Red Grass River

SEVENTEEN

February—June 1921

OVER THE NEXT FOUR MONTHS THEY HIJACKED NEARLY OF DOZEN truckloads of booze coming through on Palm Beach County roads and another half-dozen shipments that landed at various beaches along the county shoreline. The word was out among rumrunners in Florida: you paid the tribute the Ashleys demanded or you risked having them hijack your load—or you found some roundabout route to bypass their territory and get your stuff to Miami. Some of the runners coming through Palm Beach were smalltimers trying to build up their portion of Miami trade and most of them grudgingly paid off the Ashleys rather than lose their cargoes. But Nelson Bellamy steadfastly refused to pay for the right to move his product through Palm Beach County. Now and then one of his crews managed to sneak a load through Palm Beach without being spotted, but the Ashley Gang continued to intercept most of his truck imports and beach drops and cut deeply into his profits.

From the time of their first hijackings Gordon Blue had pleaded with them to desist from stealing Nelson Bellamy’s booze. “Take anybody else’s stuff but not his,” Blue told them one afternoon at Twin Oaks. “He works for the Chicago organization, for God’s sake. I represent his legal interests down here. He knows I represent you too, but he says he doesnt hold me responsible for your actions. That’s what he says. But every time you jack one of his shipments, he gives me a hard look. You’re putting me in a tight spot with the Miami people, boys, is what I’m saying.”

“If he’s so mad at us, why aint he done nothin about it when we’re in Miami?” Frank Ashley said. “We’re down there all the time—dancin at the Elser, eatin in restaurants. We do a little gamblin in Hardieville, we stay in hotels. It aint hard to find us. If he’s so made why aint he tried to shoot our ass off like he tried that one time with old Roy here?”

“Believe me, Frank, he would if he thought he could get away with it,” Gordon Blue said. “But the chief of police told him if there’s anymore public violence he’ll come down on him and his organization with both feet, no matter how much they juice him. Too many citizens have complained to him about the rough stuff in the streets. No, you boys are all right in Miami as long as you stay together so he cant take you down one at a time. But me, I’m the one getting heat from the son of a bitch.”

Joe Ashley said he didnt see what Gordon was so worried about if Bellamy wasnt holding him to account for the Ashleys. “It’s between him and us,” Old Joe said. “Got nothin to do with you, so you got nothin to fret about.” He dismissed with a handwave any rebuttal Gordon Blue might have thought to make.

Bill Ashley had sat in on the meeting but said nothing, knowing well when his father’s position was adamant. But he had earlier argued in private with Old Joe that the hijackings were bad business and could only lead to greater troubles, that the wiser course would be to seek some sort of accommodation with Bellamy. The look Old Joe gave him was rawly scornful. “You dont go askin for accommodation with some sumbitch dont show you the proper respect, boy,” he said. “Aint you learned that by now?”

Most of the hijackings during those four months went fast and smoothly—but on three occasions Bellamy’s truck crews made a fight of it. In both of the first two scraps, a truck guard got wounded but neither was killed. The sole Ashley Gang casualty came in the second fight, during a hijacking in March and less than a mile south of Boynton Beach. Albert Miller had been pleading with John Ashley for weeks to take him along on a job, and in this, his first one, he got his ring finger shot off. “To hell with this Jesse James stuff,” he said on the drive back to Twin Oaks, holding tight to the bloody bandanna wrapped around the finger stub that Ma Ashley would cauterize and bind properly. “You boys can have it.”

The most recent skirmish came on a moonlit night in April. They’d stopped a truck loaded with Jamaican rum on a desolate stretch of the Dixie Highway south of Hobe Sound and were walking up to the vehicle with their guns in hand when suddenly one of the tarpaulin sideflaps flew up and two men inside began firing wildly into the shadows with steadily flaring automatic rifles. Bullets ricocheted off the road and hummed through the air and chunked into the pines as the Ashley Gang dove for cover every which way and then counterattacked with a blazing fusillade of riflefire and buckshot into the rear of the truck. A third guard was shooting from the cab with a Winchester carbine. Hanford Mobley snaked his way on his belly through the palmettos and across the road and then stood up in the driver’s side window and said, “Hey!” The guard turned from the other window and his last vision in this world was of the bright blast of Hanford Mobley’s .45 two feet from his face—in that instant the back of his head burst open and portions of his brain sprayed over the roadside brush.

When the shooting was done, both of the guards in the rear of the truck were sprawled on the floor, their mortal remains pickling in the wash of sprits from the shattered bottles, their blood mingling with it. John Ashley looked in at them and sighed and said, “Well hell.”

Hanford Mobley said they werent worth feeling sorry for. “Them boys could be standing there breathin and thinkin how good they next piece a ass was gonna feel, but no, they had to make a fight of it. Fuck em.”

John Ashley shook his head but couldnt help smiling. “You’re a hard man, Hannie.” To which a grinning Mobley responded goddamned right he was.

The vapor of rum stung their eyes. Clarence joked that he was getting drunk just breathing the air. Half the load was yet intact and the gang transferred these hams to their own truck. Some of the sack bottoms were soaks with bloody rum. They took up the rummers’ weapons and were delighted with the pair of .30-06 Browning Automatic Rifles. They found also a pouch of extra 20-round magazines and Hanford Mobley released the empty magazine in one of the rifles and snapped in a full one. “I just got to try this thing,” he said. He stepped out into the road and aimed from the hip at the trunk of a tall pine silhouetted against the moon. He squeezed off a long deep-popping burst, the muzzle flaming and momentarily pulling to the right with the recoil before Mobley swung it back on target without easing off the trigger and the rounds kept pouring forth and began ripping chunks off the pine trunk and then the magazine was empty. Mobley lowered the BAR and gaped at grinning John Ashley and said, “Damn!”

Clarence Middleton had the other BAR and now he opened fire on the tall pine also, shooting in short bursts as he had been taught in the marines, and bark flew off the pine to either side and then his weapons too was empty. He smiled broadly and said, “I believe we gained us a tad more firepower, what I believe.”

They aligned the three dead men side by side on the truck bed and John Ashley ordered the driver—who’d survived the fight by diving under the truck—to deliver the bodies to his bosses in Miami. As the truck clattered away to the south, the Ashley Gang made bets among themselves as to how far it would get before the cops flagged it down to investigate the effluence of rum and inquire after the bullet holes.

A few days after that skirmish Gordon Blue came to see them at Twin Oaks. He was nervous and looked paler even than his usual milkiness.

“This war has got to stop, Joe,” he said at the supper table. “How about if I tell Bellamy you’d like to sit down with him, tell him you’d like to see if something can be worked out?”

“How about he asks us to sit down with him because he wants to see can something be worked out?” John Ashley said. Old Joe smiled around his pipe and nodded.

His eyes bloodshot and baggy, Gordon Blue obviously had not been sleeping well. His goatee was in need of a trim, his suit was rumpled, his tie hung loose at his collar. He rubbed his haggard face and sighed deeply. “Joe, please—let me arrange a meeting. Hell, they dont like losing loads to you, but they dont like bad publicity either. Did you know the Lauderdale cops stopped that truck with the dead guys in it? They said it smelled like an open rum barrel rolling down the street. Said it looked like something from the war. Naturally they pulled it over. Then they open the back and see the dead guys. ‘What the hell’s this?’ they ask the driver. ‘Who’re these dead men?’ The driver says, ‘There are dead men in there? Oh sweet Jesus!’ The cops said the guy was so good he nearly made himself faint.”

Everybody laughed except Gordon Blue who but smiled weakly and shook his head. Frank Ashley winked at his brothers. He had won the wager about how far the truck would get.

“Could use more fellers like that driver,” Old Joe said, still chortling. “Shoulda hired him, Johnny, while ye had the chance.” John Ashley smiled and nodded.

“It’s not really funny,” Gordon Blue said. “The papers in Lauder-dale and Miami both ran a story about it. Bellamy was as hot about the bad publicity as he was about getting jacked again. I’m serious, Joe, he’s ready to work something out and we ought to take him up on it. If we dont, there’s no telling what’ll happen but it wont be any good for anybody, thats for sure.”

“I’ll tell you what can be worked out,” Joe Ashley said. “He can agree to give us a cut of everything he brings through Palm Beach. He agrees to that and he can run all the hooch he wants through here. You reckon he’ll go for that?”

“Well yes, sure—sure he will,” Gordon Blue said, surprised by Old Joe’s sudden amenability. “Bellamy’s a reasonable man, Joe. It’s cheaper for him to give you a cut than keep losing loads to you and he knows it. Hell, giving you a cut is the only compromise that makes sense. Let me arrange a meeting and the two of you can talk about it.”

Old Joe looked at Bill Ashley sitting beside him. “I reckon I know where you stand on this.”

“It’s time we made some kind of deal so we can do business without more shootin,” Bill said. “I’ve said that from the start. We can quit jackin him and start concentrating on bringin more booze in from the islands.”

“Bill’s absolutely right,” Gordon Blue said to Old Joe. “You’ll make more money if you strike a deal with Bellamy. Everybody makes more money all around. The main thing is, the shooting’s got to stop. Sheriff Baker’s let us operate in whiskey without interference, Joe, but if this war with Bellamy stars scaring the citizens he’ll have to do something about it. That Boynton Beach fight a few weeks ago was way too close to town. People heard it, Joe, they got woke up by it. A stray bullet broke the window out of some fellow’s car a half-mile away. They were a dozen complaints to Bob Baker. He told the newspapers he was thinking of organizing a special force to do nothing but track down whiskey camps and catch bootleggers on the roads and the beaches. Nobody needs that—not you, not Bellamy.”

“Shit,” Ed Ashley said. “Bobby Baker’s too busy anymore gettin his picture took by the newspapers at the openin of ever new bank and restaurant and hotel in the county. He anyhow dont give a shit what rummers do to each other, everbody knows that.”

Old Joe turned to John Ashley. “Boy?”

“I guess it’s worth it to try and make a deal.”

“You caint trust that sonofabitch!” Roy Matthews blurted. All heads at the table turned his way. “I know what I’m talkin about. I done business with Bellamy before. He’ll cross us sure.”

“I know he kilt you friend, Roy,” Old Joe said softly. “But thats somethin between you and him and got nothin to do with business. This is business we’re talkin. Now, if the man does cross us, well, we’ll deal with that if the time ever comes.”

“It aint because of his friend,” Hanford Mobley said. “He just dont wanna run into his old bossman again.” He tucked his hands up under his armpits and flapped his arms like chicken wings. “Bawk-bawk-bawk.” He had never forgiven Roy Matthews for the business with the smoke rings and everybody knew it.

“You keep runnin you mouth, boy,” Roy Matthews said. “You just about to the edge with me.”

Hanford Mobley affected a look of fright—and then laughed and looked around at the others that they might join in.

“It’s enough of that, Hannie,” Old Joe said.

“You best listen to me on this,” Roy Matthews said, pointing a finger at Old Joe. “Bellamy’ll mean trouble to you some kinda way, you make me.”

“You made your point, boy,” Old Joe said, staring hard at him. He was not one to have a finger pointed at him or be told what he’d best do. Roy Matthews threw up his hands and looked away and said nothing more.

“All right, Gordy,” Old Joe said. “See to it.”

They met in a West Palm restaurant called The Clambake on a warm humid forenoon in latter May. Gordon Blue made the arrangements. They had a private backroom to themselves and sat at a long table bearing pots of coffee and baskets of biscuits and doughnuts. Nelson Bellamy and three of his men sat on one side of the table, and on the other, Old Joe Ashley and his boys Bill and John. As mediator, Gordon Blue sat at the head of the table. He was the only unarmed man in the room. Clarence Middleton had stayed outside with the car to act as lookout. He passed the time chatting with Bellamy’s driver about the best way to fish for snook.

Nelson Bellamy was tall and broadchested and hairy, and his suit coat was tight across his shoulders. Gold winked from his cufflinks, from his tie clasp, from a chain bracelet on his wrist, from a front tooth. He smoked cigarettes from a slim gold case he kept in his coat pocket. His right thumb was absent its forehalf. His eyes were dark and deep-set and moved constantly from one to another of the men across the table. One of the men with him was James White. On entering the room and seeing him at the table John Ashley had grinned and said, “Hey Jimmy, how you keepin?” White had smiled slightly and nodded but said nothing. The other two men with Bellamy were introduced as Bo Stokes and Alton Davis. Davis—tall, ropy, acne-scarred—was Bellamy’s “chief of import operations.” Stokes was larger even than Bellamy, thicknecked and heavyshouldered, his blond hair cropped almost to the scalp, the bridge of his nose off-center. His duties were not explained, but Gordon Blue now told the Ashleys that Bo Stokes had two-and-a-half years ago fought Jack Dempsey in the ring. John Ashley grinned at this information and said to Stokes. “That so? Did you win?” and Old Joe laughed but not Bill. Stokes turned to gaze out the window like a man profoundly bored. In the manner of their employer all three of Bellamy’s men wore well-tailored suits, but all three were sunbrowned and scarred of hands and were clearly not indoor types.

Bellamy’s voice was without accent and strained for sincerity. He said he wanted an end to their differences. It was costing him too much in lost product, he said, in lost trucks and reduced manpower. “You’ve run off a lot of my workers,” he said to Joe Ashley with a small smile void of all cheer. “A bunch more got scared just hearing the stories about your people and took off too. It’s all James here can do to put a truck crew together anymore.” He looked at John Ashley. “And you got a couple of my Brownings. I paid top dollar for those guns. They shoulda been enough to keep anybody off those trucks.”

“A gun’s only as good as the man to use it,” John Ashley said with a smile. Old Joe nodded like an approving professor.

“Looks that way,” Bellamy said. “Anyhow, they’re my guns and I’d be grateful if you gave them back.”

John Ashley laughed. “And I guess people in hell would be grateful for icewater. The thing is, I reckon we earned them guns.”

Bellamy’s smile thinned. White and Stokes and Davis wore no expression whatever. Bellamy turned to Gordon Blue and asked, “What do you think, Gordy? You’re an attorney-at-law. These boys got right to those Brownings?”

Blue seemed taken aback. “Well ah, I dont know, Nelson,” he said. “I guess so. I mean, your boys did start shooting first, so I guess—”

“Who says they shot first?” Bellamy said, voice and eyes going tight.

“Well, actually,” Gordon Blue said—looking nervous now, ad-justing his tie—“he did.” He gestured at John Ashley, who smiled and nodded at Ballamy.

“Oh, I see,” Bellamy said. He nodded at John Ashley. “If he said so, then it has to be true, is that it? That’s the way the law works.”

Joe Ashley chuckled and grinned at John and Bill, but Gordon Blue saw no humor in his situation. He gestured awkwardly and said, “No, Nelson, thats not what—I dont—what I mean is it seems like—”

Joe Ashley cut Blue off with a handwave. “Look here, Mister Bellamy,” he said, “I aint the least innersted in settin here watchin you scare ole Gordy who aint all that hard to scare anyways. All I wanna know is are you and me gone do business or aint we?”

Nelson Bellamy’s hard gaze cut to Joe Ashley and then back to Gordon Blue for a moment longer—and then his face abruptly softened and he leaned back in his chair and lit another cigarette. “By all means, Mister Ashley,” he said, “let’s do business.”

“Good. I guess Gordy told you what we want?”

“He did,” Bellamy said. “And I’ve given the matter some thought. The only question is, how much? What’s the percent?”

“Twenty,” Old Joe said without hesitation.

“That’s pretty damn steep,” Bellamy said. “I was thinking ten would be more like it.”

“I guess you would think so.”

“I cant see twenty.”

“I guess we could set here the rest of the day and argue about it,” Old Joe said.

“What say we split the difference and put it to rest?” Bellamy said.

Joe Ashley affected to ponder this suggestion. “Fifteen percent?”

“It’s still damn steep but I’ll shake on it if it’ll put an end to the trouble between us.”

“It might could if we’re talkin fifteen percent of every load that comes through Palm Beach, land or sea.”

“We are.”

“We got people who’ll be keepin count. Cant a load go through we wont know about it.”

“I’m sure thats true, Mister Ashley. I’ve heard about the grapevine you got up there. They say even the local cops cant get near you.”

“They say correct.”

“Well, we’ll be square with you on the count—trust me. What say to payment on the fifteen of every month, starting next month?”

Old Joe looked at Bill, who put the last bite of a doughnut in his mouth and licked the cinnamon sugar off his fingers and nodded.

Good enough,” Old Joe said to Bellamy and they shook hands on it over the table.

“See there?” Bellamy said. “It’s not hard for reasonable men to come to agreement. Most people have no idea.”

In truth he was seething about Gordon Blue’s siding with the Ashleys in the matter of the automatic rifles. And it had occurred to him that fifteen percent was probably the cut this redneck old goat Ashley’d had in mind from the start. Now the sonofabitch would go around telling everybody he’d got the best of Nelson Bellamy. He smiled and smiled at Joe Ashley across the table and hated him and all his trash kind.

He asked if they’d care for a drink but Joe Ashley politely declined for them all and the Ashley party took its leave. Gordon Blue went with them.

A few minutes later they were all in the Ford touring car and Clarence Middleton drove them out onto the Dixie Highway and headed for home.

“What you think, Daddy?” John Ashley said. “We trust Bellamy to pay us every month like he said?”

“I wouldnt trust him if he had one hand on a stack of bibles eight feet high and the other one glued to his dick,” Old Joe said. “We’ll just see. A deal’s a deal and we’ll hold to our end of it. But the first time he dont pay our cut we’ll be right back to jacking his damn trucks and every fucken boatload he puts down on our beaches is what we’ll do.”

That night John Ashley had a dream in which he saw Gordon Blue sitting crosslegged in some hazy setting. His suit was sopping wet and he was staring at him with unmistakable sorrow and then opened his mouth as if he would tell him something and his tongue became a fish and swam away on the air. The dream was still nettling him the next morning, but at breakfast Gordon Blue was in high spirits and joking with Ma Ashley and feeling very optimistic about the deal they’d made with Bellamy, and so John Ashley shrugged off his lingering unease. That afternoon Blue took his leave and Albert Miller drove him back to Miami.

Three days later as Gordon Blue came out of his office building at the end of the day, the man Stokes appeared at his side and took him by the arm and said, “We got business to discuss, Counselor.” A car was idling at the curb with Alton Davis at the wheel and its back door open wide. James White was seated in the back and beckoned Blue into the car. Gordon knew that to resist would be folly. Stokes could snap his arm like a broomstick if he took the notion—and he looked to have it in mind.

They drove west through the heavily trafficked streets and then the town buildings were behind them and the road turned to packed shell. They went through a few small but well-kept neighborhoods and then the road went to rutted dirt and now there were no more residences but for occasional shacks. Nobody made conversation. Now the road was flanked by dense palmetto scrub and slash pines and Davis turned south onto a rough narrow road hardly wide enough for one car. A few minutes later they came to a clearing on the north bank of the Miami River at a point about two miles from town. They parked in back of an empty fishhouse that looked out on a pair of rotted piers where Indians had until recently come to trade. The sun had lowered behind the redbark gumbo trees and the western sky was the color of raw meat. As he got out of the car Gordon Blue looked hard at the trees and at the long shadows they cast on the river surface. A flock of white herons was winging toward the fiery sunset and the deeper reaches of the Devil’s Garden. It had showered earlier and the grass was still wet and frogs rang in the high reeds. Blue breathed deeply the ripe redolence of vegetation and pungent muck and he rued that he’d never spent much time outdoors. Then he was steered inside the dark fishhouse whose windows were covered with burlap and he was made to sit at a small table that was the only furnishing in the room. The table held an oil lamp and James White lit it.

White did the talking. He reminded Blue that not long ago he had mentioned in passing to Mister Bellamy that the Ashleys were about to expand their whiskey distribution to places where they didnt have the legal protection they enjoyed along the southeast coast. Mister Bellamy, White said, was very interested in knowing where these new distribution points would be.

Gordon Blue said he didnt know. He’d now and then overheard the Ashleys discussing the possible expansion of their business, but he had no idea which places they had in mind as new drops. They did not share such information with him.

Bo Stokes let a heavy sigh and took off his jacket and hung it carefully over the back of a straight chair. James White told Blue that Mister Bellamy had been disappointed by his having sided with the Ashleys in their claim to the automatic rifles. White suggested this would be a good opportunity for Blue to prove to Mister Bellamy that he was truly on his side. Mister Bellamy didnt expect Blue to know all the new places where the Ashleys would be delivering whiskey, but he would be grateful if he would pass on the name of at least one or two of those locations.

Stokes lit a cigarette and expelled a stream of smoke at the oil lamps. Alton David stood leaning against the wall, idly picking at his crooked brown teeth with a matchstick and looking on without expression.

Gordon Blue’s throat was tight, his mouth spitless. He’d never even pretended to be physically brave. His bladder was in distress.

Mustering all the sincerity possible to him he said he’d like to help Mister Bellamy, he truly would, but he really did not know much about the particulars of the Ashleys’ business. If he knew where the Ashleys intended to sell their whiskey he’d say so. And why not? He didnt owe them anything except his legal counsel. It wasnt like they’d ever done anything personal for him.

James White studied Blue’s eyes closely as if he would read the truth there. Then moved away from the table and gestured to Davis. Davis came to Gordon Blue and locked an arm under his chin and pulled his head back and held it fast. Blue could hardly draw breath. His attempt to plead with them emerged as a strangled groan.

Stokes took a deep drag off the cigarette and then blew on its tip to produce a red glow. “You let me know, now,” he said as he loomed over Gordon Blue’s terrified upturned face, “just as soon as you start remembering.”

She never knew when he’d show up. She might come home from her typist job at the Seward Land Title Company and find him waiting on her stoop, smoking a cigarette and reading the sports items in the newspaper in the light of the late afternoon, his skimmer tilted back on his head. He’d look up with a smile full of devilment and she’d laugh and rush through the front gate of the apartment-house yard and into his arms and he’d fondle her bottom as they kissed and men driving past would toot their horns or whistled at them and grin. Five minutes later they’d be in her second-floor apartment, entwined naked on her bed. Or she might be reading a magazine after super and listening to her phonograph when there would come a soft tapping at her door and she’d open it to find him leaning against the hall wall with his ankles crossed and his thumbs hooked over his belt buckle and a toothpick waggling between his grinning teeth. Sometimes, after not hearing from him for two or three weeks, she’d be startled awake in the middle of the night by his hand clamped on her mouth and his other hand stripping her of her pajama bottoms and she’d feel his hard cock against her and his warm breath at her ear whispering fiercely, “I’m Captain Dick the Pirate and I’m gone fuck you till you faint.” Her heart would jump and her breath leave in a rush and she’d seize his erection and hasten him into her. Later she’d feign pique and slap at his chest and tell him he was awful for scaring her like that. She’d every time say she was going to change the lock on her door and he’d laugh and say the doorlock hadnt been invented he couldnt tease open.

Roy Matthews came to see her only when Old Joe sent Hanford Mobley off with a crew on some assignment that would keep him away for days—picking up beach unloadings or making deliveries to middlemen in the deeper Glades. Joe Ashley never put him on a crew under Hanford Mobley’s charge. Old Joe wanted no confrontation between them that might jeopardize a delivery or a pickup, and so he had begun using Roy for most of his one-man jobs—collecting delinquent payments for deliveries, meeting secretly with law officers on the Ashley payroll to give them their monthly bribe, making drops of bush lightning to some of their smaller clients from Fort Pierce to Miami. Sometimes he would not see her for weeks, sometimes he’d be with her for two or three nights running.

Hanford Mobley was with her every Sunday, as well as whenever the Ashley gang came to Miami with their girls to make a high time of it. He had but recently declared his love for her and had begun to hint about marriage at some time in the nebulous future when he would be rich and carefree and could afford to give her the best of everything and take her everywhere. She liked Hannie, liked his devotion to her, his boyish enthusiasm for sex. Liked above all his outsized phallus, which, as she’d measured it from base to slit with a seamstress’ tape, stood at very nearly nine inches in its enpurpled readiest state. It was her bad luck that the boy owned no discipline whatever. Within seconds of entering her he would be pumping wildly and ejaculating like a firehouse. He had wonderful times. She—despite that supremely thrilling moment when he entered her with that elephantine thing—would be left in a tight tangle of frustration.

Roy Matthews was the dark side of the moon. He never spoke of love and she knew he never would. She had tried to make him jealous by speaking in awe of Hanford’s huge member but he had affected to be unimpressed and came back at her with the ancient male bromide, “It aint the size of the tool, it’s the knowin how to use it.” And he did know how to use it, Roy did, she had to give him that. He knew how to use every tool God gave man for pleasing a woman—cock, fingers, mouth, words. For all his jokes about Dick the Pirate, he very nearly would make her swoon every time they did it. She’d once rather tentatively urged Hanford to kiss her farther down than Mister Cooter, her turtle tattoo, and he’d gaped at her and said, “You mean…down there?” as if he’d been asked to put his face in a chumbucket. She’d been glad for the darkness that hid her furious blush and she had not broached the matter with him again. But she couldnt help thinking sometimes how Hannie was such a boy.

Roy required no supplication. His mouth was a wicked thing and he loved to use it on her. He’d suck her breast tips to hard puckers. He’d roll the hood of her clitoris under his tongue. He’d lap expertly at the little pearl within until she’d shriek her pleasure. Her neighbor had more than once pounded on the wall and made threat to call the cops. Roy thought she should get another tattoo, a snake tail curling out of her public patch. “Could call it your snake in the grass,” he said. Like somebody else I could name, she’d thought, but kept it to herself.

On those occasions when the Ashley bunch would come to Miami for a good time at the Elser Pier and at whichever hotel they were staying, she would of course be with Hanford. Roy came with a different girl every time, and every one of them a looker. She would tell herself that she wasnt jealous, she wasnt, yet she’d be all the more suggestive in the way she’d press against him as they danced. Hanford Mobley of course loved it when she was so ardent. He’d sometimes question her with a grin about what had gotten into her and she’d kiss him and then whisper, “That’s for me to know and you to enjoy,” which was good enough for Hanford. As she’d insinuate herself against him on the dancefloor or tickle his ear with her tongue or grope him under the table, she’d now and then glance Roy’s way to see his reaction. Sometimes he would be smiling at her antics—but usually he was too absorbed in his girl of the moment to even take notice.

“We’ve been told John Ashley himself is the one going to make the drop,” the pockmarked one said, the one calling himself Baxter. “It’s a fishcamp, a one-man drop, but it’s their first time there and they aint bought any police protection there, not yet anyway, and so maybe he’ll have a backup. It’s not likely there’ll be more than two of them if there’s that many.” The man’s smile was a brown ruin of skewed teeth.

The big blond called himself Williams. He rarely spoke but his eyes were quick and didnt seem to miss much.

The waitress came to the booth and asked if anybody cared for more coffee and they all shook their heads. They were in the Cove Cafe in West Palm Beach. Bob Baker had agreed to meet them here after one of them called him on the telephone and said they had information about John Ashley he might be interested to know.

Freddie Baker had come along with Sheriff Bob and had been observing Baxter and Williams carefully. Now he said. “Where you all get this information?”

“We have our sources,” the pockmarked one said.

“Name one.”

The pockmark showed his bad teeth.

“Dont matter the source,” the blond one said. “I guarantee you he didnt lie.”

“Listen,” the pockmark said, “we thought you’d be interested, thats all. We heard you been wanting to catch this particular fella for a while and we thought the information might be of use to you, thats all. If you’re not interested, well, all right. We’ll be one our way.”

Freddie Baker said: “Maybe we’ll just lock up both your big-city asses for withholding information pertainin to a criminal investigation.

The pockmarked man and the blond one stared at him.

Bob Baker laughed lowly. “Hell, Freddie, these boys dont want to withhold nothin. They come to make a deal. So get to it, boys. What is it you want?”

The pockmark cleared his throat and looked about. Then said: “We heard you’re putting together a special squad to stop runners through Palm Beach. That would cause problems for us. What we want is for you to let our whiskey trucks slide. Let our boats unload on the beaches.”

Bob Baker regarded them for a moment. Then looked at Freddie Baker who pursed his lips in order to disguise his smile. Freddie knew Bobby had no intention of interfering with the booze supply coming through Palm Beach County. Certain interested parties in Broward County, which lay just south of the Palm Beach line, had recently advanced to him some sizable “campaign contributions” in exchange for his assurance that the Palm Beach portion of the booze pipeline would not be shut down.

“How much you givin the Ashleys?” Bob Baker said.

The pockmark regarded him intently for a moment before answering. “Who says we’re giving the Ashleys anything?”

Bob Baker smiled thinly. “Hell, boys, I know that family bettern you know the feel of your own peckers. Only way you could be runnin booze through Palm Beach is they’re lettin you—and if they’re lettin you it’s because you’re payin them.”

“If thats true—if—why aint you done something about it?” the pockmark said. “Sounds like they’re shaking people down. That’s against the law, aint it? Why aint you pinched the bunch of them?” He was smiling too, and as humorlessly.

“Because if they shakin anybody down it’s only people like you,” Bob Baker said. “I aint never felt it ought be illegal to steal from a thief.” He grinned.

“And we never felt it should be illegal to make a buck selling the public what it wants,” the pockmark said. “We aint crooks, we’re businessmen. If you dont like booze, Sheriff, take it up with the folks who voted you into office. I’ll give you two-to-one most of them like a drink now and then and are doing their part to keep us in business.”

“I never said I didnt like booze,” Bob Baker said. “I just dont much care for crooks. And what I said in the first place was, how much are you givin the Ashleys?”

The pockmark looked at the blond man as if he could read some meaning in his neutral aspect. Then turned to Bob Baker and said, “What the hell, we’re payin em, yeah, so what? They get seven percent of every load that comes through. It’s worth it to avoid the headaches they can give us.”

“Bullshit,” Bob Baker said. “You aint gettin by for no seven, not past them. They gettin ten if they gettin a dime. Come on, boy, tell the truth and shame the devil.”

The pockmark looked away and heaved a huge sigh, then looked back at Bob Baker and shrugged, “It burns our ass that they get ten. They had us over a barrel.”

“Eleven,” Bob Baker said.

“Huh?” the pockmark said.

“They get ten percent, I want eleven.”

The pockmark laughed and looked away again. Then nodded and said, “Well hell, I guess you got us over a barrel too.”

Bob Baker went through the careful ritual of lighting a cigar. Why not, he thought. Grab him and put him away for good. He wouldnt be cutting off Ashley whiskey to the local businesses who needed it, not if he put the arm on John but let the old man’s business be. And it would be good publicity for a crime-fighting sheriff sworn to keep the county safe. So do it. He could give himself a half-dozen reasons to do it. Practical reasons. Not that he didnt heave plenty of personal reasons too. The humiliations. Julie. Julie. Hell yes, he had reasons to put the man away. Damn good reasons. And never mind anything else. Never mind he sometimes woke in the night from the vision of an eyeball under his thumb and the sound of screaming. Or from the dream of posing with a dead man in ways that now seemed more shameful than he could bear to think about. What happened happened and was done with. Never mind that sometimes, right in the middle of the day, he’d feel a sudden inexplicable surge in his heartbeat, an abrupt dryness of mouth and tightness of chest that had nothing to do with ill health. Never mind his suspicion that he had to put the man away soon because he was only biding his time before seeking his own retribution.

Now he had the cigar burning evenly and took a few puffs and then looked at the pockmarked man and said, “All right, Tell me.”

Laura Upthegrove had a sense for things amiss. Raised from childhood in the Devil’s Garden she possessed a wildland creature’s acute sensitivity to the surrounding world and all things in it. She could intuit trouble in a subtle tightening of her skin, in the altered hum of her blood.

It was commonplace for John Ashley to take his leave of her every so often on an early evening with the explanation that he had to pick up a load or deliver one, and she’d never questioned his need to do it. Bootlegging was mainly a nighttime business, after all. One evening as they lay in a tangle of arms and legs and both of them still breathing hard from the thrash and tumble of their coupling, he told her he had to make a late delivery in Riviera, and he slid out of bed and began to get dressed. But as she watched him from the bed she quite suddenly knew he was lying. There was nothing in his manner to rouse her suspicions. There had been no abatement at all in his ardor for her when they made love (they’d learned to grip sticks between their teeth to mute their mating sounds when they coupled in the sidehouse at Twin Oaks). And yet she knew he was lying, knew it just as surely as she’d always known when a moccasin was nearby or a panther was watching from the shadows or Indians were in proximity of her house. She could feel it. And her feeling at this moment—her inexplicable but utterly certain feeling—was that he was off to see another woman.

He checked the magazine in his .45 and then snicked it back into the pistol butt and slipped the gun into his waistband at the small of his back and pulled his shirttail over it. He put on his hat and gave her a wink and went out the door. She listened to him crank the truck and heard the motor catch and then stutter until he was behind the wheel and adjusted the levers and the engine’s idling became smoother. Then the gears chunked into action and the truck clattered away toward the pinewoods trail leading to the highway.

She flew into her overalls and pulled on her brogans without lacing them and went out hatless into the moonlight-dappled yard just as his headlamp beams disappeared into the trees. She jogged to the Ford roadster and cranked it up and got behind the wheel and set out after him without turning on her lights.

Sipping bush lightning and smoking in the recessed darkness of the front porch, Old Joe Ashley and his boys Frank and Ed watched the truck and then the roadster depart. Ed spat out into the moonlight and said, “Looks like ole Johnny might could be in for more excitement tonight than he bargained for,” and they all laughed lowly. Ma Ashley came to the door and looked at them and then out to the woods where the Ford chugged away faintly in the dark. She sighed tiredly and said, “Kids,” and shook her head and went back inside.

Laura kept a quarter-mile back from the single red taillight of his truck as they bore south under a white crescent moon and a sky so think with stars she thought she might reach up and swirl them with her hand and they’d trail sparks of every color. They’d been driving for almost an hour when they reached Riviera and when he didnt stop there she knew her hunch had been right. She almost shouted her anger into the night. Goddamn him! Goddamn all men and their stupid hankering dicks!

At West Palm Beach he slowed and turned off on a side street. She followed at a distance. A few blocks farther on he turned onto a muddy street where the air assumed the smell of brackish water. He drove past a row of darkened boathouses and then pulled into a weedy half-full parking lot near a three-story building with a small front porch illuminated bright orange by a lamp over the door. The building stood at the edge of a towering pinewoods and was flanked on both sides by areca palms and clusters of bamboo standing in high black silhouette against tall openshuttered windows ablaze with yellow light. The truck’s headlamps cut off and he got out and went past a pump shed at the edge of the lot and through the shadow of a large umbrella tree and up to a lighted screendoor that she guessed opened to a kitchen. She knew what the place was without knowing how she knew. Her fury swelled in her breast. Bad enough another woman—but a whore! Goddamn him!

She parked at the end of the street and reached under the seat and withdrew the .44 revolver he always kept under there. She checked the loads and then tucked the pistol in the deep sidepocket of her overalls and got out of the car and stood there for a moment with fireflies blinking greenly all about her. She wondered what she was going to do. The front door was out of the question. The idea of simply leaving and confronting him later made her want to curse out loud. Whatever she was going to do about this she was going to do it now.

She crossed the parking lot and headed for the screendoor. She went up the low wooden steps and stood in the shadow of the eaves’ wide overhang and looked in through the screen. In a kitchen spacious and bright a young Negro girl was taking a cut-glass bowl out of a cupboard. There was a wide door at the far end of the room, a narrower one near the pantry. Muttering to herself the girl went out through the larger door.

Laura eased the door open against a softly creaking spring and stepped inside. The air held the mingled aromas of bread and perfume, pipe and cigar smoke, sex and whiskey. She paused and glanced nervously from one door to the other, expecting somebody to come in at any moment and demand to know what she was doing here. What could she say? She was suddenly quite conscious of her nakedness under the overalls.

Plinking piano music carried faintly through the wider door—“Frankie and Johnny”—and she felt like both laughing and crying at this tune so perfect to the circumstance. Now the muffled laughter of men and women came through the wider door and she guessed a parlor lay that way. She went to the narrower door and saw a shadowy hall with a stairway at the far end. Her mouth was dry and she felt her heartbeat throbbing in her throat. She touched the pistol for courage and then went down the hall and slowly ascended the stairs and came to a landing and yet another door, this one shut. She turned the knob and the door opened onto a red-carpeted hallway with a half-dozen doors to either side and another closed door at its far end and she knew this was there the whores would be.

Gripping the pistol in the pocket she stepped into the hall. She could think of nothing to do but put her ear to each door in turn. At the first one on her left she heard nothing. She opened it silently to reveal a man and woman lying naked and is spooned fashion, their eyes closed, the man idly fondling one of the woman’s breasts. For a moment she stood and stared, and then eased the door shut. In the next room an unfamiliar male voice was talking about Australia. From the room on the other side of the hall came a low urgent chanting, “Yes-yes-yes,” but she did not know this voice either. The next door to her left was open and she saw there was no one inside. The room after that was also deserted. The following door was closed and silent and she opened it and saw a thin naked brunette with pear-shaped breasts sitting astraddle a man so hairy he seemed of another species. They looked at her and the man grinned through his beard but the girl scowled and said, “The hell you want?” She quickly closed the door and stood there for a long moment with her heart hammering. The man was laughing, the girl cursing that you couldnt get any privacy in this business anymore, just anydamnbody could come walking in on you.

At the last door on the left she heard him. He was saying something about seeing Bobby in a dream. She didnt know if he was talking about his dead brother or the sheriff or somebody else. She didnt care. She took out the .44 and swiftly opened the door, stepped inside and closed it behind her.

The room was dimly illuminated by a small bedside oil lamp turned down low. They were lying naked on the bed, his back to the door, the bedsheets in a tangle at their feet. He looked over his shoulder and saw her and then saw the gun in her hand. His mouth opened but he made no sound.

“Who is it?” the woman said. She sat up with her face to the door and in a quick glance Laura saw that her hair was short and blonde and that she was pretty.

She strode quickly to the bed and put the pistol muzzle against John Ashley’s forehead and forced his head back into the pillow and said, “Give me one good reason I ought not to shoot you here and now, you no-count whore-mongerin son of a bitch.” She cocked the hammer.

His good eye fixed on her. He was trying to affect indifference but she knew him too well to be fooled. He was scared—she could see it in his eye, in the pale tightness of his mouth. She wanted to laugh, she suddenly felt so good, but she kept her aspect deadly serious the better to preserve the mood and her authority.

“I aint got no good reason,” he said.

“I’ll give you a reason,” the blonde said quickly. “He loves you.”

Laura looked at the woman whose stare was strange and unfocused. “Who the hell asked—”

John Ashley grabbed her wrist with one hand and clapped his other hand tightly over the cocked hammer so it could not fall as she squeezed the trigger. She tried to pull the pistol free but he locked both hands tight and yanked her off balance and onto the bed. She punched at him with her free hand and cursed him and he rolled over on top of her and straddled her stomach and she shouted, “Get offa me—get off!” and vainly bucked and writhed and tried to unseat him. He wrested the revolver from her and eased the hammer down and Loretta May’s hands scrabbled over his shoulders and her arms locked around his neck and she said, “Get offa her before you squash her!” With a hard choking tug backward she pulled him off Laura and he went tumbling to the floor. He scrambled away from the bed on all fours and got to his feet and stood with his back against the wall and the gun in his hand as Laura sat up and rubbed her wrist and glared at him like she might come at him yet. Both of them were gasping for breath.

“You damn crazy woman,” John Ashley said.

“You hush, John Ashley,” Loretta May said sharply. “It’s no way to talk to the woman you love.”

“The woman I love was ready to blow my damn brains out, is what she was—”

“Goddamn right I was, you cheatin, lying son of—”

“Hush now, the both you!” Lorreta May said, reaching out and finding Laura’s back and then scooting up beside her. She put her arms around Laura’s shoulders and said, “It’s all right now, honey, it’s all right.”

And then suddenly Laura was crying—crying hard with her face in her hands—and Loretta held her closer and rocked her gently and crooned, “There now, baby, there now, dont you cry. It’s no need to cry, it’s no need. Everything’s better than you know. It is, it is.”

Laura’s unlaced brogans had come off in the struggle, and one of the overall straps had slipped off her shoulder to expose a breast and even as she wept she became aware of the soft warmth of Loretta May’s naked breasts against her arm. She snuffled and wiped at her tears with the back of her hand and turned to look at Loretta May and saw the strange lack of focus in her eyes. And even as the realization came to her she said, “What’s the matter with you? Are you—? I mean—”

“She’s blind, for chrissake,” John Ashley said. “Cant yousee?”

Laura stuck her tongue out at him and then said to Loretta, “Are you really?”

“As a damn bat, honey. Aint you never knowed anybody blind before?”

“Uh-uh. You been blind since always? Since you was borned?”

“No. Just since I was ten.”

“You used to could see till you was ten year old?”

“Used to could.”

“And now you cant see nothin? Nothin at all?”

“Well. Nothin you can put your hand to.”

“But thats…it must be so awful dark all the…you poor…that’s just terrible!” Laura said. And broke out crying again. She pulled Loretta May to her and kissed her on the forehead and hugged her around the shoulders.

Loretta May stroked Laura’s hair and kissed her cheek and they hugged more closely still and Laura caressed Loretta May’s bare back and kissed her perfumed shoulder and then each of her eyes in turn. She looked into her sightless eyes a moment and then kissed her quickly and lightly on the lips.

Loretta May smiled and brushed at Laura’s tears with her fingers and put her fingers to Laura’s mouth and whispered, “I always known why you love him. Now I see why he loves you.”

Laura smiled against Loretta May’s fingers and took a fingertip in her mouth and rolled her tongue on it and then blushed brightly and grinned and Loretta May grinned back at her and put a hand to Laura’s face and kissed her full on the mouth. And Laura held the kiss. And then they were kissing deeply and with tongues and Loretta pushed down the other of Laura’s overall straps and lightly touched her breasts. They kissed and tentatively put their hands to each other in Loretta May eased her hand down Laura’s taut belly and playfully wriggled her fingers into her public bush and Laura’s eyes came open wide and she pulled back slightly in Loretta’s embrace and the two women faced each other and burst into giggles like mischievous schoolgirls.

“You know what?” Lorretta said. “We forgettin somethin.” She put her hand over her eyes like a sun visor and turned her head in one direction and then the other, as if she were scanning the horizons. “Wherever he’s at.”

Laura looked at John Ashley still standing with his back to the wall. He’d put the pistol aside on a chair and was smiling. He bore an erection as sizable as any she’d ever seen on him. It was nodding in time with his heartbeat like an approving bystander. She laughed and shook her head and said, “He’s over there with that ugly thing all swole up and pointin at us like it aint seen a nekkid woman in a year.”

He looked down at himself and said, “I dont know it’s so ugly.”

“How you, ah, feel about this, Johnny?” Loretta May said, lightly it to her and grinned at John Ashley.

“I feel like everbody’s gone to a hell of a good party,” John Ashley said, “and I aint been invited.”

The girls tittered. “Poor boy feels left out,” Laura said.

“Well now, you one-eyed gator skinner,” Loretta May said, “maybe you wouldnt be left out of nothin if you just quit bein way over there and got your outlaw ass on over here.”

His grin widened the more and he bounded for the bed with his bobbing erection pointing the way like a compass right and true.

One of their informants brought the news to Twin Oaks. He’d heard it from a West Palm Beach cop who got it from some Miami cops just a couple of days before.

The corpse had been weighted by something heavy tied to its neck by quarter-inch cord. Whatever the weighting object had been—a concrete block, a section of scrap metal, a limerock boulder—it had to have been rough-edged because the action of the current’s steady tugging on the body had eventually severed the cord where it rubbed against the anchor. The body had then carried downstream and floated up near the mouth of the river at Biscayne Bay and in front of the Royal Palm Hotel where it was spotted by a guest taking an early morning stroll. The police were summoned and they pulled it out of the water and even though the dead man was eyeless several of the cops recognized him as Gordon Blue.

Much of his face bore small dark pocks about the size of bulletholes, particularly around the empty sockets. The cops figured them for burns. The body was conveyed to the city physician who surmised that the victim had been dead at least a week. He found that several fingers on each hand were broken and that the victim’s scrotum had suffered severe trauma. “The man went through some goodly pain before he went in the river,” the informant told the Ashley Gang. “And he went in still alive. The doc said he died of drowning.”

The Ashleys figured it was most likely Bellamy’s doing. The question was why. If Bellamy didnt like the deal with them why take it out on Gordy? Hell, if Bellamy didnt like the deal why even bother to shake on it? If he’d intended to crawfish why make the first payoff as he already had?

“What we gone do about this, Daddy?” Ed said.

Old Joe knocked his pipe against a porch post to dislodge the dottle and then put the stem in his mouth and blew the remaining ashes from the bowl. “Nothin,” he said. “We dont know it was Bellamy—not for a fact, we dont. And even if it was, it dont look to have nothin to do with us. Bellamy’s holdin to his end of the deal, so we’ll hold to ours. I dont know why he’d do Gordy such as he did but I figure it for somethin personal between them.”

For a moment no one spoke. Then Frank Ashley said: “Gordy was our friend.”

Bill Ashley snorted. “He was a lawyer. A lawyer aint nobody’s friend.” The late afternoon light played off his spectacles and made them look like circles of tin.

John Ashley glared at him. “You do best when you do like usual and keep you mouth shut.”

Bill turned his glinting lenses toward him but said nothing.

“Quit now,” Old Joe said. “You both right. He was our friend and he was a lawyer and sometimes I wasnt real sure when he was being the one and when the other. But it was his choice to do business with them Miami sumbitches. I always told him he oughten to truck with them—some you heard me tell him. But he always said he knew what he was doin. Well, he took his own chances is what he did and we had nothin to do with it then and we dont now. And thats the end of it.”

Shortly thereafter John Ashley made a delivery of Old Joe’s bush lightning to a new customer, a man named Goren, who operated a fish camp on the Peace River just east of Wauchula in brandnew Hardee County barely two months old. Goren had been informed he could get booze at a better price from the Ashleys than from the Arcadia moonshiners he’d been dealing with for the past year, and he sent word to Old Joe that he could use twenty cases a month if the Ashleys could see fit to get him off the hook with the Arcadia dealers. They were some pretty rough old boys and he didnt want them to get mad at him for quitting them. Old Joe told Goren he’d settle the matter with the Arcadians, but it would be a month before he’d have a sufficient store of hooch on hand to make the fish camp’s first delivery. He promised that thereafter the hooch would come around as regular as the moon. He said his boy John would deliver the first load to ensure that everything went all right and that Goren was satisfied with the stuff. Goren said they had a deal. He was impressed that Joe Ashley would take so much trouble for such a smalltime customer. Old Joe said he treated all his customers the same whether they bought a thousand cases or just one jug. He then sent Clarence Middleton to apprise the Arcadians of Goren’s switch in hooch suppliers. The Arcadians didnt like it but knew better than to make an issue of it. And now John Ashley was delivering the Wauchula fish camp’s first load of Old Joe’s hooch.

The camp stood on a stretch of riverbank in the deep shade of live oaks hung thick with Spanish moss. A dozen small boats were tied up at a trio of piers jutting into the river. Ten yards back from the river was a bait and tackle shop set on six-foot pilings and engirt by a wide planked deck with rough-hewn tables and benches. Goren’s two Negro workers were quick to unload the truck and store the cases in the bait shop’s backroom next to Goren’s tiny living quarters. The fishing camp fellas were good old boys and all of them were excited to have John Ashley in their midst. John accepted their invitation to have a short one with them before heading back and they sat themselves at one of the long tables on the portion of deck overlooking the river. As the fish camp owner poured a round of Old Joe’s shine a school of mullet broke the surface of the river like silver shards of a bursting mirror. The men were just raising their glasses to one another’s health when police cars came roaring down the shell drive and cops with shotguns came running out of the flanking trees yelling, “Hands up! Get your fucken hands up, you sons of bitches!”

His first thought was to dive over the railing into the river. But he knew the cops would open fire and there were too many of them to miss and that would be all she wrote. Either that or they’d get in one of the ready boats and go out and pluck him from the water before he was halfway to the other bank. So he stood up with the others and raised his hands high as the cops closed in and Goren whispered fiercely, “We dont know no Ashley, none of us, got that, boys?” The others nodded and grinned, their faces bright and unable to hide their excitement at this adventure of a police raid and John Ashley in their midst.

There were a dozen or so Hardee County deputies in the raiding party and some of them shoved the fishcamp men up against the wall face-first and frisked them while others went into the bait shop and found the cases of hooch. The deputy who patted down Ashley relieved him of the .45 in his waistband and called, “Sheriff Poucher, right here!” The sheriff came over and examined the pistol and then looked at John Ashley as though he might smile at him. He said, “You the one brought the shine in?”

John Ashley said he sure as hell was not, he was just passing through and thought he’d stop and see if there was aught to drink at this camp and there was, and he was just having a short one with the fellas is all. The sheriff asked what he was doing with the .45. He said it was for protection, a present from his uncle who’d fought against the Hun to defend the American way of life and freedom for all. He told the sheriff he was a sewing machine salesman and he’d heard that south Florida roads were bad for bandits and he was afraid of being robbed on the road. He’d sold every machine in his truck between Fort Lauderdale and Avon Park was why the truck was empty and why he had a fat roll of money in his pocket. He said was on his way home to his wife and three little children in Tampa who he’d sorely missed these past few weeks on the road and couldnt wait to see again. The sheriff nodded as though seriously considering this explanation and then, asked his name. “Murphy, sir,” John Ashley said. “Art Murphy.”

A man laughed loudly behind him and John Ashley abruptly felt a great sagging weight in his chest. He turned and saw him standing there, large and beaming, his thumbs in his gunbelt, his yellow grin showing teeth the size of thumbnails.

“Hey, Johnny,” Bob Baker said. “How you keepin?”

Hardee County Sheriff John Poucher relinquished custody of the prisoner to Sheriff Robert Baker who’d brought him the tip about the hooch drop at Goren’s fish camp and who had a handful of outstanding warrants to serve on the bootlegger. By the following sunrise John Ashley was once again in the Palm Beach County Jail.

The jail had just begun to undergo renovations and the clamor and dust of construction was daylong. He was manacled by both wrists to the solid-piece iron bunnk in one of the windowless isolation cells along the back wall of the block, the chain just long enough to allow him to sit up but not stand fully. The single other furnishing was a half-gallon tin can for his waste. The only light was a black-crossed yellow shaft angling in through a small barred window in the door. Just outside the cell a pair of guards with shotguns were stationed round the clock. They were under Sheriff Baker’s orders to shoot the prisoner dead if anybody tried to break him out. Two more guards were posted in the outer room and two more just outside the front door. The reinforced fence around the jail was patrolled by a dozen cops with carbines. For the whole time John Ashley was in the Palm Beach County Jail Bob Baker put most of the sheriff’s department on duty there. It was a plum time for robbers and burglars and holdup men working in other parts of the county.

He was permitted no visitor but his lawyer, one Ira Goldman, who’d been recommended to Joe Ashley as the best criminal defense attorney in Miami. Goldman was at his side at every court session and filed a steady progression of motions and briefs all of which were rejected just as quickly as the judge scanned them. Goldman forth-rightly informed Joe Ashley that there was no chance of keeping John from going back to prison to serve out the rest of his original sentence—plus time added for his escape. Old Joe refused to believe he couldnt buy John out of jail one way or another. “Just find out who we got to grease,” he told Goldman. “The judge, the guards, whoever. No matter how much they want, I’ll get it.”

Goldman told him to forget it. There wasnt a thing the judge could do. As for the guards, their fear of what Bob Baker would do to them if John Ashley should escape was even greater than their greed. No payoff of any size, Goldman said, not to anybody, would suffice to get John free. Not right now anyway. He’d heard they even planned to shut him up in solitary confinement at first—and no, they couldnt buy him out of that, either. There had been too many escapes off the road gangs the last few years. Too much written in the papers about corruption in the penal system. John Ashley was the perfect example for them to show they meant business up in Raiford. In a couple of years, Goldman said, they might be able to make some arrangement with somebody up there. “When our chance comes,” Goldman said, “it’ll cost us plenty. But first John’s going to have to do some time.”

Old Joe glared at Goldman and nearly quivered under the urge to kick him until he hollered that yet, there was a way to get John Ashley out of jail. But he held his fury in check. In his bones he knew Goldman was right. John Ashley wasnt just a captured fugitive from the law—he was a political issue. The newspapers were crowing about the arrest of Florida’s most notorious desperado. Politicians from Fort Pierce to Miami were blowing hard about this being the beginning of a long-overdue effort to rid South Florida of its festering criminal element. Day after day Bob Baker smiled for the cameras and reminded reporters that he’d sworn to bring John Ashley to justice and now he’d done it. He wanted to thank the people of Palm Beach County for putting their trust in him by electing him to office and he hoped they would continue to support him in his fight against crime. Up at Raiford the warden awaited the desperado’s transfer and told reporters it would snow peach ice cream in hell before John Ashley was assigned to a road gang again where it would be easier to try another escape. Mister Ashley, he said, was going to become very familiar with the penitentiary’s walls.

To avoid crowds of gawkers and the possibility of confederates trying to free John Ashley in transit, Bob Baker made no announcement public or private of when he would move the prisoner to Raiford. One humid morning an hour before first light ten armed sheriff’s deputies escorted him from his cell to the train depot. The only witnesses on hand besides cops were the station agent and the train crew. He was hustled aboard a prison car which on the outside looked no different from the other boxcars but whose interior contained a cell with bars as thick as baseball bats and a padlock the size of a bible. He looked around for Bob Baker as he boarded the car, curious to see his expression of the moment, but he did not spot him among the policemen milling in the station platform’s weak lamplight. During the weeks he had been in county custody they had seen each other only at the court sessions and had not exchanged a word since his arrest. He’d expected Bobby to say something about the pictures of his brother in the morgue, to at least make some allusion, and he’d decided to try to strangle him with his manacle chain if he did. In court he’d a few times caught Bobby staring at him, his expression each time unfathomable in the instant before he realized John was staring back and his face broke into a yellow grin.

By sunrise he was miles to the north and bearing for the penitentiary. The transfer detail planned to arrive at Raiford at midmorning of the following day and the officer in charge so notified the warden by telegraph from the Titusville station. The warden and his assistant met them at the prison’s front gate. They had tipped local reporters to the infamous desperado’s arrival and now smilingly obliged the photographers by posing for a picture of themselves aflank the prisoner. In their black suits and smiling pallors they looked like celebrant undertakers. Dressed in white and his aspect rueful John Ashley looked bound for the grave.