good-naturedly.

Mary got her hat and the two went out to Mary's car, a 1938 DeSoto that could have used some bodywork. Mary started the old vehicle, and they backed out of the driveway and headed through the maze of gravel roads in the vets village.

"Do you think we'll ever get out?" Mary asked.

"They say they're building more houses. If you had a good war record you can get a loan. But it'll still be a wait."

"All that time when Phil was in the Pacific, I kept thinking how wonderful it was going to be. Now he's back and"―she laughed bitterly, her signature reaction to the complexities of the world―"it's not wonderfiil at all. In fact, it plain stinks."

"It'll work out" was all Junie could think to say.

"Honey, you are such an incorrigible optimist! Oh, well, at least we won the war, we have the atom bomb, our men are back in one piece and we have a roof over our heads, even if it's made of tin and smells like the inside of an airplane!"

They laughed. Mary could always get a laugh out of Junie. Junie was so duty-haunted, so straight-ahead, so committed to the ideal, that Mary was a refreshment to her, because Mary saw through everything, considered every man who ever lived a promise-breaking, drunken, raping lout, and in her day had riveted more Liberator fuselages than any man in the Consolidated plant.

The camp vanished behind them as they hit Route 71 and followed that road's generally southward course as it plunged down the western spine of Arkansas.

There was little enough to see in the daylight and even less in the twilight. Traffic was light.

"You know, we could miss Earl's car. It would be easy to do."

"I know. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea."

"If it makes you feel better, you should do it. You get few enough chances in this lifetime to feel better."

Small towns fled by: Rye Hill, Big Rock, Witcherville, little dots on a map that turned out to be a gas station and a few outbuildings of indistinct size and meaning. It grew darker.

"Why don't we stop and get that beer," said Junie.

"Hmmm, now I'm not so sure. These boys out here, they may think we're fast city gals out larking about. See, all men think that all women secredy desire them and want to be conquered and treated like slaves. I don't know where they get that idea, but I do know the further you get from city lights, the stronger that idea becomes, although it's certainly very strong in the city too. And the fact that you're carrying thirty extra pounds of baby'll just get 'em to thinking you want a last adventure before you're a mama forever."

Junie laughed. Mary had such a bold way of putting things, which is why some of the other wives in the village didn't like her, but exactly why Junie liked her so much.

She looked at the map.

"Up ahead is a city called Peverville. It's a little larger.

Maybe we'll find a nice, decent place where nobody'll whisde or make catcalls."

"Oh, if they don't do it out loud, they'll do it in then-heads, which is the same thing, only quieter."

The land here was quiet and dark; it was all forest, and the gende but insistent up and down of the road suggested they were going through mountains. Occasionally a car passed headed in the other direction, but it was never Earl's old Ford.

"I hope he's all right," Junie said.

"Honey, if all the Japanese in the world couldn't kill Earl Swagger, what makes you think some likkered-up cornpone-licking crackers from Hot Springs could?"

"I know. But Earl says it's not always who's the best. When the guns come out, it's so much luck too. Maybe his luck finally ran out."

"Earl is too ornery. Luck wouldn't dare let him down, he'd grab it by the throat and fix that Marine Corps stare on it, and it would give up the ghost!"

Again, in spite of herself, Junie had to laugh.

"Mary, you are such a character!"

"Yes ma'am," said Mary.

An approaching car looked to be Earl's, and both women bent forward, peering at it for identification. But as it sped by, a much older man turned out to be the driver.

"Thought we had us something for just a while," said Mary.

"You know, Mary," said Junie, "I think maybe we better head on back."

"Are you all right?"

"Suddenly I don't feel so good."

"Is that critter kicking up a storm?"

"No, it's just that I seem to be cramping or something."

"Oh, gosh, does it hurt?"

Junie didn't answer, and Mary saw from the pallor that had stolen over her features that it did.

"Do you want to go to the hospital?"

"No, but if I could just―"

She hesitated.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," she said. "I made a mess. I don't know."

Mary pulled off, reached up and flicked on the compartment light.

"Oh, God," she said, for Junie was soaked.

Suddenly Junie curled in pain.

"My water just broke," she said. "I am so sorry about the car."

"Forget the car, honey. The car don't mean a thing. You are going to have that damn baby right now. We have to find you a hospital."

"Earl!" screamed Junie as the first contraction hit, "oh, Earl, where are you?"

Chapter 60

The boat was behind them. They had left it at the River Bluff Float Camp, where the river grew too rough to be navigated. Now they traveled through the darkness in a 1934 V-8 Ford station wagon, primer dull, which had come from the Grumleys' store of boodegging vehicles. It had a rebuilt straight-8 Packard 424 engine, super-strong shocks, a rebuilt suspension and could do 150 flat-out if need be. Revenooers had called it the Black Bitch for years.

Forest was everywhere, and the narrow, winding road suggested that civilization was far, far behind.

Owney kept looking at his watch.

"Are we going to make it?"

"We'll make it fine," said Johnny. "I set it up, remember."

Now there was just this last, long pull through the mountains, along a ribbon of moonlit macadam; and then a final rough plunge down old logging roads, the exact sequence to which Johnny swore he had committed to memory.

"Suppose something goes wrong? Suppose we have a flat tire or have to evade a roadblock, and we fall behind schedule."

"If we're not there, he comes back next day, same time, no problem. It's flexible. I accounted for that. But we have clear road and we ought to keep going. The sooner we're out of here, me boy, the sooner you're enjoying the pleasures of them dusky Mex women."

"Okay, okay," said Owney. "I hate being nervous. I want to fucking do something."

"This is the hard part, old man," said Johnny.

"Say, Owney," said Herman Kreutzer from the back seat, "whatever happened to your English accent? It seems to have escaped too."

The gunman erupted in laughter. This annoyed Owney, but until he had reestablished himself, he was subject to such predations. His misery increased.

"Uh oh," said Johnny.

"Oh, shit," said Herman.

Owney felt the sudden infusion of red light as, just behind them, a police or sheriff's car had just turned on its lights and siren.

"Fuck, he's got us," said a gunman.

"We're going to have to pop this boy," said Johnny.

"No," said Owney. "I'll handle it. You guys, you been laughing at me like I'm nobody. I'll show you Mr. Fucking New York rackets."

"Oh, he's a tough one," said Vince the Hat.

"Let the boy operate," said Johnny.

Johnny guided the car to the shoulder and eased to a halt: Owney got out, raised his hands high.

The policeman―no, a sheriff's deputy, or possibly the sheriff himself, for the black-and-white's door read SHERIFF and under that MONTGOMERY COUNTY, ARK.―climbed out of the car, but kept his distance. He was not distincdy visible behind the haze of lights.

"I'm unarmed," called Owney.

He spread his coat open to show that he had no pistol. Then he started to walk forward.

"Y'all just hold it up there," said the sheriff.

"Ah, of course. Meant no harm, sir," said Owney in his best stage British.

"Who are you? Mite late to be pleasure-cruising through the mountains in a big oP station wagon."

"We were enjoying the sporting possibilities of Hot Springs," said Owney. "Our money having run rather abrupdy dry, we decided to head straight toward Fayetteville. We may have taken a wrong turn. Glad you're here, Sheriff. If you'd just―"

He took another step forward.

"You hold it," said the sheriff. "And tell all them boys to stay in that car. I am armed, and I am a good shot, and I'd hate there to be any trouble, because if there is, one or t'other of you and your boys is going to Fayetteville in a pine box."

"Yes sir. No need for violence. We'll show proper ID and you may verify our identities via your radio. I appreciate that people are jumpy tonight, what with that fellow escaping prison in Hot Springs. We've been stopped twice at roadblocks already."

He kept advancing.

"You hold it there, pardner," said the sheriff, putting his hand to a big gun in his holster, and at the same time looking quickly to the car to make certain nobody had stepped out and all the windows had remained rolled up.

"Sheriff, uh―?"

"Turner, sir."

"Sheriff Turner, I appreciate your nervousness given the drama of the evening. But I wish to assure you I am harmless. Here, go ahead, search me. You'll see."

Owney assumed the position against the fender of the police vehicle; the fellow gave him a quick pat-down and came to the conclusion he was unarmed.

But Owney also saw that he was a professional, and shrewd. He hadn't approached the Ford but stayed back by his own vehicle. No one in the car could get a shot at him, not without opening the doors and leaning out, and he was probably very good with his gun. If they all jumped out of the car, they might get him, but not before he'd gotten two or three of them. And he could then dip back into the woods, pop their tires and make it to a phone to call in reinforcements quick. Sly dog.

"What business are you in, sir?" asked the sheriff, somewhat relaxed that he'd found no gun on Owney.

"Well, I've been known to wager a penny on the ponies, the fall of a card or the roll of a die."

"Gambler, eh? But you didn't do too well in Hot Springs."

"Had a run of bad luck, yes. But I'll be back, you can make book on it."

"Well, y'all be careful. Ain't no speed limit here but you were moving mighty fast. Don't want to scrape you off a tree."

"No, indeed."

"Say, what was the name again?"

"Vincent Owen Maddox."

The sheriff's face knitted with a little confusion, for the name sounded so familiar.

"And you say you're headed to Fayetteville."

"Headed toward Fayetteville, old fellow."

"Well, Mr. Maddox―"

Then his face lit with amazement as he realized that the Owen became Owney, and his face set hard, for in an instant he knew who he was up against, and his hand flew fast and without doubt toward the big gun at his hip.

But Owney was faster.

In less than half a second he had a small silver revolver in his hand, as if from nowhere, as if from the very air itself, and he fired one bullet with a dry pop into the sheriff's chest. The big man never reached his Colt and stepped back, for the bullet packed so little impact it felt only like a sting, but in the next second the blood began to gush from his punctured aorta and he sat down with an ashen look, then toppled sideways to the earth.

"All right, you fellows," called Owney. "Get him in his car and get it off the road, chop chop now."

Johnny's gunmen got out of the Ford and dragged the dead police officer to his car. Vince started it, and began to creep along the road until he found enough of a hill to drive it over so that it would tumble off and into the underbrush.

"Say," said Johnny, "ain't you a fast piece of work. Where'd you get that little ladies' gun?"

"When they delivered my suit to the cave, it was tucked in a pocket."

"I don't mean that. I mean, where were you packing it? I didn't realize you were heeled. You sure got it out in a flash."

"I am a man of some dexterity."

"Where was it?"

Owney smiled, and pulled up his coat sleeve. His shirtsleeve underneath was unbuttoned and a black piece of elastic circled his wrist. Quickly he slid the gun under it, then drew the suit sleeve back down over it, where it disappeared to all but the most discerning eye. But Johnny could see it was an old nickel-plated revolver of the sort called a bicycle gun, a.32 rimfire from very early in the century, that lacked a trigger guard and had a one-inch barrel.

"It's a trick another sheriff once taught me," said Owney.

Chapter 61

My father knew the land. That's what my father knew. But what good is that? What value is that? What does that get you?

Earl walked out onto the porch, where he could see the sim setting to the west. But it was a quiet twilight in Polk County and no cars had headed on down the road in quite some time.

My father knew the land.

What does that tell me?

But the more Earl hammered against it, the harder it became.

He knew this land. What the hell good would that be to train robbers in Hot Springs, fifty odd miles away. He knew Polk County, an out-of-the-way spread of land, mostly mountain wilderness with a few one-horse towns far to the west, hard up against Oklahoma. What was there about Polk County that could be important to these men?

Well, maybe they could hide out in the mountainous trees of the Ouachitas. But there were plenty of trees, mountains and wilderness in Garland County itself or in Montgomery County. What would they need to come an extra county over here for?

He tried to recall what he knew about that robbery, what old D. A. had told him months back. Five armed men, an inside job, four guards killed, a huge payroll in cash taken, and they got away without a trace.

He applied his tactical imagination to it. It was a military problem. You have to leave an area. You are behind enemy lines. You are being hunted in force by all police agencies. How do you do it?

Well, obviously, you drive. But to where? Roadblocks are already out. You can't get far by road. Do you take a train? No, don't be ridiculous. Well, maybe you don't leave. Maybe you go to ground for a month and wait the manhunt out. You have, after all, friends in the area who can hide you. But… the longer you stay there, the more likely that somebody will notice something, somebody will talk, somebody will see something.

That leaves a boat. Could you take a boat? Could you ride up the Ouachita River to― well, to where?

That was interesting. You might go by boat, and possibly the cops wouldn't be covering the river or the lake because they'd believe you'd be on the road. But… a boat to where? You take the Ouachita to where? It would make most sense to take it south, toward the Mississippi, and he didn't even know if the Ouachita reached the Mississippi. And that took them into the flat part of the state, where―

This was getting him nowhere. It was poindess speculation. Maybe they did take a boat. Where would it get them, which way would they go, who could know now, six years later? And what difference would it make?

He heard a dry light whine from far off. It was so familiar he almost didn't notice it. He'd heard it in the Pacific a million times. He looked into the fading light and finally caught it, a plane, a silver speck up high, where the sunlight still commanded, glowing against the darkening sky, entirely too far to be identified.

An airplane, he thought.

They might go someplace where they could be picked up by an airplane. This suddenly seemed reasonable. You get into an airplane and you're free. It's 1940, after all. There's no radar, because it's still a secret; and the big wartime push hasn't begun, so the system of commercial aviation is haphazard and roundabout, planes come and go every day.

They go to an airplane.

What kind of airplane?

There are four men. They all have automatic weapons and presumably some supply of ammunition. They have clothes because they've been living in the area prior to their raid, and they have the trophy of their efforts, the payroll. Close to half a million, in cash. In small bills, in bags or a strongbox or some such. All that cash, maybe a hundred pounds of it. He had no idea how much a half million in small bills would weigh but it would be considerable.

So: What kind of airplane?

Not a Piper Cub or any other small puddle-jumper, like the observation jobs he'd seen in the war. Maybe you could land all right, but it would be too dangerous to take off again with all that weight.

Therefore: it would have to be a multiengine plane, a substantial airplane that could carry five men, their equipment, their money. Something like… a DC-3? No, too big. But maybe some kind of Beechcraft, twin-engined, like the staff planes the brass had used in the war. You never saw them in combat zones, but behind the lines they were ubiquitous. Heavy, slow, low, but planes that were dependable and could land anywhere it was fiat.

So where would you land such a plane?

Obviously, the airports were out, because they'd be watched by cops. You couldn't land that big a plane in a farm meadow, or anywhere near civilization because it would clearly be spotted, and you probably couldn't do it at night, because it would be too dangerous.

So: you had to find a big, flat field somewhere, but somewhere far from prying eyes, somewhere in the wilderness, in the mountains, somewhere safe and secure, unlikely to be stumbled upon. That would leave out a road, a farm, a park, it would leave out just about anywhere.

Where would you land a plane? And what on earth would his father the hunter have to do with it?

A memory came to Earl. It was indistinct at first, a blurred image from some deep pool where experiences had been recorded. It was from his childhood. He had a vision of a remote field, a valley, yellow and rolling. He was there with his father and a few other men. It was maybe 1927 or '28, he was maybe twelve or fourteen years old. He heard his father's voice, instructing.

"Now you pay attention," the man was saying, in that low rumble that was his voice, "because I don't want to have to say this twice, Earl. You want to look to the treeline. The mule deer is a creature of the treeline. He likes the boundary between the open and the closed. He also likes the wind to be blowing across the open, so that he can smell anything tracking him. He won't go into the full open, particularly during hunting season, because he knows he's being hunted. Don't know how, but he does. He's smart that way. He wants the tender shoots of the margins. This is where you will find him, in the dawn or possibly at twilight. You must be alert, for his moves can sometimes seem magical, and you must be patient, for there is nothing in his mind to distract him, as there will be to distract you, so you must compel yourself to stillness. Do you understand, Earl? Are you listening, boy?"

Of course he was listening. Who could not listen to Daddy? Daddy demanded respect, and Daddy got it. Earl sat with his rifle as his father explained to him, as he was introduced into the rituals of the hunt.

But now he remembered and he saw: a wide field, so remote that to see it was to feel oneself the first white man in the territory in the year 1650-something, and to marvel at it, its length, its yellowness, the low hills that encased it to make it a valley and the far, blue peaks of higher mountains.

A name came out of his memory.

Hard Bargain Valley, a splash of flat yellow in the mountains, called such because some westward pilgrims had thought to winter there and by spring all that remained was food for the crows. Earl remembered the crows wheeling overhead, back and forth, like bad omens. God had made a hard bargain with the pilgrims indeed.

Could you land a plane on Hard Bargain Valley?

Yes, he knew in a second. You could. Easily. A bigger plane too, not a Cub but a substantial twin-engined craft.

Now it came together in a moment, as if all the parts of the puzzle had been sunk in his brain all these years and at some darker deeper level he'd been working on them. Now they fit. They announced themselves with a thunderclap, a vision of purity so intense it almost knocked him back.

Five men, heavily armed, fleeing Hot Springs. They have to get to a remote spot where a plane can pick them up.

There's only one such place within a night's travel. But how will they find it? There're no paved roads in, only a hopeless mesh of old logging trails, some drivable, some not. Who would help them?

It would have to be a man who knew the territory better than anyone. Sheriff Charles Swagger, the great lawman and hunter.

And they'd know about Swagger. He had a secret life in Hot Springs. Once a month, he'd show up for gambling and whoring and sporting with the special, secret vice he loved the best. Owney Maddox, that champion of human weakness, would know this. He'd have the leverage on old Charles and there would be the man, a paragon of public morality for so long, suddenly caught in the grip and crushed into obedience by a gangster.

So Charles would draw up a route. He would then engineer the roadblocks so that the fleeing men could get through them when they reached Polk County. Then he would meet them deep in the forest, and take them the last few miles to Hard Bargain Valley, and it would be a good bargain for them, for the plane would come at dawn and pluck them away and they'd have disappeared forever. The $400,000 would be quickly enough laundered and it would return in a few weeks to Hot Springs, as working capital for Owney Maddox, who would use it to build the Southern, the most elegant and successful casino in America.

Earl could see the last melancholy act too. Charles hadn't known men had been killed in the robbery. He'd gotten in because it was just robbers stealing money from Big Business like Alcoa and the money would go to gamblers, it was just the way the world worked, victimless, corrupt, ancient. But four men had died and suddenly his father is an accessory to murder. It sickens him, and that's why he returns home drunk and bent with anger at himself, and who does he run into but his young son, Bobby Lee, and the boy becomes the focus of his fury, his deep disappointment in himself, all his failures. He beats the boy and beats him and beats him, then passes out. Maybe he beats him to death and strings up the body to hide the crime. Maybe the boy hangs himself. But that is how it had to be. The evil father, the helpless son, the one man who had a chance to stop it fled to another family called the United States Marine Corps.

It was at that point Earl realized that they would do tonight exactly what they did in 1940. Of course. It was the same problem, except the treasure wasn't a payroll, it was Owney Maddox himself. It had worked before. The same route, the same arrangements with a plane, the same destination. Only this time they didn't need a Charles Swagger because they were smart, one of them had paid attention and he could find Hard Bargain Valley on his own.

Earl looked at his watch. It was near 8:00 and the sun was almost gone.

They were going to get away with it, because nobody else knew where Hard Bargain Valley was or could get there in time.

He himself had no idea where it was. It was somewhere in the mountain vastness that even now was fading into darkness and that no one could find who hadn't been there before and didn't know the way and he didn't know the way and there was no map, the map was gone.

Then Earl remembered his daddy's room. The map was gone, yes, but its outline still was described by that bright patch of unfaded paint.

He turned swifdy, walked back through the house and entered the room.

He faced the emptiness.

Nothing. What had he expected? It was just a square of lighter paint, even now losing its distinction as the light failed.

He tried to remember what it showed. It showed Polk, one of Arkansas's most westerly, most poverty-stricken, most mountainous, most remote counties. He tried to think: What is the essential quality of Polk County? He tried to remember as he stared at the square: What did I see here? Remember what you saw. Remember what was here.

He remembered. A big map, with few roads and many creeks, and many blank areas marked UNMAPPED. The swirl of color depicting different elevations as the larger forms of the mountains were at least suggested. But what was the pure quality of Polk County by shape?

He remembered: it was very regular. It was, like the sheet of paper that documented it, almost perfecdy rectangular, with only a flare to the northwesterly comer and the southwesterly quarter to render the shape irregular. But otherwise it was drawn as if with a ruler, by men who laid out counties from far away without any knowledge of what the land was and therefore in defiance of the land. The borders didn't follow mountain crests or rivers or natural forms in the land; they defied them, they bisected them, they conquered them.

So the rectangle on the wall, it almost represented the pure shape of the county, with those deviations in the corner that were largely irrelevant because neither of them contained unmapped areas.

Earl tried to remember. What else was there? What else marked the county? He couldn't remember anything, any roads, any mountains, any creeks or rivers. It was over sixteen years since he'd really been here. How could he be expected to―

Pins. Pins. The map was festooned with pins where Charles Swagger had taken game and over the years he'd taken a lot of game, and he loved mule deer most of all, mulies they were called, magical creatures of muddy earth color who exploded from stillness to grace to invisibility in the blinking of an eye, and if you even saw one, much less managed to kill one, you felt that nature had been benevolent.

Earl looked away, then looked back again, seeing nothing. Then he edged sideways so that he saw the blank space on the wall at an angle, and could read the texture of it and that's when he saw them.

Of course. The map was gone. The pins were gone. The Swaggers were gone, all of them, dead or cursed, especially this last one, but what remained after it all were the pinholes.

Scanning the empty space from an angle, Earl quickly began to pick them up, here, there, one at a time, little pricks in the plaster, perhaps visible only in this light, with its play of shadows to bring out the irregularities. A prick here, a prick there, two pricks close together and―

That would be it. That had to be it.

A large concentration of pricks lay in the northwest comer of the lightened space, maybe thirty-five or forty. Not in a cluster, but in two parallel lines, suggesting the margins of the treeline defining the valley itself. That's where Hard Bargain Valley would be. That's where Charles Swagger went every year and every year he tagged his mulie buck, in the margins, just off the flat, remote high field of yellow grass, over which crows heeled and cruised, like omens of ill chance.

Earl knew: it's in the northwest comer of the county.

He knew if he could get close enough by car, he could hump it in if he worked like the devil. He'd need a county map―there was an Arkansas state map in large scale in his car, and with it he could get close enough. It was maybe two hours' driving, maybe four hours of hard hike and climbing. He glanced at his watch. He could make it by dawn with an hour to spare.

He only needed one more thing.

He went into the third dusty stall and bent to the boards against the wall. He remembered hiding here in the long ago, from his father's rages. Earl! the old man would cry, Early you get your ass in herey goddammit! But Daddy never found him though it only forestalled the beatings a few minutes. No one else ever found him there either. He bet Bobby Lee had a secret place too, but this was Earl's.

With a few swift tugs he removed the boards from the wall. He leaned in―as he had when he stopped at the farm months ago, though then to emplace, not remove. He leaned in and dragged it out, a green wooden box wrapped in a tarpaulin, which bore the stamp SWAGGER USMC atop it, denoting that it was a sea chest that had followed its owner from ship to ship and battle to battle. He dragged the case into the bam, flicked on the bare-bulb light and pried it open.

More objects wrapped in canvas lay inside. He removed them, then unwrapped them, seeing each gleam dully in the yellow light. Each still wore that slick of oil that would keep it safe from the elements. He knew the parts so well. The frame and stock group, the barrel and receiver group, the bolt and recoil-spring group, the buffer and buffer pad. They all slid together with the neatness of something well designed. He knew the gun's trickery, all the little nuances of its complexity, where the bolt had to be, how the pins had to be set, when to screw in the bolt handle. Finally he slid the frame and stock group together and locked it in, and the thing assumed its ultimate shape. It took less than three minutes and he held his M1A1 Thompson submachine gun, with its finless barrel and its snout of muzzle, like a pig's ugly nose, its bluntness, its utilitarian grayness, its faded wood and scratched grip. He also had ten 30-round magazines and in the trunk of his car a thousand rounds of.45 ball tracer that he'd meant to trade to some other law enforcement agency.

Now, as in so many other nights of his life these past years, he had to get somewhere by the dawn. In the dawn, the killing would begin.

Chapter 62

At last, with a burst of energy from its 324 Packard horses, the Ford wagon got up a little hill and broke free from the trees.

"We're here," said Johnny Spanish, "with more than an hour to spare. Did I not tell you, Owney, you English sot, I'd have it done in time for you?"

Owney felt a vast relief.

He stumbled from the vehicle, taking in a breath of air, feeling it explode in his lungs.

The field seemed to extend for a hundred miles in each way under a starry sky and a bright bone moon. In pale glow it undulated ever so slightly from one end to the other. He could make out a low ridge of hills at the far side but on this side there were only trees as the elevation led up to it.

The last hours had been ghastly. Slow travel down dirt roads, at least twice when the engine seemed to stall, rough little scuts of inclines where all the boys had to get out and Johnny's deft skills alone, his gendeness with the engine, his knowing the balance and power of the automobile, when those alone had gotten them up and to another level.

How had Johnny known so well? It had been six years since, and in that experience that old sheriff had been the guide. He must have some memory. He was definitely a genius.

"You did it, lad," he said to Johnny.

"That I did. You're grateful now, Owney, but come the pay-up time it won't seem like so much. You'll come to believe you yourself could have done it and what I did will seem as nothing. Then you'll try to jew me down hard, I know."

"No," said Owney. "Fair is fair. You boys done two hard jobs in the last two weeks. I'll pay you double what I paid for the yard job."

"Think six times, Owney."

"Six!"

"Six. Not twice times, but six times. It's fair. It leaves you with a lot of what you've got."

"Jesus. It was a one-day job."

"Six, Owney. It was a five-day job, with lots of arranging to be done. Else you'd be looking at the rest of your time in an Arkansas Dannamora."

"Four and it's a deal."

"All right, Owney, because I don't like to mess about. Make it five, we shake on it, and that would be that."

Owney extended his hand. He had just paid $1.5 million for his new life. But he had another $7 million left, and beyond that, $3 million in European banks that neither a Johnny Spanish nor a Bugsy Siegel nor a Meyer Lansky knew a thing about.

They shook.

"Boys, we're rich," said Johnny.

"Richer, you mean," said Owney.

"We're set for life. No more jobs. We can toss the tommies off the Santa Monica fishing pier."

"Believe I'll keep my Browning," said Herman. "You never know when it'll come in handy."

"All right, you lot, just a bit more to do. You know the drill."

They had to secure the field for landing. This involved reading the wind, for the plane landed against it and took off with it. As efficiently as any OSS team setting up a clandestine landing in occupied France, Johnny's boys picked some equipment out of the rear of the big Ford and went deep into the valley. There they quickly assembled a wind pylon and read the prevailing breeze. It was now only a matter of using a flare to signal the aircraft when she came, then turning her, then climbing aboard and it was all over.

While the boys did their work, and then moved the car to the appropriate spot in the valley, Owney took out and lit a cigar. It was a Cohiba, from the island, a long thing with a tasty, spicy tang to it, and it calmed him down.

He had made it. He, Owney, had done it. He was out; he would repair to the tropics and begin to plot, to raise a new crew, to pay back his debts, to engineer a way back into the rackets.

He had an image of Bugsy after the hit. He imagined Bugsy's face, blown open by bullets. Bugsy in one of his famous creamy suits, spattered with black blood, his athlete's grace turned to travesty by the twisted position into which he had fallen. He saw Bugsy as the centerpiece in a tabloid photo, its harshness turning his death into some grotesque carnival. When a gangster died, the public loved it. The gangsters were really the royalty of America, bigger in their way than movie stars, for the movies the gangsters starred in were real life, played out in headlines, whereas an actor's heroics took place only in a fantasy realm. A star in a moving picture could come back and make another one; a star in a tabloid picture could not, and that impressed incredible elan and grace upon the gangster world. It was glamorous like the movies but real like life and death itself.

Then he heard it. Oh, so nice.

From far off the buzz of a multiengine plane. She'd circle a bit, waiting for a little more of the light that was beginning to creep across the western sky to illuminate the valley, then down she'd come. It was a good boy, or so Johnny insisted. A former Army bomber pilot who could make an airplane do anything she could do and had set planes down on dusty strips all over the Pacific. But before that the boy had run booze and narcotics for some Detroit big boys, where he really learned his craft.

High up, the plane caught a glimpse of sun, and it sparkled for just a second, just like Owney Maddox's future.

Owney turned and before him suddenly loomed a shape, huge and terrifying.

It took his breath away.

Don't let me die! he thought, but it was not a man-made thing at all, or even a man. It was some kind of giant reddish deer, with a spray of anders like a myth. The beast seemed to rise above him. His throat clogged with fear. In the rising light he saw its eyes as they examined him imperially, as if he were the subject. It sniffed, and pawed, then turned its mighty head. In two huge, loping bounds it was gone.

Jesus Christ, he thought.

What the hell was that?

He didn't like it, somehow. The animal's presence, its arrogance, its lack of fear, its contempt seemed like a bad omen. He realized his pulse was rocketing and that he was covered with a sheen of sweat.

"Owney, lad, come out of the field or you'll get cut to pieces by the props of your savior," called Johnny.

Chapter 63

The pain came every two minutes now. It built like a worm growing to a snake growing to a python growing to a sea serpent or some other mystical creature, red hot and glowing, screaming of its own volition, a spasm, an undulation, a sweat-cracking, muscle-killing pure heat. Someone screamed. It was her. She screamed and screamed and screamed.

From her perspective, she could only see eyes. The eyes of the young doctor and they looked scared. She knew something was wrong.

"Let me give you some anesthetic, Mrs. Swagger."

"No," she said. "No gas."

"Mrs. Swagger, you're only a little dilated and you've got some hours to go. There's no need to suffer."

"No gas. No gas! I'm fine. I want my husband. Is Earl here? Earl, Earl, where are you? Earl?"

"Ma'am," said the nurse, looking over, "ma'am, we haven't been able to reach your husband."

"I want Earl. I want Earl here. He said he'd be here for me."

"Ma'am, he's got time. It's going to be a bit. We'll get you into the delivery room when you've dilated to ten centimeters. He'll get here fine, I'm sure. I just think you'd be more comfortable if―"

The pain had her again. The snake roped through her body. How could such a little bitsy thing hurt so much? She was so afraid of letting down Earl. But at the same time, where was Earl?

"Ma'am, I'm going to get your friend. She can be with you. That's all right, isn't it?"

"Yes."

Mary swam into view.

"Honey," she said. "I'll call Phil at the shop. He'll go straight home. He'll go to your house and wait on the front steps for your husband."

"Key," she said.

"What, honey?"

"Key. Key in the flowerpot to right of door, third pot. Answer phone."

"Yes. I'll tell him. He'll wait inside and if Earl calls he'll tell him where you are, so Earl can come direct."

"Where is Earl?"

"I don't know, baby. I'm sure he'll be there as soon as he can."

"I'm not strong."

"Oh, yes you are, baby. You are the strongest. You got through this whole thing without Earl, and you'll get through this if you have to. I know you've got the strength in you."

The pain had her again.

"What's wrong, Mary?" she said.

"There's nothing wrong," said Mary, but she flashed an uneasy look at the doctor. "You're having a baby. I have been led to believe it hurts a bit."

"I can tell something is wrong. Don't let them take my baby. They can't have my baby. I don't want the gas. If I have the gas, they'll take my baby."

"No, sweetie, that won't happen."

But again she had a guilty look.

In time the two women were alone as the doctor, the only one on call this late hour in the near-empty Scott County hospital, went on his rounds, such as they were. They weren't much because "hospital" was entirely too grand a word for this place; it was more a poverty ward with an operating room/delivery room/emergency room attached, because the quality went up to Fort Smith or over to Little Rock with their medical problems.

Mary came over with a conspiratorial look on her face.

"Baby, they don't want you to know, but they want you to take the gas."

"What's wrong? Oh, God, what's wrong?"

"It's called a posterior presentation. The baby is facing down, not up, and he can't come out down."

"Oh, God."

"With another doctor, they might be able to turn him when you dilate some more. Then they'd cut you a little and remove him and sew you up. But they need two doctors. They can't do it with one doctor."

"Don't let them take my baby."

"Honey, you may have to―"

"No, no, no. No!" Her hand flew to Mary's and grabbed it tightly. "Don't let them hurt my baby."

"Honey, if they can't get the baby turned, they may have to do something to save your―"

"No. No! Don't hurt my baby! Cut me but don't hurt the baby."

Mary started to cry as she held tightly to Junie's wan hand.

"You are so brave. You are braver than any man who ever lived, sweetie. But you can't give up your life to―"

"No," she said. "Earl will―"

"Earl would make the same decision. He wants you to be with him. You can have other babies. You can't give up your life for one baby. What would Earl do? He'd be by himself with a baby he wouldn't know how to care for."

"No," she said. "I don't want them to hurt my baby. They can't take the baby! Don't let them take the baby. Earl will be here. Earl will save us both."

"Honey, I―"

The pain had her again, and she jacked as it flashed through her.

Earl? Where are you, Earl? Earl, please come.

Chapter 64

Earl lay on his back. The dew had soaked through his coat. His hat was a pillow. He could see nothing but sky lightening as the sun came up. A cool wind rushed through the grass that concealed him. He could have been any man on a park bench or a camping ground, stretching, damp, a little twitchy as the dawn came up and a new day began.

But no other man would have a tommy gun cradled in his arms across his chest and no other man would carry nine other stick magazines loaded with ball tracer in the pockets of his coat or stuffed inside his belt―oh, for a Marine knapsack.

But Earl lay calmly, letting his heartbeat subside, letting his body cool. He was at the long end of a desperate journey across the northwest corner of Polk County, guided by an old map and his instincts. The car had taken him along dirt roads through vast forest and a nickel compass kept him oriented toward the section of the county where Hard Bargain Valley just had to be.

When he ran out of road, he took ten minutes to load up his magazines and his weapon, then he headed off on a track trending north by northwest, through strange forest, across swollen streams, and finally up a raw incline. It seemed to take forever; he thought of a night or two in the Pacific, the 'Canal especially, when the jungle had been like this, dense and dark and unyielding. You hated to be in it at night because the night belonged to the Japs, and them little monkeys could make you stew meat if they wanted. But there were no Japs in this jungle, except his own memories, his own fears, his own angers.

The worst part of the ordeal came at around 5:30 when the land, which should have been rising steadily to Hard Bargain Valley, instead seemed to straighten out. He kept his trust going in the cheap compass, but then he wondered if the presence of so much metal in the tommy gun and all the ammo had knocked it askew. But it held to a steady N and he kept orienting himself to the right of that pointing arrow, even though in the dark his doubts mounted fearfully. He had no other choice.

And then, as sweet a sound as he'd ever heard, there came the whine of a cruising plane, holding at about two thousand feet in a steady drone. That had to be it. That was Hard Bargain Valley and the plane that came for its human cargo.

Abrupdy he ran into ridge, heavily overgrown, and made his way up it as quickly as he could. Thank God the tommy had a sling, for without one, the going would have been almost impossible. The gun hung on his shoulder, heavy and dense with that special weight that loaded weapons have, as he pulled himself up.

Then he saw it: the broad sweep of valley, flat and only gently undulating, pure natural landing strip, and on the other side other hills, and beyond them, presumably, mountains, for the darkness still closed out longer views.

Earl could see some kind of activity at the far end of the valley. He knew that's where Owney and his boys would be waiting for the plane to land.

Thus he edged down to the valley floor, still shielded for another few minutes by the darkness, and duckwalked out to the center. The plane had to land over him. When it did, he would empty a magazine into the nearest engine, concentrating all his firepower. That would drive it away. It would not land and then he would close with Owney and his boys, and although the odds were one against six it didn't much matter: business had to be taken care of, accounts settled, and there was no one else about to do it.

A shift in the pitch of the engines of the orbiting plane signified that enough light had arrived at last. Earl craned his head up a bit and saw the plane far off to the northwest, one wing tip high, the other low as it fluted in its approach to the landing path. It seemed to waver in the air as it turned, then straightened, then lowered itself. The gear was already down. It was some kind of low-winged twin-engine Beechcraft, a sturdy, prosaic aircraft. The pilot found his angle and seemed to come in on a string, bearing straight for Earl, coming faster and faster and lower and lower.

Earl's fingers flew involuntarily to the weapon's controls, to test them for the millionth time: the one lever was cranked fully forward to FIRE and the other fully forward to FULL. Then his fingers dipped under the weapon and touched the bolt handle on the other side, to check again that it was drawn back and cocked.

The gun seemed to rise to him and he rose from the grass. The butt plate found his shoulder and all ten pounds of the weapon clamped hard against himself as his vision reduced only to that narrow circle of visibility that was the peep sight. He saw: the flat of the receiver top, the diminishing blunt tube of the barrel and the single central blade of sight. The plane seemed to double, then double again in size as it roared at him, dropping ever lower. He knew that the increase in speed was a function of its closing the distance and it seemed to double again, its roar filling the air, and he pulled the gun up through it, sighting on the right-side engine, leading it, and when the computational machine in his brain so instructed, pulling the trigger and holding it down while running the gun on a smooth rotation from nine o'clock up to midnight and then over to two o'clock.

The gun emptied in one spasm, the sound lost in the roar of the plane. He could sense the empties tumbling, feel the liquid, almost hydraulic pressure of the recoil without a sense of the individual shots as it drove into his shoulder, but most of all he could see the tracers flicking out and extending his touch until he was an angry God destroying the world from afar. The arc of tracers flew into the engine and wing root and the plane trembled ever so slightly, then changed engine pitches again as it pulled up, banked right and flew out of the zone of fire. It seemed to dip, for flames poured from the engine, but then the pilot feathered it, and only a gush of smoke remained, a stain he pulled across the sky with him, and he waggled his wings and headed elsewhere.

Owney watched the plane come down. The pilot was good. He was very good. He had his course, his gear had been lowered, his flaps were down, he was coming lower and lower and seemed just a few feet from touching down.

Then a line of illumination cracked out of the darkness and lashed upward; it was so sustained that for just a second Owney thought it was a flashlight beam or some other form of light until he realized he was deluding himself. The streaking bullets caught the plane experdy, speared it, and the plane seemed to wobble. Owney thought it might explode. Smoke abrupdy broke from the targeted engine and the plane quivered mightily as fire washed outward. Then the pilot yanked up and away and almost as if it had been a dream, the plane was gone. It reduced in size arithmetically as it sped away, trailing smoke.

"What the fuck was that?" asked Owney.

"It's him."

"Him?"

"The cowboy."

"AGHHHH!" Owney bellowed, a great spurt of anger uncontaminated by comprehensibility. "That fucking fucker, that fucking dog!" His rage was absolute and immense.

But Johnny spoke calmly.

"You just saw some tommy-gunning, old man. Isn't but one man in a thousand can hold the Thompson so perfectly on a moving target, leading perfecdy, not letting it bounce off target. I suppose the tracers help some. They verify impact. But the bastard's bloody good, I'll tell you that. I know only one better. Fortunately it's me."

Around him the others had already unlimbered weapons and were quickly readying for action, the usual fitting of magazines and snapping of bolts. Hats and coats were coming off, automatics being checked for full loads.

"That fucking bastard," said Owney. "Oh, that hick bastard! I should have settled his fucking hash at the railway station. Who the fuck does he think he is?"

"Right now, he thinks he's going to kill all six of us, I should imagine. Owney, dear, you stay here. Johnny and his boys will take care of all this. Right, fellows?"

But there was no cheer from the boys. They had read the fine blast of sustained, controlled automatic fire just as surely as Johnny, and knew they were up against a professional.

"We've got the Ford," called Vince the Hat. "We could just get the hell out of here."

"He'd just ambush us. If he knows the way in, he'll know it out. Anyhow, we've got to deal with him now, or look over our shoulders forever. Evidently that railyard business upset the fellow."

"You bastard!" Owney yelled. "We'll fuck you but good in a few minutes!"

"Feel better, now, Owney? There's a good lad. You stay here while the men handle it."

"Johnny, what's your plan?" asked Herman Kreutzer, his BAR loaded and ready.

"He's probably slithering toward us right now. I'd stay wide, separated so he can't take more than one down with a single burst. I'd say let's move now and fast, because if it's only tracer he has, we'll be able to track them back to him better before the light is full up. Herman, you've the heaviest weapon, you'll provide sustaining fire. Take all your magazines. No point in saving them for a rainy day. It is the rainy day. Let's form a line abreast and move in spurts. Stay low, keep moving. Look for the source of his fire. When you spot it, Herman, you must pressure him while we move in. Anybody have a better suggestion?"

No one did.

Earl knew they'd come quickly and they did. His every impulse told him to advance. Get among them, shoot fast from the hip, trusting instinct, their panic at his aggression, and luck. It never remotely occurred to him that he might die. His focus was entirely on destroying them.

All his voices were still. He did not think of the father who had failed him or the men he believed he had failed or the wife alone somewhere. He didn't think of D. A. Parker ordering him to get out or the long rim through the sewer or the rage that the raid-team tragedy had been turned into farce for the good of a politician. He had no sense of failure at all, but only a sort of battle joy, hard and pure, and the need to get in close, put the bursts into them and punish them for their transgressions and for his own.

He squirmed ahead, low, sliding through the grass. The blood sang in his ears. The air tasted magnificent, like a fine wine, a champagne. The gun was alive in his hands, marvelously supple and obedient. He had never felt this way in the islands or in any of his other fights. There, fear was always around. Now he was shorn of fear.

A burst of fire came. It was duplicated instantly by three others, as Johnny's boys panicked, even though they were so professional. Bullets hurled through the grass, and where they struck, they raised a great destruction. Smoke and debris, liberated by their energy, rose in a fog, obscuring the field, but Earl saw his advantage. He quickly flicked the fire-control lever on his Thompson, setting it to single shot, rose slightly into a kneeling position even as the random bursts filled the air with a sleet of lead, found a good target and fired one round, its noise lost in the general thunder. He shot low, through the grass, so that his tracer might not be seen, and knew he'd made a good shot.

"Stop it! Stop ity goddammit!" screamed Johnny.

The firing stopped.

"Jesus Christ, don't panic, boys. You'll make it easy on him."

"Johnny, Johnny―"

"Shut up, Vince, you've got―"

"I been hit!"

It was so. Vince the Hat de Palmo lay on his side, astounded that he was bleeding so profusely. He'd taken it at the ligature of thigh to hip, and the wound spurted wedy, the blood thick and black across his suit. He looked at Johnny as his eyes emptied of meaning and hope.

"Take his magazines, boys," said Johnny. "We may need them yet."

"Johnny, I―"

"Easy, lad," said Johnny to the youngest of his men, shordy to be the deadest. "Don't fight Ding-Dong."

In his last motions, Vince cooperated with Jack Bell as the older man rolled him over and grabbed the two flat drums that were wedged between his belt and his back.

"You'll come back for me?"

"Sure, kid," said Ding-Dong. "You can bet on it." He gave the kid a wink, which Vince may or may not have seen before he slipped irretrievably into blood-loss coma.

In the interlude, Earl squirmed to the left, toward the low hill that rose at that side of the valley. He crawled and crawled and though he hated to crawl, this day it filled him with joy. The sun was now full on them, drying the dew from the stalks of grass.

The grass at the hill was drier, somehow, for the hillside drained more fluently than the fladand. As he drew near, a plan formed in his mind. This grass was of a different texture, possibly of a different species. He could tell because unlike the soft grass of the valley floor which merely hissed as he crawled through it or the wind pressed rills into it, this grass crackled like dry old bones and sticks in the breeze.

He stood.

He could not see them, for they too had sunk into the grass, or taken up concealed positions behind the odd bushes on the floor of the valley. He chose one such, leaned into his gun and fired a long squirt of tracers into it.

Then he ducked and squirmed away, as someone with a larger weapon than a Thompson brought fire to bear. These bullets whipcracked through the sound barrier as they passed overhead, their snap echoing against the wind. It had to be a Browning rifle. Someone had a Browning at the railyard too.

He'll try and pin me, the others will work around and up the hill and the one other will go around me, yes. That's how it has to be.

"Do you have him?"

"Yes, he's in a gully at the edge of the hills, about two hundred yards off to the right. I saw the tracers come out."

"You keep him pinned, Herman. Red, you and Ding-Dong go high. Try and get to that hillside above him to get the fire down on him. I'm circling around to the back. You'll drive him to me, boys, and if you don't get him, I'll get him square in the belly."

"Let's do it."

Johnny scuttled off, beginning his long arc around to the rear. For Jack and Ding-Dong, it was an easier journey, for theirs was the straight shot to the hillside, and then a climb to bend around and get above him. The grass here was high and it concealed them; they didn't have to crawl but could run, keeping low, particularly as more gullies opened up the closer they got to the hill itself.

As for Herman, he waited a bit, then a bit more, and finally rose and began an exercise called walking fire, which was exactly what John M. Browning had designed his automatic rifle to accomplish. It was originally conceived as the answer to trench warfare and in this role it was the perfect instrument.

Herman was a big man, strong and fearless, and he loved and knew the gun he carried passionately. He could do amazing things with it. Now he rose, wearing two bandoliers with loaded magazines Mexican style across his body over his suit coat, the gun locked into his side and pinned by his strong right forearm, which pressed it tightly against him. His reflexes were superb. He fired half a magazine and the burst sped exactly to the gully from which he'd seen the original tracers come. The burst lifted a stitch of dust. No man could do it better and the shame of Herman's life was that he'd not been a BAR man in Europe or the Pacific, for in that classification he'd have been a true genius. It wasn't that he hadn't tried; it was that he had too many felony convictions.

He finished up the magazine, stitching a hem of lead where he wanted it exactly. He dropped the empty mag, neatly and deftly inserted a new one, all the while walking, and was back putting out his bursts in less than a second. If that's where the cowboy was, he wasn't going anywhere.

Owney could hear the gunfire, but the men had disappeared into the grass. There seemed to be a lot of moving around. It was like chess with machine guns where you couldn't quite see the board.

He was nervous, but not terrified. Johnny's crew was the best; they seemed calm and purposeful. They had succeeded at every enterprise they had tackled, often spectacularly. They were the best armed robbers in America, fearless, famous, quality people, stars in their own universe. They would get him. He knew it. They would get him.

But they wouldn't.

He knew that too, at least somewhere deep inside.

Who was this guy? Where was he from? Why was he so good?

It unnerved him. He had been hunted by Vincent Mad Dog Coll. He was the ace of aces, Owney Killer Maddox, from the East Side. He had shot it out with the Hudson Dusters in 1913, one man against eight, and walked out unhurt, leaving the dying and the wounded behind him. He, Owney, had walked out spry as a dancer, stopped to reset his carnation in his lapel, and gone out for a drink with some other fellows.

Who could scare him? Who had the audacity? Who was this guy?

The BAR bursts ripped up clouds of dust and dirt. The gully filled with grittiness, so that you almost could not breathe. If Earl had been where Herman thought he was, he would indeed have been one cooked fella. The noise, the ricochets, the grit, the supersonic bits of stone and vegetable matter, the sheer danger―all would have shaken even the toughest of individuals.

But Earl had shimmied desperately forward only a matter of a few yards and found a rotted log behind which to hide, even if he knew it was wholly unable to stop the heavy.30s that might have flown his way.

He now did the unthinkable. Instead of seizing the opportunity to put distance between himself and the shooters who were closing in from all sides, he did exactly what they expected him to do, which was nothing. That's what they wanted him to do. He did it. He just didn't do it where they wanted him to do it, not quite. He knew that as the BAR fire kept him nominally pinned, some others would be entering the dry, higher grass of the hillside, in order to get elevation on his position and bring even more killing power. That's exactly what he wanted.

Methodically, he began to tug at the stem of a bush that had grown up just in front of the log.

Jack Bell and Red Brown reached the edge of the hillside, still well hidden. They were rewarded for their efforts.

"Will ya look at that," said Ding-Dong. "Just what the doctor ordered."

"If it was a dame, I'd marry it," said Red, who actually had several wives, so one more wouldn't hurt a bit.

What they saw was a kind of crest running vertically up the hill, one of those strange rills for which only a geologist could give an adequate explanation. What it meant for the two gunmen was a clear easy climb up to the top of the hill, well protected by the geographical impediment from the gunfire of their opponent.

"Okay," said Jack, "you cover me. I'm going to make a dash, then I'll cover you and you make yours."

"Gotcha," said Red.

Both men rose. Jack clashed the twenty or so yards to the beginning of the spine of elevation, even as Red stood and hosepiped twenty-five rounds down the line of the hill, into the area where Herman's bullets had been striking. His too tore clouds of earth upward, and sent grit whistling through the air.

As he fired the last, his partner made it, righted himself, set up close over the ridge, and fired a blast. Red rose under cover of the fire, and sprinted till he was safe.

Both men drew back, breathing hard.

They looked up the hill. Alongside the ridge, it was about two hundred feet up through tall yellow grass, though it was protected the whole way. About halfway was a small strange group of stunted trees, yellowed and sinewy, then another hundred feet to the crest.

'Johnny/' Red cried. "We're going up."

"Good move," said Ding-Dong. "He'll wait for us, we'll get up there, we'll have real good vision on the guy, we can take him or we can pin him while Johnny and Herman move in on him."

"Johnny's a fuckin' genius."

Herman couldn't be but a hundred or so feet from the edge of the field and the beginning of the hill. His BAR was almost too hot to touch. He'd sprayed steadily for the past five minutes, until he got close enough. He'd seen nothing.

Maybe he's dead. Maybe I hit him. Maybe he's bled out. If he'd gone another way, he'd have rim into Johnny.

Nah. He's in there. He got himself into a jam, he's scared, but he's waiting. He's a brave guy. He's a smart guy, but one on five was just too many. He's in there. He can't move. He's real close.

He heard the gunfire from far to the right and judged that it was covering fire from Red and Ding-Dong. Red's yell came a second later.

That was it. If they got above him, the guy was screwed. They could bring fire on him and if they didn't kill him, he'd have to move. Herman would bring him down if he moved.

Herman snapped in a new magazine, waiting for the guy to move. He stood in a semicrouch and was so strong that the fourteen-pound automatic rifle felt light and feathery to the touch. He looked over its sights, through a screen of grass, searching for signs of movement.

He saw nothing, but given the source of the fire, given the speedy response on his part and the volume of fire he had poured in, the man could not have gotten away, unless there were secret tunnels or something, but there were only secret tunnels in movies.

Be patient, he told himself.

Johnny worked his way around in a wide arc to the base of the hill. He was possibly a hundred yards behind the cowboy's position. He squatted in the grass. He hadn't fired yet. He had a full drum, one of the big ones, with a hundred rounds. He could fire single shots, doubles, triples, even quadruples and quintuples if he had to, so exquisite was his trigger control. He could hold one hundred rounds in a four-inch circle in a fifty-yard silhouette if he had to. He could shoot skeet or trap with a Thompson if he had to. He was the best tommy-gunner in the world.

He was a little anxious.

This fellow was very good. He'd obviously used a Thompson well in the war and could make it do tricks. But Johnny knew if it came to shooting man-on-man, he'd take it. Nobody was faster, nobody was surer, nobody could make the gun do what he could make it do.

He squirmed ahead, then heard the gunfire from Red and Ding-Dong. Red yelled something―he could not quite make it out―but knew what it signified. Red and Ding-Dong had reached the hill and were heading up it. When they got elevation, it was all over. It would be all over very shortly. It was just a question of waiting.

Owney heard the firing. There was so much firing from the right-hand side of the field, and then there was nothing. But all the guns that fired had to be Johnny and his boys. He'd only heard one burst that seemed to come from elsewhere.

He could see nothing. Though the floor of Hard Bargain Valley was relatively flat and hard, for some reason the grass grew at different heights upon its surface, and from where he was, it looked like a yellow ocean, a ripple with waves. Toward the edges of the valley, small stunted trees appeared in strange places, randomly.

He thought the fighting was going on over there, maybe a half mile down, on the right side. He thought he could see dust rising from all the gunfire.

Suddenly a long burst broke out, and his eye was drawn to what he took to be the position of the shooter. Another came in on top of the first. Each burst chattered for about two seconds, though from this distance the sound was dry, like a series of pops, like balloons exploding, something childlike and innocent.

Then he saw movement. It was hard to make out, but he saw soon enough that two of Johnny's men, visible in their dark suits, were scrambling up the ridge. They seemed well under cover.

Owney grasped the significance instantly. If they got above him, the cowboy was finished. They could hold him down while the others moved in on him.

Johnny, you smart bastard, he thought. You are the goddamned best.

Herman waited and waited. Nothing seemed to be happening. He decided to move on the oblique and come on the cowboy's position from another angle.

Ever so slowly he moved out, angling wide, edging ever so gently through the high grass, keeping his eyes on the area where the man had to be. Once in a while he'd shoot a glance up the ridge that ran up the hill for signs of Red and Ding-Dong. But he saw nothing.

The sxm was high now. A bit of wind sang in his ears, and the grass around him weaved as it pressed through, rubbing against itself with a soft hiss.

The grass seemed to be thinning somewhat as he drew near to the beginning of the incline. He slowed, dropped to his knees, and looked intently ahead. He could see nothing.

Where was the bastard?

He wiggled a little farther out, staying low, ready to squeeze off a burst at any moment. The silence that greeted his ears was profound.

He planted the gun's butt under his right arm, locking it in the pit, and stepped boldly out, its muzzle covering the beaten zone where haze still drifted. He expected to see a body or a blood trail or something. But he saw nothing. He saw a log ahead on the left and in the deeper grass some kind of bush and he directed his vision back, looking for―

Something to the left flashed. In die instant that his peripheral vision caught the motion, Herman cranked hard to bring his muzzle to bear on the apparition; it was a living bush and as it rose, fluffs of grass fell off it, the bush itself fell away and then Herman saw it was a man.

Earl fired five tracers into the big man in one second. They flew on a line and he absorbed them almost stoically in the center body, then sank to the earth, toppling forward, then trying to prevent his fall with the muzzle of the Browning Automatic Rifle, which he jammed into the ground. So sustained he paused, as if on the edge of a topple, his face gray and his eyes bulging, the blood running everywhere.

Earl didn't have time for this shit. He put seven more into him, knocking him down. The tracers set his clothes aflame.

Earl turned as fire broke out behind him. Two men with tommy guns lay at the crest of the ridge, and fired at him. But of course they had forgotten to adjust their Lyman peep sights for the proper distance, so while they aimed at him, the extreme trajectory of the.45s over two hundred downhill yards pulled their rounds into the ground fifty feet ahead of him.

Earl slid back to the earth, making a range estimation as he went. Bracing the gun tight against himself, he hosed a short burst high in the air, watched as it arched out, trailing incandescence visible even in the bright air. At apogee the consecutive quality of the burst broke up and each bullet spiraled on a slightly different vector toward the earth. Earl watched them, and saw that they hit just fine for windage but too far back. He needed more elevation. He corrected in a second, fired two shots and watched them rise and fall like mortar shells. They fell where he wanted. He pressed the trigger and finished the magazine, dumped it, quickly slammed another one home, found the same position in his muscle memory and this time squeezed off the entire thirty rounds in about four seconds. The gun shuddered, spewing empties like a brass liquid pouring from its breech, and the tracers curved through the air, riding a bright rainbow. Where they struck, they started fires.

It was Red who saw what was happening first. He felt okay, ducking back behind cover as a rainbow of bright slugs lofted high above him and descended, but without precision. It was absurdly raining light. Still, there was no real chance that any of the rounds could hit a target, as they dispersed widely as they plummeted.

Then he felt a wall of heat crushing over him, and the heat's presence seemed to distend or twist the air itself. To the right a wall of flame seemed to explode from nowhere. He'd never understood how fast a brushfire can bum, particularly on a hillside where the wind blows continually and there is no shelter.

The fire was a crackling enemy, advancing behind them in a human wave attack, throwing out fiery patrols of pure flame and crackling, popping menace. It sucked the air from them and its smoke closed on them quickly. They turned to run, but the fire was all around them and suddenly a lick of it lashed out and set Ding-Dong's sleeve afire.

He screamed, dropped his weapon and went to his knees to beat it out. But more flame was on him and soon he was lit up like a Roman candle, and if the power of the fire would drive him to rim, the pain of it took his energy from him, and he fell back, his flesh burning.

Red didn't want that happening to him. He had just a second to decide, and then he scrambled up the ridge and leaped over it, escaping the hungry flames, but before he could congratulate himself, a fleet of tracers rose from nowhere and crucified him to the ground.

Earl spun, changed magazines again, and looked backward for another target. He could see nothing. If there was another man moving in on him from behind he was moving stealthily. Earl didn't have much cover here and in fact there was very little cover anywhere. He emptied another magazine, then another, hosing down the area where another man would be if he existed. That was sixty rounds in about ten seconds, and the tracers sprayed across the area before him like lightning bolts seeking the highest available target. They churned through the grass, setting small fires when they encountered dryness, but generally just ripping up earth and drawing a screen of dirt into the air.

He changed magazines a third time, moved out a little for a slightly different angle and squirted another batch out in another bright fan of searching bullets.

Johnny was too far to shoot when the thing started happening. Then it happened so fast and so unpredictably he was uncertain what to do. He watched the tracers arc out and descend behind the ridge. Smoke rose so fast in the aftermath it was astonishing. The ridgeline caught fire.

But by that time he had gone totally prone and begun to crawl, crawl desperately forward in the highest grass there was, hoping he could get so close he could count on his superior reflexes to carry the battle. He squirmed like a man aflame, whereas it was others who were aflame. Then the cowboy started shooting wildly. He listened as the man pumped out magazine after magazine, but behind him, where he'd been, not where he was now and where he was headed.

He crawled and crawled until the firing stopped.

By his reckoning he was now just twenty yards or so away, and the cowboy had no idea where he was.

He peered through the grass, rising incrementally higher for visibility and suddenly beheld a wondrous sight.

The cowboy had a jam. His empty magazine was caught in the gun and he tugged it desperately to get it free, his hand up toward the receiver. Then suddenly whatever it was gave, he pulled the magazine out, and dropped it, his hand reaching into his suit pocket for another.

"Hold it!" said Johnny, covering him with the muzzle.

The cowboy whirled but what could he do? He had an empty gun in one hand and a fresh magazine in the other. He was a good two seconds from completing the reload.

"Well, well," said Johnny, walking forward, his muzzle expertly sighted on the big man's heaving chest, "look who we've caught with his pants down. Jam on you, did it? Them damn things is tricky. You've got to baby them or you'll regret it, lad. Come now, let's have a look at you."

The man regarded him sullenly. Johnny knew he'd be thinking desperately of something to do. Caught like this, with no ammo! Him with the big fancy gun, him who'd shot all them other fellers, and now him with nothing.

"Cut me a break, will you, pal?" said the cowboy.

"And live the rest of me life looking over the shoulder? I should think not."

"I just want Maddox. I don't give a fuck about you. Just walk away and forget all this. You can live."

"Oh, now he's dictating terms, is he?" Johnny laughed. He was now about fifteen feet away, close enough.

"I didn't have to kill your boys. They were here, that's all."

"I should thank you for that, pally. Now the take's so much bigger. You've made me an even wealthier man. I'll drink many a champagne toast to you, friend, for your fine work. You are a game lad. You're about the gamest I've ever seen."

Earl just stared at him.

"I know what you're thinking. Maybe you can get the magazine into the gun and get the gun into play and bring old Johnny down. Why do I think not? No, old sod, you've been bested. Admit it now, you've been handled. Ain't many could handle the likes of you, but by God I'm the one man in a million who could do it."

"You talk a lot," said the man.

"That I do. The Irish curse. We are a loquacious race. Maybe I should walk you across the field and let Mr. Owney Maddox himself put the last one into you. He'd probably pay double for that pleasure."

"You won't do that. You won't take the chance."

"Well, boyo, that's the sad truth. But I won't be long. I'll just―"

His eyes lit.

"Say," he said. "I'm a sporting fellow. You're holding an empty gun."

"Let me load it."

"No thank you. But here's what I'll do." He reached under his coat and removed a.45. It was one of the Griffin & Howe rebuild jobs with which D. A. had armed his raid team.

He threw it into the dirt in front of Earl.

"That one's nice and loaded," he said with a smile.

"But it's five feet away."

"It is indeed. Now I'll count to three. On three you can make a dive at the gun. Til finish you well before, but I might as well give you a one-in-one-thousand chance. Maybe my tommy will jam."

"You're a bastard."

"Me mother said the same. Are you ready, fellow?"

He let his gun muzzle drift down until it pointed to the ground. He watched as Earl looked at the gun on the ground five feet in front of him.

"See, here's the thing," said the cowboy. "Fights sometimes ain't what you want 'em to be."

"One," said Johnny.

He meant to shoot on two, of course.

The cowboy's tommy gun came up in a flash and there was a report and for just a millisecond it seemed a tendril of sheer illumination had lashed out to snare him.

The next thing Johnny knew, he was wet.

Why was he wet?

Had he spilled something?

Then he noticed he was lying on his back. He heard something creaking, like a broken accordion, an air-filled sound, high and desperate, a banshee screaming out in the bogs, signifying a death. He blinked and recognized it as a sucking chest wound. His own.

He could only see sky.

The cowboy stood over him.

"I slipped one cartridge into the chamber before I shucked the magazine," he said.

"I― I―" Johnny began, seeing that it was possible. The gun looked empty. It wasn't.

"Think of the railyard, chum," said Earl, as he locked in the new magazine, drew back the bolt and then fired thirty ball tracers into him.

Chapter 65

"Twelve," said the doctor. "Yes sir," said the nurse.

"Mrs. Swagger, you are dilated twelve centimeters. You have another four or five to go. There's no need to endure this pain. Please let us give you the anesthesia."

"No," she said. "I want my husband."

"Ma'am, we've tried but we can't raise him. Ma'am, I'm afraid we've got a problem. You would be so much better off with the anesthesia."

"No, you'll take my baby."

She felt so alone. She could only see the ceiling. Occasionally the doctor loomed into view, occasionally the nurse.

The two put her gown down.

"We do have a problem with the baby," said the doctor. "It may be necessary to make a decision."

"Save the baby. Save my baby! Don't hurt my baby!"

"Mrs. Swagger, you can have other babies. This one is upside down in your uterus. I can't get it out, not without cutting you horribly and, frankly, I'm not equipped to do that and I don't know if I could stop the hemorrhaging once it got started, not here, not with two nurses and no other doctors."

"Can't you get another doctor?" someone asked, and Junie recognized the voice of her friend, Mary Blanton.

"Mrs. Blanton, please get back into the waiting room! You are not permitted back here."

"Sir, somebody has to stay with Junie. I cannot let her go through this alone. Honey, I'm here."

Good old Mary! Now there was a woman! Mary couldn't be pushed around, no sir! Mary would fight like hell!

"Thank you, Mary," Junie said, as another contraction pressed a bolt of pain up through her insides.

"Ma'am, there are no other doctors. In Fort Smith, yes, in Hot Springs, yes, at Camp Chaffee, yes, but you chose a small public hospital in Scott County to have your baby during a late-night shift and I am doing what I can do. Now please, you have to leave."

"Please let her stay," begged Junie.

"When we go back to delivery, she can't come. You may stay here, ma'am, but do not touch anything, and stay out of the way."

"Yes sir"

The doctor seemed to leave, but instead he pulled Mary out into the hall.

"Look," he said, "we have a very complicated situation here. That woman may die. By my calculus, the baby's life is not worth the woman's life. The woman can have other babies. She can adopt a child. If it comes to it, I may have to terminate the baby's life, get it out of her in pieces. That may be the only way to save her life."

"Oh, God," said Mary. "She wants that baby so bad."

"Where is her husband?"

"We're not sure."

"Bastard. These white trash Southern hillbillies are―"

"Sir, Earl Swagger is not trashy. He's a brave man, a law enforcement officer, and if he's not here, it's because he's risking his life to protect you. Let me tell you, sir, if someone broke into your house at night, the one man you'd want to protect you and yours is Earl Swagger. That is why we have to protect his."

"Well, that's very fine. But we are coming up to decision time and I am not authorized to make this decision on my own and I could get in a lot of trouble. If I don't terminate the baby, that woman will die a needless, pointless and tragic death. She needs your help to decide. You help her decide. That's the best you can do for your friend."

Chapter 66

The screen of smoke blew across the valley, white and shifting.

Owney had a hope that Johnny Spanish and one or two of his boys would come out of it, laughing, full of merry horseplay, happy to have survived and triumphed. But he was not at all surprised or even disappointed when the other man emerged.

Out of the smoke he came. He was a tall man, in a suit, with his hat low over his eyes. He carried a tommy gun and looked dead-set on something.

Owney saw no point in running. He was a realist. There was no place to run to and if he got into the forest he would be easy to track and he'd be taken down and gutted.

It occurred to him to get into the station wagon and try and run the man down. But this cool customer would simply watch him come and fill him with lead from the tommy gun.

So Owney just sat there on the fender of the old Ford station wagon. He smoked a Cuban cigar and enjoyed the day, which had turned nice, clear, with a cool wind fluttering across the valley. The sun was warm, even hot, and there were no clouds. In the background, the hillside burned, but it seemed to have run out of energy as the flames spread and died, leaving only cinders to smolder.

The man seemed to come out of war. That's what it looked like; behind him, the smoke curled and drifted, and its stench filled the air; the hillside was blackened. There were bodies back there. Five of them. He'd gotten Johnny Spanish and his crew. Nobody ever got Johnny, not the feds, the State Police, all the city detectives, the sheriffs, the deputies, the marshals. But this one got them all in a close-up gunfight. He was something.

The cowboy was finally within earshot.

With a certain melancholy and an idea for his last gambit, Owney rose.

"Lawman!" he screamed. "I surrender! I'm unarmed! IyU go back with you! You win!"

He stood away from the car and took off his jacket and held his hands stiff and high. Slowly he pirouetted to show that he had no guns tucked in his belt. He rolled up his sleeves to show that his wrists were bare to the elbow.

He had the bicycle gun stuck in its sleeve garter against his left biceps, on the inside, just above the elbow. He'd ripped a large hole in the inside seam of the shirt, invisible from afar, so that he could get at it quickly.

Let him get close, he thought. Let him get close. Offer him respect. Show him fear. Relax him. Put him at his ease. When he lowers the tommy gun, go for the bike pistol and shoot him five times fast, in the body.

He smiled as the man drew near.

The cowboy was lean and drawn. His face had a gaunt look, exhaustion under the furious concentration. His suit was dusty, his eyes aglare, the hat low over them. He looked Owney up and down, taking his measure.

"I'm unarmed," said Owney. "You won! You got me!"

It just might work.

Earl was not surprised that Owney Maddox awaited him with his hands high, his arms bare. What else could Owney do? He was out of options, other than killing himself, and Owney wasn't that kind of boy. He was no Japanese marine, who'd cut his own guts out and die with a grenade under his belly so that when you turned the corpse over two days later, the grenade would enable you to join him in heaven. No, that was not Owney's style.

He stopped ten feet shy of Owney.

"You win, partner," said Owney, with a smile. "You are a champ. I'll say that. You are a pro. You handled the best there is, my friend. I'm outclassed."

Earl said nothing.

He raised his tommy gun, and holding it deftly with one hand let it cover Owney.

"You're not going to shoot me," Owney said. "My hands are up. I've surrendered. You don't have it in you for that kind of stuff. That's the difference between us. You can't make yourself squeeze on an unarmed man with his hands in the air. I know you. You're a soldier, not a gangster. You won a war, but you wouldn't last a week on an island with alleys and nightclubs."

Earl just looked him over, then transferred the Thompson to his left hand.

"Take your belt off and throw it over here."

"Yah. See. I knew you weren't the type," said Owney, doing the job with one hand.

"Thought you was English," said Earl.

"Only when I want to be, chum. Come on, tie me, let's get this over. I want to get back in time to hear Frankie on the radio."

But then he stopped. He looked quizzically at Earl.

"I have to know. You're not working for Bugsy Siegel, are you?"

"That guy?" said Earl. "Don't know nothing about him."

"You fool," said Owney. "You have no idea what you've done, do you?"

"Nope."

Owney joined his hands together for Earl to loop them with the belt. Earl knelt to retrieve the belt. As he rose with it, Owney stepped forward and seemed to stumble just a bit and then his hand fled to his arm. He was fast.

But Earl was faster. His right hand flew to the Colt automatic in his belt like a bolt of electricity shearing the summer air. It was a fast that can't be taught, that no camera could capture. He caught the pistol in his other hand and thrust it toward Owney even as a crack split the air. Owney had fired one-handed. Owney had missed.

Hunched and doublehanded, Earl knocked five into the gangster, all before Owney could get the hammer thumbed back on the bike gun for a second shot. The rounds kicked the gangster back and set him down hard as the little weapon fell from his fingers into the grass.

Now Earl knew who had killed his father. Now Earl knew what had happened to his father's little gun. But he didn't care. His old father meant nothing to him now. He thought of his new father, the man who'd died for him in the railyard. Now he'd tracked D. A.'s true killer down and paid out justice in gunfire.

Earl walked over to Owney. Five oozing holes were clustered in a slightly oblong circle on his white shirt under his heart. They were so close you could cover them with one hand, and they were wounds nobody comes back from.

"W-who are you?" Owney asked.

"You'd never believe it," said Earl.

Chapter 67

She had borne so much pain she had become numbed by it. Her eyes were vague, her sense of reality elongated, her sense of time vanished. The pain just came and came and came, and had its way, though now and then a moment of lucidity reached her, and she concentrated on the here and now, and then it all went away in pain.

She heard someone say, "She's at fifteen. We've got to do it."

"Yes, doctor."

The young doctor's face flew into view.

"Mrs. Swagger, I have been on the phone all over the state trying to get an OB-GYN, even a resident, even a horse doctor over here. Someone can be here in an hour, I'm sorry to report. So I have to act now, or we will lose both you and the child."

"Don't take my baby!"

"You will bleed to death internally in a very short while. I'm sorry but I have to do what's right. Nurse, get her prepped. I'm going to go scrub."

She had fought so hard. Now, at the end, she had nothing left.

"It's all right," she heard Mary whispering. "You have to get through this. You'll have other babies. Honey, he's right, you've fought so hard, but it's time to move on. You have to survive. I couldn't live without you, I'm so selfish. Please, your mama, your papa, everybody, they are pulling for you."

"Where's Earl, Mary?"

"I am sorry, honey. He didn't make it."

Then she felt herself moving. A nurse was pushing her down the dimly lit hallway. The gurney vibrated and each vibration hurt her bad. A bump nearly killed her. She was in a brightly lit room. The doctor had a mask on. Then he turned away from her. A mask came and she smelled its rubbery density. She turned her face, waiting for the gas, and saw the doctor with his back to her. He was working with a long probe but she saw that it had a pointed end to it, like a knitting needle.

My baby, she thought. They are going to use that on my baby.

"She's ready, doctor."

"All right, give her―"

There was a commotion.

A woman had broken in. Angry words were spoken. Then she heard the doctor say, "I don't care about all that. Get him in here."

The doctor was back.

"Well, Mrs. Swagger, your husband just showed up."

"Earl!"

"Yes ma'am. And he has another doctor with him."

But there was something on his face.

"What's wrong?"

"This is your part of the country down here, not mine. You would understand better than me. I don't understand, but that nurse says if we let this doctor in here, there will be some trouble."

"Please. Please help my baby."

"All right, ma'am. I knew you'd say that."

"The doctor―?"

"The doctor your husband brought. He's colored."

Earl explained it once again.

"Ma'am, I don't care what your rules say. That's my wife in there and my child, and you need another doctor and this doctor has kindly consented to assist and he's delivered over a thousand babies through the years, so just step aside."

"No Negroes are allowed in this hospital. That's the rule." This was the hospital shift supervisor, a large woman in glasses, whose face was knit up tight as a fist as she clung to her part of the empire.

"That was yesterday. There are new rules now."

"And who has made that determination?"

"I believe I have."

"Sir, you have no right."

"My wife and baby ain't going to die because you have some rule that never made no sense and is only waiting for someone to come along and blow it down in a single day. This is that day and I am that man."

"I will have to call the sheriff."

"I don't give a hang who you call, but this doctor is going to help my wife, and that's all there is to it. I'll thank you to move or so help me God I'll move you and you won't like it a bit. Now, for the last time, madam, get the goddamned hell out of our way."

The woman yielded.

The two men walked in the corridor and a neighbor lady was standing there.

"You are not a man to be argued with, Mr. Swagger/' said Dr. James.

"No sir. Not today."

A woman rushed to join them. She looked tired too, as if she'd been through it the same as Earl.

"Thank God you got here."

"You're Mary Blanton. Oh, Mary, ain't you the best though. I called and your husband told me what was going on. Dr. James was good enough to say he'd come along."

"Thank God you're here, doctor."

"Yes ma'am."

The young resident came out into the hall.

"Dr.―?"

"Julius James. OB-GYN. NYU School of Medicine, 1932."

"I'm Mark Harris, Northwestern, '44. Thank God you're here, doctor. We've got a posterior presentation and she's dilated all the way to fifteen and she's been in labor for twelve hours. That little bastard won't come out."

"Okay, doctor, I'll scrub. I believe I can flip the baby. I've managed to do it several times before. We'll have to perform an episiotomy. Then you'll have to cut the cord when I get into her so it doesn't strangle the infant in the womb. Then you'll have to stitch her while I resuscitate the infant. Make sure to have…"

Earl watched the two men drift away, and they disappeared into the delivery room.

He went back outside, to the waiting room, which was now deserted. The woman who had given him so much trouble was gone.

He couldn't sit down. He tried not to think about what was going on in the delivery room, or the hours since he'd dumped the bodies, called home, talked to Phil Blanton, driven to Greenwood, begged Dr. Julius James to accompany him, and driven here.

"I am worried about the doctor," he said to Mary. "This could be dangerous for him. He doesn't deserve all this bad trouble."

"Mr. Swagger, if they should move against him, they will be moving against you. I don't believe they will do that. They are bullies and cowards anyhow, not men."

"I do hope you are right, Mary."

In time, after Earl paced and Mary sat dumbly, a law officer approached, as if skulking. He wore a deputy's badge and had the look of the kind of old cop who sat in offices all day long.

"Are you the man that brought the Negro doctor?"

"Yes, I am," said Earl.

"You're not from around here, are you?"

"I grew up down in Polk County."

"Then you know this is not how we do things. We keep white and nigger separated. We have laws about it. I have to arrest you and the Negro doctor."

"I think you'd best go on home, old man," said Earl. "I do not have time for all this."

"Mr.―?"

"Swagger. Earl Swagger."

"Mr. Swagger, this is a great principle we are defending. It's bigger than your wife and your baby. We have the future of the nation at stake here."

"Deputy, possibly you know of my father, Charles Swagger? He was a man who done what he said he would do. He was famous for it. Well, sir, I am that kind of man only more so. So when I say to you, go away, go far away, then you'd best obey me or there will be hell for lunch."

The sheriff slunk away.

But he paused at the door.

"Your beefiness may work with an old man like me, Swagger, when all the deputies are out hunting Owney Maddox. But there are some boys at the end of the street getting liquored up who will take a different view."

Til deal with them when they come. If they have the guts. And don't you worry none about Owney Maddox. That bill was settled."

Another half hour passed. Mary sat, now hugging herself. Earl walked back and forth, smoking, like a man in a Saturday Evening Post cartoon. He kept glancing at his watch, kept looking at the door, kept trying to calm himself down. He was so desperately exhausted he could hardly think straight, but he was in that keyed up state where he couldn't sleep either. He was just a raw mess.

At last the door opened, but it wasn't a doctor. It was a janitor, a black man.

"Sir," he said.

"Yes, what is it, Pop?" Earl asked.

"They's coming. A mob. Seen it before. It happens onct a while. They done got to set things back die way they was and when they do that, some boy's got to swing or bum."

"Not this time, Pop. You can bet on it."

He turned to Mary.

"I'll take care of this."

"Mr. Swagger, I―"

"Don't you worry none. I faced Japs. These boys ain't Japs. But just in case, I want you down on the floor. If some lead sails through, you don't want to catch a cold from it."

Earl walked out onto a porch.

He watched them come. The old man was right-There were about fifty of them, and from the groggy, angry progress, he could tell there had been much liquor consumed. The mob spilled this way and that, and shouts and curses came from it. He watched as supposedly decent people stepped aside, or stood back in horror, but he noted too that nobody stood up to these boys, nobody at all.

It was now four o'clock in the afternoon. He'd lost most sense of time and wasn't sure how long he'd been here, how long they'd been drinking, how mad they were. The sim was low in the western sky, and flame-colored. The mountains were silhouettes. A wind blew, and the leaves on the trees all shimmered.

On the boys came. He saw shotguns, a few rifles, a few squirrel guns, hoes, shovels, picks. They'd grabbed everything they could fight with. They were killing mad.

The leader was a heavyset man in overalls with a battered fedora and the hardscrabbled face of a fellow life hadn't treated kindly. His compatriots were equally rough, men who'd been purged of pity by bad breaks, brushes with the law, beatings from bigger men, and a sense of lost possibility. They looked like a ragtag Confederate infantry regiment moving out agin the bluebellies at some Pea Ridge or other. Earl had known them his whole life.

Earl watched them come, standing straight. His hat was low over his dark and baleful eyes. His gray suit was dusty and rumpled but not without some dignity to it. His tie was tight to his throat and trim. He calmly smoked a Chesterfield, cupping it in his big hands.

Finally they were there, and only his imperturbability stood between him and the doctors and his wife.

"You the feller brought that nigger here?"

"I brought a doctor here, boys. Didn't stop to notice his color."

"We don't 'low no niggers in this end of town. Bad business."

"Today, that changes. I'm here to change it."

In the crowd faces turned to faces and low, guttural exchanges passed electrically among them. Like an animal they seemed to coil and gather strength.

Finally, the leader took a step forward.

"Mister, we'll string you up next to that coon in a whisker if that's what you want. Now you stand aside while we take care of business, or by God this'll be the day you die."

"Boys, there's been lots of days when I could die. If this is the one at last, then let's get to it."

He flicked aside the cigarette, and with a quick move peeled off his coat.

He had a.45 cocked and locked in the shoulder holster that Herman Kreutzer had been wearing, another.45 cocked and locked in the speed holster on his hip that Johnny Spanish had been wearing and a third stuffed into his belt backward to the left of his belt buckle. His shirt pocket was stuffed with three or four magazines.

"I can draw and kill seven of you in the first two seconds. In the next two seconds I'll kill seven more. In the final two seconds, I'll get the third seven. Now if some of you boys in the back get a shot into me, you'd best make it count, 'cause if it only wounds me, I may get a reload or two in, and each time I reload that means seven more of you boys are going down. So I figure a sure twenty-one of you are dead, and probably more like twenty-eight or even thirty-five."

He paused. He smiled. His hand fell close to the gun on his hip, and there wasn't a lick of fear in him.

"Well, boys, what do you say? Are we going to do some man's work today? You will be remembered, I guarantee you that. You will go into history, you can bet on it. Come on, Fat Boy, you're up front. Is this the day you picked to get famous?"

The fat man swallowed.

"Ain't so much fun when somebody else has the gun, is it, Fat Boy?"

The fat man swallowed again, looked back to his mob and saw that it was leaking men from the rear. It seemed to be dissolving.

Suddenly he and four or five others were alone.

"Fat Boy, I am tired of standing here. You make your play or I just may shoot you so I can sit a spell."

The others left and the Fat Boy was alone. A large stain spread across his crotch as his bladder yielded to stress. But he didn't blink or swallow. He peered ahead intently at nothing.

Earl walked down to him.

He reached into his back pocket. The man stood stock-still, quivering.

Earl took out his wallet, opened it.

"I see your name is Willis Beaudine. Well, Willis, here's something for you to remember. If anything ever happens to that good doctor in there, it's you I'll come visit in the night. And Willis Beaudine, don't think you can run and hide. Many a man has thought that and they are now sucking bitter grass from the root end."

He dropped the wallet down Willis's overalls.

"Now scoot,Willis."

Willis turned and in seconds disappeared. Odd a fat man could move so fast.

Earl picked up his coat, threw it over his shoulder and walked back into the hospital waiting room.

Dr. James was waiting, along with Mary.

"How's my wife?" Earl demanded.

"Your wife is just fine, Mr. Swagger," the doctor said. "She's not bleeding anymore, and she's going to recover very nicely."

"And―"

"Yes," he said, "congratulations. You have a son."